following on from my last post and alina's comments...
the equation between a live repetition of a historical event and its
mediation is well played out in the 70s performance group ant farm
and t.r uthco, whose 1975 film the eternal frame documents their
seminal performance to re-enact the assassination of President
Kennedy in 1963 which they staged in dealey plaza, the actual site of
the assassination. their piece is not just a live re-creation of the
assassination it also includes a simulation of the zapruder film.
the link between mediated event, history and an intrusion into the
real is established early on in the video. the artist Doug Hall
appears dressed as JFK, complete with facial prosthetic, making his
features reminiscent of JFK's. In a mock presidential office he
declares,
"I am in reality nothing more than another image on the television
set. . . . I am in reality nothing more than another face on your
screen, I am in reality only another link in that chain of pictures
which makes up the sum total of information accessible to us all as
Americans. . . . Like my predecessors, the content of the image is no
different from the image itself."
(The Eternal Frame, 1975)
Although the rhetoric might belong to mcluhan ant farm's tactics are
closer to debord.
From its beginning The Eternal Frame situates JFK's death as a real
death and as an image death, critiquing the powerful hold that the
images as history have on our memory and emotions. and it is here
that my own interest lies where re-enactment seems, as a form of
representation, strangely well equipped to address moments of
collective trauma and anxiety.
almost as if, taking a debordian turn, that the re-enactment operates
as the uncanny of the spectacle. a live image, in real space and real
time, but simultaneously displaced.
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