Research Streams

This research stream investigates the dichotomy between allographic and autographic works as first introduced by Nelson Goodman in Languages of Art.¹

Explicitly or implicitly, this distinction lies at the core of most of the frameworks seeking to explore the conservation and documentation of performance-based complex works. Nonetheless, it also complicates the transmission of manifestations that do not quite fit into any of these two categories, as in the case of works that resist articulation through codified regimes of/for embodiment such as systems of notation, textual descriptions of gestures, movements or overarching intentions, or even oral instructions.

That is arguably the case with many of the performance-based works created during and after the Portuguese revolutionary period, which includes the years leading up to the 1974 Carnation Revolution, and the period that immediately followed it. This research stream will map out some of these works to understand the ways in which their ontological categorisations are destabilised by the political context of the long-seventies in Portugal.

For Goodman, the main difference between allographic and autographic works lies in their forms of authentic production and reproduction. On the one hand, autographic works are considered to have a singular material manifestation deemed authentic, such as paintings, sculptures, or drawings. Allographic works, on the other hand, do not have a single or unique manifestation. Based on notations of any kind, allographic works can instantiate multiple times and occasions. That is the case of theatre playscripts or musical scores. 

These conceptual enclosures were especially useful fixes at a time when artistic practices committed to exhausting form started to enter the economies of exchange, circulation, and reproduction: prominently, conceptual art, early installations, or kinetic art. With the development of artistic means beyond the paradigms driven by cybernetics — or possibly even through and with forms that lent themselves to codification, such as conceptual art — the limited capacity of these theoretical coteries became strikingly clear ². On the one hand, studies have shown that scores are typically insufficient to reperform two-stage works within the theoretical and political ecologies of the visual arts, i.e., works materialised in two stages, where the first stage usually manifests as a score ³ .

Fundamentally, much is left to the imagination,  improvisation, or authority of who is manifesting the artwork, and the artist’s intention remains obscured by modes of interpretation accessible, at best, through their approval or revision moments ⁴ . On the other hand, in the case of works emerging from the performing arts, such as theatre, dance, or music, instructions often seek to point out the unpredictable, the wandering, and the whimsical. They work well in materialising what remains and resonates as code — let us think here about a particularly vibrant performance of Debussy’s Clair de Lune, or an especially well-directed performance of Brecht’s Die Mutter. But what happens when the subtext, stirred by the political-affective zeitgeist, quietly overtakes the text during its performance?