Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History ed. by Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (review)

In recent years, performance re-creation has become a prevalent concern in theatre and performance studies. In a sense, reperformance is nothing new or unusual. Revivals of plays, remounted dance pieces, and everyday rehearsals all involve the repetition of prior acts of performance. Theatre artists devoted to original historical practices and repetiteurs employed by choreographic trusts have long since institutionalized self-conscious performance re-creation. Yet a distinct phenomenon has appeared in this century: meticulous performance re-creations that pay attention to gestural, material, and other nontextual elements, often with the aid of photographs and other documents. In the past decade for instance, the Wooster Group and the Rude Mechanicals have applied such techniques to both re-create and recontextualize theatrical works by Grotowski’s company, Mabou Mines, and the Performance Group.

As Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield make clear in their substantial new anthology, such undertakings are best understood alongside recent trends in what is variously called live art or performance art. While they are embedded in the spaces, critical discourses, and consumer economies of visual art, events such as Marina Abramović’s recent re-stagings of durational artworks highlight the cognate theoretical and practical challenges that confront artists, curators, repetiteurs, and all those who record and remake prior performances. Given recent investments in spaces for performance-based work by the Tate Modern gallery and Abramović’s own Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art, it seems that reperformance is not merely a transient strategy adopted by savvy contemporary artists, but a curatorial practice with a long horizon. The re-creation of performance is also tied to a question that reverberates into every corner of theatre and performance studies: as Jones puts it, “the conundrum of how the live event or ephemeral art work […] gets written into history” (11).

The volume that Jones and Heathfield have put together deftly approaches this question with transparency, modesty, and an ethos of inclusiveness. The editors emphasize the disciplinary positions—in art history and performance studies, respectively—that bring them to the topic. They acknowledge, too, that they do not exist outside the systems of cultural and capitalist value circulation that enfold works of art—and whose protocols performance artists have endeavored to expose and disrupt. Rather than attempt to define a new subfield of art or performance history with this book, Jones and Heathfield explore a set of theoretical quandaries that arise from ongoing efforts to theorize and enact performance art’s various afterlives. Two introductory essays by the editors introduce a range of salient contextualizing ideas for the historiography of live art: the historical conditions that may have fostered the recent resurgence of embodied durational artwork, the culture of re-enactment, as well as glosses of performativity, deconstruction, trauma theory, and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the chiasm.

Containment and temporality, however, emerge as the volume’s most potent binding concepts. For Jones, containment is a condition that modern Western aesthetics has imposed upon fine art, which “a consideration of the performative” effectively undoes in part by “reminding us that meaning and value are contingent” (12). Containment is also crucial to Jones’s outlook on performing bodies, none of which, she claims, necessarily resist containment or can be fully contained by exertions of power. Time similarly presents paradoxical tensions central to the book. Heathfield notes that performance “bears a temporal paradox: it exists both now and then, it leaves and lasts” (28). Rather than attempting to arbitrate between critical standpoints that see performance as fundamentally disappearing or remaining, Heathfield notes that such divergent views concur that performance transforms into remembered, reiterated, and recorded forms as a matter of course.

Ambivalence toward containment and a spirit of inclusiveness help account for both the size (44 chapters) and quirky organizational strategy of the book. The first section, or “zone,” “Theories and Histories,” includes important discussions of performance ontology by Christopher Bedford, Rebecca Schneider, Sven Lütticken, and...