Reenactments

Extracts from the paper:

From Beyond the Grave of the Politics of Re-Enactment
Text / Pil and Galia Kollectiv

Art in the period of its dissolution, as a movement of negation in pursuit of its own transcendence in a historical society where history is not yet directly lived, is at once an art of change and a pure expression of the impossibility of change.
—Guy Debord, Thesis 190, The Society of the Spectacle1

Guy Debord's thesis number 190 concisely defines the paradox at the heart of twentieth-century art practices—the demand for an impossible permanent revolution, the mediation of an unmediated, authentic experience, and the constant pull of both past and future, progress and decadence. The recent spate of artists' re-enactments of historical events and performances seems caught up in this dialectic, haunted by Debord's paralyzing circular discourse. In his writing about history and time, Debord claims that modern time, in the wake of the domination of linear history, is subordinated to pseudo-cycles of work and leisure. Fads, consumerist seasons, remakes, and retro fashions are, in his view, imposed by capitalism on history. Are we therefore to see artistic re-enactments as logical conclusions of the spectacle's repetitive imperative?

Melanie Gilligan writes in her essay on performance and its appropriations, "Which practices involving re-enactments might be retrograde withdrawals from new aesthetic and political struggles, and which others are catalysts for them?"

Jeremy Deller, stills from The Battle of Orgreave, DVD, 2001, 62:37 minutes (directed by Mike Figgis; commissioned and produced by Artangel, London; photo: Martin Jenkinson)

Andrea Fraser, (Kunst Muss Hängen) Art Must Hang, 2001, DVD, 32:55 minutes (courtesy of the artist, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, and Galerie Christian Nagel, Köln/Berlin)