Re-enact! Or, Just Like the Real World, only Different
Brody Condon - Performance Modification (Nauman), Machine Project, Los Angeles, Saturday February 9th, 2008.
Domenico Quaranta, “Re-enact! Or, Just Like the Real World, only Different”, first published in Spawn of the Surreal in 2 parts,August 22 and August 23, 2007
“The difference between what is evoked and what is real can even be sensible: I always happen to take no account of it.”
I started thinking to post on reenactment some time ago. That’s why when I read on -empyre- Patrick Lichty’s “missive” on The Issue of Remediation, I was happy and disappointed at the same time: disappointed because he came first, and happy because he showed the way, giving me some points of departure to enter this complicated issue. Let me sum up Lichty’s points:
- “ironic tension between the physical and the virtual” vs “affective connection [of the user] to online identity”;
- history and memory vs ephemerality and ahistoricity in virtual worlds;
- reenactment of performance-based works as “a way to preserve their degree of affect in space and time” vs reenactment as a way to challange/criticize Performance art.
As for the first point, I completely agree with Lichty. The problem is: which is the target of this irony? Lichty notes that, in the passage from the real to the virtual, an act, for example, of violence, doesn’t become “wholly symbolic”, because “residents in Second Life clearly have investiture in the avatar as extensions of themselves.” That’s right, but this observation works only when the victim of violence is your own avatar. In other words, in Second Life this affect takes the shape of self respect, but doesn’t produce solidarity for other virtual identities. So, if I’m frightened, worried and even angry when Gazira Babeli confines me in a Campbell’s soup can, or when she breaks up my legs with Code Deforma; I don’t feel anything similar to what might have felt the audience of Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971) when Eva Mattes fires Franco Mattes, or when Wirxli Flimflam shoots Great Escape.
In the same time, I believe that these two reenactments of the same performance are coming from a very different order of ideas. In his Paradise Ahead Series (2006 – 2007), Scott Kildall aka Great Escape “captures the anticipation and familiarity of [the] simulated environment by restaging iconic art installations, films and photographs. Using only primitive graphics of Second Life, the documentation of these performances – large-scale prints serves as a historical record of the initial launch point into simulated worlds.” His target is the graphic environment of Second Life; or, better, Second Life as an artistic medium. And his message is, I think, that in Second Life reality becomes powerless, ineffective, fake. Even the most emotional, dramatic event, when re-staged in Second Life, becomes a parody of itself. Kildall’s prints are more similar to comics than to the source images he used for his remediation. In other words, the medium is stronger than the reality it tries to emulate.
Coming to Eva and Franco Mattes, in their interviews they are very critical about Performance Art: “Eva and me, we hate performance art, we never quite got the point. So, we wanted to understand what made it so un-interesting to us, and reenacting these performances was the best way to figure it out.” With their Syntethic Performances, they are questioning the works they recreate, reproposing them in the most literal way in a context where they appear senseless and paradoxical. Their realistic avatar are perfect to this purpose. And in fact, their reenactment of Shoot is more similar to the source, and much more dramatic than Kildall’s one: they are not saying that in a virtual world violence is meaningless and reality loses its own drama; they are saying that, in a world anaesthetized by media, the original Shoot is almost as powerless as their own virtual version. In a world where, in front of a car crash, people take pictures with their beautiful smart phones instead of trying to help the victims, Shoot can’t be anything more than an interesting spectacle. Video killed the performance art stars. RIP.
In his Missive 3, Lichty asks: “could the remediation of historical works, from 7000 Oaks to sculptures of the David be prime examples of the appropriations of history in cultural milieus that do not possess them?” I don’t think that the answer to this question would be “yes”. Believing that Second Life is “a dumpster of the imaginary”, the fruit of the collective dream of the amount of its residents, I can’t believe that it suffers of a lack of memory. Quite the opposite, I think that Second Life in itself IS memory. Second Life IS remediation. Second Life IS re-enactment, not of our first life – as most people think – not of Snow Crash or The Matrix – as many other people think – but of a sort of mediated unconscious, that is nothing more that our visual culture, and that helps building up the frame through which we look at reality.
Virtual worlds are the places where pop culture, the cyberpunk imagery, cinema, television, postmodern architecture, pornography, contemporary art, literature, design and so on all collapse and mix together to create a new world. Making art, you can choose and recycle one of the bricks of the wall or add your own brick. So, when Eva and Franco Mattes remediate Warhol’s portraits, or when Patrick Lichty himself remediates Cicciolina, they point out to a stereotype that is commonplace in Second Life – where most avatars want to be young, sexy, beautiful, photogenic – and they improve it by recalling its historical roots, namely the ideal of beauty imposed by media and pop culture, investigated by Warhol in his Screen Tests and in his tons of portraits, and embodied by Cicciolina in the Eighties. They are improving a memory, rather then creating it ex-novo. This is virtuous recycling. When Dancoyote Antonelli builds up a new installation, he is remediating the aesthetics and the ideals of Cyberart of the Early Nineties, or – better – he is emulating it on a new machine; this is all the new I can find in hyperformalism (and in fact, what is new and fascinating in the hands of Dancoyote Antonelli, appears pretty old-fashioned and overtaken in the hands of DC Spensley); but it’s not that bad, because we forgot almost all about Cyberart, and a refresh can be useful…
About the relationship between re-enactments and the original piece, I think the question is really complex, and we can’t come out with just one answer. In the press release of the show History will repeat itself. Strategies of Re-enactment in contemporary (media) art and performance (HMKV at PHOENIX Halle Dortmund, June 9 – September 23, 2007), curator Inke Arns writes: “Artistic re-enactments are not simply affirming what has happened in the past, but rather they are questioning the present via repeating or re-enacting historical events that have left their traces in the collective memory. Re-enactments are artistic interrogations of media images that try to scrutinise the reality of the images, while at the same time pointing towards the fact that collective memory is essentially mediated memory.” The show is more about repetition of historical events than of Performance Art of the past, but this observation works also in SL: artists use reenactment as a way (1) to question the present and (2) the way media mediated memory. Besides that, they question (3) the medium they work in (Scott Kildall) and (4) the original work of art (Eva and Franco Mattes), raising questions such as: why is it significant / meaningless to me? why does it work / doesn’t work in SL? What does REALLY change when I change the contest and the medium?
This very last question introduces another interesting issue, and another interesting form of re-enactment: what will happen if we start re-mediating Second Life in the real world? This is a really compelling question. We usually think about the relationship between virtual worlds and real life as univocal, even if many events – from the Columbine massacre to cosplaying – showed us that it is definitely bi-univocal. Some artists already started to work on that, with interesting results: from Eddo Stern’s SCA Arab Intervention (2004) to Brody Condon’s Death Animations (2007), in which an actor performs the death animations of a videogame. Concerning SL, I know just a few examples, such as Goldin+Senneby’s Objects of virtual desire (2006) and Aram Bartholl‘s Tree (2007), an unfinished “virtual” tree brought to the public space. But what will happen if, let’s say, Second Front will start performing in real life, or Gazira Babeli will rebuild her provocative installations in the real space? Then we’ll see that virtual worlds are not “just like the real world”, as many people think, but something completely different.
