Thoughts on Re-Performance, Experience, and Archivism

The term “re-performance” has a catchy refrain, a resonance with an implicit political if not seductive undercurrent, specifically in relation to art politics. To perform on some level is everyone’s dream. Yet to re-perform—what is that? Could it be that re-performance implies a fundamental need for artists to sustain the importance of their work as “live art” through some form of documentation? Hypothetically, this should include performances of some merit—whether by Joseph Beuys, Joan Jonas, Gina Pane, Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, Ann Hamilton, or Carolee Schneemann—that are reproduced synthetically ad infinitum over a period time in places other than from where they originated. It is a virtual idea to place performance art in an institution—a modern art museum, for example—where various works may be represented both as archival software and as ephemeral artifacts, documents, or notices of one kind or another. Meanwhile, research coming from various institutions appears bent on mining the same sources while alternative publications and Websites from less predictable sources are being ignored.

On one level, the topic of re-performance appears to hold the attention of some observers in denial of more pressing issues, such as the impact of global economy on the future of a deeply faulted art market, now involving “live art”—a topic that deserves serious attention. Instead of going this route, it would appear that the topic at hand has become typically self-indulgent as increasing numbers of mostly younger performance artists—and museum curators who support them—are scrambling for appointments with destiny, hoping their work will be placed on virtual call in the future. One might say that to contemplate the exigencies of performing a work of body art by an artist from another time at another youthful moment, based on extant documentation, archived to the teeth, is like transferring a four-by-five-inch photographic negative into a digital image or copying a reel-to-reel Portapak tape into a DVD format. As Philip Auslander correctly, though reticently suggests in his superlative essay published in PAJ 84 (September 2006), there is the question as to whether performances produced on the basis of archival documentation might lose some of the vitality of the performance, assuming the vitality was there in the first place.¹ Assuming it was there, the question might arise as to what future artist would want to do it. Would he or she appear like a performance clone functioning as a replica of the original? How different is this from those vapid copies of De Chirico’s early pittura metafisica (1911–16) painted decades later by the same artist? In either case, there are simulations—not even convincing ones, but self-willed fakes. Whether Abramović or De Chirico, the artists have fashioned replicas of works created by themselves at another time period that might easily be translated in terms of a fetish.

In either case, re-performance carries a heavy dose of overdetermination and therefore is liable to transform itself into unmitigated kitsch. One might ask: What is the essential difference between performing a saccharine tableau vivant of Thomas Couture’s Romans in the Decadence of the Empire (1847) in the mid-twentieth century—a century after the painting was shown at the Salon in Paris—or re-performing Acconci’s Seedbed (1972) in the twenty-first century? The unforeseeable problem in both cases is that the historical moment that contextualizes the performance has inevitably disappeared. One might speculate that a tableau vivant of the Couture performed a century later would be appreciated primarily in terms of kitsch. Seedbed, however, presents a slightly different problem in that it is intrinsically unrelated to kitsch. Unlike the more traditional performing arts, i.e., theatre, music, or opera, the historical moment for Acconci’s Seedbed has become overtly connected to the work’s context.

As a result, it has been locked into a period of time related to the history of contemporary art. The only recourse by which to unlock this academic connection to history would be to transcend the moment of...