History Will Repeat Itself
History Will Repeat Itself: Strategies of Re-enactment in Contemporary Art and Performance Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund, June 9 – September 23, 2007 and KunstWerke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 18 November 2007 until 13 January 2008.
A review by Anthony Iles
HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, New York: Dover Thrift Editions.
Throughout the last ten years there has been a rash of artistic re-enactments, from Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave, 2001 revisiting a famous confrontation between pickets and police during the 1984-85 miner’s strike, to Mark S Grubb’s Death of Peter Fechter, which re-enacted the death of one of the first victims of the Berlin Wall in London last year. So, it seems the time has come for this burgeoning genre to be historicised with a touring retrospective that surveys over twenty works by artists working with historical re-enactment and repetition.
I visited the exhibition at KunstWerke in Berlin, one of Berlin’s key contemporary art institutions privately funded ‘on the American model’, a place visibly proud to be part of the Cold War’s cultural remainder. It did not seem coincidental at all that an exhibition which isolates re-enactment ‘as a strategy’ was being staged in a city exemplary of the historical traumas of the long 20th century: financial crisis, depression, war, foreign occupation, partition and state capitalism has been followed by real estate speculation, civic bankruptcy and gentrification.
The exhibition is surprisingly successful at gathering a wide range of works of different media into a coherent four floor installation. Each work is given sufficient space to be approached in its own right and though roughly thematised by floor, no work feels overdetermined by its placement. There is a particular focus upon ‘media arts’ engagement with re-enactment and in curator Inke Arns’ catalogue essay there is a strong insistence upon the theme of media and mediation. This was reflected in the prevalence of video and the interrelation of many works with mass media footage of historical events. This is a case in point for Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco’s, Eternal Frame, Deller’s Battle of Orgreave, Irina Botea’s Auditions for a Revolution and Korpys/Löffler’s The Nuclear Football, The Last American. Elsewhere works by Pierre Huyghe and Omer Fast confuse personal accounts of real events with their cinematic representation thus further mediating the unrecoverable truth.
Rather than sinking into a multi-dimensional postmodern relativism – ‘all is possible in this the best of all possible worlds’ – re-enactment as an artistic strategy seems to work best when detailed attention to and transformation of what might have been actually exposes what is provisional about history as written and what, in fact or imagination, could be. The extremely canny video Mondrian ‘63 – ‘96 by ‘Walter Benjamin’ resurrects this dead theorist of mechanical reproduction to deliver a live interrogation of the work of art; intentionality, the author, the copy and the original, in the form of a lecture. On the other hand, Rod Dickinson & Tom McCarthy’s project Greenwich Degree Zero does not simply raise the question of authenticity with respect to the work of art, but rather, constructs a highly literate intertextual inauthenticity drawing out the asymmetry of interests behind the production of record and fact.
Artur Zmijewski’s work, 80064 (2004), is probably the one that left most impact in its raw approach to historical trauma, (a miniature theatre of trauma, repetition and death). A video of small means - three actors manage to uproot a historical tragedy that continues to produce museums, monuments and controversy in Berlin. The video shows a conversation between the artist and Holocaust survivor Jósef Tarnawa. When the artist asks if he tried to resist Jósef replies ‘that the only way to survive was to submit’ an attitude that is replayed when the artist cajoles the reluctant interviewee into allowing him to ‘refurbish’ his tattoo - the very index of his suffering is rendered anew, making him a victim a second time around. The video will trouble anyone who sees it and from this we can rescue a complex moral lesson about authenticity, re-enactment and artistic responsibility - by probing a historical wound the artist implicates himself as one willing to re-enact a crime against humanity, yet through this act the very authenticity of the witness and the inscription of history is tested and put into question. Still, in this moral play an ethics does not emerge: Žmijewski simply the exposes his, and our own, implicit hatred for the witness. For as Giorgio Agamben has written of Auschwitz: ‘it is the site in which it is not decent to remain decent, in which those who believed themselves to preserve their dignity and self-respect experience shame with respect to those who did not.’* The real tragedy of this work is that we are still far from an understanding of this ethical aporia, the possibility of life after dignity, and despite probing around the liminal space beyond dignity and morality, I remain unconvinced that this clever and controversial video brings us any closer.
It seems important to note, at the passing of this artistic trend, that re-enactment was (and continues to be) a popular pastime before it became the zeitgeist obsession of the contemporary art world. Only one work here, Private Battles: only the past will tell, 2007 by Heike Gallmeir and Tabea Sternberg by exploring the activities and motivations of English re-enactment groups who relive the battles of German SS and Wehrmacht units, gives us significant insight into this phenomenon. Re-enactment requires special attention to the details of an event itself, isolating its action from the conditions it sprang from and its consequences. In purely artistic re-enactment there is often no before or after, in its place instead, like so many of the videos exhibited in KunstWerke, only a circular recursive loop. My choices for a survey of this area might have been somewhat different. For example The Pageant of the Paterson Silk Strike (’performed by the strikers themselves’), which took place at Madison Gardens in 1913, precedes the better known mass theatrical re-enactment organised by Nikolaj Evreinov – The Storming of the Winter Palace, (1920), represented here in photographic documentation. Another omission, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s film It Happened Here (made between 1958-1966), in which the period immediately following World War II is re-imagined as if Nazi forces had occupied England, raises traumatic questions about counterfactualism, nationalist identification and imagined history that were largely skirted in the exhibition. Inventory’s video work The Sealed Knot, 1999, an intervention into an English civil war re-enactment, anticipates the obsession with re-enactment usually attributed to Jeremy Deller, but asked serious political questions about the many unresolved social tensions of the present day that originate in this period. More recently, on October 29th, 2006, 894 participants gathered for a zombie flash mob at the Monroeville Mall in Pittsburgh, which served as the set of the film Dawn of the Dead, to collect food for a community food bank. These examples pertain to a longer, more messy, history of re-enactment as praxis. At odds with ‘History Will Repeat Itself’, it is a version of events in which, after 1989, history continues.
