5. Amelia Jones, The Artist is Present Artistic Reenactments and the Impossibility of Presence, TDR...

8/20/2019 5. Amelia Jones, The Artist is Present Artistic Reenactments and the Impossibility of Presence, TDR 55 1, 2011

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"The Artist is Present": Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility

of Presence

Amelia Jones

TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 55, Number 1, Spring 2011 (T 209),

pp. 16-45 (Article)

Published by The MIT Press

For additional information about this article

Access provided by UniversitÃ¤tsbibliothek Bern (29 May 2013 04:41 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tdr/summary/v055/55.1.jones.html

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16DR: Te Drama Review 55:1 (209) Spring 2011. ©2011

Amelia Jones

“Te Artist is Present” Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence

Amelia Jones

Figure 1. Marina Abramovic ;: Te Artist is Present, 2010. Performance view, Museum of Modern Art,

New York, 2010. (Photo courtesy Marco Anelli)


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I m p o s s i b i l i t y o f P r e s e n c e

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The live act is most often privileged as delivering an authentic and “present” body — as the2010 retrospective of Marina Abramovic ;’s performance art career at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Marina Abramovic ;: The Artist is Present reveals instantly in its title.1 Theexhibition galleries were staged with the actual van she and her performance partner from the1970s, Ulay, drove across the Australian desert, signaling the brute “presence” claimed for the

performance ephemera that dominated the retrospective of this important artist from Serbia,now based in New York City. The galleries themselves, with melodramatically darkened walls, were filled with spotlighted vitrines containing objects presumably deployed in the origi-nal performances and with screenings of digital video transfers of contemporaneous film and video documentation. One entire large gallery was replete with photographs of Abramovic ; from her birth onward and ephemera relating to her life. In addition, the galleries, controver-sially, included several live re-enactments of the artist’s 1970s performances by younger dancersand performers.

Most dramatically the center of MoMA’s large dazzlingly white modernist interior court- yard (visible in a spectacular vista from the galleries above) featured Abramovic ; sitting in a chairacross from another chair in which museum visitors could engage with her live-ness.2 The vis-

itation element, for which she sat every day the Museum was open, and for the entire time it was open, enacted the “presence” of the artist in a literal way. The retrospective as a whole,curated by Klaus Biesenbach in close consultation with the artist, extended Abramovic ;’s interestin (often her own) performance histories, and her claims for the authenticity of live art and theemotional impact of durational performance.3

However, in this case, the dependence of Abramovic ; and MoMA on documentation (before,during, and after the actual time of the exhibition’s display) to spread the word of her “pres-ence” and its supposedly transformative effects, points to obdurate contradictions in the recentobsession with live art, its histories, and its documentation and re-enactments. The museum’s web documentation (paralleled by dozens of spontaneous websites put up during the show to

1. Claims of presence and authenticity are extremely common in discussions of performance art both from art his-

torical and performance studies points of view. For example, film and art history scholar Catherine Elwes noted

in 1985, “[p]erformance art offers women a unique vehicle for making that direct unmediated access [to the

audience]. Performance is about the ‘real-life’ presence of the artist [...]. Nothing stands between spectator and

performer” (165). I don’t want to scapegoat Elwes, an important theorist of feminist performance, here; in mak-

ing these claims, she is completely typical of most writing on performance art particularly in the art context from

the 1970s through the 1990s and even into the present.

2. Te first weeks Abramovic ; had a table placed between herself and the other chair, explicitly re-staging the perfor-

mance Night Sea Crossing (a series begun in 1981), which she and Ulay had enacted at various venues around the

world, sitting across from each other with a large table in between. She removed the table partway through the

roughly three-month length of the show (14 March–31 May 2010); according to her dealer, Sean Kelly, whom I

spoke with while I was waiting in line to “visit” the artist, this was because she felt the table distanced her psycho-

logically from the individuals she faced (Kelly 2010).

3. Assistant Curator Jenny Schlenzka clarified the process of the show’s organization (Schlenzka 2010).

Amelia Jones is Professor and Grierson Chair in Visual Culture at McGill University in Montréal. She

has organized exhibitions on contemporary art and on feminist, queer, and anti-racist approaches to

visual culture. Her recent publications include the edited volumes Feminism and Visual Culture Reader

(Routledge, 2010) and A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006). Fol-

lowing on Body Art/Performing the Subject (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), Jones’s books include

Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (MIT Press, 2004) and Self Image:

echnology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (Routledge, 2006). Her current projects are

an edited volume Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (with coeditor Adrian Heathfield) and a

book tentatively entitled Seeing Differently: Identification and the Visual Arts.


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document personal experiences and/or photographs of other “visitors”) draws on the claimsfor presence made by the artist herself and yet reveals the dependence of any concept of pres-

ence on (in this case web) documentation — including, on MoMA’s own website, a “gallery” ofphotographs of visitors who sat across from Abramovic ;. These contradictions play out not onlyin Abramovic ;’s recent project, The Artist is Present , but also in Seven Easy Pieces, her important2005 series of re-enactments of 1970s performances at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museumin New York. My critical investigation has a political motivation — not to debunk Abramovic ;’spractice, but to use her bold and assertive work, which casts a raking light on the dilemma ofperformance histories, to explore the limits of what we can know about live art.

Paradoxically, Abramovic ;’s recent practice, in its desire to manifest presence, points to the very fact that the live act itself destroys presence (or makes the impossibility of its being securedevident). The live act marks the body, understood as an expression of the self, as representa-tional. Thus, as someone who sat across from Abramovic ; in the atrium of MoMA, surrounded

by a barrier like a boxing ring, itself surrounded by dozens of staring visitors, cameras, and lit byklieg lights, I can say personally I found the exchange to be anything but energizing, personal,or transformative. Though I felt aware that the person I have met and whom I respect as an art-ist and cultural force was sitting there before me, I primarily felt myself the object of myriadindividual and photographic gazes (including hers), and the experience overall was very stronglyone of participating in a spectacle — not an emotionally or energetically charged interpersonalrelation, but a simulation of relational exchange with others (not just the artist, but the otherspectators, the guards, the “managers” of the event). For me this felt like an inadvertent parodyof the structure of authentic expression and reception of “true” emotional resonance that mod-ernist art discourse (brought to its apotheosis in institutions such as MoMA) so long claimed formodernist painting and sculpture.

If anything, as a visitor to The Artist is Present I felt vaguely sorry that Marina was subjectingherself to something so exhausting. And depressed and a bit distressed at the spectacularization(albeit largely self-induced) of a “body” and a “body” of work I have long admired, as a historianof art and performance. If anything, I found myself wanting to revert to reading books aboutperformance to escape the noisy emptiness of this “real” live art experience.

“Presence” as commonly understood is a state that entails the unmediated co-extensivityin time and place of what I perceive and myself; it promises a transparency to an observer of what “is” at the very moment at which it takes place. But the event, the performance, by com-bining materiality and durationality (its enacting of the body as always already escaping intothe past) points to the fact that there is no “presence” as such. I felt this paradox strongly as a

visitor at The Artist is Present . This paradox haunts performance studies and other discourses(such as art history) seeking to find ways to historicize and theorize — to exhibit and sell — liveperformance art.

MoMA clearly promoted The Artist is Present show by putting forth, and even

exaggerating, the artist’s own claims for the transcendent and mythical effects of her

“presence”; their website, which went live during the show and is still active, proclaims:

A pioneer of performance art, Marina Abramovic ; (born Yugoslavia, 1946) began

using her own body as the subject, object, and medium of her work in the early

1970s. For the exhibition Marina Abramovic ;: The Artist is Present , The Museumof Modern Art’s first performance retrospective, Abramovic ; performed in the

Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium every day the Museum was open

between 14 March and 31 May 2010. Visitors were encouraged to sit silently

across from the artist for a duration of their choosing, becoming participants in

the artwork. [...] The Artist is Present is Abramovic ;’s longest performance to date.

(MoMA 2010)


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4. Tese points are made by Jacques Derrida in his deconstruction of the philosophy of presence in the work of

Edmund Husserl. Derrida’s deconstructive strategy is to raise the spectre of nonpresence at the core of every

“present” moment: “the presence of the perceived present can appear as such only inasmuch as it iscontinu-

ously compounded with a nonpresence and nonperception, with primary memory and expectation (retention

and protention)” (1973:64). It is in this sense that “presence” only exists as a fantasy or a construct to anchor us

(phantasmagorically) in the now, and (playing on the phrase “in the blink of an eye” to call forth the idea of the

instant ), Derrida notes that as soon as we admit nonpresence into the instant, we admit that “[t]here is duration

to the blink, and it closes the eye” (65).

5. Te 2007 interview with Abramovic ; will be published as “Te Artist as Archaeologist: An Interview with Marina

Abramovic ;” in Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (forthcoming[a]).

6. Beyond art and performance there has been a huge surge of interest in re-enactment societies that restage histor-

ical events, such as the Civil War in the US. See the history of re-enactment in terms of these more popular uses

Looking at Abramovic ;’s re-enactments in Seven Easy Pieces and her self-presentation in The Artist is Present , I find that what her recent projects expose, in spite of claims in the media to thecontrary, is that there cannot be a definitively “truthful” or “authentic” form of the live eventeven at the moment of its enactment — not even (if this could be imagined) as lodged within thebody that originally performed or experienced it. There cannot, therefore, be a re-enactment

that faithfully renders the truth of this original event. Where would such a version of the liveevent reside at any rate? In the minds/bodies of the “original” performer(s) or spectator(s)? Inthe documents that seem indexically to fix in time and space what “really” happened? In thespaces where it took place?

When one puts the questions this way, it becomes painfully clear that there is no originalevent — or that there was, but it was never “present.”4 The difficulty of positing the truth of per-formance as lying in the minds/bodies of the original performer was exposed by Abramovic ;’sown admission, when I interviewed her in 2007, about her 2005 re-enactment of her 1975 per-formance Lips of Thomas :

When you re-do your own work you can really see the bigger picture; the first time youcan’t see what’s going on — you are just doing it. I think this re-enacted performance was much better than the original. I really did the best I could, I think, at that time, but Ididn’t have the consciousness I have now. (in Jones forthcoming[a])5

At the time of the “original,” in the mid-1970s — a period when performances in the Europeanand North American context were raw, often undocumented, and frequently spontaneous — Abramovic ; performed in small galleries in Europe for a select art world audience. Today sheis at the forefront of an industrial-strength institutionalization of performance histories. Whather body “contains” of the original event is (by her own admission) unavailable to consciousretrieval. What we get in the re-enactment is a willed aestheticization of the original versions of

Lips of Thomas .

Re-enactment, currently a hugely popular strategy in the art and performance worlds andbeyond (as signaled, importantly, by Abramovic ;’s own Seven Easy Pieces ), activates precisely thetension between our desire for the material (for the other’s body; for “presence”; for the “trueevent”) and the impossibility of ever fixing this in space and time. The re-enactment both tes-tifies to our desire to know the past in order to secure ourselves in the present and the para-dox of that knowledge always taking place through repetition. It thus exposes the paradox of thatknowledge, proving our own inexorable mortality: the fact that we are always reaching to securetime, and always failing.

The interest in re-enactments marks the current fascination with retrieving live events thattook place and are now known only through archival documents, film and video clips, inter- views, and so on.6 In the art and performance worlds this has taken the form of an obsessive


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in Howard Giles’s “A Brief History of Re-enactment” (2009). Performance art scholar Rebecca Schneider is pro-

ducing new work on historical re-enactment societies in relation to performance theory (forthcoming).

7. Here I am referring of course to the now classic theories of the performative drawn from J.L. Austin’sHow oDo Tings with Words (1967) and elaborated by Derrida and Judith Butler in their theories of performance.

See Derrida’s, “Signature Event Context” (1982:309–30); and Butler’s 1988 “Performative Acts and Gender

Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Teory” (in Jones 2010:482–91).

8. It is precisely the material forms, static and commodifiable, of works of art that make the stakes of art criticism,

theory, and history so high in their attempts to ward off embodiment and durationality — and performance is

borrowing these structures in the recent surge of exhibitions and texts written on the topics of performance doc-

umentation and re-enactment, in which of course this essay to some extent participates. On the commodification

of the artwork and the artist, see my essay “Te Contemporary Artist as Commodity Fetish” (2006). And on the

distinctions between a performance studies and art history approach to performance see my article “Live Art in

Art History: A Paradox?” (2008).

9. On music, performance, and liveness see Phillip Auslander’s Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture ([1999]2008), and Jonathan Sterne’s Te Audible Past (2003). And, on the trend towards re-enactments of experimental

dance from the 1960s and 1970s, clearly related to the interest in re-doing performance from this period (as the

two were intertwined), see Joan Acocella, “Tink Pieces: Return of the Judsonites” (2010).

interest in histories of performance or live art, ephemeral works that expose the contradictionbetween durationality and aesthetics — between the passage of time and the materiality that artdiscourse requires to substantiate the value of works of art as “unique.”

My argument here is that the re-enactment actually establishes itself from the get-go assimultaneously representational and live (it is a live re-doing of something already done in the

past — it is a reiteration, a performative re-doing — and one that itself becomes instantaneously“past,” raising questions about its own existence in time and in history).7 In so doing it exposesthe impossibility of our desire for the situation Abramovic ; proclaims in the title of the MoMAretrospective: The Artist is Present . While the artist may be sitting before us in a chair for as longas we wish to confront or engage with her (as Abramovic ; did as the central part of the retro-spective — and 30 years earlier in Night Sea Crossing opposite Ulay) questions are raised, suchas: What does this putting in proximity of artist and viewer mean? And, more philosophicallyspeaking, do we know what we mean when we claim someone is “present”? And, finally, whatare the ideological implications for such claims of presence?

The re-enactment also exposes the centrality of the marketplace in all of these expressions;one could argue the impulse to “re-enact” or document the live act results largely from the

pressure of the global art market attached to the visual arts.8 This market pressure inspires therange of methods that have been developed to “document” the work and/or its re-enactmentsand thus to secure the work its place in the markets of objects and histories. Even the seeminglypurely intellectual and political motivation of performance studies scholars or art historians tosecure important performance works in “history” is linked to the pressure of the market; afterall, writing academic books and art criticism that substantiate particular performance careers isa practice itself linked to marketing.

Re-enactments have a particularly fraught relationship to the visual arts, the discourses andinstitutions of which revolve around static objects (hence the challenge performance art posedin the first place to modernist beliefs and values in the 1950s and onward). In contrast to the

situation with the visual arts, music, dance, and theatre have an entirely different relationshipto temporality, the body, objecthood, and structures of history making. These arts alwaysacknowledged their reliance on the script that passes down through time to be “redone.”9 Whilealmost all dance and musical concerts (except the rare entirely improvisational event) are re-enactments of previously written and/or known songs, some performative re-enactments ofdance and/or musical events — notably the work of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, who hireactors to restage famous (“singular”) performances of famous rock gigs, such as David Bowie’s


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10. Burden’s practice in the 1970s marked an unusual awareness of the importance of addressing the issue of future

presentation of past performances. He commented extensively on his awareness of documentation and his use of

relics in a recent phone interview (2010).

11. Tese re-stagings took Kaprow Happening scripts as jumping off points, recognizing the impossibility of freez-

ing Kaprow’s work with exemplary or iconic movements, moments, or images. As Suzanne Lacy, a former stu-

dent of Kaprow, put it: “Te conundrum of Allan’s work is how to move it into the museum, which was sofraught for him. I wanted to capture the part of Allan’s work that was the most significant to him and the most

ephemeral. And that is the experience of his work as it becomes part of, and lives on in, someone else’s memory”

(in Finkel 2008).

penultimate performance as Ziggy Stardust in 1973 — deal explicitly with these tensions amongmusic, performance art, and the visual arts. Forsyth and Pollard’s work has been featured inrecent shows on performance re-enactment in art galleries, but it deals with the expansion ofrock music events into visually elaborate performances.

Histories of performance art proper (that is, the genre defined discursively in these very his-tories by authors such as Roselee Goldberg) have tended to devolve around a handful of iconicphotographs and textual descriptions, or in some cases film or video footage. Artists such asChris Burden in the early 1970s set the stage for such approaches by documenting their work(in Burden’s case) with single iconic images, brief textual accounts, and “relics.”10 Until recently,this reliance on these documents and descriptions by performance historians and curators was

rarely scrutinized or questioned for the way in which it paradoxically reduces the celebrated“live” act to singular (and commodifiable) objects of display and exchange. While Burden, asan artist, can be viewed as ironic in his deadpan reliance on these material remains, art histori-ans, curators, and performance studies scholars miss the point if they simply take these remainsas “proof” of some singular version of the event (or, even worse, as somehow the event-cum-artwork itself — with Burden’s photographs, texts, and relics now displayed, bought, and sold asunique artworks).

In contrast to this common situation within histories and exhibitions of performance upthrough the 1990s, the massive resurgence of interest in performance art and its histories overthe past five years has increasingly been worked through in relation to some variation on a

newly developed re-enactment format — whether this means literal performance works, redoneby the same or a different author, or elaborate and often more conceptual homages inspired byearlier works, as in the restaging of Allan Kaprow’s Happenings during the retrospective Allan

Kaprow: Art as Life at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2008.11 Abramovic ;’s

Abramovic ; has described Night Sea Crossing as an attempt to bring “Eastern” models

of temporal experience to “Western” viewers; in this description she notes her time

with Ulay engaging aboriginals in Australia and Tibetan monks as the backdrop for her

creative urge to establish presence: “I spend time with Tibetans or Aborigines, or decide

to be just by myself on a little island somewhere in the Pacific. And there I get the energy

and ideas for art. Then I come back to Western society and serve as a bridge. [...] WhenI say ‘the East,’ I think of nature too. Here in the West nature is already very disturbed.

But if you go to the Sahara or to the Gobi Desert or the Tar Desert in India, there is

still this purity of nature and pure vibrations that call. I need that to develop my mind

and to reach the level on which I can create” (in Wijers [1990] n.d.). Here, Abramovic ;’s

language familiarly recalls that of the European modernists with their yearning for a

more truthful experience, found often among “primitive” cultures — a belief system that

strikingly parallels the desire for live art to deliver presence. As much postcolonial and

poststructuralist theory suggests, ideologically, a belief in presence as articulated in this

way is in fact an artifact of European early-modern to modern belief systems, conditioned

through European colonization of Africa and other parts of the world.


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Text reads: Inside a small garage on Speedway Avenue, I stood on the rear bumper of a

Volkswagen. I lay on my back over the rear section of the car, stretching my arms onto

the roof. Nails were driven through my palms into the roof of the car. The garage door

was opened and the car was pushed half-way out into Speedway. Screaming for me, theengine was run at full speed for two minutes. After two minutes, the engine was turned

off and the car pushed back into the garage. The door was closed.

Figure 3. Chris Burden, text and relics for rans-Fixed, 1974; as

displayed at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in the exhibition Chris

Burden: Relics, 1976. Relic: 2 nails; Case: 6 7/8 x 6 1/4 x 6 1/4

inches. (Courtesy of Jasper Johns Collection, New York, New York)

Figure 2. Iconic photograph of rans-Fixed. Chris Burden, rans-

fixed, 23 April 1974, Venice, California.


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12. I have compiled an extensive timeline of re-enactments and performance art history exhibitions for the forth-

coming Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History , eds. Adrian Heathfield and Amelia Jones (see Jones

forthcoming[b]).

13. On Hayes’s work and the important protest re-enactments of Mark ribe and his Port Huron Project, see

Schneider (2010).

14. Tere is an interesting generational issue with the political re-enactments — most of the artists involved in this

kind of work were born between 1960 and 1970; most of the events re-enacted took place during the heyday

of political activism, during the ’60s and ’70s, and in the UK up through the failed 1984 miners’ strike, which

marked the death knell in Britain for 1960s ideals of political change. I would conjecture, having been born in

1961 myself, that these artists are redoing their own formative years — years of intense politicization — as a wayof insisting on the importance of those histories both politically and personally. Tis return is partly nostalgic

and partly political: we want to know how to be political in a world in which there are no longer clear binaries or

guidelines.

Seven Easy Pieces , is the most celebrated and best-known example of this surge of re-enactments.In Seven Easy Pieces Abramovic ; re-enacted six major 1970s body art works at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, including one of her own earlier works ( Lips of Thomas ) and produced anew performance as the “seventh” piece.

While Abramovic ; was herself an active performance artist in the 1970s, a period of explo-

sive development in contemporary performance art, a number of younger generation artistshave also used the re-enactmentformat over the past decade.Interestingly, many of these younger artists choose to re-do political events (although thereare many re-enacting perfor-mance art works as well).12 Examples of the strategy of re-doing political events include:British artist Jeremy Deller’s

2001 The Battle of Orgreave (restaging the failed British min-ers’ strike of 1984, using some ofthe original police and strikersas “actors” in the re-enactment);US artist Sharon Hayes’s recentproject having herself photo-graphed with signs from his-toric protests standing on thesites of the original events;13 andStockholm-based German art-

ist Felix Gmelin, whose ColorTest, Red Flag II (2002) restagedfor videotape a 1968 activist pro-test in which students from WestBerlin, organized by his own father (who was their professor), ran through the streets of the citypassing a red flag in a relay.

Deller, Hayes, and Gmelin re-enact political actions — in Gmelin’s case also an event ofdirect personal relevance — within the aesthetic context of the art gallery. To some degreein this way they reify these acts into “art,” freezing temporal events into things (albeit insome cases maintaining an aspect of the temporal — as in Gmelin’s video and the Deller/ Figgis film).14 While, at their most compelling, re-enactments presented in visual arts and/or

Figure 4. Jeremy Deller, Te Battle of Orgreave, 2001. Commissioned and produced by Artangel. Tis is the “archive” of the work in one of its permutations,

as installed at ate Britain, London. (© ate, London, 2010)


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15. For an important reading of the piece as a mode of Marxist political activism see Neil Cummings and Marysia

Lewandowska, “A Shadow of Marx” (2006).

performance contexts interrogate the previously accepted bases for documenting live artworksand political events, they are also ironically themselves turned into conventional aesthetic dis-plays in their presentation in galleries via forms of documentation.

In the best cases the artists actively acknowledge this contradiction. Deller, for example, self-reflexively interrogates this tendency brilliantly by including in The Battle of Orgreave project

a vast range of events, things, and processes — from objects and images relating to the initial Thatcher-era strike, which is now refigured into his artwork as an event of historical impor-tance being re-enacted; to relics and documents from the re-enactment performance itself, allof which are displayed in museums in various configurations as the piece itself; to the film astransmitted over BBC television, showed in cinemas and art galleries; to the piece’s presenceon the web (see Deller n.d.).15 Crucially, The Battle of Orgreave itself is continually changing —and is never presented as a “final” or fully coherent work or object, even though it consists ofdocuments, objects, and other material traces of prior re-enactments. Notably, too, while manyof the other re-enactments tellingly substitute the re-enactor as new “author” of a unique andultimately static (documented) work, Deller himself does not feature in a noticeable way eitheras part of the re-enactment or the public relations materials circulating around the film, its

most visible “documentation” — the work in its infinite permutations does not tend to devolveback to a singular body, though it does only have coherence in relation to the author-name Jeremy Deller.

Deller’s project crystallizes the paradox of re-enactments in the art context — the fact, pre-cisely, that they activate the impossibility of presence in relation to the visual arts while alsopointing to the impossibility of the ephemeral event ever being known as such in any but highlycontingent and unreliable human memory and in the event’s reified forms. As Jacques Derridahas noted in his interrogation of beliefs about presence in European philosophy, the “visibil-ity and spatiality” of performance (as itself a kind of “redo” of “real life”) can only ever be expe-rienced through the senses; “presence,” the live body in performance, is representational (seeDerrida 1973:64, 65). And as artist Rod Dickinson has noted in relation to his art practice,

which includes restagings of famous psychology experiments from the 1960s: “The audience ispresented with something inherently contradictory in that they are being presented with some-thing live and happening in real time, yet they know that this is an impossible scenario, sincethe event has already happened” (in Pil and Gallia Kollectiv 2007).

These are vastly different examples of re-enactments in the art and performance worlds,from Deller to Dickinson to Abramovic ;. The latter’s Seven Easy Pieces project (as we will see)scrupulously engages live art histories through documentary, archival, and interview researchand proposes to recreate original art performances authentically in the present (which itselfbecomes immediately past). And Seven Easy Pieces was by no means the first or the last of thistype of re-enactment. In fact, one would be hard put to establish a “beginning” for the re-doing

of an iconic art performance, since almost all performance artworks were performed more thanonce in their earlier incarnation — for example, Yoko Ono’s influential Cut Piece was enacted in Tokyo and New York in the mid 1960s; it has since been reinterpreted by a number of youngerartists, and by Ono herself in 2003 in Paris (see Jones forthcoming[b]). In other instances, suchas the Kaprow case noted above, former colleagues, students, and other artists reinterpret worksfrom scripts that were never meant to produce “artworks” in museum settings. A huge range oftypes of re-enactments drawing on visual arts conceits and institutional contexts thus exist. Incontrast, Deller re-stages a political event and then through exhibition display and film alignsdocumentation of this re-staging with ephemera from the original event; Dickinson redoesfamous social psychology experiments as “art.” Each type of project seems to be motivated dif-ferently, engages different audiences in different ways, and has different aesthetic and political


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16. See my discussion of this “fixing” tendency in these discourses of the visual arts in my essay “Performance: ime,

Space and Cultural ‘Value’” (2009).

17. Kant’s Critique of Judgment , due in part to its profound influence on 20th-century modernist art criticism, is stilla benchmark for understanding the obdurate contradictions at play in the human (subjective and sensory) rela-

tionship to things in the world that we want to call art, which we thus want to have an “objective” or “universal”

meaning and value. Kant attempts to resolve this impossible contradiction by noting “[t]he universal voice is [...]

effects. Key to all of them, however, is an interest in how time, memory, and history work —and how or whether we can retrieve past events (in their political [viz. Deller], social [viz.Dickinson], and/or personal/aesthetic [viz. Abramovic ;] power) by redoing them in some fashion.

In all cases of re-enactments the question of what happens when art, political, or social sci-entific events are redone in a gallery or museum context is crucial. Surely re-doing past non-art

events in an art context shifts our understanding of their meaning and significance more dra-matically than the re-staging of former performative artworks in new art contexts. But thereare some potentials and dangers common to all types of re-enactment. Although all of these re-staging gestures have interesting critical potential, they also have the potential to flatten out oraestheticize the act (precisely by evacuating the act of its original political specificity) and thusto reduce or erase the act’s potential for provoking awareness or for transformation or change.Even in the case of re-done body art works (made, after all, in a loosely aesthetic or art context)the act of aestheticization can violently eradicate their political potential. The Happenings, forexample, were never meant to be aesthetically pleasing. I leave aside for now a detailed analysisof the nuances of how different re-enactment strategies might be seen to function — in the end,the most important point to note is that each project would have to be evaluated for its very

specific modes of retrieving past acts, and within its very specific, ongoing contexts of produc-tion and reception.

In this way, the strategy of re-enactment can activate the disavowal at the heart of our rela-tionship to live art in productive ways: we “know” the performance (even the re-enactment per-formance itself) is always already in the past even if we are watching it “now,” and yet we carryinto our writing about performance a belief in the possibility of constituting meanings (andknowledge about the event) “as if” these reside somewhere permanently and can be retrieved intheir full essence for the present moment — a belief central to the development of art criticismand art historical models of interpretation out of 18th-century aesthetics (most importantly,Immanuel Kant’s 1790 Critique of Judgment [1986]).16

Even the most sophisticated performance theorist/historian argues her points “as if ” herinterpretations hold water somewhere in relatively fixed form, “as if” they are not dependenton material traces after the immutable always already “gone” character of the act establishes its“non presence” in the world. In the rush to privilege the supposedly unfixable ephemerality ofthe act, most scholars or critics writing about live art will tend to downplay (if not completelydisavow in many cases) our reliance on photographic and filmic documentation, textual descrip-tions, and our own memories of live acts witnessed. This tendency is understandable (if regret-table), for, after all, while live performance is clearly of interest partly because of its liveness, itsapparent confirmation of presence, there seems to be little point intellectually or politically inengaging with works in a way that truly accommodates the fact that their ephemerality makesthem forever inaccessible to full knowledge — this would be to throw our hands up and admit

defeat at the hands of time.It is worth returning briefly here to the most influential theory of aesthetics in Euro-

American thought. In the terms of aesthetic theory sketched by Kant over 200 years ago inCritique of Judgment , we must act as if we can interpret these works through a judgment thatcompels agreement; we must act as if the works are graspable in some full and knowable (fixed) way even though our entire point is often that they are ephemeral and impossible to retrieveexcept through moments of subjective perception and interpretation.17


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Frozen/Live Art

The re-enactment projects noted here negotiate the paradoxical fact that the live act itselfboth claims and destroys presence; the live act is always already passing and the body in action,understood as an expression of the self, is thus representational. In the context of the visual arts,the live body in action always already, in the words of Robert Legorreta, becomes “frozen art”

(in Flores Sternad 2006). All the most interesting artists deploying performance, in my view,understand this and play with it self-reflexively. (Burden is a strong example — he seems to beopening out precisely the contradiction Kant noted 200 years ago in how art comes to meanthrough acts of encounter.)

The re-enactment foregrounds the desire for the live and the tendency of the live alwaysalready to become “frozen art,” a paradoxical situation that is exposed in the case of Abramovic ;’s Seven Easy Pieces , the performance and documentation of which epitomizes the tendency topresent the re-enactment itself as the site where the authentic meaning of the original event isto be found (as ephemeral yet “here now,” as past yet present). Abramovic ; herself has consis-tently remarked upon the contradictions at play in such an enterprise: “redoing is still perfor-

mance and performance is somehow living . For me the performance only has sense when youperform; otherwise it’s dead” (in Jones forthcoming[a]). This kind of poignant statement indi-cates that the performance is only “alive” at the very moment of its enunciation — indicating thenecessary failure of any attempt to secure this “truth” historically or personally. And of coursethe re-enactment, itself a performance, is plagued by the same encroachment of pastness (theerosion of the present at every instant, its freezing into something knowable and “over”). ThusSeven Easy Pieces as a whole — the performances; the press put out by the museum and articles written about the event; the documentation of the event through photography, audio, and filmrecording; and the catalogue and film made after the fact — pivots around the artist’s use of past works, and of the institutional setting of the Guggenheim and the sites of documentation, to sit-uate the artist within a newly ratified discourse of performance art histories. Reciprocally, Seven

Easy Pieces works to substantiate the artist as a genius of re-enactment and (as the MoMA show,five years later, was to indicate) of performing the “presence” of the artist.

Seven Easy Pieces retrieved the past to substantiate a mythological structure of “present”meaning and value summed up by the author named Marina Abramovic ;. The Artist is Present functioned to confirm the way in which the artist-gallery structure (with the viewer to somedegree an “extra”) functions to reciprocally confirm cultural status, in this case via the “authen-ticity” of live art. By “delivering” Abramovic ; to us, The Artist is Present ended up exposing the lieof the promise of live art to secure presence.

In order to explore how this process of meaning-making functions with Seven Easy Pieces ,here I perform a necessary but I hope adequately self-reflexive interpretive and textual “re-enactment” of sorts of Abramovic ;’s re-enactments — for any textual description and analysis isinevitably a form of reiteration that itself participates in the work as it circulates in discourse.In contrast to my “direct” experience of The Artist is Present , I did not view any of the Seven

Easy Pieces performances “live,” though I have seen and read every form of documentation avail-able to me. So my retelling is based on the large amount of existing documentation, and on anextensive interview I performed with the artist in 2007. And of course I document these com-plex durational re-enactments here with still photographs — belying the range of documentarystrategies Abramovic ; deploys in these projects. Accordingly, I use illustrations sparingly here,directing the reader to the wealth of documentation I describe (particularly in the catalogueaccompanying the show).

only an idea” ([1790] 1986: second moment, section 6,) and yet an idea that we must claim to be “true.” His

simultaneous claim and disavowal is a productive model for the contradictions I am sketching here in relation to

re-enactments.


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18. On this point, see my article “‘Presence’ in absentia : Experiencing Performance as Documentation” (1997:11–18).

19. Relatively in the sense that performance histories have only recently begun to be established, and so these works

are nowhere near at the level of visibility in specialized histories or the more popular consciousness of contempo-

raneous artworks such as Andy Warhol’s celebrity portraits or even Barbara Kruger’s feminist appropriation art.

It is limiting but also perhaps in some ways appropriate that I did not see the works at theGuggenheim; because of this limit, I am much more aware of how circumscribed my accessto the events of the seven nights in November 2005 is — in this case, I cannot comment onmy “feelings” or “experience” as I did above in describing sitting across from the artist in The

Artist is Present . Neither experience, however, feels more truthful or more “authentic” to me asI attempt to understand how each project functions socially, aesthetically, and politically. (Thisis not at all to say I think people who were at the Guggenheim, even those rare few who mighthave been there every night for the seven-hour duration of each re-enactment, have a full ortruthful access to the performances. But they certainly have embodied memories — as mediatedand unreliable as these would no doubt be — that I do not. 18) I am writing of the works of Seven

Easy Pieces clearly on a discursive level, not on a level of embodied memory (whatever that maybe or mean; phenomenology and neuroscience aside, I am not sure we have any idea). No illu-sions of truth, of restating the authentic moment through words drawn from memories, here.

For Seven Easy Pieces , Abramovic ; researched five relatively well-known pieces by other art-ists from the history of Western performance art and rethought one of her own. 19 Each of the works was re-enacted by Abramovic ; for seven hours (from 5:00 to midnight) over each ofsix nights, with the seventh night consisting of her newly commissioned piece entitled Enteringthe Other Side (in which she inhabited a gargantuan blue dress, occupying the vortex-like cen-ter of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous spiraling building of the Guggenheim). The works shere-enacted were (in order of their re-performance): Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure (1974), apiece never known to have been performed by Nauman himself, which originally consisted of

a poster exhorting visitors to press themselves against the gallery wall; Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972), in which he had a ramp built in a gallery in New York, and laid under it masturbatingin response to visitors entering the gallery space, his voice projected through a sound system; VALIE EXPORT’s c. 1969 Action Pants: Genital Panic , in which she supposedly stalked the malespectators at a porn theatre in the late 1960s wearing crotchless pants, a disheveled wig, andholding a gun; Gina Pane’s The Conditioning (1973), an endurance piece in which Pane laid on ametal frame over lit candles that burned her back; Joseph Beuys’ 1965 How to Explain Pictures toa Dead Hare, a performance in which the artist, adorned with his trademark elements of honey,

The term “frozen art” was articulated by the Chicano activist and artist Robert Legorreta,

aka the cross-dressed diva “Cyclona.” Two of Legorreta’s collaborators, Gronk and Patssi

Valdez, formed the core of Asco, the activist Chicano/a performative art group in Los

Angeles from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, which also included Harry Gamboa and

Willie Herrón. Legorreta spoke at length with Jennifer Flores Sternad about the fluidity of

his work, along with that of artists Gronk, Valdez, and Mundo Meza, enacting elaborately

costumed cross-gendered personae such as Cyclona in theatrical settings for the making

of photographs and then paintings. Legorreta notes of these projects: “What we were

doing was capturing live art and putting it into photographs, and then sometimes it

would go from the photographs onto canvas or different media. Usually a work of art was

already created, like a mural or a painting, and then we would do something live in front

of it in order to be part of the artwork. Then we made that into a photograph as one art

piece. We coined it ‘frozen art’” (in Flores Sternad 2006:482). Legorreta’s project, along

with his collaborators’, enacts precisely the consciousness of history I am interested in

here, as well as showing an awareness of the failure of the live to “stick” outside of its

representational modes.


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20. In my interview with Abramovic ;, she explained further: “So the VALIE EXPOR thing again; I was the most

critical and most careful about this piece because in reality she stated that she originally performed the piece in

this theatre at the erotic film festival in Vienna, but at the same time she made the poster as well. Genital Panic isa great contradiction [in terms of the issue of “live” versus documented performance] because she also made the

photograph in her studio and there are lots of different images of that poster. And she wouldn’t give me any clear

answers when I asked her about it” (forthcoming[a]).

gold leaf, iron, and felt, cradled a dead hare, whispering to it, while viewers peered inthrough a glass window in the gallery door;and Abramovic ;’s own 1975 Lips of Thomas ,a semi-narrative performance involving her

performing a number of actions, includingcutting a star in her stomach with a razor, whipping herself, and lying on an ice cross.

I note all of these with relatively loadeddescriptions because each raises differentquestions in terms of an original versus re-enacting body, an original versus re-enacted work, and thus about the meaning and valueof the bodies and works at issue in each case.For Abramovic ; to re-enact a work that, asfar as we know, was never actually performed

by the initiating artist (the Nauman piece)is clearly of a different order from her re-doing a well documented work in the historyof performance art (the Beuys or Acconci works), a work by a woman artist herselfmarginalized due to her gender and sexuality(Pane), a work which itself might never haveoccurred as such (see below on EXPORT),or an earlier work by the artist herself ( Lips ofThomas ). The importance of Seven Easy Pieceslies in part in the care with which Abramovic ;

chose, researched, and explored the limitsof each type of situation she was evoking inredoing the works.

The research, presentation, performance,and documentation of each piece begins andends with the reiterative devices of repre-sentation — for Abramovic ; just as for me, aresearcher and scholar of performance. This

is evident if one looks closely at the catalogue, where each of the Abramovic ; redos is presentedthrough the following means: brief documentation of the “original” performance (typicallyfor performance histories, through still photographs and textual information); brief indica-tion of Abramovic ;’s research process; extensive photographs of Abramovic ;’s re-dos along withtexts transcribing both Abramovic ;’s own speech during the performances (17 pages long inthe case of Seedbed ) and the words of audience members, taped by volunteers mingling amongthe crowds. Abramovic ; admits in an interview with Nancy Spector (also published in the cata-logue) that the research to find the “facts about the original piece” was not always satisfying orcomplete (in Spector et al. 2007:22), and she laments in the 2007 interview I did with her that VALIE EXPORT inexplicably refused to discuss Genital Panic with her.20

Figure 5. Marina Abramovic ;, Entering the Other Side,

commissioned for Seven Easy Pieces. Solomon R. Guggenheim

Museum, New York, 2005. (Photo by Attilio Maranzano; courtesy

Sean Kelly Gallery and the Marina Abramovic ; Archive)


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In fact, it is worth noting that, due to EXPORT’s refusal to give her further information, Abramovic ;’s re-enactment of EXPORT’s piece had to be based on a handful of very limitedexisting remainders — a few famous black-and-white photographs of EXPORT sitting withher gun and wearing “action pants.” Abramovic ;’s belief in the “truth” of the original event isrevealed in her comment to Spector on this conundrum:

It was really difficult to determine the facts about the original piece from all the archeo-logical evidence. Looking at the images, you see that one was a pose for the poster, one was the real performance in the theatre [...]. In the end, I thought, given the circumstances,it was best for me to create an image. (in Spector et al. 2007:22; emphasis added)

Abramovic ; reveals her desire to recreate the supposed performance that took place in the actualporn theatre — but this historical “fact” about the “real performance” has, since Abramovic ;’sproject was performed and documented, now been exposed as a myth by art historian Mechtild Widrich, who interviewed the photographer of EXPORT’s documents, Peter Hassmann, anddiscovered that apparently she never actually went to a porn theatre but told this story later as amode of embellishing the performative images (Widrich forthcoming).

In this extraordinary case, we seem to have “evidence” (again one must be careful in claiming“facts”) that the original artist, EXPORT, performatively enacted through discourse and photographicimagery a “performance” that never took place as mythically described. Widrich is one of a newgeneration of art history and performance studies scholars who are poised to begin to under-stand the significance of such gaps and contradictions, reveling in the impossibility of knowingfor sure rather than claiming to find final meanings. EXPORT’s refusal to speak to Abramovic ; simply exposes further the extent to which our understanding and beliefs about past worksare always contingent on what information is available to us — as Widrich’s research makes

Figure 6. VALIE EXPOR, one of several photos of Genital Panic/Action Pants, 1969 (Peter Hassmann,

© VALIE EXPOR Archive), as reproduced in the online version of New Zealand Art Monthly (Gimblett 2005). Tis reproduction and caption shows the tendency both to repeat stories circulating around

EXPOR’s photograph and, after Abramovic’s 2005 re- enactment, to label EXPOR’s work in relation to

the re-enactment.


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21. See also the photographic redo of the EXPOR piece by artist Eve Fowler, who photographs a fellow woman

artist (named as “Hardy”) posing like EXPOR with “action pants” (del Carmen Carrión and Dawsey 2008).

Tis text typifies the way in which EXPOR’s self-mythologizing circulates, as evidenced by the way the authors

describe the c. 1969 EXPOR piece: “In that performance, Export removed the crotch from a pair of pants and

wore them to a movie house, proceeding slowly through the aisles, challenging male viewers to confront ‘the real

thing’ instead of passively watching the fragmented bodies of women on the screen.”

22. Bergson’s ime and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness ([1889] [1913] 2005) is a mind-

blowing rumination on precisely the human tendency to make sense of the world by creating temporal sequences

in space, codifying the layers of durationality that are otherwise constantly in flux.

clear (and, who knows, perhaps Widrich or I will be exposed later on for believing Hassmann’sstory...and so on...).

Speaking her work through mythification, EXPORT, like Deller, has shown a sharp

attention to how history works — making the images mean something discursively but incontradiction (or at least contrast) to what occurred with the physical body and in materialspaces at the time (as far as we can know, again a “knowledge” itself gained from memories con- veyed by others and documentary traces). EXPORT’s self-mythifying act prompts later re-enactors such as Abramovic ; to fantasize the work in ways that may or may not be connected toan “original” durational event.

EXPORT’s Genital Panic unfolds as part of a reiterative ever-expanding network of meaning-generating ideas, images, and beliefs that themselves relate to an ever-metamorphosing con-cept about what constitutes the “original” event.21 If time is sequential (which, since Einstein,is a doubtful proposition anyway), then the sequence here is based on an “original” that began(as far as we now “know”) as a lie. If temporality is understood more as a network of ideas that

expands outward but always from multiple rather than singular origins, and origins that onlyexist as themselves represented in history and memory — a Bergsonian layering rather than apoint-to-point teleology — then the impossibility of Abramovic ;’s project of retrieving some-thing authentic from an original event becomes clear.22 This conundrum, this gap between theoriginal and the re-enactment, to my mind makes Abramovic ;’s project much more interest-

Figure 7. Marina Abramovic ; performing VALIE EXPOR’s Genital Panic/Action Pants at Seven Easy

Pieces. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2005. (Photo by Kathryn Carr; courtesy Sean Kelly

Gallery and the Marina Abramovic ; Archive)


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23. I am deliberately evoking Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonian take on cinema ([1983] 1986 and [1985] 1989). In

Deleuze’s terms, Mangolte’s film seems to me to reside somewhere in between the “movement image” of early cin-

ema and the “time image” of more recent cinema in that it both insists on the moment-to-moment “photograph”

or instant, frozen (the potential for a still photographic “document” is pressed on the viewer at every moment of

the film) and activates the temporality of cinema and live art as self-implicating (it is very clear that one is watch-

ing an art film of sorts, the temporality of which is constructed through editing and camera work). ime takes

place both in a narrative sense and, through editing and point of view, through “depth” of the duration implied

in the vignettes representing each re-enactment.

24. By Abramovic ;’s team I’m referring to everyone from the curators of SEP , Guggenheim employees Nancy Spector

and Jennifer Blessing, to her critical supporters (such as the essayists in the catalogue) and the funding body

that partly sponsored the show (in the latter regard, the press for the exhibition thus noted: “Funding for Seven

ing than if we simply buy into and repeat claims for her authenticity and truthfulness as sheretrieves earlier works from the past.

Documentation as Reification?

This problem of reification or fetishization of the very kind of art said to be privileged because

of its ephemerality — or, otherwise put, the problem of live art in history and in the marketplace(of ideas as well as of artworks) — is crystallized by Abramovic ;’s extensive use of documenta-tion to secure Seven Easy Pieces a place in art history, even as she, and the curators and promot-ers of the work, propose these performances as securing the authentic meaning of “original”live works by re-entering them into the domain of temporality through the re-enactment for-mat. The paradox here of course is that the re-enactment itself is durational and thus alwaysalready “over,” its meaning and value in history just as contingent and problematic as that of the“original” performance.

Abramovic ;’s careful management of the documentation of Seven Easy Pieces , particularly hercentral role in arranging the production of the catalogue and film, indicates her clear concern with its “fixing” in history in a very particular way. Along with the catalogue, which includessome of the extensive still photographs and text documenting the project, the feature-length2007 film by professional filmmaker Babette Mangolte seems bent on establishing the pres-ence of the project in history through the semi-material durationality of cinema.23 As a critic who attended Seven Easy Pieces notes dryly, “The filming of Pieces was itself a performance, with Babette Mangolte deftly choreographing a fleet of cameras and crew” (Burton 2006:56).Seamlessly edited together, with the most stunning color camera work (clearly involving mul-tiple cameras, carefully placed and their movements carefully choreographed), the highly artsyfilm is a far cry from the grainy black-and-white super 8 footage taken by a single, often static,movie camera common to most 1970s performance documentation, for those works that wereeven documented at all (many weren’t).

Several scholars have already noted the bundle of contradictions surrounding Seven Easy Pieces — contradictions, I want to stress, that make the project more not less important for con-siderations of writing performance histories. As art historian Jessica Santone has noted of theproject, “The medium of the documentation that Abramovic ; produces, authorizes or uses istherefore part of a layered, knotted set of materials all hovering around the idea that some‘original’ precedes the current documentation” (2008:148). Art critic Johanna Burton, citingthe museum’s claim in the brochure handed out on the final night of the project that the art-ist “is present, here and now,” acerbically notes, “[y]et she looks, for all the world, like apicture” (2006:56).

The sheer volume of materials produced by Abramovic ; and her team (including the cura-tors of Seven Easy Pieces , Nancy Spector and Jennifer Blessing) indicates that the artist is more

aware than most of the impossibility of this very ideal she sets for herself, but at the same timecontinues to make what I would argue to be untenable claims for the authenticity and presenceof live art.24 The film version of Seven Easy Pieces thus begins with the claim “[p]erformance,


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time-based art, features the physicality of the artist’s body in front of a live audience,”confirming her insistence on both temporality and the presence of the “physical” body and theproximity of this body to the audience in live art. But, again, the project itself, with its depen-dence on the film and an array of supporting representations, begs the question crucial to alllive performance art of how presence can survive duration; the fact that this claim for physical-

ity is made in an obviously representational medium highlights this contradiction.In her introduction to the large and beautifully produced Seven Easy Pieces catalogue,

Abramovic ; crystallizes the tension at work in beliefs about performance by moving back andforth between noting the belief in the authenticity of the live event (“in the early seventies, [...]most of us believed that any documentation [...] could not be a substitute for the real experi-ence” (2007:9), presumably of the performer as well as of audience members) and yet acknowl-edging the impossibility of sustaining this belief if one has any interest in promoting this workafter its original performance (“[l]ater on, though, our attitude changed. We felt the need toleave some trace of the events for a larger audience”). Abramovic ; poses the issue of re-doingperformances as a question — “Can we treat the instructions of the performance like a musi-cal score — something that anyone who is properly trained can re-play?” (9) — but then pro-

poses the goal of establishing a “stable grounding” for performance art “in art history,” notingthat “the only real way to document a performance art piece,” presumably to ensure its placein this history in its truthful, authentic, embodied, live form, “is to re-perform the piece itself”(Abramovic ; 2007:11). Elsewhere she explicitly details her role in choreographing the documen-tation of the work, begging further the question of why these efforts would be necessary if theliveness is its only authentic mode of being. Abramovic ; notes:

With Seven Easy Pieces I spent a lot of time working with the filmmaker, Babette Mangolte, to produce good documentation. I had a static movie camera that filmedeach piece in its entirety over the seven hours and then I had three other cameras mov-ing around. I also had numerous still photographs taken, which we used for the book. And I gave instructions to the photographer on how to take each photograph. (in Jonesforthcoming[a])

On the one hand Abramovic ; claims to be retrieving the authentic “original” event in her re-enactment of it (deferring through copyright to the original performers) — and several authorsin the catalogue reiterate these claims; on the other hand, she is explicit about her interest inand dependence on documentation both for the retrieval of what she can know about the orig-inal and for the dissemination of knowledge about her own reworked versions of it. On the onehand, Abramovic ; more than anyone knows from experience that performances can never befully “known” (even while they are taking place, even by the artist herself), and that time itselfis the key issue in the enactment and retrieval of performances. In her interview with me, shethus noted that successful performance demands duration and that “[t]he only new element I

bring to the [re-enacted] piece is time, the element of time, which is my interpretation”; sheadmitted as well the impossibility of retrieving full histories: “the resurgence of interest in per-formance is due to a lot of different things; looking back to that history, we can’t really seeor isolate what exactly happened at the time either.” On the other hand, Abramovic ; and theauthors in the catalogue claim that by re-enacting an earlier performance its true meaning canbe retrieved, and then it can be written into art history. Catalogue author Erika Fischer-Lichtethus notes that with each evening of Seven Easy Pieces Abramovic ; “created a completely new,original artistic event, which, in some respects, referred to performances of the past, but by nomeans repeated them” (2007:42). Abramovic ;’s events are thus originals even while they are, par-adoxically, repeats. And just before this claim, Fischer-Lichte draws on Abramovic ;’s own lan-guage of “energy” and the authenticity of the live to insist that the project affirms “moments of

Easy Pieces has been generously provided by the Marina Abramovic ; Leadership Committee” (Guggenheim

Museum 2005).


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25. For a wonderful and sophisticated exposition on live art as a mystical transferal of love and energy, see Lea

Vergine’s classic Il Corpo Come Linguaggio ( 1974), which includes a (very bad!) English translation.

26. On this centering tendency of aesthetics, see Jacques Derrida’sruth in Painting ([1978] 1987) and Luc Ferry,

Homo Aestheticus: Te Invention of aste in the Democratic Age ([1990] 1993).

27. As an aside, the fact that Abramovic ; explicitly repudiates feminism might explain the willingness of curators at

MoMA, an institution that has hosted almost no retrospectives of work by women artists and certainly none byfeminists, to promote her career through such a show. See “Interview: Klaus Biesenbach in Conversation with

Marina Abramovic ;,” where the artist answers Biesenbach’s question “did you or do you consider yourself a femi-

nist?” with the categorical, “Absolutely not, never” (in Stiles 2008:20).

presence [...which] happen when the performer brings forth his body as an energetic body thatreleases energy and allows it to circulate in the space and to energize spectators so that theysense the performer as well as themselves not only as intensely present, but as embodied minds”(42; emphasis added).

Drawing on the premises of a particular kind of live art from the 1970s — which promoted

a concept of live performance as a kind of mystical transferal of life force — Fischer-Lichtethus seemingly inadvertently raises another contradiction, and the paradox of live art in his-tory, or live art placed in art institutions and discourses of aesthetics, rears its head again.25 Theoriginality of Abramovic ;’s “energetic” body — its very (supposedly) authentic “presence” — infact opens to otherness (the otherness of the initial author, the otherness of interpreters andspectators from then and now), and thus to the impossibility of its own wholeness and coher-ence (and of its “originality”).

The belief that the meaning of the body in action can only be known to the spectatorthrough its authentic live enactment, as performance theory suggests, contradicts the fact — anda fact explicitly admitted and highlighted in Abramovic ;’s project — that this body’s actions canonly be known if they are recognizable, if they are reiterating or repeating previous gestures

that have salience to viewers, as coded from accepted past traditions. While Fischer-Lichte, tak-ing her cue from Abramovic ;’s own statements, wants to claim “originality” for an act that in facthas been repeated from the past, this very repetition reveals the fact that there is no “original”act lodged somewhere as an authentic, immutable “presence.” As suggested briefly above in myevocation of Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment, the basis for aesthetics is the drive to coherethe subject in relation to the objects of the world deemed to be art through the sleight of handsecuring this subject’s judgments of these objects passed off as universal (and thus reciprocallyconfirming the subject’s judgments as true).26

The paradox of Abramovic ;’s project is that she and her team want to situate her work withincontradictory frameworks — both within these terms of aesthetics, presenting the work in the

heart of the international contemporary art world and constructing around it the accoutre-ments of the typical art museum exhibition to disseminate it through the catalogue and film,and within discourses of live performance art, with their privileging of the live, durational, andephemeral. Seven Easy Pieces is reified and at the same time celebrated for its confirmation of thetruth of presence and ephemerality (the “energy” of the live engagement). The two frameworksas constructed and mobilized are discursively and institutionally incompatible — or at least donot fit together without a lot of contortions and contradictions, as well as disavowals of what isat stake in such an enterprise (most abstractly, cultural capital; on the most base level, careersand economic security).

Abramovic ;’s investment in aesthetics has paid off brilliantly. She has been one of the keyfigures in bringing performance art histories into the institutions of art, fully and with all of

the contradictions this entails. She has fully entered the most conservative modernist institu-tions within the art academy, as the Guggenheim and MoMA exhibitions confirm.27 But, as sug-gested, Abramovic ;’s work is built on a fundamental contradiction. Her very desire to secure thetruth and value of her re-enactments (as themselves “ephemeral, and then ceas[ing...] to exist”


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28. Te Pane “piece,” such as it now exists in the form of documents and the “relic” of the metal bed, is owned by the

Pompidou.

after the moment, available only to visitors at the Guggenheim during the run of the show) isbelied by her very construction and promotion of them through representation in the book,film, and so on (in Jones forthcoming[a]). Her desire to secure herself a position in art and per-formance histories, while understandable, results in the reification of Seven Easy Pieces and theauthor-function Marina Abramovic ; as commodities (commodities that, it is crucial for me to

foreground, I am in turn benefiting from here in my own writing of this essay, which furthersmy own career). Given this dynamic, at the very least, we need to reconsider the central claimof mainstream performance art discourse, which has been to suggest that performance, throughits temporality and ephemerality, escapes the marketplace.

Abramovic ; has become the new author-name through which all of the performances sheclaims to be authentically returning to their artistic origins are coming to mean and be valued. This is signaled by the fact that, for at least two years after Seven Easy Pieces took place, if oneinitiated a search on Google images (the most common way today of looking for informationon live or other artworks) of “Beuys hare” to find information about Beuys’s How to Explain

Pictures to a Dead Hare, from 2005 to 2007, most of the images on the first page of the searchresults were of Abramovic ; re-performing the piece at the Guggenheim. From around 2005 to

2009, if one were to search Google images for the lesser known works that Abramovic ; restaged,

such as Gina Pane’s The Conditioning (under the search terms “Gina Pane Conditioning”) — nota single image of the original performance or even of Pane’s work in general would come up;even today, in September of 2010, most of the images that appear with such a search (“PaneConditioning”) are of Abramovic ; redoing the piece in 2005 (this in spite of the fact that thePompidou Center in Paris exhibited documentation of and relics from Pane’s “original” as partof their large-scale show of art by women, elles@centrepompidou in 2009).28

This set of questions raised is itself reiterative, returning us around the circle of ourinquiry to the questions with which we began: Where is the “truth” of works such as Pane’sThe Conditioning ? Does it reside in the now long-dead body of Pane herself? In the memo-ries of those who attended the original event? In the relics and photographs that remain of this

event — the metal “bed” on which Pane laid over the lit candles; the series of images displayedin a grid of photographs by the Pompidou? Or, as our most common resource for learningabout the past in our computer-literate society, Google search engine, suggests, does the “truth”of Pane’s work actually reside in the photographs, texts, and film documenting the now also pastre-enactment by the much more internationally famous artist Marina Abramovic ; (whose famelargely resides now in her capacity to reopen the question of historical meaning in performanceart through these very re-enactments)?

This entire discussion points to a difficult and recalcitrant problem with live art, and onethat is brought to the fore precisely by the attempt through re-enactment to in some way securethe original (or even a new) authentic “meaning” for the piece. As this conundrum suggests, the

re-enactment is not the “event itself” and, even more strikingly, is itself durational and alwaysalready gone.

Reiteration as the Presence thatCan Never Be Full in/to Itself

Re-enactments, like the live in general, might seem to promise an escape from commodifica-tion — certainly Abramovic ; does not by all appearances aim primarily to promote the histori-cal performance first and foremost as a commodity. But of course, as I have argued, that is whather re-enactments (and thus by extension the “originals,” through her) become, particularly asthey circulate out from such a major art institution as the Guggenheim, and via the carefullychoreographed professional photographs, film, and book that she produced in relation to Seven


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29. She also noted in my interview with her that Chris Burden, whose rans-Fixed she hoped to re-enact, refused her

permission and hence his piece is not one of the works referenced (in Jones forthcoming[a]). Burden has a slightly

different memory of the situation, emphasizing the impossibility of retrieving the past in any final way; he stated

to me in an interview that when Abramovic ; asked him if she could re-enact the work he said to her: “ ‘You don’t

[legally or morally] need to ask me and you don’t need my permission; you can do whatever you want, but now

that you are asking me I’m saying no because its absolutely meaningless for you to do that performance or it has

no meaning.’ [For me, by redoing the work] It becomes a parody and I think stupid” (Burden 2010:18).

Easy Pieces . In fact, as I have suggested here, due to the very visibility it has gained through pub-

lic relations and its various forms of documentation, Seven Easy Pieces , along with The Artist is Present, have become the most visible vehicles in the production of “Abramovic ;” as (arguably) amarketing term, a brand name.

Abramovic ; herself has been very clear on how her work is to be bought and sold, indicat-ing her awareness of the market and the importance of positioning her work in a specific way within its structures. Abramovic ; has explicitly noted, in relation to the re-enactments of Seven Easy Pieces , that she gained permission from each artist and paid copyright fees where neces-sary in order to obtain the proper right to re-do the work. 29 She told me in our 2007 interview:“With my lawyer I made a statement that I would only make photographs of my own work andnever of anyone else’s, so that I wouldn’t benefit financially if the original ideas were not mine.

[I am] absolutely not [selling the photographs of myself performing other artists’ works].” And yet, in the May 2006 interview printed in the catalogue, she tells Spector that her work can bepurchased by museums such as the Guggenheim: “the museum [...] can buy the documentation,including video, photographs, and objects — and the permission to re-perform the piece in thefuture, with precise instructions made by the artists [...]. [A]rtists, in their lifetimes, must supplyextremely strict instructions [to this end]” (2007:25).

Figure 8. A 2009 Google Images search of “Pane Conditioning” yields no images of the original (Gina Pane’s

Te Conditioning , 1973); most are of the 2005 re-enactment, with Abramovic ; as Pane. (Screen grab by

Amelia Jones)


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30. Foucault elaborates the notion of the author-function in “What Is an Author?” (1969) to describe the way in

which author names function to secure coherence in relation to a constellation of discourses and expressions

attributed to this author (1977: see esp. 124–27).

31. For a caustic and intelligent critical review of Sehgal’s practice see Mira Schor (2010). See also Caroline Bem’s

more forgiving analysis of his work as, through repetition of similar pieces (without scores, documents, or receipts

of any kind), activating the vicissitudes of liveness (2010). And for a critical comparison between Abramovic ;’s

and Sehgal’s practices, see Caroline Jones’s “Staged Presence” (2010); see also Carrie Lambert-Beatty’s discus-sion of Abramovic ;’s MoMA piece in the same issue, “Against Performance Art” (2010). In the interest of full dis-

closure, I should note that Caroline (my sister) and I discussed my work on Abramovic ;’s practice early in 2010

before Te Artist is Present had burst forth onto the scene; her essay innovates in her attention to the particulari-

ties of the global art market, her current research project.

Abramovic ;’s project thus raises crucial questions not just about the abstract aesthetic orcultural value of particular performance practices, or even of particular author-functions (inthe Foucauldian sense), but about the economic and legal value ascribed to works of art andperformance as attached to particular author-names.30 Far from romantically ensuring that theoriginal act exists in some pure form, never becoming commodified, the re-enactment attenu-

ates its temporality in the re-doing of it at a later time and so itself ends up channeled into the very same structures of capital that, in fact, made the “original” available historically (art galler-ies, books, magazines, art history discourse, etc.). As Sven Lütticken asks: “Like other perfor-mances, re-enactments generate representations in the form of photos and videos. Is it the fateof the re-enactment to become an image? And are such representations just part of a spectaclethat breeds passivity, or can they in some sense be performative, active?” (2005:5).

While the inevitability of repetition in the securing of a historical “presence” for art thattakes place over time also seems to lead inexorably to the marketplace, perhaps it is not inevi-table that it leads to the horrifying mind-numbing qualities of the capitalist spectacle as theo-rized in much Marxian postmodern theory from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle in 1967 tothe work of Jean Baudrillard in the 1970s and 1980s...and perhaps unfortunately echoed in the

spectacle presented in The Artist is Present .Resisting the simplistic notion of any commodification as necessarily damaging to progres-

sive political goals (including the goal of keeping key events in British history such as the 1984miners’ strike in some way “alive” in British culture), younger-generation artists such as JeremyDeller (born in 1966) have recognized and begun to negotiate the structures of capital and therelated structures of repetition and reiteration that underlie any performance project articulatedin relation to the discourses and institutions of the visual arts.

Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (born in 1959) has also shown a strong consciousness of issuesof history and the role of the marketplace in staging live works, writing of his epic piece When

Faith Moves Mountains (2002) that “five hundred volunteers were supplied with shovels and

asked to form a single line [...to move] a sixteen-hundred foot long sand dune about four inchesfrom its original position [near Lima, Peru].” Alÿs continues after this description to note thatin the aftermath of such live events, “[w]e shall now leave the care of our story to oral tradi-tion [...]. Only in its repetition and transmission is the work actualized” (2002:108–9). But thecontradictions of this stance are evident as well. As art historian Grant Kester has noted of Alÿs’s practice, “it is precisely in the circulation of the event-as-image before a ‘global audience,’as Alÿs writes, that he is able to accrue the symbolic capital necessary to enhance his career asan artist” (forthcoming). A similar point has been made about the work of Tino Sehgal, who ison record refusing to have any of his performative events (each of which is re-done any numberof times by different “actors” in different, usually gallery, sites) officially documented in photo-graphic or textual form; and yet, as some critics have pointed out, this refusal itself has become

a marketable trope attached to Sehgal as author-name.31

Whether an “original” choreographed event per the Alÿs

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