Making exhibitions of themselves

Some say that you really had to be there. Others see no reason why the notorious 'happenings' of the 1960s and 1970s shouldn't be recreated. Tom Lubbock saw an attempted reprise of performance art's greatest hits

"What is performance art?" you may ask. There's a simple answer. Performance art is a kind of photography. It's a series of usually black-and-white photographs, of no particular merit, that record inexplicable goings-on. Some of these photos have become quite famous (though it always helps to know the story). There's the one of Yves Klein painting a picture using naked women dipped in paint. There's the one of Joseph Beuys, entirely hidden in a roll of felt, interacting with a coyote. There's the one of Carolee Schneeman pulling a long scroll of paper out of her vagina. There's the one of a dozen horses tethered by Jannis Kounellis inside an art gallery. There's the one of Hermann Nitsch doing something unspeakable with a lamb's carcass and a naked man.

Or rather, that is how performance art from the golden age of the 1960s and 1970s survives – as a parade of iconic photos. Not many people saw the original actions and happenings, but many know the pictures. The photographers who took them, on the other hand, are mostly unknown. The reason being, I guess, that the pictures are simply identified with the performances of which they're often the only visible remains.

What a world, it seems now – and what a world away, in its extremity, its sincerity, its optimism. These acts, sometimes wildly spontaneous, sometimes painfully methodical, generally involving nudity, sticky messes (paint or blood), embarrassing intimacy, actual suffering, degradation and violence, duration and endurance, often trying to pull the audience in and put them through it – they were staged as purgation rites, caustic, ecstatic, mind-blowing. (Some of them were funny, too.) They weren't shows to be spectated; they were experiences, and after one or two outings they weren't repeated or revived. Performance art wasn't meant to last.

Which gives it a strange historical standing. It feels both irrecoverably ancient and still radically advanced. The works are lost, preserved only in the photos and the memories of eye-witnesses (often retold, and perhaps not very accurate to start with). And since they're never repeated, they can never become familiar or dated. They exist only as something once new.

But not any more. Last week the Whitechapel Gallery staged A Short History of Performance: Part One. Over five days, half a dozen classic performance pieces were re-presented by their original artists. It's now or never, I suppose. Some of the artists literally died of their self-inflicted wounds, but many still have mens sana in corpore sano. It was a good roster of revivals. They had Kounellis's horses in on Sunday. They had Nitsch doing his stuff with the blood of a lamb on Friday (though I wasn't able to see that). And there on Tuesday night was Carolee Schneeman, owner of the legendary vagina. She was not there to do a re-pull of Interior Scroll (1972), though – rather to preside over a re-enactment of an earlier group piece, Meat Joy (1964).

Ten youngish people, male and female, after a long preamble in which they pretend to have a meal round a table, leave the acting-area. A huge quantity of tissue paper is dropped in a pile. The players return in couples (some looking a bit sheepish), slowly strip each other to their underwear and engage in non-specific romping activities. A loud rock'n'roll/Motown-plus-thunderstorm soundtrack plays over all this. And then Schneeman appears with buckets of wet fish and plucked chickens and flings them into the mêlée of bodies.

The meat pieces are kind of incorporated into the romping, getting rubbed and squeezed and muckily pulled apart and tossed about and stuck down pants and bras. The players also start painting each other. The mountain of tissue paper is drawn into the spectacle from time to time, with the players burying themselves in it, sometimes with limbs protruding sculpturally, and sometimes just writhing, so that the whole surface of the paper seethes. That seemed to me the most beautiful effect – the rest suggesting an "orgy" out of a film by Ken Russell of a few years later, cheerful, not very rude (though smelly) and slightly absurd in its restraint. Pieces of fish were chucked into the audience in a spirit that didn't strike me as wholly celebratory.

Compare that with Stuart Brisley's Beneath Dignity the following evening. Brisley has specialised in acts of self-degradation – lying in a bath of rotting meat for several days was one of his. But the striking thing about Beneath Dignity, originally performed in 1977, was what a dignified action it is. The floor is marked out with wooden frames in a row of five large squares. The first is empty, the second contains pieces of chalk, the third a pile of flour, the fourth a pool of black paint, the fifth a pool of white paint. The artist crawls, stumbles, steps, falls, from one square to the next, feeling out the floor space within it with his body, writhing, drawing arcs with the chalk, plunging his head straight into the flour, covering himself in it, rising from it like Mr Pastry, diving into the paint, swimming, rising from it like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and so on.

Brisley is a lovely mover – that's the decisive thing. He has pace. He has stillness. And the solemn acts of self-messing didn't seem either silly or show-off, fake infantile or fake martyrish. I couldn't really say what the action was about, but the doing of it carried great conviction. And although this version of Beneath Dignity was certainly different from its original performance, which took place on a pier on a lake and finished with the artist disappearing into the water, the re-presentation of it was entirely valid.

That's the question that this week of revivals raised: can such performances be meaningfully repeated? And there seems to be a general feeling that they can't, and that when they are, the experience is somehow unreal. The original happening was the only time it really happened. The replay only refers back to and dimly recalls the first time round. Like the photos and the descriptions, it's just another way for us to imagine what it must have been like back then.

I don't really see that. Performance art seems to me no less repeatable than any other kind of live performance. Of course, it is a logical truth that something can be done for the first time only once. It is an empirical truth that some art dates rapidly and when repeated shows itself to be strictly a period piece. (It is perhaps impossible now for the performers or the audience of Meat Joy to believe that the experience is "liberatory", and if you don't feel that, there doesn't seem much point to it.) And it is probably true that some performances can be done only by a particular performer, and so will die with them. But none of these things prevents repetition in principle. Indeed, as the years pass, there should be as much as possible, for memory's sake. It was good to see the Brisley piece. The artist is now almost 70. I suppose he won't be doing it again. But video cameras have been taking it all down all week, from every possible angle. In future, we'll have more than just those holy photos.

A Short History of Performance (Part One) was at the Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 (020-7522 7853). Part Two will follow in the next two years