42 REPRESENTATION

Inke Arns

Representation (from Latin repraesentatio, repraesentare, “to bring to mind by description,” also “to symbolize, to be the embodiment of”) is a philosophical term for the use of signs that stand in for and take the place of something else (Mitchell, 1995).

we give things meaning by how we represent them—the words we use about them, the stories we tell about them, the images of them we produce, the emotions we associate with them, the ways we classify and conceptualize them, the values we place on them.

(p. 3)

It is through representation that people organize reality by naming its elements. These signs are arranged to form semantic constructions and express relations (Mitchell, 1995). Representation is thus an essential feature of linguistic processes, the semiotic dimensions of which were explored and systematized by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839—1914), the founder of modern semiotics, and by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857—1913), the founder of structuralism. As a mediation process that functions through referrals and “proxies,” representation is an integral part of language, as well as sign systems in art and music. In philosophy, it describes a contro­versial epistemological problem: Robert Cummins (1989) distinguishes two main problems in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. One is the problem of determining which states or objects are used by minds or cognitive systems to represent. The other is the problem of defining the relation between representations and what they represent. Representation con­cerns a wide range of subjects: since antiquity, representation has been a fundamental concept within aesthetics, semiotics, and, for about 300 years, since the publication ofThomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651), also within politics and political science.

Drawing on Mitchell's observation that “representation (in memory, in verbal descriptions, in images) not only ‘mediates' our knowledge (of slavery and of many other things), but obstructs, fragments, and negates that knowledge” (1994, p. 188), many contemporary artistic reenactment projects take a critical stance toward representation. Such artistic reenactment is not only critical of representation; it intends to question and destabilize images through immersion, immediacy, bodily experience, and empathy. However, while artistic reenactments adopt a broadly con­structionist approach to representation and meaning, other historical simulations, like battle reenactments, work very differently. As forms of popular culture, they seem to accept history as a given. They are not interested in questioning representation per se, but rather, they have a mimetic understanding of it.

Contemporary art has seen a burgeoning of artistic reenactments that restage historical situa­tions and events. One reason for this uncanny desire for performative repetition seems to reside in what Benzaquen-Gautier refers to as “(t)oday's ubiquity of media images and their triumph over direct observation in our experience of the world” (this volume, art). Obviously, all history comes to us as a form of representation and is always represented via narrative. Thus, it would be naive to ask what really happened outside of the history represented and, in contradistinction to more conventional forms of reenactment, to look for the “authenticity” beyond the images. That is not what artistic reenactments are about. However, artists working with reenactment consider certain past events too important to let them remain abstract knowledge—what is generally thought of as history. Benzaquen-Gautier points out that 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” (art). She adds that in artistic reenactments, artists intend to break down representation by “exposing the constructedness of mediation” and by replacing it with immediacy, thereby pro­posing “an affective relation to history through embodiment and the erasure of any safe distance between abstract knowledge and personal experience of the past.”

British artist Rod Dickinson's Milgram Reenactment (2002) is a reenactment of one of the 20th century's most controversial experiments in social psychology. In 1961, Stanley Milgram, a 27-year-old assistant professor at Yale University, conducted the so-called Milgram Experiment, which aimed to analyze the crimes of National Socialism from a social-psychological perspec­tive. The experiment tested the obedience of individuals toward people in authority and also the willingness of ordinary people to follow orders, even when the orders contradicted their consciences.

Although this was just a dramatic performance with a predetermined course and results that were known to most audience members, the effect was nevertheless special. The spectators' position as observers generated an experience that greatly differed from that of looking at pho­tographs or reading the experimental write-up. By becoming witnesses to an event—an event usually accessible only in a form communicated by media, but whose simulation now unfolded in real time—observers were confronted with a necessity to act (or act differently), they were

Inke Arns

prompted to question themselves. Dickinson thus added an ethical dimension to the event. As Gaskin asks (2003):

How far would I have gone, how many shocks would I have administered? You then question the degree to which you resist authority in your daily life. Should you feel reassured that, in the original experiment, 60% of the people were prepared to kill their subject if instructed to do so? (...) are you sure you would resist authority?

(p. 13)

In Dickinson’s reenactment of the Milgram experiment, the paradox of reenactment becomes clear: the critique (and erasure) of representation and the simultaneous creation of distance— often co-existent in one and the same artwork—are key mechanisms in the contemporary practice of artistic reenactments. Initially it is about the elimination of safe distance. Viewers or readers become immediate witnesses of a (repeated historical) event, which unfolds before their eyes, or they become participants in an action, in which they actively take part. Reenactments eliminate the distance, construed as safe, between the historical event represented by the media and the present, between performers and audience.

Artworks that utilize strategies of reenactments attempt to (re-)create a connection with his­tory, which is increasingly based on media images. The short-circuiting of the present with the past makes it possible to experience the past in the present—actually, an impossible view of history. This is an attempt to feel sympathy for the subjects of bygone events by imagining the self in their position. By eliminating the safe distance between abstract knowledge and personal experience, between then and now, between the others and oneself, historical as well as artistic reenactments make personal experience of abstract history possible. A good example of this is Jeremy Deller’s recent project We’re Here Because We’re Here (2016), which brings soldiers who died in World War I “back to life.” This project coincided with the centennial of one of the deadliest battles ofWorld War I, the Battle of the Somme (1916), in which 1,000,000 men were wounded or killed. Deller dispatched 1,600 young men dressed up as British World War I soldiers to 17 places around the UK. As a “decentralized memorial” (Deller, 2016), the soldiers moved around the cities, walked, rested, took the subway, waited at train stations, entered Ikea or Tesco—and visited places that did not exist in 1916. Deller did this, he said, in order to create a maximum “visual incongruity” or a “visual shock.” The radical transposition of the soldiers into contemporary life makes this project very different from typical historical reenactments, battle restagings, or living history. The soldiers also did not speak, but handed out cards with their name and rank, age, and place and date of death (“Died at the Somme on 1st July, 1916.

Artistic reenactments, therefore, do not stop at the elimination of distance (i.e., the critique of representation) or at the partial or total identification with historical subjects (like many pop- cultural reenactments). The second, not less important step is the active creation of distance. In reenactments one finds, as Steve Rushton puts it, a

complex and in-depth reflection of the mediation of memory—which can be even described as the core subject of reenactment as an art form. This tendency asks how memory

is an entity which is continuously being restructured—not only by filmmakers and reenactors but also by us personally, as mediating and mediated subjects.

(2005, p. 10) (memory and commemoration; mediality)

In this sense, Rod Dickinson wrote about the role of reenactment in his works:

I have very consciously focused on events that were heavily mediated in their original form. My hope with these pieces is that the audience’s direct experience of the live performance is constantly undercut by their knowledge of the layers of mediation that are at play in both the original historical event and my double of it. I hope with pieces such as these that rather than making “history” “real” (often the declared aim of reenactments found in other cultural spaces, such as TV or hobbyist recreations), history is actually experienced by the audience as deferred and displaced, but through the apparently immediate and direct lens of live performance.

(2005, n.p.)

It is in this sense that Dickinson writes about The Eternal Frame (1975), which is for him a key work in the context of reenactments:

From its beginning The Eternal Frame situates JFK’s death as a real death and as an image death, critiquing the powerful hold that the images as history have on our memory and emotions. (...) Reenactment seems, as a form of representation, strangely well equipped to address moments of collective trauma and anxiety. Almost as if, taking a Debordian turn, that the reenactment operates as the uncanny of the spectacle. A live image, in real space and real time, but simultaneously displaced.

(2005, n.p.)

Representation and reenactment are not necessarily opposites—Dickinson even calls reenact­ment “a form of representation”—but their relationship is a complex one. One could say that (historical as well as artistic) reenactment generally is critical of representation, and, through embodiment, seeks to stimulate and activate the imagination. Battle reenactments, however, allow the participants to imagine themselves in a different role unconnected to their own situ­ations or the present. Artistic reenactments, in contrast, focus on those historical events that are seen as of relevance today. They transform abstract knowledge (history) into a personal experi­ence of the past precisely because the events that get reenacted are considered too important (traumatic, overtly political) to be tamed through tacit inscription in the history books. At the same time, artistic reenactments address the mediation of collective memory—by means of an immediate image which is at the same time experienced as deferred and displaced.

Further reading

Culler, J., 2000; Eagleton, T., 1999; Eco, U., 1984; Hall, S. (ed.), 1997a; Mitchell, W J. T., 1994; Mitchell, W J. T., 1995; Saussure, F. de, 1983 [1916].