Hi all,

A late response to Johannes on the generalizability of reinterpretation:

No preservation strategy works for every form of cultural expression. The exhibition Seeing Double (2004), for example, made the case that emulation kept the spirit alive for Weinbren and Friedman's Erl King but would have extinguished the spirit of Paik's TV Crown. Even when reinterpretation is apt, we can still make judgments about which performances are better than others, in fidelity to the original or in inherent value. Music and dance critics do this all the time, and artists' reinterpretations of their own work are not immune from critique (cough George Lucas cough).

But let's recognize that some of this critical impulse stems from our society’s narrow conception of a creator, which biases us against considering reinterpretation a form of preservation. We worry that the intent breathed by the artist into the original atoms or bits will be lost--lost in a muddle of successive re-creations by reinterpreters with only a tenuous connection to the historical context.

This apprehension seems perfectly natural until we look outside of the narrow genres of painting and sculpture, or indeed outside the Euro-ethnic artistic tradition. As Liza noted eloquently, the Balinese presume their lamak will be recreated as necessary, to be "activated in new social contexts." Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, meanwhile, has shown how natives of Papua New Guinea sell a Malangaan sculpture after a public display, only to destroy it so the new caretaker must have it re-created from memory. [a] A Malangaan figure carved from wood and shells is not nearly as ephemeral as a lamak made of palm leaves--or indeed a website made of HTML and Perl. But each generation re-creates Malangaan because they value such "proliferative preservation" [b] as a mechanism for forging bonds among people across clans and generations.

Don't get me wrong: reinterpretation can be effective as a preservation strategy regardless of other social benefits. Last month the New York Times ran an article on indigenous tribes of Namibia wiped out by Nazis in what some are calling a prelude to the European Holocaust. Over 80% of Herero perished in the colonial campaign, yet the survivors' families have passed down memories of those times through songs and re-enactments of wartime stories. [c] If aliens descended tomorrow to eradicate our civilization--and in the US it feels increasingly like this just happened--the Guggenheim and the Vatican Archive would go the way of the Library of Alexandria. What survived would look more like underground media: African spirituals, Okinawan katas, fanzines.

That's not to say that museums, libraries, and archives shouldn't harness the powerful engine of persistence that is reinterpretation. But they will have to change ingrained habits and attitudes. Rick Rinehart and I conclude our book Re-collection with a chapter called "Only You Can Prevent the End of History," which calls for 12 different stakeholders in cultural preservation--from curators to historians to lawyers--to change how they do things. You can find an interactive infographic that summarizes these recommendations here:

http://re-collection.net/recommendations.html

Fans of the book can also find a breezy digital preservation quiz here:

http://re-collection.net/re-collection_quiz.html

Cheers,

Jon

[a] Joline Blais, "Indigenous Domain: Pilgrams, Permaculture, and Perl," http://thoughtmesh.net/publish/6.php#indigenousculture-indigenousculturecatchmentin

[b] For more on proliferative preservation, see "Unreliable Archivists," Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory, http://re-collection.net.

[c] "Germany Grapples With Its African Genocide," The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/world/africa/germany-genocide-namibia-holocaust.html