Hi Folks,
Thanks for the lively discussion about reenactment in contemporary practice.
I am posting the description of a work of mine because I feel that it speaks
to some of the questions that have been posed thus far.
Best, Caroline Koebel
ReAction: "From the Portfolio of Doggedness" (2003, miniDV, 3:30)
ReAction: "From the Portfolio of Doggedness" springs from the desire for
familiarity with a temporal and site-specific artwork by Valie Export and
Peter Weibel: "Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit," a 1968 action in Vienna
³proclaiming the negative utopia of erect posture in our animalistic
society." Koebel caught herself reflecting on the iconic black-and-white
photograph that through its repetition across various volumes has come to
stand in for the performance. Acknowledging the impossibility to know the
artwork as Weibel and Export had intended it, she nonetheless imagined that
the proximity afforded by the image was open to scrutiny and that an
alternate route to experiencing the work, however inauthentic the result,
was navigable. Treating what is known of the original as a script, ReAction
features the Viennese semiotician Bernadette Wegenstein walking as her dog
the artist Tony Conrad across a busy intersection in downtown Buffalo, New
York. ReAction looks for slippages between the original action and the video
reenactment, and considers tensions between animals, humans and cars as they
move through the built environment. The ¹03 performance shares a shoe store
as a major set component with the¹68 action. The new locale has a high
frequency of auto mishaps, as judged by Koebel from the perspective of her
studio overlooking the scene. The casting of the particular two personas is
a metafilmic act in that they both teach in the Department of Media Study at
SUNY Buffalo, which was formerly headed by Weibel, and also in that
Wegenstein writes extensively on Viennese Actionism in general and Valie
Export in particular. Koebel likes to associate the image of the human on
hands and knees moving through urbanity to her own action in 1968 in which
she crawled as a naked baby down Garfield Street in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, when her father was supposed to be looking after her. The
soundtrack is an original 1969 performance by the Golden Galaxy Symphony, in
which Beverly Grant Conrad directed the musicians to maximize their vocal
chords¹ capacities to mimic a barnyard of animals.
Credits:
Caroline Koebel‹director, camera, editor
Tony Conrad‹performing as Peter Weibel
Bernadette Wegenstein‹performing as Valie Export
Carolyn Tennant‹production manager
Canine Clubhouse clients‹extras
Sound:
The Golden Galaxy Symphony, 1969
Beverly Grant Conrad‹Director
Tony Conrad‹Producer
Screenings:
Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle Kino.Lab, Warsaw, Poland,
September 30, 2004
Robert(a) Beck Memorial Cinema at the Collective: Unconscious, New York
City, April 20, 2004
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