hello alina

great to hear you are still researching re-enactment based work.

i think your post, drawing a relationship, even a 
dependence, between live art and mediation is 
very pertinent.

as you know i have made a number of projects over 
the past five years that use ideas of 
reconstruction, often working with actors,  to 
create live events that repeat difficult or 
contested moments in recent history.
(as one of the invited respondents to this months 
theme i have linked to two projects below for 
interested list members).

in these works i have very consciously focused on 
events that were heavily mediated in their 
original form. My hope with these pieces is that 
the audience's direct experience of the live 
performance is constantly undercut by their 
knowledge of the layers of mediation that are at 
play in both the original historical event and my 
double of it.

by way of an illustration: a piece that i made in 
2002, 'The Milgram Re-enactment', repeats the 
well known 1961 social psychology experiment 
'obedience to authority' where subjects in a 
laboratory were asked to give what they believed 
were real and fatal electric shocks to a 
protesting victim as part of a memory and 
learning experiment. in fact they were duped and 
the real the aim of the experiment was to find 
out if the subjects would unconditionally obey 
the orders of an authority figure, a scientist in 
a lab coat.
in the original experiment the scientist and the 
protesting victim are actors. in duping the 
subject they elicit an (ironically) authentic 
response from him or her.
In my re-enactment this artifice is doubled; my 
actor in the lab coat is playing the role of the 
original actor, who was playing the role of a 
scientist...

i  hope with pieces such as these that rather 
than making 'history' 'real' (often the declared 
aim of re-enactments found in other cultural 
spaces, such as tv or hobbyist recreations) 
history is actually experienced by the audience 
as deferred and displaced, but through the 
apparently immediate and direct lens of live 
performance.

in the milgram piece this deferral is compounded 
by the knowledge that original experiment was 
intended as an abstracted repetition of the 
holocaust, at least in as far as the experiments 
designer, stanley milgram, was seeking to test 
the nazi defence at nuremberg of 'only following 
orders'.

i think that re-enactment can be a useful way of 
navigating the status of the original and 
reflecting upon the processes of mediation that 
construct and form events. it is possibly also a 
useful way of foregrounding those processes 
because so often the tropes of a live experience 
(immediacy, immersion) dramatically collide with 
an obviously mediated spectacle of a historical 
event reproduced in contemporary (real) time and 
space.

rod dickinson

==
projects:

the milgram ree-enactment
as referred to above
http://www.milgramreenactment.org
video clip
http://www.milgramreenactment.org/archive/milgram-clip1.html

nocturn
a live reconstruction of the FBI psychological 
warfare programme as used at waco texas in 1993
http://www.wacoreenactment.org



media art and reenactment


>Dear List,
>
>Hello, My name is Alina Hoyne, I'm currently conducting research for a PhD
>at Melbourne University on re-enactments in contemporary art.  This is my
>first post.  My apologies for being a lurker, but until fairly recently I
>thought I would have little to contribute to the monthly discussions as my
>knowledge of new media technology is not so 
>great, I am not a curator and I didn't want to
>throw the list off topic with too many re-enactment led
>discussions/questions.
>
>But recent discussions of the relationship between "Live Art" and
>recording/reproduction/replaying media be it new - the web, digital
>technologies - or older video, film etc, have been really inspiring, so
>here is my contribution.  I hope it is not too theory heavy.....
>
>Marina Abramovic’s recent show at the Guggenheim seems to me to
>challenge the (perhaps false) binary that seems to persist in theatre and
>performance studies between live and media forms.   It is an interesting
>example of the relationship between live art and mediatized reproduction,
>as Abramovic used recordings of the original performances where possible
>to create her reconstructions or translations of these seminal art pieces.
>
>Some people have been calling Abramovic's Seven Easy Pieces a series of
>reenactments - and while in some ways they are replaying an original or a
>re-performances of past events, there is little evidence of the drive for
>authenticity or fidelity to the original event within her work that can be
>found in the work of other artists working with reenactment as a form.
>The methodology of Seven Easy Pieces seems to me more akin the traditional
>practices of a theatre company or an orchestra who rehearse a score or
>play script, the only difference being that Abramovic is working from
>video footage. What do others think about these issues?  What are the
>limits of reenactment?  When does  reenactment stray so far from the
>original that it becomes an original rather than a copy?  Or is all this
>talk of originals and copies completely defunct in contemporary discourse
>on art and (re)production technologies?
>
>As for the relationship between live art and media art, if indeed there
>can be any division drawn between the two, it is a lot more complex than
>many of the key texts which have dealt with this phenomenon in performance
>art or theatre have conceeded. I think that Philip Auslander has gone the
>furthest in his study Liveness, though he does employ quite an ugly
>umbrella term "mediatization" to apply to all forms of technology used in
>live events.
>
>In Liveness he claims mediatization and liveness are mutually dependent,
>suggesting that "liveness" was created in the process of mediatization for
>before the advent of recording technologies there was no concept of the
>live event.   He also suggests that recent developments in new media
>technology and in live art have problematized the assumption that the live
>preceeds the mediatized as now the "apparatus of reproduction and its
>attendant phenomeonolgy are inscribed within our experience of the live."
>This idea, that our experience of the live is always attended by or
>informed by the apparatus of reproduction, is interesting to consider when
>regarding the practices of many artists who work at the edge of live and
>mediatized forms.  This even brings to mind the practices of photobloggers
>who capture and curate their daily experience eg. electro-folk musician/
>artist Momus:
>www.imomus.com
>
>But for me Auslander's most interesting claim is that live performance
>cannot necessarily claim ontological difference from mass media, a claim
>made against those of performance theorist Peggy Phelan - in particular
>her suggestion that live performance escapes commodification through
>resisting repetition - in the book Unmarked.  He also challenges the
>binary oppositions set up by others - including Herbert Blau and Jacques
>Attali - which differentiate between economies based on representation and
>those based on repetition.
>
>It seems to me that reenactment also resists the categorisation as either
>representation or repetition.  But does this mean that reenactment somehow
>escapes the commodification associated with repetition? I could say so
>much more, but I'll leave it there for now.
>
>Hope this has not been too long and/or boring.  Apologies again for
>lurking and I look forward to future discussions!
>
>alina--
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