Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment by Rebecca Schneider (review)

The severed, curving finger on the cover points the way. But which way? Backwards? Forwards? No. It gestures to the time of the now, again. To the now of the past's fugitivity, a queer time that occupies Rebecca Schneider throughout her book Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. The finger, like the book, indexes a time "out of joint" (1). Echoing her first scholarly monograph (The Explicit Body in Performance, 1997), Schneider brilliantly replays what we think we know or knew about history, memory, feminism, aesthetics, perspectivalism, politics, theatre, and of course performance. Schneider turns again to the body as an object staged, and retains her concern with questions of ghosts and reenactments—which is to say, with history and the archive. Performance Remains is a timely and challenging study of an undertheorized topic in American culture: historical reenactment. While performance commonly is seen as an ephemeral art form, Schneider argues for the myriad ways in which it remains in the here and now. She shows the value and possibility of not only actual material remains—such as the fake finger from a Civil War reenactment she photographed for her cover—but also of the material traces of performance that many might have dismissed as merely metaphorical lingerings of performance. Schneider's inter(in)animation of scholarship on this recurrent topic gives readers a comprehensive theory that teaches how to value the past even as it appears in presentist, partially presenced presents.

An elegant prose stylist, Schneider's writing is, as always, incisive and deft. Moreover, her arguments are as compelling as they are persuasive. epistemological community juxtaposes a jarring array of artists, theorists, performers, Her epistemological community juxtaposes a jarring array of artists, theorists, performers, media, and more—even as it adds up to a most illuminating study of why re-doing something reveals time itself as a complicated structure. Thus, time and place are interactive in a significant way. Schneider adds to the archive of useful material even as she questions what an archive of performance might be. One wants to read the book interactively, as a palimpsest because its chapters seem to work by the logic of superimposition and indeed syncopation. The "Foreward—By way of other directions" quotes Gertrude Stein and proceeds to confound movements in all directions as it explains how time warps and returns in flashes of performance as it is made fungible for future times that are inevitably the now of history.

Schneider's astute analyses of visual material, found sculpture, and photography move us to reconsider their performative capacity. She asks:

What happens to linear history if nothing is ever fully completed nor discretely begun? When does a call to action, cast into the future, fully take place? Only in the moment of the call? Or can a call to action be resonant in the varied and reverberant cross-temporal spaces where an echo might encounter response—even years and years later? Can we call back in time? Across time? What kind of response might we elicit? [...] What are the limits of the future? What are the limits of this now?

(180-81)

It is precisely these preoccupations that Schneider seeks to reanimate in protest...in multiply-cited actions against war, empire, industrial capital, and injustice the world over, again.

Performance Remains presents an eclectic, exciting array of performances (e.g., Allison's Smith's queer Civil War reenactment The Muster, Mark Tribe's Port Huron Project, Marina Abramavic;'s The Artist is Present, Suzan Lori-Parks's The America Play, and many more works of art, theatre, photography, and sculpture) all of which (con)found normative notions of time and teach us the efficacy, if not the necessity, of beginning again. The book cogently redacts the too often contentious contemporary arguments about how performance works and then provides its own more measured and subtle retake on...