Marina Abramović and the Re-performance of Authenticity

Spring 2008 23 Marina Abramović and the Re-performance of Authenticity Jessica Chalmers Introduction This essay argues that the critique of authenticity that has dominated academic discourse since the early 1980s is currently being dismantled under the rubric of a general 1960s revival—including a revival of authenticity, a moral category having to do with representational purity. Evidence of authenticity’s return—and transformation—can be seen in the phenomenon of “re-performance,” whereby scantly documented performances are recreated for the purpose of re-experiencing, documenting, and preserving them. These recreated performances from the late 1960s to mid-1970s are not mere repetitions of the original works, most of which were not meant to be repeated either live or in photos or on videotape. Most of the re-performances of this ephemeral art have been presented for the purposes of historical preservation, including Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces, which is discussed in this essay. Curiously, the preservation of work whose authenticity once expressly relied on its not being preserved has not met any resistance, even from those who had previously insisted on ephemerality as performance’s defining feature. I read this development as evidence that attitudes towards representation are shifting, at least in the avant-garde. It seems that authenticity, itself, is changing. As Philip Auslander has shown,1 the meaning of authenticity is not stable, but has shifted in relation to technological and generational change. In what follows, I attribute the welcome reception being accorded re-performance to the current generational configuration. With the looming retirement of baby boomers and the rise of the new “millennial” generation, the 1960s—a period I understand as beginning around 1963 and ending with the U.S. pullout from Vietnam in 1974—is being recalled with new interest. In the art and performance worlds, this is occurring through two linked processes. First, there is a nostalgic process of historicization and sacralization that seeks out and honors neglected 1960s figures and works. Second, there is a regenerative process that brings back ideas, frameworks, styles, and techniques as models for future artistic endeavors. Subject to both processes, many works that were dismissed as naïvely essentialist in the 1980s and 1990s are being rediscovered—their rescue from oblivion rendered even more dramatic by the idea of their originally intended ephemerality. Having been created to exist authentically only in the present—and thus having been created, as Peggy Phelan Jessica Chalmers teaches performance art and performance studies in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theater. This essay is part of her current book project on generation and representation, tentatively entitled The Authenticity Revival. 24 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism has noted, in order to disappear2 —these performances are being resurrected into art history and re-performed as a generational legacy. The 1960s Today There is a sense in which the 1960s have never really died, and the current revival does bear a general resemblance to other 1960s-referencing moments that have cycled through popular culture over the past forty years. One might recall, for instance, Coca-Cola’s 1994 launching of Fruitopia, a “revolutionary” beverage with flavors like “Strawberry Passion Awareness.” The appearance of that kind of marketing, along with the reappearance of chokers and other fashions, were a part of the brief retro phenomenon of the mid-1990s. Yet the current revival is distinct from such commercially-driven revivals, which lacked today’s wistfulness towards the period. Along with a general shift in mood towards positive thinking (including the advent of Happiness Studies in academia), there have been several fortieth-anniversary celebrations (a day-long Summer of Love celebration in San Francisco, to name a recent example), the release of new Beatles covers by younger bands, the publication of several new books about the Beatles, at least one film about them (Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe), as well as the publication of autobiographies of Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan, who has also been the subject of a recent Todd Haynes film, I’m Not Here. Bell-bottom pants have also made a comeback, but the biggest surprise is the return of 1960s art, and in...