metropolis m

A double projection on two small LCD monitors. The left shows a man holding a large red flag running through the streets of Berlin. The right screen shows a younger man with a smaller and cleaner red flag running through the streets of Stockholm. There’s a marked resemblance between the two protesters, a similarity in their expression, around the mouth, a certain determination. Looking more closely there’s also a slight but somehow telling difference: a hint of a smile hiding in the corners of the younger man’s mouth, and an awkwardness in his raised shoulders. The title of the work is Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II (Color Test, The Red Flag II), Time travel, 2002 to 1968 and we learn -by reading the label- that the young man on the right is the artist, Felix Gmelin, and the other is his father. The left film is from 1968 and the one on the right from 2002. Left documents a relay protest where several runners pass on the flag eventually all the way to the town hall and end up waving it from its balcony. As a signal of defiance, of course, but also as closure to their demonstration. Right we find out is a re-enactment of this protest, this time in Stockholm, a truthful re-enactment that is, up until the part where they would have had to enter the town hall. Right doesn’t, it stops before, there’s no storming of town hall and no righteous flag waving from the balcony. Right has no signal, no closure, it’s a replay clearly without the same loaded significance as the original act; so obviously devoid of it, in fact, that it’s as if Gmelin the younger were pointing to the discrepancy, underlining it, making it about it, as if he were saying: no need to look further boys, there is no symbolism here, what you see is what you get. Holding a protest without reason to protest means re-doing the gesture of it, its shell, acting it out. That’s the apparent reading. The broader meaning lies in what this discrepancy signifies, what it means to see the same then, now.There’s been quite a lot of talk recently about re-enactment. Or, I should say, the term re-enactment has become of late an understanding. A, I won’t say common, but I would say established and even captivating, notion. Perhaps not excessively widespread, but certainly not remote either. And this in a matter of quite a short time. Re-enactment in fact isn’t standard art lingo. It’s been borrowed from the world of weekend hobbyism where a professional re-enactment company might be hired to re-play famous battles or other historical events with (re-en)actors dressed up in costume playing for a willing town audience. Like a parade, a re-enactment is in nature folkloric and, to make matters worse, a group affair. It couldn’t get less sexy. So for now, for here, we’ll keep its hobbyist root somewhere tucked in our minds but we’ll focus instead on its recent juicy art bastardization. Re-enactment, simply put, is a re-making. But because of its root -enact- and its prefix -re- it not only implies a repetition or a remake but brings with it acting, and acting leads to performance, and where there is performance, there is usually rehearsal. In other words you could say that performance -usually- and re-enactment -always- are two-part. They both include an ‘original’ act, whether it be a script to be rehearsed (performance) or a script to be repeated. The difference lies in exactly these ties between ‘original’ and ‘result’. The result of a re-enactment is indeed a re-doing or a re-construction but one with a more intimate link to the thing being redone or reconstructed than a simple copy of. Closer to ‘homage’ than ‘reproduction’, it involves feelings of respect and sentiment -albeit, often ambiguous- and draws on both personal and collective memory -on nostalgia- mixing them like a good cocktail. Each slight alteration of the original is therefore potentially loaded with extreme significance, and reads like a personal commentary of then in the now. Not unlike ‘homage’s’ vital link to the past, re-enactment, has an equally crucial r e l a t i o n s h i p to its original act, to the thing it’s repeating. What is more, all the reasons, each desire to re-make the thing being re-enacted are present in the re-enactment itself. But quietly so. And deciphering them -the search for the why- is an extended, I dare say performative activity. So let’s get straight to that, the why, why this compulsion to return, to re-make, to appropriate, to re-enact? What is it, especially now, which has us buzzing the term re-enactment?Douglas Huebler said in an interview on July 25 1969 : “..The world is full of junk, anyway. The world is full of too much stuff to walk around…” Pierre Huygue, years later explained his art-making intentions as “not to add anything else to the world.” If there is among some artists today a will not to add, an allowance for a certain saturation of things in the world, be it the world of culture or the (visual) world at large, then perhaps a tendency to re-look at the already there isn’t so strange. Or could it quite simply be a question of masochism? This need to return? This need to go back to the scene of the crime, to the origin of the trauma, to repeat it, to re-enact it? Freud explains the ‘repetition compulsion’ as a manner to gain mastery. And mastery is surely something we all seek, if not mastery -as in control- in the very least mastery in terms of understanding. But apparently clinical experience has shown that this rarely happens. Instead -in laymen’s terms- everything just gets worse. Think of J.G. Ballard’s desperate hero in the novel Crash (and later David Cronenberg’s film adaptation) who after having experienced a serious car accident becomes obsessed, addicted really to (the surge of adrenalin of) a crash, his crash, any crash. Throughout the book he continues to re-play various ‘famous’ car crashes, returning to the locations where they occurred. He returns to the trauma, or rather, more precisely, his incessant return to it, his re-living of it, creates it. Turns the original experience into the trauma, after the fact. Things just get worse.I suppose one of the first times the term re-enactment (please, someone, correct if I am wrong) was used distinctly for a artistic project, would be for a work by Jeremy Deller. ‘The Battle of Orgreave’ as the now infamous 1984 minor’s strike clashes in South Yorkshire are known was re-enacted on the 17th of June 2001 under the auspices of Deller. It was his concept, his idea, but it was organized by EventPlan, a professional Re-enactment logistics company, and filmed by Mark Figgis for ArtAngel Media and channel 4. The hour long film is basically a documentary of the day’s events, a behind the scenes look following the minors who were invited to participate and the ‘professional’ re-enactors. A making of, you could say. Howard Giles, the head of EventPlan refers to Jeremey Deller as the ‘event creator’ but it is clear in the film that Deller is just as surprised and curious about the (psychological) effects of the grand staging as we are. Giles explains re-enactment as being ‘re-creation’, successful if it is able to get ‘as close to fact as possible’. It’s about ‘getting it right’, he says, about ‘re-living it’. But what does this ‘getting it right’ imply? If we’re to understand the drive behind such an extensive hobbyist folklore tradition, then we must try to understand the why. We have to comprehend why a certain event has been chosen in the first place to be duplicated. ‘Orgreave’ was a ‘running sore’, according to Giles, an open wound, an embarrassing moment in history loaded a priori with significance. As though that moment in history was a self-aware watershed, an iconic instant full of its own future significance. As if the minors and the police force then, in 1984, were already being ‘trained for a specific role’. This pre-training (picket manipulation) becomes apparent in stories form one of the policemen and a lobbyist who describe how Margret Thatchers politics in fact forced the issue actually orchestrating the conditions for the conflict, what with M15 infiltration in the plant, provocation from the police instead of the minors to kick start the conflict (though sequences were reversed on TV), forcing the strikers (actually escorting them) to picket in a field North of the plant and then flanking them on three sides leaving the railway lines still open for transport…Plainly put, some claim it to have been a grand set-up, both the strike and its outcome (the mineworkers lost). A re-enactment avant la letter you might say, a set-up, as if Orgreave 1 were already a rehearsal. Without skipping into an easy though still so poetically paradoxical trap of chicken and egg: it can be said that the artifice was present in the original event. In other words, the past event held within itself its potential to be re-enacted. The London Riot Re-enactment Society’s mission statement touches on this chicken and egg -though without understanding its Zenness- “If we staged a re-enactment of May Day 2000 on May Day 2003, would people notice it was a re-enactment or would they think it was that year’s May Day riot? And if the next year we re-enacted June 18 1999 on May Day 2004 would people notice the discrepancy?” Indeed, indeed, would they? But is that the point? I can understand The London Riot Re-enactment Society being worried about misleading the audience but I think the point is more subtle and more complicated than mere honesty. Onlookers may or may not notice a difference but the difference would still be there, plainly, but implicitly. And that’s the point. There’s part of the why. One would have to know.Pierre Menard, the subject of Borges’ short story, ‘Pierre Menard, The author of the Quixote’, has taken it upon himself to ‘write, not re-write’ Cervantes ‘Quixote’. He speaks, as expected, in some length of the difficulties involved in re-creating a masterpiece:I have taken on the mysterious duty of reconstructing literally his spontaneous work. My solitary game is governed by two polar laws. The first permits me to essay variations of a formal or psychological type; the second obliges me to sacrifice these variations to the ‘original’ text and reason out this annihilation in an irrefutable manner…To these artificial hindrances, another – of a congenial kind – must be added. To compose the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable undertaking, necessary and perhaps even unavoidable; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is almost impossible. It is not in vain that three hundred years have gone by, filled with exceedingly complex events. Among them, to mention only one, is the Quixote itself.At this point in the story, the reader is still confused, even after having read the above, as to how Menard has managed this mysterious duty, but we are soon given an small excerpt of Menard’s work as means of clarification. Borges now as narrator conveys:It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counsellor.Written in the seventeenth century, written by the ‘lay genius’ Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other, writes:…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counsellor.[…] The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard – quite foreign, after all – suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.One would have to know. In 1980, in a small town in western Lithuania, Arturas Raila saw strange lights in the sky. Pinkish ones, which, in his words, moved in an unworldly fashion. He saw them four times afterwards and all five times in total he was fascinated and confused. It is the way in which he tells of these encounters that we as readers and viewers begin to feel a connection between his thoughts and these lights. He speaks of them as though they had a kind of r e l a t i o n s h i p. That he would somehow have had the ability, the forth time, to influence their movements. And it is the strength of this relationship which causes him -we assume, we feel- to attempt to re-create and record these experiences. The result is a film and stills from this film, of the sky at night in this small Lithuanian town. Without the story, without knowing this is a re-creation, a re-enactment of a significant moment, frankly you would walk passed and only wonder -like I did- at the plain-in-your-face tediousness of it all. We see dull homes, average snowy suburban streets, bear trees, power lines and faintly, very faintly -so that the dull homes and the streets seem the subject- lights, strange geometric crisscrosses or jelly fish-like forms, red, indeed pinkish swarms or wavy lines. But once you know and look again and think of Raila’s encounters, of his story, of these passed five -to him- sublime experiences, you can’t but help to feel as though you’re looking right into someone’s head, right into his dream. Arturas Raila is telling us a story. This video and C-prints are as though he had said ‘sit back, relax and listen…’. He’s re-played his experiences as much, it would seem, for himself as for us. As much a poetic exorcism for himself as proof for all others. ‘See, this is what I’ve witnessed…’ As much a return via recollection to the very personal ‘scene of the crime’ as a nostalgic narrative. This witnessing of a birth of a legend which appears to go hand in hand with a psychological story-telling is apparent in a slightly more complicated approach to re-enactment. More complicated because it’s a slightly more auto-referential case in point. By this I mean re-enactment here is taken to another level where ‘original’ and ‘result’ are self inflicted, where part 1 and part 2 fall seamlessly together. Almost, but not quite, and that’s the point –again: Manon de Boers’ excellent work ‘Sylvia’ (2001), a 40 minute super 8 film, shows Sylvia Kristel in the opening scene smoking a cigarette. She says nothing, just takes a few drags and turns away from the camera. And then we’re given a pan shot of a grainy Paris, an overview of what looks like the entire city and she starts telling. In French she commences ‘The first time I went to Paris it must have been 1972…’ She went, she tells, because a producer at the Utrecht film festival had seen her and asked her why she hadn’t participated for she was surely the most attractive woman there…Triggered by the compliment and indeed a desire to get into the industry Sylvia Kristen decides to take the man up on his offer of a screen test and leaves by plane for Paris soon after. When she’s picked up -arriving rather late- from the airport she asks about her hotel arrangements but is brushed off quickly. He wants to take her for dinner first, the hotel would come later. They dine and dance until 2 a.m., too late to check in anywhere she claims she realized. But was quickly reassured that her escort had an extra room in his apartment. She’s charmed she says, enticed by the elegance of Paris, the nightlife, this man, experiences she had never had before. They return to his apartment where Sylvia ‘of course’ never sees the extra bedroom, she is seduced, she says, and a week long affair ensues. A blissful affair until near the end of the week she starts cooking for him, laughingly she explains she’s not a very good cook. However, the certain end comes she admits, when she declines his offer for a threesome. Not disheartened it appears by their breakup she returns to Amsterdam to build up a bit of real experience ‘in her own country’, first as a model and then later as an actress. There, she soon meets Hugo Claus who becomes her next lover and returns with him to Paris. For him to write, for her to try to find work. They have a child and she lands her first breakthrough role in Emmanuelle. Her tale persists as she moves from film set to film set, from man to man, sometimes happy in love and successful in her career and sometimes depressed and in doubt. As though we were reading it, Sylvia’s unbroken monologue coincides with the camera moving through scenes of Paris, the streets, the buildings, sometimes the sky overhead, birds, shots moving from a metro, across bridges, all in a left to right direction. After 20 minutes she comes to an end (though not the present) and we see her again, silent, smoking, on the same green hill overlooking, in the distance, a city. This is an interruption but a tentative one, we soon see, since it promptly start all over again. But not quite the same. We pan back to Paris and Sylvia begins recounting again. This time though she starts differently, in a different tone, a less anecdotal ring to her voice. She begins more factual, she was 18 the first time she went to Paris and went she tells in order to do a screen test with a ‘quite famous’ producer. She tells of the fantastic light, the impressive architecture, she skips over their affair, without mention of her bad cooking or the declined threesome, explaining her departure back to Amsterdam as her coming to the realization that she needed more acting experience. We are skip back to Paris this time because she goes for a shooting and Hugo accompanies her. And then she informs us of her love for movies, for being an actress, talks of her mounting recognition, her growing fans, her love of the city. She doesn’t mention her reason for leaving Hugo, her repeated infidelity, merely says ‘there was a rupture between us’. She talks again of the solitude she experienced during her brief stay in L.A. but uses it as an excuse for her artistic development, speaking at some length of the importance of her painting. She ends this time somewhere closer to the present, somewhere in Amsterdam, her current home. Closer to the truth? Closer to now? But we’re left wondering why she’s edited herself, why she first told us of her insecurities, her infidelities, her desires and her misgivings. We’re left to reflect on a possible correlation between the two stories, the whys of certain screaming gaps and other more silent ones. And we remember how she asked herself aloud in the first monologue, close to the end, why her stories always lack depth, why they’re always a recount of her going from man to man, bed to bed, and not a commentary on architecture, for example…Which makes your mind jump to when, in the second monologue, she mentions the impressive architecture of Paris and the fascinating light, her painting, her success as a film star, if this wasn’t her attempt to re-create herself for us, if she wasn’t already filling in the gaps. Re-creating, re-adjusting her image. You end up reflecting on how she felt the day of the first recording, why she was less confident during the second recording. And there is but a subtle mirroring of her altered composure in the film itself, no explicit instructions for re-reading. Only slight alteration in the images during the second half: the camera moves form left to right instead of from right to left. As if we were reading Sylvia’s monologue backwards. I’ve left out an important clue, I should have started with. In the beginning of the film we’re told the first monologue was recorded 22.09.2001 and the second monologue 10.11.2000. There it is again: the clue. The point. The why nudged in between two tellings.One more: In 1998 Jonathan Monk made a neon sign and called it Hungry I. It was an exact replica of the neon sign which used to hang above his fathers’ restaurant in Leicester. For a recent duo show with John Baldessari at Galerie Nicolai Wallner in Copenhagen, Monk made just one work. And hung it opposite a John Baldessari. He called it: This painting should ideally be hung opposite a John Baldessari (2004). For a work now in the process of being made, Monk has taken 93 pages from an On Kawara catalogue, pages with on one side both the front and back of one of the many postcards he sent to various people around the world from his different locations, hotels mainly, saying things like “I got up at 9:09 A.M.” Monk has folded these pages around an A5 envelope so that the back of the postcard is on one side and the front on the other. He’s stuck his stamps across the original address, the address to whom they were originally sent, hiding this, and has placed his own address on the front of the card. Thereby ‘uncovering’ the address from which On Kawara sent his postcard as the address to which they must now be sent. So far he’s received 23 back. All returned to Monk the sender from On Kawara’s sending addresses, various hotels, boats…Similar to the Baldessari work, Monk is following a technique, you could say. He’s doubling the mechanics of the works he’s quoting. In his own black lettering on white canvas he’s repeating Baldessari’s infamous paintings, paintings which said, also with black typeface on (off) white canvas, things like: EVERYTHING IS PURGED FROM THIS PAINTING BUT ART NO IDEAS HAVE ENTERED THIS WORK.It’s as though Monk is taking his time to return to something which has made an impression on him, as though he’s saying ’there’s enough brand spanking new in this world but not enough time to consider what’s already been.’ As though Gmelin’s protest, Deller’s riot, Raila’s vision, de Boer’s Sylvia and of course Menard’s brilliant novel were all trying to re-tell us our favorite bedtime story. As though the speed of images, the speed of history today, of history’s being immediate, like never before brings us to a need to pause, to re-look to find an alternative. Not only re-look, but re-work, a re-use. Because we like what’s already there. What’s already been, is valid. This re-look and re-work comprises a re-think that offers the audience at the very least a re-telling of what has already passed or been made, and at best an alternative view of that same past. Perhaps, but this might be going too far, this re-telling is a not dissimilar version of (former) oral traditions: it too is a passing on, a slight re-interpretation, re-collected timely amendments, from generation to generation, from them to us. Question is, does a proper re-think not comprise a new? And the answer is of course; of course. But a contingent new. This could very well be the first form of artistic practice where knowing the background, knowing the part 1 is an explicit pre-requisite to part 2. Minus any elitist implications.