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Recent years have seen new levels of visibility for performance in Australian art, and with it greater purchase among a younger generation of practitioners. As with any shift in perceptions of how art might be made or exhibited, the reasons for this change are complex. Certainly the improved accessibility and durability of reproductive technologies that gave rise to the institutional and commercial legitimisation of video art earlier this decade are contributing factors. Such is the intertwining of the performative gesture with its documentation in recent practice that an increase in available modes of reproduction would be inconceivable without a commensurate proliferation of actions to be reproduced. The most sophisticated examples of this type of practice, then, are those that demonstrate an awareness of the relationship between performance and documentation - of its problematics and potentialities - and which exploit or complicate it. In the process they suggest models of artistic agency which, while not entirely separate from the immediacy of the encounter with the performing body, are also not entirely reducible to it ...

Lucas Ihlein's 'project blogs', for instance, are the chief vehicle for documentation of a series of artistic projects. Each is defined by a certain set of parameters and predetermined timeframes which in practice correspond exactly with the artist's life. In Ihlein's work, the process of documentation itself is incorporated into the project, as made explicit within the terms of the speculative proposition that inaugurated his project The sham, 2007: 'I must not leave my suburb boundaries for two months. I must write a blog entry every day to observe what happens.' The project and the blog can therefore not exist independently of one another. Blogging becomes a rigorously diaristic process that cannot pretend to effectively restage the event, nor even report on it objectively, because it constantly draws attention to its own mediating role and direct participation in that event ...

Often consisting of inert objects, videos and photographs, Astra Howard's installations also tend to signify that the art has occurred somewhere else. As with Ihlein, Howard's practice could be framed as a series of intensive engagements with everyday life, but her activities are strategically positioned against established flows within public space to announce themselves immediately, if not as art, then at least as unusual. Much of Howard's work centres on her 'action research' into the behavioural codes and hidden narratives of urban space. This has been effected through a series of conversation booths that have been remarkably successful in provoking public interaction. In most cases these transactions take the form of written exchanges scribbled in felt pen by Howard and members of the public onto the clear Perspex walls of her ongoing Surveillance with public intent vehicle (SPIV) model booths, or as stenographic accounts of stories relayed within the privacy of the booth displayed publicly on externally mounted LED screens, as with her 2006 CITYtalking project in Melbourne's laneways ...

In addition to her better-known video performance practice, (Laresa) Kosloff has for more than a decade produced a body of Super 8 films that document physical activities taking place in public space. Crucially, these activities are not the artist's own. Kosloff's short films jettison cinematic framing conventions in favour of formally composed static shots of an array of everyday leisure activities: swimmers in a wave pool; a roller disco in a public park; a water-side laughing club; the outside world reflected from the windows of a luxury car dealership through which the rituals of sale are visible; and so on. The specific use of the outmoded, culturally loaded medium of Super 8 produces a simultaneous sense of nostalgia and distancing. The warm tones and uneven focus make it difficult to pinpoint the events in time, an effect consolidated by the general exclusion of periodically specific signifiers from the frame.

In an extremely short period Ash Keating has progressed from tactical, street-level guerrilla actions to more ambitious, strategic mobilisations of bureaucratic, commercial and administrative forces. Within this trajectory there are two identifiable strands of practice which have become more closely hewn as the artist's projects have grown in scale. These strands correspond neatly with Keating's two major performance personas, both of which press notions of ugliness and beauty into the service of the political. The first persona involves the artist himself, playing the besuited Everyman, performing repetitive, thankless-looking tasks as he sorts through consumer detritus, methodically configuring it into rigorously formal installations and highly poetic gestures. The second figures as a theatrical return of the repressed excesses of consumer society, manifested as an amorphous waste monster that implicates an array of industries - including the art world - in reckless environmental destruction pursued in the name of production. Here waste becomes an abject costume worn by the artist and an ever-growing cast of actors. In Keating's large-scale temporary public installations - 2020?, 2008, and Activate 2750, 2009 - it is accumulated to such a point that it soon overtakes the artist's role as performer ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2009 issue.