"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

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

Access provided by Universittsbibliothek Bern (29 May 2013 04:41 GMT)

The Artist is Present

Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence
Amelia Jones

Figure 1. Marina Abramovic;: The Artist is Present, 2010. Performance view, Museum of Modern Art,
New York, 2010. (Photo courtesy Marco Anelli)

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TDR: The Drama Review 55:1 (T209) Spring 2011. 2011

Amelia Jones

The live act is most often privileged as delivering an authentic and present bodyas the
2010 retrospective of Marina Abramovic;s performance art career at New Yorks Museum of
Modern Art (MoMA), Marina Abramovic;: The Artist is Present reveals instantly in its title.1 The
exhibition galleries were staged with the actual van she and her performance partner from the
1970s, 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 original 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, controversially, included several live re-enactments of the artists 1970s performances by younger dancers
andperformers.
Most dramatically the center of MoMAs large dazzlingly white modernist interior courtyard (visible in a spectacular vista from the galleries above) featured Abramovic; sitting in a chair
across from another chair in which museum visitors could engage with her live-ness.2 The visitation 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 interest
in (often her own) performance histories, and her claims for the authenticity of live art and the
emotional 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 exhibitions display) to spread the word of her presence and its supposedly transformative effects, points to obdurate contradictions in the recent
obsession with live art, its histories, and its documentation and re-enactments. The museums
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 historical 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 dont want to scapegoat Elwes, an important theorist of feminist performance, here; in making 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. The first weeks Abramovic; had a table placed between herself and the other chair, explicitly re-staging the performance 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 March31 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 psychologically from the individuals she faced (Kelly 2010).
3. Assistant Curator Jenny Schlenzka clarified the process of the shows organization (Schlenzka 2010).

Impossibility of Presence

Amelia Jones is Professor and Grierson Chair in Visual Culture at McGill University in Montral. 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), Joness books include
Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (MIT Press, 2004) and Self Image:
Technology, 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.

17

MoMA clearly promoted The Artist is Present show by putting forth, and even
exaggerating, the artists 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 Museum
of Modern Arts first performance retrospective, Abramovic; performed in the
DonaldB. 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)

document personal experiences and/or photographs of other visitors) draws on the claims
for presence made by the artist herself and yet reveals the dependence of any concept of presence on (in this case web) documentationincluding, on MoMAs own website, a gallery of
photographs of visitors who sat across from Abramovic;. These contradictions play out not only
in Abramovic;s recent project, The Artist is Present, but also in Seven Easy Pieces, her important
2005 series of re-enactments of 1970s performances at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
in New York. My critical investigation has a political motivationnot to debunk Abramovic;s
practice, but to use her bold and assertive work, which casts a raking light on the dilemma of
performance 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 secured
evident). The live act marks the body, understood as an expression of the self, as representational. 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 by
klieg 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 artist and cultural force was sitting there before me, I primarily felt myself the object of myriad
individual and photographic gazes (including hers), and the experience overall was very strongly
one of participating in a spectaclenot an emotionally or energetically charged interpersonal
relation, but a simulation of relational exchange with others (not just the artist, but the other
spectators, the guards, the managers of the event). For me this felt like an inadvertent parody
of the structure of authentic expression and reception of true emotional resonance that modernist art discourse (brought to its apotheosis in institutions such as MoMA) so long claimed for
modernist painting and sculpture.

Amelia Jones

If anything, as a visitor to The Artist is Present I felt vaguely sorry that Marina was subjecting
herself 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 historian
of art and performance. If anything, I found myself wanting to revert to reading books about
performance to escape the noisy emptiness of this real live art experience.

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Presence as commonly understood is a state that entails the unmediated co-extensivity

in 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 combining materiality and durationality (its enacting of the body as always already escaping into
the 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 theorizeto exhibit and selllive
performanceart.

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 the
contrary, is that there cannot be a definitively truthful or authentic form of the live event
even at the moment of its enactmentnot even (if this could be imagined) as lodged within the
body 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 live
event reside at any rate? In the minds/bodies of the original performer(s) or spectator(s)? In
the documents that seem indexically to fix in time and space what really happened? In the
spaces where it took place?
When one puts the questions this way, it becomes painfully clear that there is no original
eventor that there was, but it was never present.4 The difficulty of positing the truth of performance as lying in the minds/bodies of the original performer was exposed by Abramovic;s
own admission, when I interviewed her in 2007, about her 2005 re-enactment of her 1975 performance Lips of Thomas:
When you re-do your own work you can really see the bigger picture; the first time you
cant see whats going onyou 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 I
didnt have the consciousness I have now. (in Jones forthcoming[a])5
At the time of the original, in the mid-1970sa period when performances in the European
and North American context were raw, often undocumented, and frequently spontaneous
Abramovic; performed in small galleries in Europe for a select art world audience. Today she
is at the forefront of an industrial-strength institutionalization of performance histories. What
her body contains of the original event is (by her own admission) unavailable to conscious
retrieval. 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 and
beyond (as signaled, importantly, by Abramovic;s own Seven Easy Pieces), activates precisely the
tension between our desire for the material (for the others body; for presence; for the true
event) and the impossibility of ever fixing this in space and time. The re-enactment both testifies to our desire to know the past in order to secure ourselves in the present and the paradox of that knowledge always taking place through repetition. It thus exposes the paradox of that
knowledge, proving our own inexorable mortality: the fact that we are always reaching to secure
time, and always failing.
The interest in re-enactments marks the current fascination with retrieving live events that
took place and are now known only through archival documents, film and video clips, interviews, and so on.6 In the art and performance worlds this has taken the form of an obsessive

5. The 2007 interview with Abramovic; will be published as The 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 historical events, such as the Civil War in the US. See the history of re-enactment in terms of these more popular uses

Impossibility of Presence

4. These points are made by Jacques Derrida in his deconstruction of the philosophy of presence in the work of
Edmund Husserl. Derridas 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 is continuously 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).

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interest in histories of performance or live art, ephemeral works that expose the contradiction
between durationality and aestheticsbetween the passage of time and the materiality that art
discourse 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 as
simultaneously representational and live (it is a live re-doing of something already done in the
pastit is a reiteration, a performative re-doingand one that itself becomes instantaneously
past, raising questions about its own existence in time and in history).7 In so doing it exposes
the impossibility of our desire for the situation Abramovic; proclaims in the title of the MoMA
retrospective: The Artist is Present. While the artist may be sitting before us in a chair for as long
as we wish to confront or engage with her (as Abramovic; did as the central part of the retrospectiveand 30 years earlier in Night Sea Crossing opposite Ulay) questions are raised, such
as: What does this putting in proximity of artist and viewer mean? And, more philosophically
speaking, do we know what we mean when we claim someone is present? And, finally, what
are 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 the
range of methods that have been developed to document the work and/or its re-enactments
and thus to secure the work its place in the markets of objects and histories. Even the seemingly
purely intellectual and political motivation of performance studies scholars or art historians to
secure important performance works in history is linked to the pressure of the market; after
all, writing academic books and art criticism that substantiate particular performance careers is
a practice itself linked to marketing.
Re-enactments have a particularly fraught relationship to the visual arts, the discourses and
institutions of which revolve around static objects (hence the challenge performance art posed
in 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 r elationship
to temporality, the body, objecthood, and structures of history making. These arts always
acknowledged their reliance on the script that passes down through time to be redone.9 While
almost 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 of
dance and/or musical eventsnotably the work of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, who hire
actors to restage famous (singular) performances of famous rock gigs, such as David Bowies

in Howard Giless A Brief History of Re-enactment (2009). Performance art scholar Rebecca Schneider is producing 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. Austins How To
Do Things with Words (1967) and elaborated by Derrida and Judith Butler in their theories of performance.
See Derridas, Signature Event Context (1982:30930); and Butlers 1988 Performative Acts and Gender
Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory (in Jones 2010:48291).

Amelia Jones

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 durationalityand performance is
borrowing these structures in the recent surge of exhibitions and texts written on the topics of performance documentation 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 The 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).

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9. On music, performance, and liveness see Phillip Auslanders Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture ([1999]
2008), and Jonathan Sternes The 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, Think Pieces: Return of the Judsonites (2010).

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. [...] When
I 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 culturesa 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.

penultimate performance as Ziggy Stardust in 1973deal explicitly with these tensions among
music, performance art, and the visual arts. Forsyth and Pollards work has been featured in
recent shows on performance re-enactment in art galleries, but it deals with the expansion of
rock music events into visually elaborate performances.
Histories of performance art proper (that is, the genre defined discursively in these very histories by authors such as Roselee Goldberg) have tended to devolve around a handful of iconic
photographs and textual descriptions, or in some cases film or video footage. Artists such as
Chris Burden in the early 1970s set the stage for such approaches by documenting their work
(in Burdens 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, as
an artist, can be viewed as ironic in his deadpan reliance on these material remains, art historians, curators, and performance studies scholars miss the point if they simply take these remains
as proof of some singular version of the event (or, even worse, as somehow the event-cum-
artwork itselfwith Burdens photographs, texts, and relics now displayed, bought, and sold as
uniqueartworks).
In contrast to this common situation within histories and exhibitions of performance up
through the 1990s, the massive resurgence of interest in performance art and its histories over
the past five years has increasingly been worked through in relation to some variation on a
newly developed re-enactment formatwhether this means literal performance works, redone
by the same or a different author, or elaborate and often more conceptual homages inspired by
earlier works, as in the restaging of Allan Kaprows Happenings during the retrospective Allan
Kaprow: Art as Life at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2008.11 Abramovic;s

11. These re-stagings took Kaprow Happening scripts as jumping off points, recognizing the impossibility of freezing Kaprows work with exemplary or iconic movements, moments, or images. As Suzanne Lacy, a former student of Kaprow, put it: The conundrum of Allans work is how to move it into the museum, which was so
fraught for him. I wanted to capture the part of Allans 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 elses memory
(in Finkel 2008).

Impossibility of Presence

10. Burdens 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).

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Figure 2. Iconic photograph of Trans-Fixed. Chris Burden, Transfixed, 23 April 1974, Venice, California.

Amelia Jones

Figure 3. Chris Burden, text and relics for Trans-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)

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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, the
engine 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.

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 a
new performance as the seventhpiece.
While Abramovic; was herself an active performance artist in the 1970s, a period of explosive development in contemporary performance art, a number of younger generation artists
have also used the re-enactment
format over the past decade.
Interestingly, many of these
younger artists choose to re-do
political events (although there
are many re-enacting performance art works as well).12
Examples of the strategy of redoing political events include:
British artist Jeremy Dellers
2001 The Battle of Orgreave
(restaging the failed British miners strike of 1984, using some of
the original police and strikers
as actors in the re-enactment);
US artist Sharon Hayess recent
project having herself photographed with signs from historic protests standing on the
sites of the original events;13 and
Stockholm-based German artFigure 4. Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave, 2001. Commissioned and
ist Felix Gmelin, whose Color
produced by Artangel. This is the archive of the work in one of its permutations,
Test, Red Flag II (2002) restaged
for videotape a 1968 activist pro- as installed at Tate Britain, London. ( Tate, London, 2010)
test in which students from West
Berlin, organized by his own father (who was their professor), ran through the streets of the city
passing a red flag in a relay.
Deller, Hayes, and Gmelin re-enact political actionsin Gmelins case also an event of
direct personal relevance within the aesthetic context of the art gallery. To some degree
in this way they reify these acts into art, freezing temporal events into things (albeit in
some cases maintaining an aspect of the temporalas in Gmelins video and the Deller/
Figgis film).14 While, at their most compelling, re-enactments presented in visual arts and/or
12. I have compiled an extensive timeline of re-enactments and performance art history exhibitions for the forthcoming Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, eds. Adrian Heathfield and Amelia Jones (see Jones
forthcoming[b]).
13. On Hayess work and the important protest re-enactments of Mark Tribe and his Port Huron Project, see
Schneider (2010).
Impossibility of Presence

14. There is an interesting generational issue with the political re-enactmentsmost 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 yearsyears of intense politicizationas a way
of insisting on the importance of those histories both politically and personally. This 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.

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 erformance contexts interrogate the previously accepted bases for documenting live artworks
p
and political events, they are also ironically themselves turned into conventional aesthetic displays in their presentation in galleries via forms of documentation.
In the best cases the artists actively acknowledge this contradiction. Deller, for example, selfreflexively interrogates this tendency brilliantly by including in The Battle of Orgreave project
a vast range of events, things, and processesfrom objects and images relating to the initial
Thatcher-era strike, which is now refigured into his artwork as an event of historical importance being re-enacted; to relics and documents from the re-enactment performance itself, all
of which are displayed in museums in various configurations as the piece itself; to the film as
transmitted over BBC television, showed in cinemas and art galleries; to the pieces presence
on 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 of
documents, objects, and other material traces of prior re-enactments. Notably, too, while many
of the other re-enactments tellingly substitute the re-enactor as new author of a unique and
ultimately static (documented) work, Deller himself does not feature in a noticeable way either
as part of the re-enactment or the public relations materials circulating around the film, its
most visible documentationthe work in its infinite permutations does not tend to devolve
back to a singular body, though it does only have coherence in relation to the author-name
JeremyDeller.
Dellers project crystallizes the paradox of re-enactments in the art contextthe fact, precisely, that they activate the impossibility of presence in relation to the visual arts while also
pointing to the impossibility of the ephemeral event ever being known as such in any but highly
contingent and unreliable human memory and in the events reified forms. As Jacques Derrida
has noted in his interrogation of beliefs about presence in European philosophy, the visibility and spatiality of performance (as itself a kind of redo of real life) can only ever be experienced through the senses; presence, the live body in performance, is representational (see
Derrida 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 is
presented with something inherently contradictory in that they are being presented with something live and happening in real time, yet they know that this is an impossible scenario, since
the event has already happened (in Pil and Gallia Kollectiv 2007).

Amelia Jones

These are vastly different examples of re-enactments in the art and performance worlds,
from Deller to Dickinson to Abramovic;. The latters Seven Easy Pieces project (as we will see)
scrupulously engages live art histories through documentary, archival, and interview research
and proposes to recreate original art performances authentically in the present (which itself
becomes immediately past). And Seven Easy Pieces was by no means the first or the last of this
type 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 than
once in their earlier incarnationfor example, Yoko Onos influential Cut Piece was enacted in
Tokyo and New York in the mid 1960s; it has since been reinterpreted by a number of younger
artists, and by Ono herself in 2003 in Paris (see Jones forthcoming[b]). In other instances, such
as the Kaprow case noted above, former colleagues, students, and other artists reinterpret works
from scripts that were never meant to produce artworks in museum settings. A huge range of
types of re-enactments drawing on visual arts conceits and institutional contexts thus exist. In
contrast, Deller re-stages a political event and then through exhibition display and film aligns
documentation of this re-staging with ephemera from the original event; Dickinson redoes
famous social psychology experiments as art. Each type of project seems to be motivated differently, engages different audiences in different ways, and has different aesthetic and political

24

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).

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 scientific 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 dramatically than the re-staging of former performative artworks in new art contexts. But there
are some potentials and dangers common to all types of re-enactment. Although all of these restaging gestures have interesting critical potential, they also have the potential to flatten out or
aestheticize the act (precisely by evacuating the act of its original political specificity) and thus
to reduce or erase the acts 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, for
example, were never meant to be aesthetically pleasing. I leave aside for now a detailed analysis
of the nuances of how different re-enactment strategies might be seen to functionin 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 production and reception.
In this way, the strategy of re-enactment can activate the disavowal at the heart of our relationship to live art in productive ways: we know the performance (even the re-enactment performance itself) is always already in the past even if we are watching it now, and yet we carry
into our writing about performance a belief in the possibility of constituting meanings (and
knowledge about the event) as if these reside somewhere permanently and can be retrieved in
their full essence for the present momenta belief central to the development of art criticism
and art historical models of interpretation out of 18th-century aesthetics (most importantly,
Immanuel Kants 1790 Critique of Judgment [1986]).16
Even the most sophisticated performance theorist/historian argues her points as if her
interpretations hold water somewhere in relatively fixed form, as if they are not dependent
on 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 of
the act, most scholars or critics writing about live art will tend to downplay (if not completely
disavow in many cases) our reliance on photographic and filmic documentation, textual descriptions, and our own memories of live acts witnessed. This tendency is understandable (if regrettable), for, after all, while live performance is clearly of interest partly because of its liveness, its
apparent confirmation of presence, there seems to be little point intellectually or politically in
engaging with works in a way that truly accommodates the fact that their ephemerality makes
them forever inaccessible to full knowledgethis 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 EuroAmerican thought. In the terms of aesthetic theory sketched by Kant over 200 years ago in
Critique of Judgment, we must act as if we can interpret these works through a judgment that
compels 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 retrieve
except through moments of subjective perception and interpretation.17

17. Kants Critique of Judgment, due in part to its profound influence on 20th-century modernist art criticism, is still
a benchmark for understanding the obdurate contradictions at play in the human (subjective and sensory) relationship 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 [...]

Impossibility of Presence

16. See my discussion of this fixing tendency in these discourses of the visual arts in my essay Performance: Time,
Space and Cultural Value (2009).

25

Frozen/Live Art
The re-enactment projects noted here negotiate the paradoxical fact that the live act itself
both 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 examplehe seems to be
opening out precisely the contradiction Kant noted 200 years ago in how art comes to mean
through acts of encounter.)
The re-enactment foregrounds the desire for the live and the tendency of the live always
already 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 to
present the re-enactment itself as the site where the authentic meaning of the original event is
to be found (as ephemeral yet here now, as past yet present). Abramovic; herself has consistently remarked upon the contradictions at play in such an enterprise: redoing is still performance and performance is somehow living. For me the performance only has sense when you
perform; otherwise its dead (in Jones forthcoming[a]). This kind of poignant statement indicates that the performance is only alive at the very moment of its enunciationindicating the
necessary failure of any attempt to secure this truth historically or personally. And of course
the re-enactment, itself a performance, is plagued by the same encroachment of pastness (the
erosion of the present at every instant, its freezing into something knowable and over). Thus
Seven Easy Pieces as a wholethe performances; the press put out by the museum and articles
written about the event; the documentation of the event through photography, audio, and film
recording; and the catalogue and film made after the factpivots around the artists use of past
works, and of the institutional setting of the Guggenheim and the sites of documentation, to situate 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 some
degree an extra) functions to reciprocally confirm cultural status, in this case via the authenticity of live art. By delivering Abramovic; to us, The Artist is Present ended up exposing the lie
of the promise of live art to secure presence.

Amelia Jones

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 reenactment of sorts of Abramovic;s re-enactmentsfor any textual description and analysis is
inevitably 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 available to me. So my retelling is based on the large amount of existing documentation, and on an
extensive interview I performed with the artist in 2007. And of course I document these complex durational re-enactments here with still photographsbelying the range of documentary
strategies Abramovic; deploys in these projects. Accordingly, I use illustrations sparingly here,
directing the reader to the wealth of documentation I describe (particularly in the catalogue
accompanying the show).

26

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.

The term frozen art was articulated by the Chicano activist and artist Robert Legorreta,
aka the cross-dressed diva Cyclona. Two of Legorretas 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 Herrn. 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). Legorretas 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.

It is limiting but also perhaps in some ways appropriate that I did not see the works at the
Guggenheim; because of this limit, I am much more aware of how circumscribed my access
to the events of the seven nights in November 2005 isin this case, I cannot comment on
my 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 as
I attempt to understand how each project functions socially, aesthetically, and politically. (This
is not at all to say I think people who were at the Guggenheim, even those rare few who might
have been there every night for the seven-hour duration of each re-enactment, have a full or
truthful access to the performances. But they certainly have embodied memoriesas mediated
and unreliable as these would no doubt bethat 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 may
be or mean; phenomenology and neuroscience aside, I am not sure we have any idea). No illusions of truth, of restating the authentic moment through words drawn from memories, here.

18. On this point, see my article Presence in absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation (1997:1118).
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 contemporaneous artworks such as Andy Warhols celebrity portraits or even Barbara Krugers feminist appropriation art.

Impossibility of Presence

For Seven Easy Pieces, Abramovic; researched five relatively well-known pieces by other artists 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 pm to midnight) over each of
six nights, with the seventh night consisting of her newly commissioned piece entitled Entering
the Other Side (in which she inhabited a gargantuan blue dress, occupying the vortex-like center of Frank Lloyd Wrights famous spiraling building of the Guggenheim). The works she
re-enacted were (in order of their re-performance): Bruce Naumans Body Pressure (1974), a
piece 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 Acconcis Seedbed
(1972), in which he had a ramp built in a gallery in New York, and laid under it masturbating
in response to visitors entering the gallery space, his voice projected through a sound system;
VALIE EXPORTs c. 1969 Action Pants: Genital Panic, in which she supposedly stalked the male
spectators at a porn theatre in the late 1960s wearing crotchless pants, a disheveled wig, and
holding a gun; Gina Panes The Conditioning (1973), an endurance piece in which Pane laid on a
metal frame over lit candles that burned her back; Joseph Beuys 1965 How to Explain Pictures to
a Dead Hare, a performance in which the artist, adorned with his trademark elements of honey,

27

gold leaf, iron, and felt, cradled a dead hare,

whispering to it, while viewers peered in
through 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, including
cutting a star in her stomach with a razor,
whipping herself, and lying on an ice cross.

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)

I note all of these with relatively loaded

descriptions because each raises different
questions in terms of an original versus reenacting body, an original versus re-enacted
work, and thus about the meaning and value
of the bodies and works at issue in each case.
For Abramovic; to re-enact a work that, as
far as we know, was never actually performed
by the initiating artist (the Nauman piece)
is clearly of a different order from her redoing a well documented work in the history
of performance art (the Beuys or Acconci
works), a work by a woman artist herself
marginalized due to her gender and sexuality
(Pane), a work which itself might never have
occurred as such (see below on EXPORT),
or an earlier work by the artist herself (Lips of
Thomas). The importance of Seven Easy Pieces
lies in part in the care with which Abramovic;
chose, researched, and explored the limits
of each type of situation she was evoking in
redoing the works.

Amelia Jones

The research, presentation, performance,

and documentation of each piece begins and
ends with the reiterative devices of representationfor Abramovic; just as for me, a
researcher and scholar of performance. This
is evident if one looks closely at the catalogue, where each of the Abramovic; redos is presented
through the following means: brief documentation of the original performance (typically
for performance histories, through still photographs and textual information); brief indication of Abramovic;s research process; extensive photographs of Abramovic;s re-dos along with
texts transcribing both Abramovic;s own speech during the performances (17 pages long in
the case of Seedbed) and the words of audience members, taped by volunteers mingling among
the crowds. Abramovic; admits in an interview with Nancy Spector (also published in the catalogue) that the research to find the facts about the original piece was not always satisfying or
complete (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 withher.20

28

20. In my interview with Abramovic;, she explained further: So the VALIE EXPORT 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 is
a 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 wouldnt give me any clear
answers when I asked her about it (forthcoming[a]).

In fact, it is worth noting that, due to EXPORTs refusal to give her further information,
Abramovic;s re-enactment of EXPORTs piece had to be based on a handful of very limited
existing remaindersa few famous black-and-white photographs of EXPORT sitting with
her gun and wearing action pants. Abramovic;s belief in the truth of the original event is
revealed in her comment to Spector on this conundrum:
It was really difficult to determine the facts about the original piece from all the archeological 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 actual
porn theatrebut this historical fact about the real performance has, since Abramovic;s
project was performed and documented, now been exposed as a myth by art historian Mechtild
Widrich, who interviewed the photographer of EXPORTs documents, Peter Hassmann, and
discovered that apparently she never actually went to a porn theatre but told this story later as a
mode 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 photographic
imagery a performance that never took place as mythically described. Widrich is one of a new
generation of art history and performance studies scholars who are poised to begin to understand the significance of such gaps and contradictions, reveling in the impossibility of knowing
for sure rather than claiming to find final meanings. EXPORTs refusal to speak to Abramovic;
simply exposes further the extent to which our understanding and beliefs about past works
are always contingent on what information is available to usas Widrichs research makes

Impossibility of Presence

Figure 6. VALIE EXPORT, one of several photos of Genital Panic/Action Pants, 1969 (Peter Hassmann,
VALIE EXPORT Archive), as reproduced in the online version of New Zealand Art Monthly (Gimblett
2005). This reproduction and caption shows the tendency both to repeat stories circulating around
EXPORTs photograph and, after Abramovics 2005 re-enactment, to label EXPORTs work in relation to
the re-enactment.

29

Figure 7. Marina Abramovic; performing VALIE EXPORTs 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)
clear (and, who knows, perhaps Widrich or I will be exposed later on for believing Hassmanns
story...and so on...).
Speaking her work through mythification, EXPORT, like Deller, has shown a sharp
attention to how history worksmaking the images mean something discursively but in
contradiction (or at least contrast) to what occurred with the physical body and in material
spaces at the time (as far as we can know, again a knowledge itself gained from memories conveyed by others and documentary traces). EXPORTs self-mythifying act prompts later reenactors such as Abramovic; to fantasize the work in ways that may or may not be connected to
an original durational event.

Amelia Jones

EXPORTs Genital Panic unfolds as part of a reiterative ever-expanding network of meaninggenerating ideas, images, and beliefs that themselves relate to an ever-metamorphosing concept 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 only
exist as themselves represented in history and memorya Bergsonian layering rather than a
point-to-point teleologythen the impossibility of Abramovic;s project of retrieving something authentic from an original event becomes clear.22 This conundrum, this gap between the
original and the re-enactment, to my mind makes Abramovic;s project much more interest-

30

21. See also the photographic redo of the EXPORT piece by artist Eve Fowler, who photographs a fellow woman
artist (named as Hardy) posing like EXPORT with action pants (del Carmen Carrin and Dawsey 2008).
This text typifies the way in which EXPORTs self-mythologizing circulates, as evidenced by the way the authors
describe the c. 1969 EXPORT 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. Bergsons Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness ([1889] [1913] 2005) is a mindblowing 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.

ing than if we simply buy into and repeat claims for her authenticity and truthfulness as she
retrieves 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 ephemeralityor, 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 documentation to secure Seven Easy Pieces a place in art history, even as she, and the curators and promoters 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 format. The paradox here of course is that the re-enactment itself is durational and thus always
already 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 her
central 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 includes
some of the extensive still photographs and text documenting the project, the feature-length
2007 film by professional filmmaker Babette Mangolte seems bent on establishing the presence 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 multiple cameras, carefully placed and their movements carefully choreographed), the highly artsy
film 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 were
even documented at all (many werent).
Several scholars have already noted the bundle of contradictions surrounding Seven Easy
Piecescontradictions, I want to stress, that make the project more not less important for considerations of writing performance histories. As art historian Jessica Santone has noted of the
project, The medium of the documentation that Abramovic; produces, authorizes or uses is
therefore 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, citing
the museums claim in the brochure handed out on the final night of the project that the artist is present, here and now, acerbically notes, [y]et she looks, for all the world, like a
picture(2006:56).
The sheer volume of materials produced by Abramovic; and her team (including the curators 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 time
continues to make what I would argue to be untenable claims for the authenticity and presence
of live art.24 The film version of Seven Easy Pieces thus begins with the claim [p]erformance,

24. By Abramovic;s team Im 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

Impossibility of Presence

23. I am deliberately evoking Gilles Deleuzes Bergsonian take on cinema ([1983] 1986 and [1985] 1989). In
Deleuzes terms, Mangoltes film seems to me to reside somewhere in between the movement image of early cinema 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 watching an art film of sorts, the temporality of which is constructed through editing and camera work). Time 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.

31

t ime-based art, features the physicality of the artists body in front of a live audience,
confirming her insistence on both temporality and the presence of the physical body and the
proximity of this body to the audience in live art. But, again, the project itself, with its dependence on the film and an array of supporting representations, begs the question crucial to all
live performance art of how presence can survive duration; the fact that this claim for physicality 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 and
forth 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 experience (2007:9), presumably of the performer as well as of audience members) and yet acknowledging the impossibility of sustaining this belief if one has any interest in promoting this work
after its original performance ([l]ater on, though, our attitude changed. We felt the need to
leave some trace of the events for a larger audience). Abramovic; poses the issue of re-doing
performances as a questionCan we treat the instructions of the performance like a musical scoresomething that anyone who is properly trained can re-play? (9)but then proposes the goal of establishing a stable grounding for performance art in art history, noting
that the only real way to document a performance art piece, presumably to ensure its place
in 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 documentation of the work, begging further the question of why these efforts would be necessary if the
liveness 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 filmed
each piece in its entirety over the seven hours and then I had three other cameras moving 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 Jones
forthcoming[a])

Amelia Jones

On the one hand Abramovic; claims to be retrieving the authentic original event in her reenactment of it (deferring through copyright to the original performers)and several authors
in the catalogue reiterate these claims; on the other hand, she is explicit about her interest in
and dependence on documentation both for the retrieval of what she can know about the original and for the dissemination of knowledge about her own reworked versions of it. On the one
hand, Abramovic; more than anyone knows from experience that performances can never be
fully known (even while they are taking place, even by the artist herself), and that time itself
is the key issue in the enactment and retrieval of performances. In her interview with me, she
thus 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; she
admitted as well the impossibility of retrieving full histories: the resurgence of interest in performance is due to a lot of different things; looking back to that history, we cant really see
or isolate what exactly happened at the time either. On the other hand, Abramovic; and the
authors in the catalogue claim that by re-enacting an earlier performance its true meaning can
be retrieved, and then it can be written into art history. Catalogue author Erika Fischer-Lichte
thus 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 no
means repeated them (2007:42). Abramovic;s events are thus originals even while they are, paradoxically, repeats. And just before this claim, Fischer-Lichte draws on Abramovic;s own language of energy and the authenticity of the live to insist that the project affirms moments of

32

Easy Pieces has been generously provided by the Marina Abramovic; Leadership Committee (Guggenheim
Museum2005).

presence [...which] happen when the performer brings forth his body as an energetic body that
releases energy and allows it to circulate in the space and to energize spectators so that they
sense 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 1970swhich promoted
a concept of live performance as a kind of mystical transferal of life forceFischer-Lichte
thus seemingly inadvertently raises another contradiction, and the paradox of live art in history, or live art placed in art institutions and discourses of aesthetics, rears its head again.25 The
originality of Abramovic;s energetic bodyits very (supposedly) authentic presencein
fact opens to otherness (the otherness of the initial author, the otherness of interpreters and
spectators from then and now), and thus to the impossibility of its own wholeness and coherence (and of its originality).
The belief that the meaning of the body in action can only be known to the spectator
through its authentic live enactment, as performance theory suggests, contradicts the factand
a fact explicitly admitted and highlighted in Abramovic;s projectthat this bodys actions can
only 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, taking her cue from Abramovic;s own statements, wants to claim originality for an act that in fact
has 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 my
evocation of Kants theory of aesthetic judgment, the basis for aesthetics is the drive to cohere
the subject in relation to the objects of the world deemed to be art through the sleight of hand
securing this subjects judgments of these objects passed off as universal (and thus reciprocally
confirming the subjects judgments as true).26
The paradox of Abramovic;s project is that she and her team want to situate her work within
contradictory frameworksboth within these terms of aesthetics, presenting the work in the
heart of the international contemporary art world and constructing around it the accoutrements 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, and
ephemeral. Seven Easy Pieces is reified and at the same time celebrated for its confirmation of the
truth of presence and ephemerality (the energy of the live engagement). The two frameworks
as constructed and mobilized are discursively and institutionally incompatibleor at least do
not fit together without a lot of contortions and contradictions, as well as disavowals of what is
at stake in such an enterprise (most abstractly, cultural capital; on the most base level, careers
and economic security).
Abramovic;s investment in aesthetics has paid off brilliantly. She has been one of the key
figures 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 institutions within the art academy, as the Guggenheim and MoMA exhibitions confirm.27 But, as suggested, Abramovic;s work is built on a fundamental contradiction. Her very desire to secure the
truth and value of her re-enactments (as themselves ephemeral, and then ceas[ing...] to exist
25. For a wonderful and sophisticated exposition on live art as a mystical transferal of love and energy, see Lea
Vergines classic Il Corpo Come Linguaggio (1974), which includes a (very bad!) English translation.

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 by
feminists, to promote her career through such a show. See Interview: Klaus Biesenbach in Conversation with
Marina Abramovic;, where the artist answers Biesenbachs question did you or do you consider yourself a feminist? with the categorical, Absolutely not, never (in Stiles 2008:20).

Impossibility of Presence

26. On this centering tendency of aesthetics, see Jacques Derridas Truth in Painting ([1978] 1987) and Luc Ferry,
Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age ([1990] 1993).

33

after the moment, available only to visitors at the Guggenheim during the run of the show) is
belied 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 performance histories, while understandable, results in the reification of Seven Easy Pieces and the
author-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 furthers
my own career). Given this dynamic, at the very least, we need to reconsider the central claim
of mainstream performance art discourse, which has been to suggest that performance, through
its temporality and ephemerality, escapes the marketplace.
Abramovic; has become the new author-name through which all of the performances she
claims 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 one
initiated a search on Google images (the most common way today of looking for information
on live or other artworks) of Beuys hare to find information about Beuyss How to Explain
Pictures to a Dead Hare, from 2005 to 2007, most of the images on the first page of the search
results 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 Panes The Conditioning (under the search terms Gina Pane Conditioning)not
a single image of the original performance or even of Panes work in general would come up;
even today, in September of 2010, most of the images that appear with such a search (Pane
Conditioning) are of Abramovic; redoing the piece in 2005 (this in spite of the fact that the
Pompidou Center in Paris exhibited documentation of and relics from Panes original as part
of 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 our
inquiry to the questions with which we began: Where is the truth of works such as Panes
The Conditioning? Does it reside in the now long-dead body of Pane herself? In the memories of those who attended the original event? In the relics and photographs that remain of this
eventthe metal bed on which Pane laid over the lit candles; the series of images displayed
in a grid of photographs by the Pompidou? Or, as our most common resource for learning
about the past in our computer-literate society, Google search engine, suggests, does the truth
of Panes work actually reside in the photographs, texts, and film documenting the now also past
re-enactment by the much more internationally famous artist Marina Abramovic; (whose fame
largely resides now in her capacity to reopen the question of historical meaning in performance
art through these very re-enactments)?
This entire discussion points to a difficult and recalcitrant problem with live art, and one
that is brought to the fore precisely by the attempt through re-enactment to in some way secure
the 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 always
already gone.

Reiteration as the Presence that

Can Never Be Full in/to Itself

Amelia Jones

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

34

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

Figure 8. A 2009 Google Images search of Pane Conditioning yields no images of the original (Gina Panes
The Conditioning, 1973); most are of the 2005 re-enactment, with Abramovic; as Pane. (Screen grab by
Amelia Jones)
Easy Pieces. In fact, as I have suggested here, due to the very visibility it has gained through public 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) a
marketing term, a brand name.
Abramovic; herself has been very clear on how her work is to be bought and sold, indicating 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 necessary 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 and
never of anyone elses, so that I wouldnt 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 be
purchased by museums such as the Guggenheim: the museum [...] can buy the documentation,
including video, photographs, and objectsand the permission to re-perform the piece in the
future, with precise instructions made by the artists [...]. [A]rtists, in their lifetimes, must supply
extremely strict instructions [to this end] (2007:25).

Impossibility of Presence

29. She also noted in my interview with her that Chris Burden, whose Trans-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 dont
[legally or morally] need to ask me and you dont need my permission; you can do whatever you want, but now
that you are asking me Im 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).

35

Abramovic;s project thus raises crucial questions not just about the abstract aesthetic or
cultural value of particular performance practices, or even of particular author-functions (in
the Foucauldian sense), but about the economic and legal value ascribed to works of art and
performance as attached to particular author-names.30 Far from romantically ensuring that the
original act exists in some pure form, never becoming commodified, the re-enactment attenuates 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 galleries, books, magazines, art history discourse, etc.). As Sven Ltticken asks: Like other performances, re-enactments generate representations in the form of photos and videos. Is it the fate
of the re-enactment to become an image? And are such representations just part of a spectacle
that 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 that
takes place over time also seems to lead inexorably to the marketplace, perhaps it is not inevitable that it leads to the horrifying mind-numbing qualities of the capitalist spectacle as theorized in much Marxian postmodern theory from Guy Debords Society of the Spectacle in 1967 to
the 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 progressive political goals (including the goal of keeping key events in British history such as the 1984
miners strike in some way alive in British culture), younger-generation artists such as Jeremy
Deller (born in 1966) have recognized and begun to negotiate the structures of capital and the
related structures of repetition and reiteration that underlie any performance project articulated
in relation to the discourses and institutions of the visual arts.
Belgian artist Francis Als (born in 1959) has also shown a strong consciousness of issues
of 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 inches
from its original position [near Lima, Peru]. Als continues after this description to note that
in the aftermath of such live events, [w]e shall now leave the care of our story to oral tradition[...]. Only in its repetition and transmission is the work actualized (2002:1089). But the
contradictions of this stance are evident as well. As art historian Grant Kester has noted of
Alss practice, it is precisely in the circulation of the event-as-image before a global audience,
as Als writes, that he is able to accrue the symbolic capital necessary to enhance his career as
an artist (forthcoming). A similar point has been made about the work of Tino Sehgal, who is
on record refusing to have any of his performative events (each of which is re-done any number
of times by different actors in different, usually gallery, sites) officially documented in photographic 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 Als or a deliberately re-enacted one
per the works in Seven Easy Pieces, it is precisely this contradictory accrual of symbolic capital

Amelia Jones

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. 12427).

36

31. For a caustic and intelligent critical review of Sehgals practice see Mira Schor (2010). See also Caroline Bems
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 Sehgals practices, see Caroline Joness Staged Presence (2010); see also Carrie Lambert-Beattys discussion of Abramovic;s MoMA piece in the same issue, Against Performance Art (2010). In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that Caroline (my sister) and I discussed my work on Abramovic;s practice early in 2010
before The Artist is Present had burst forth onto the scene; her essay innovates in her attention to the particularities of the global art market, her current research project.

by the artist through the live event (the assigning of value to that which, as ephemeral, supposedly cannot be commodified) that I have discussed above. As Kester argues of Alss magnificent and hyperbolic performative events, and as one might argue about Sehgal and Abramovic;
as well, large-scale public performance events and re-enactments can and do participate in the
marketplace. They are at the center of what business theorist Jonathan Schroeder has called the
role of artists as brand managers, actively engaged in developing, nurturing, and promoting
themselves as recognizable products in the competitive cultural sphere (2005:1292).
Is there any way out of this circuit through which the live gets turned into capital? I have
suggested that Dellers project, in its self-reflexive acknowledgment of the art world as a marketplace, at least proposes possible ways of navigating these structures without fully succumbing to the political evacuations of the full-blown spectacle, which reifies the live as artwork
(whether in the MoMA atrium or elsewhere). A final comment on Abramovic;s recent work will
clarify how I see her project sitting in this larger picture.
The marketing dynamic surrounding Abramovic;s career
was highly evident in the advertising and staging of the third
key Abramovic; project of the
last five years, Marina Abramovic;
Presents at the University of
Manchesters Whitworth Art
Gallery in Manchester 319
July 2009, produced as part of
the Manchester International
Festival and curated by
Abramovic;.32 I did attend
Marina Abramovic; Presents and
also witnessed the public relaFigure 9. Marina Abramovic; conducting The Drill at Marina
tions machinations leading up
Abramovic;
Presents. Whitworth Art Gallery, July 2009. (Photo by
to and following the event, as I
Joel
Chester-Fildes)
lived in Manchester at the time
and worked at the University
(though I played no role in the planning of the event). Marina Abramovic; Presents took place
over 16 evenings at the gallery. Each evening visitors, who were told in advance in no uncertain
terms that they had to stay for the entire four-hour duration of the evening, were given white
lab coats on entry.33 The program included a workshop run by Abramovic; herself for the first

33. I complained about this to my colleagues at the Whitworth who kindly told me, confidentially, that they were
legally required not to lock people inthat I could thus leave if I must. This secret information did not alleviate my sense of being strong-armed into experiencing in full a durational event whether I wanted to stay or

Impossibility of Presence

32. The Whitworth website notes that the event was curated by Abramovic; and the Concept by Abramovic;, Hans
Ulrich Obrist, and Maria Balshaw, the latter being the director of the Whitworth (Whitworth Art Gallery
2009a). It is worth noting here that a fourth major re-enactment event dominated by Abramovic;s name took
place in January 2010 at the Plymouth Arts Center, UK. Entitled The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow,
the event was organized with the Marina Abramovic; Institute for Preservation of Performance Art and the
Performance Re-enactment Society (PRS; a UK-based collective). In the PRS portion of the event participants
were invited to focus in on a particular moment or image from a memorable performance, and bring an object
to recreate it at the event, in order for a series of new works to be produced through original performance photographs (Plymouth Arts Center 2009). Pointing to another conflation between an event supposedly about performance histories and the author-name Abramovic;, the event was followed by the publication of a book, Marina
Abramovic; and the Future of Performance Art, edited by Paula Orrell (2010). Interestingly, however, Abramovic;
herself ended up missing the actual event and apparently appeared only via video conferencingmuch could be
said about such virtual presence of the artist at an Abramovic; event.

37

hour, rather alarmingly entitled The Drill, which relied heavily on setting up, in Abramovic;s
terms, energy exchanges between and among audience membershaving us, for example, stare
into each others eyes for five minutesand between herself and her audience.34 After The
Drill, visitors were set free for the three subsequent hours to navigate around (and in some cases
within) a series of site-specific performances in various parts of the Gallery by 13additional artists: Nikhail Chopra, Ivan Civic, Amanda Coogan, Marie Cool Fabio Balducci, Yingmei Duan,
Eunhye Hwang, Jamie Isenstein, Terence Koh, Alastair MacLennan, Kira OReilly, Fedor
Pavlov-Andreevich, Melati Suryodarmo, Nico Vascellari. Each of the 14 pieces (including The
Drill ) was reiterated each night across the run of the show.
While the artists were fully credited in
more detailed publications on the work, the
public relations for the exhibition (which
included most notably large billboards and
posters all over the city of Manchester,
with smaller versions even in the womens
toilets at the Whitworth!) featured a glamorous portrait of Abramovic; holding a kind of
mini-me, without the names of the other
performers (as Abramovic; put it ruefully during the conference organized for the event
(for which I did participate as a panelist), I
am a good marketing figure). At this conference she also made the quite poignant
point that her obsession with documentation and history is linked to her own background growing up in the former Yugoslavia:
Figure 10. Marina Abramovic;, ME & ME, 2008.
I am from communist background, we docImage used on advertising for Marina Abramovic;
ument everything.35 This comment points
Presents, Whitworth Art Gallery, July 2009. (Photo
to a potentially strong connection between
by Marco Anelli; courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery and the
Abramovic;s particular views about hisMarina Abramovic;Archive)
tory, documentationand surely about the
marketplaceas informed by her experience growing up in a communist regime. I leave this point aside for scholars such as Branislav
Jakovljevic who know more about conditions in the former Yugoslavia, which Abramovic; left
in 1976 for Amsterdam, to address.36 But clearly the dominant 20th-century Euro-US model
not. The entire event felt coercive, though some of the performances were powerful and among the most inspiring interventions into a specific gallery setting (the Whitworth was completely cleared of all permanent collection
items) that I have seen.
34. The feeling of this Drill for me was of a parody of the kind of brainwashing Americans imagine the Soviet government to have purveyed in the era of the iron curtain. There are possibly links between Abramovic;s method
and her youth in Yugoslavia, with parents who had positions high up in Titos government; Branislav Jakovljevic,
a Serbian performance studies scholar now working in the US, confirms that this link has explanatory value
(2010). Michael Benson has noted Abramovic;s practice as expressing the last gasp of Titoism, in reference to
the MoMA staging of the artists presence (2010).

Amelia Jones

35. Abramovic;s comments were made with self-deprecating humor at the Real Time/Real Documents symposium
on 12 July 2009. Typical of galleries and museums today, the Whitworth has a bookshop which expanded this
sense of the artists ubiquity by including vast arrays of postcard images reiterating this doubled Abramovic;, as
well as shelves of books on the artist.

38

36. In personal correspondence with Jakovljevic over the summer of 2010 he shared some of this knowledge and his
thoughts on the specifics of the position and significance of Abramovic;s work in Yugoslavian and, later, Serbian
cultural histories.

of avantgardism, which requires a skeptical or critical view towards the market and/or high
art institutions epitomized by MoMA, is not very helpful in understanding what Abramovic; is
doing, or where she seems to be coming from, in her recent practice.
Most interestingly for my arguments here, a few weeks after the July 2009 event at the
Whitworth, Marina Abramovic; Presents was re-enacted in the gallery through a series of large
video projections (with Abramovic;s installed at the center, and in the largest format), called
(ironically) Real Time/Real Documents.37 The labeling of this exhibition of documentary evidence as assertively real while also, simultaneously, noting the status of the real time performances as now being reiterated
as fixed documents, surfaces
some of the contradictions
involved in staging and restaging such a project. In this way
the organizers of Real Time,
curator Mary Griffiths and gallery director Maria Balshaw,
who are colleagues of mine
and were thus forced at various
points to engage with my cranky
interrogations, at least ironicized the shows foregrounding of Abramovic; and her claims
for presence, by insisting that
the re-enactive documents and
the video footage themselves
be labeled oxymoronically as
Figure 11. Real Time/Real Documents, follow-up installation to Marina
real.38
Abramovic; Presents. Whitworth Art Gallery, August-September 2009.
Real Time/Real Documents
(Photograph by Tony Richards)
crystallizes the importance of
re-enacting and documenting past works, but also the paradox of doing so while still relying on discourses of authenticity
and presence. Finally, and perhaps most worryingly, the Real Time project and the entire discourse and public relations surrounding the Marina Abramovic; Presents event points to the crucial political stakes in the re-staging of performance events. Even in Real Time (organized by a

37. Real Time/Real Documents was installed in the galleries at the Whitworth from 1 August to 6 September 2009.
The footage of Abramovic;s The Drill clearly dominated the exhibition space. The only other artists project that
was projected in digital video on an equal scale was that of Nikhil Chopra; the rest of the projects were displayed
on modestly sized monitors on the gallery walls.

Impossibility of Presence

38. The Real Time show was advertised as follows: The works performed as part of the epic exhibition of performance art, Marina Abramovic; Presents [...] have been video recorded in real time (Whitworth 2009b). The problem with this conceit is that it masks the fact that the videos played in the show are fully edited from footage
made by more than one camerathe real time element is faked (or, rather, an illusion of immediacy and the
flow of time is produced through editing and camera placement). What, after all, is real time as displayed on
videotape?
It should be noted that I played a role in Real Time in the embarrassing form of appearing on an additional
video monitor in the same exhibition space; the monitor was showing a tape of the conference in which I participated during the run of the event, with Abramovic;, Adrian Heathfield, and co-organizers of Marina Abramovic;
Presents, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Maria Balshaw, on 17 July 2009. Watching myself staged in the same space as
the beautifully edited and crafted footage of the performances was not a nice feeling, but did remind me of the
elusiveness of ones utterances, which are always startling to hear (apparently coming out of ones own mouth,
even worse) at even a slight temporal remove.

39

curator highly conscious of issues of exclusionnot the least because of my constant prickly
interventions!) all of the documentation of the 13 other performance projects is subordinated
to Abramovic;s presence via the large-scale film of The Drill. Highly memorable pieces by
major performance artistssuch as Kira OReillys magnificent twist on the nude descending
the staircase, in which, with incredible restraint and muscular control, her naked body fell
excruciatingly slowly down a dramatic Victorian staircase at the Whitworth over the three hour
duration of the show each eveningare largely lost to history (it is difficult even to find information on the internet on the individual projects other than The Drill, and there is unfortunately no catalogue documenting the exhibition).

Reclaiming Histories:
to put the performance into the museum
Expanding on her ambitious founding of the Marina Abramovic; Performance Center in upstate
New York and her recent re-enactment efforts, Abramovic; has thus recently noted: I really feel
that I have almost the historical function to put the performance into the museum and then
other people after me can really understand performance in mainstream art (in Abramovic; and
Anderson 2010).39 Reinforcing this idea of Abramovic; as the genius of performance art, and
the key figure responsible for its history, one breathless review thus claims: Forcing herself to
endure beatings, starvation, and psychological violence, [Abramovic;...] has defined the role of
the performance artist as that of the daredevil performer, the one who risks death and emerges
intact for the benefit of her viewers (Goldstein and Russeth 2010).
While one can certainly appreciate Abramovic;s seemingly heartfelt desire to play a key role
in historicizing performance, as the reviewers comment reveals overall such hyperbolewhich
flies in the face of, in fact, the very messiness and resistances complex performance practices
such as Abramovic;s, at their best, provokeweakens rather than strengthens our understanding of live arts effects. The reviewers hyperbole (sadly typical in the case of writing about
Abramovic;s work), draws uncritically on outdated language from modernist aesthetics, claiming
a kind of transcendence for the creating artist as genius: as such, it adds absolutely nothing to
our understanding of how performance actually functions either in the moment of its liveness
or as (inevitably and instantaneously) historically experienced.
As undeniably important to the history of performance art as Abramovic;s practice is, ambitious claims for her practice (by herself and others) end up, ironically, freezing her work in time.
Arguably, the spontaneity and durationality of the best of the works she re-enacts is mitigated
through the continual staging and restaging of Abramovic; by Abramovic; and others. The power
of the works she redoes initially came from the various ways in which they surprised, confused,
pressured, or otherwise destabilized gallery visitors or (in the case of pieces done in public)
unsuspecting members of the general public. All such potential to provoke a productive feeling
of unease in viewers is, of course, lost in re-enactments such as those of Seven Easy Pieces, which
are accompanied (if not, largely driven) by large-scale public relations campaigns proclaiming
their own importance, and which themselves take place in large and fully sanctioned art institutions and are conceived and performed for representational apparatuses such as catalogues, photographs, and films.
Returning explicitly to Jonathan Schroeders identification of a shift towards the role of artists as brand managers (noted above) the stakes of forming a respectful but forceful critique

Amelia Jones

39. For more examples of the hagiographic press, see Andrew Goldstein and Andrew Russeth, Present and Past
(2010); and James Westcott, Artist Marina Abramovic;: I have to be Like a Mountain (2010).

40

Figure 12. (facing page) Documentation of Kira OReilly, Stair Falling, 2009. Part of Marina Abramovic;
Presents. Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester International Festival, 2009. (Photograph by Marco Anelli)

Impossibility of Presence

41

of this increasingly monolithic construction of Abramovic; along the lines of the artistic genius
capable of delivering the true history of past performance events are, in my view, clearnot as
a commentary on Abramovic; herself, clearly an important (if contested) figure, but as a critique
of the tendency noted in this essay of the art world and broader popular media to draw on a
notion of performance as delivering presence precisely by freezing it as a commodity (often via
the figure of the artist, as here), and a tendency to gloss over or ignore this blatant contradiction
in what is going on.
The stakes of this critique should be pretty clear, but one last example will further support
my arguments: just before the MoMA retrospective opened, the New York Times Home and
Garden section featured a lifestyle story about Abramovic; and her two high-end living spaces
(a large loft in Manhattan and a country home in upstate New York). The final picture of the
photographic slide show (the usual array of images of impeccable modernist spaces) displays
Abramovic; herself posing coyly in a black mini-dress in the chic kitchen doorway of her loft
(Louie 2010). The fact that this story debuted before the opening of the retrospective indicates
a public relations project in full force constructing Abramovic; (certainly with her participation)
as both genius and celebrityand thus as brand manager, who in turn serves the museums
desire to market performance as the latest thing in modernisms long teleologyin a decidedly
non-ironic way.
Still, as this analysis I hope has shown, the performative re-enactment, when critically
engaged, can remind us not only how closely all cultural expressions are tied to the marketplace
in late capitalism, but of questions of history in relation to performance art that are extremely
important politically. This interrogation points to broader questions of how histories get written, and why we continue (in the supposedly postmodern age of the 21st century) to fall back
on mystifying language of presence and energy exchange. The following questions are raised
by looking at the current rage for re-enactments, and the work of Abramovic;, more critically:
What performances get talked and written about in the culture as a whole? Which get written
into history and in what ways? How and why do historians write certain things into the present,
exclude others, and continually fix and re-fix the meaning of objects as well as events in order to
bring them into a continually refreshed present? And how does that hallowed present (the
guarantor of artistic presence) inevitably include and even depend on the circuits of the marketplace, which itself makes and informs histories as we know them?

Amelia Jones

History and even memory are themselves re-enactments, scriptings of the past (based on relics, documents, remainders) into the (always already over) present. Crucially, re-enactments
remind us that all present experience, including (as Kant recognized) the apprehension of things
called art or acts called performance, is only ever available through subjective perception,
itself based on memory and previous experience (we could not apprehend or make sense of the
world around us without relating it to past experience). All eventsthose we participated
in as well as those that occurred before we were borncan only ever be subjectively enacted
(in the first place) and subjectively retrieved later. There is no singular, authentic original act
we can refer to in order to confirm the true meaning of an event, an act, a performance, or a
bodypresented in the art realm or otherwise. We are always already in the now, which can
never be grasped, and yet all experience is mediated, representational.

42

Historian R.G. Collingwood famously argued 50 years ago that history itself is always
re-enactment. For Collingwood, history can only be known through the performative
identification of the historian with his subjects: How does the historian discern the
thoughts which he is trying to discover? [...] There is only one way in which it can be
done: by re-thinking them in his own mind (1956:215; see also Dray 1995). And, as Robert
Blackson puts it in Once More...With Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Culture,
reflecting on false memory experiments in relation to artistic re-enactments, memory, like
history, is a creative act (2007:31).

While often posed as confirming the truth of the past, paradoxically re-enactments activate the now as always already over, the present always already turning into the futureand
both continually escaping human knowledge. Politically, the best we can do might be at least
to acknowledge this paradox self-reflexively rather than covering it over by clinging to an outdated, modernist notion of presence that relies on a mystified notion of artistic intentionality
and that ultimately relies on and reinforces the circuits of capital.
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