2 ART

Stephanie Benzaquen-Gautier

The staging of the Storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd, a mass action dramatizing key moments of the October Revolution and created by a collective of artists under the direction of Russian director Nikolai Evreinov in 1920, is often mentioned as one of the first examples of artistic reenactment.

As a recent study has shown (Arns et al., 2017), the Storming of the Winter Palace deceptively fit the category of reenactment.Yet, it provides a starting point for the genealogy of a practice that has gained prominence in modern and contemporary art over the past decades, up to the recent boom in the 1990s and 2000s, when reenactment featured centrally in a number of exhibitions and conferences. Among them, projects such as Life, Once More (2005), Experience, Memory, Reenactment (2005), and History Will Repeat Itself (2007) provide a basis for the conceptualization of this cultural phenomenon. Art theorists and curators emphasize the diversity of stories, media, methods, and results in artistic reenactment at the turn of the century. Far from seeing it as a new genre, a movement or a mode, they consider it as part of a long history, “an element within a wider cultural field, which incorporates the copy in its manifold manifestations” (Rushton, 2005, p. 7). Moreover, they point out the similarities between reenactment in art and in other domains, such as criminology (forensic architecture), experimental archaeology, and living history.

Besides the photographic and video documentation by artists of popular historical re-staging of battles, art theorists and curators distinguish between two principal categories of artistic reenactment: that of artistic events and that of historical events. While the two categories have different implications and give rise to different discussions, they are nevertheless related through the question of mediation.

Today's ubiquity of media images and their triumph over direct observation in our experience of the world might explain the turn to reenactment in the arts in the 1990s and 2000s (Arns, 2007; Quaranta, 2009). Artists do not seek to understand what “really” happened or how to access the actual event. Rather, they use reenactment as a means of reflecting on the tension between liveness and mediation, and the effect of the images and texts through which the event is remembered (Pil and Galia Kollektiv, 2007, n.p.) (mediality). Yet, there is a paradox at the heart of this attempt to regain control over mediation. Artistic reenactments in public spaces and museums produce in turn a massive amount of documentation. Therefore, they replicate “the tension between the experience and the image of the performance” (Lutticken, 2005, p. 41). This interdependence of reenactment and media representation constitutes a critical feature of artistic reenactment.

The historical events reenacted in art are often events of the 20th century, considered in their traumatic or political dimension and seen as of relevance today (Arns, 2007, p. 2) (trauma). For example, in Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II (2002), Felix Gmelin reenacts in Stockholm a 1968 relay race of students waving a red flag in West Berlin. In 80064, Artur Zmijewski (2004) convinces a Holocaust survivor to tattoo afresh the concentration camp number he has on his arm. Such works are less about the past events themselves than the ways in which events keep haunting the present, more specifically, the channels through which they reach us after many decades. The notions of history and memory are thus deeply entangled in the practice of artistic reenactment. Writer Steve Rushton sees the ongoing restructuring of collective memory as the core element of it (2005, p. 10). For some theorists, it is the transformation of historicism—our relation to history—and the cultural regimes through which it is expressed that plays a central role (Lutticken, 2005, p.

29). Art critic Jan Verwoert makes a direct connection between the upsurge of reenactment practices in art in the late 1990s and the loss of the grand narratives (such as modernity, progress, and civilization) that shaped our experience of history until postmodernism, postcolonialism, and associated ideological crises fractured them. Deprived of paradigms of historical interpretation,Verwoert argues, we experience the present either as “continuum without end or direction,” or as “absolute urgency.” Artistic reenactment thus becomes a means of reintroducing “true perspectives” or “true choice” into our relation with time and historical change (2009, p. 29). There are two main strategies at play. One consists in creating distance vis-a-vis the past by laying bare the constructedness of mediation. The other proposes an affective relation to history through embodiment and the erasure of any safe distance between abstract knowledge and personal experience of the past (Arns, 2007, pp. 8-9) (embodiment).

By exposing mediation as something to be challenged either through critical interpretation or imagination, reenactment opens up a different space for addressing the presence and effect of the past in our lives. This makes possible the rewriting of canonical history, even “do[ing] justice to history” (Verwoert, 2009, p. 30). Such corrective dimension, as emphasized by a number of authors, has much to do with linguistic structures. Reenactment introduces a narrative aspect—with a beginning, an end, and a sense of duration—into “the chaotic unfolding of the [original] event” (Allen, 2009 [2005], p. 20). Moreover, rather than being a descriptive act, reenactment is best understood as a performative utterance that creates something new (Caronia, 2009, pp. 14—15). This production may also contribute to the (re)emergence of voices that had been written off in official versions, hence the possible cathartic effect of reenactment. Works such as Jeremy Deller's The Battle of Orgreave support this view.

In 2001, the artist re-staged the 1984 confrontation between picketing miners and police forces in South Yorkshire, using firsthand testimonies. Among the reenactors were former miners and policemen, whom Deller asked to swap their roles. Authors generally concur on the emancipatory dimension of such projects. Not only does reenactment release history “from the confinement of the past” by reopening it to changing perspectives (Verwoert, 2009, p. 31). By proposing alternative scenarios, it also gives people a way out of the scripts they feel compelled to follow in their everyday life (Gilligan, 2007; Lutticken, 2005). Reenactment attributes transformative power to tools of narration. Those who tell the story anew do not only re-fashion historical representations in their own way. Their re-appropriation of the past makes it possible for them to redefine their position in the present as well.

This informs to a great extent the discussion about the effect of reenactment on the public. Two essays structure this debate. On the one hand, Guy Debord's La Societe du Spectacle (1967) problematizes the use of reenactment, itself an element in the repetitive logic of the spectacle, as a means of disrupting the passive consumption of mass/popular culture and narratives. Producing more mediation only adds to the self-dispossession inherent in the spectacle. On the other hand,

Stephanie Benzaquen-Gautier

Jacques Rancieres Le SpectateurEmancipe (2009) deconstructs the idea of mediation as alienation, and instead revalorizes the spectator’s position as being an active one. Some art theorists and curators think that the affective experience of history achieved through immersion and physical involvement turns passive viewers into active participants (Arns, 2007, p. 8). On the opposite side, it is argued that the interchangeability of the audience, which is the outcome of the mechanical recording and the conventional museum display of artistic reenactments, hampers any direct form of involvement (Allen, 2009 [2005], p.

22). Moreover, artists focus on events rather than processes, and resurrect “hollowed out” forms rather than the labor that produced these forms (Sarlin, 2009, pp. 144-147). This deprives the reenacted action from its original political or ideological specificity. It aestheticizes the action, thus making any mobilization around this purely cultural form an empty gesture (Jones, 2011, p. 25). What emerges, though, is mostly a set of moderate views on the capacity of reenactment to generate “participatory politics” (Gilligan, 2007, p. 429). Reenactment is seen as a “realism of potentialities” that may change people’s perception of what is possible politically (Muhle, 2013b, p. 89). While it “cannot be a substitute for a political force that is lacking,” it may at least create a “space of reflection” and perhaps a stage for “small but significant acts of difference” (Lutticken, 2005, p. 60). As it disassociates cause and effect, reenactment makes people aware of the existence of a range of options and their own responsibility in choosing one over the others. This enables individual acts of interpretation and imagination that might coalesce, or not, around questions of mediation and agency. In that sense, reenactment is the promise rather than the realization of a new kind of community.

The reenactment of art performances, nowadays a staple in museum programing, poses the question of potentialities in a different way. If the political mobilization of the public appears at first sight less of a concern for the artists, the practice is nonetheless political since it intersects with institutional dynamics and production of knowledge. In the context of performance art, the question of mediation is inseparable from that of documentation. Furthermore, it points to the theatrical dimension of the genre, and the foundational discussion in theater about the tension between stage and public. For the past 40 years, the relation between performance art and its documentation has been an ongoing debate, shaped by diverging views on the genre’s ephemerality and interactivity, and how these are affected by authorship, commodification, fetishization, and the marketplace.

Marina Abramovic’s oft-discussed project Seven Easy Pieces (New York, 2005) provides an interesting entry point into these issues. For seven consecutive nights at the Guggenheim Museum, the artist reenacted historical artistic performances (including two of her works). From the start, documentation was central to her endeavor. Not only did Abramovic explore the role and reactivation of documents by choosing to reenact pieces she had never attended and knew only via iconic photos (Burton, 2006, p. 55). Through “performative documentation” or “embodied documentation,” she proposed to create alternative ways to preserve performance for future generations (Santone, 2008, p. 147; Cesare and Joy, 2006, p. 170). Ironically, though, the conventional fashion in which the project itself was documented through a film, photos, and a book, was at odds with Abramovic’s declaration of intent (Shalson, 2013, p. 433).

Reenactment is thus part of the debate about the institutionalization of performance art, the curatorial strategies this implies, and the historicization of the genre. The question it raises is whether it offers a way out of what performance scholar Lara Shalson aptly calls the “evidentiary crisis” of performance (2013, p. 432). Being itself a performing—and performative—act, reenactment may help go beyond the reductive, “freezing” dimension of material documentation. At the same time, if the artist-reenactor is driven by the wish to produce “a truer account of the past” (Santone, 2008, p. 150) or as Abramovic stated in an interview, to “[keep] the story straight” (Kennedy, 2005, n.p.), reenactment becomes just another means of stabilizing or fixing the original work. Still, it might have the potential for generating new ways of documenting

performance, collaborative and cumulative rather than hierarchical ones (Santone, 2008, p. 147). But for this to work, reenactment needs to maintain a continuous tension between liveness and mediation, between the unrecordable and the documented. It must acknowledge within its own unfolding “the impossibility of ever fixing [the original performance] in time and space” (Jones, 2011, p. 18) and the existence of“irretrievable losses” in the process (Santone, 2008, p. 151). In Seven Easy Pieces, these losses were expressed through the variations Abramovic introduced into each reenacted performance, for example, in the duration. While this creative act reflects the “liberating trait” characteristic of reenactment (Blackson, 2007, p. 3), it might also be construed as a denial of the original work (Boyd, 2007, n.p.). This denotes the limits of emancipation in the reenactment of artistic performances, and the moment when extending or reinventing the original piece might turn into mere appropriation, or worse even, into parody (Boyd, 2007, n.p.; Cesare and Joy, 2006, p. 172). Rather than a legal or copyright issue, it is the moral aspect of authorship that is to be underlined. Moreover, this calls attention to the degree of participation expected from the audience: are spectators witnessing a “re-make” or participating in the creation of a novel piece? Reenactment, indeed, complicates performance art. It does not bring any solution to the ongoing dilemma of theater as possible “exemplary community form,” to draw on Rancieres expression (2009, p. 5), since the distance between stage and public remains something to be either shown or abolished. However, it generates blurred areas that foreground the interdependence of past and present.

As some art theorists remind us, the differences in histories of performance art should not be overlooked when it comes to the question of emancipation (Brygzel, 2018; Sosnowska, 2015; Wood, 2012). In her study of artistic reenactment in Eastern Europe, art historian Ami Brygzel emphasizes the particular situation in the former Eastern bloc. Under communist regimes, performances were often an attempt to break free from political power, rather than from an art market that did not exist. Taking place in private settings, they remained “invisible” since documentation could not be circulated easily (2018, n.p.). Faced with the task to rebuild national art histories after 1989, some artists, such as collectives Kontejner (Croatia) and IRWIN (Slovenia), chose reenactment as both an instrument of historiographical recovery and an educational tool for younger generations. Rather than nostalgically pointing to a totality that can never be fully conveyed through reenactment, the “irretrievable losses” encountered in the process bore witness to the radical transformation that post-socialist societies had just lived through. This shows the importance of decentering Western stories and looking into other contexts of performance art. For example, when Otobong Nkanga reenacted in 2007—2008 Allan Kaprow's piece Baggage (1972), she extended the geographical scope of the original performance. Kaprow displaced sandbags across the United States. Nkanga shipped sandbags from Belgium to Nigeria, and vice versa. Through this gendered and racialized reinvention, she laid bare historical ties between the two continents, and explored recent forms of migration and human trafficking. She gave a contemporary inflection to Kaprow's action, and, as such, illustrates how new works, as information scientists Christina Manzella and Alex Watkins call reenactments by other artists (2011, pp. 28—29), help capture anew the critical power of the original artistic performance and the potentialities it had opened up at the time. There lies, perhaps, the potential for a new form of community as two actions separated by a time span of several decades enter into deep resonance, one with another.

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