Re-enactment: False Evidence and Dangers

In the same way that the idea of the “performative,” borrowed from J. L. Austin’s linguistic pragmatics, entered the performing arts in order to account for certain practices while simultaneously demonstrating the limitations of the détourné use of the theory, the idea of re-enactment has acquired a preponderant place in some works of contemporary art. Its possible applications have similar limitations. These works are replays, remakes, reconstructions, reactivations, and restagings of performances or actions, whether done by the creators themselves or by some third party. Assuredly, the term re-enactment signifies re-making, re-playing or re-acting (performing an act again); and replaying Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate or Oskar Schlemmer’s ballets is, in this sense, simply banal; one might not understand all the fuss about a mere change of label. Thus re-enactment makes a claim to something beyond re-playing or re-making what has already taken place. Of course, the difference is sometimes minimal, even indiscernible; one might not notice any change between Ursonate replayed and Ursonate re-enacted. In fact, it is a mere interpretation, an umpteenth version of the work, of the kind that has been done for ages. If to “enact” means to play, to represent on stage, to hold a role, logically re-enactment would be to reprise what has been played or represented. The main flaw in this use of re-enactment is that it obliterates the historical modification that doing so imposes on events, on perceptions and interpretations of the factual reality of art history. Restricting oneself to just a re-performance, in the philosophical sense of the term, without setting the aesthetic and artistic effects in their historical perspective, is a pretty poor showing. The presentation of a construction of Josephine Baker’s house (designed by Adolf Loos) as a re-enactment of an object (Ines Weizman/Andreas Thiele, 2008) in Mythologies of Re-enactment at the Royal Academy of Arts was a trick of language, despite its being an architectural success. The announcement read: “The process of re-enactment — the act of restaging a performance or recreating an object — is central to how the past can be interpreted. Re-enactments transmit memory, yet also inevitably lead to its alteration with the creation and propagation of mythologies.”1 1  - http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/architecture/future-memory/mythologies-of-re-enactment,1961,AR.html Yet reconstructing a building or remaking or remanufacturing an object is not a re-enactment. It is, precisely, reconstructing, remaking, or remanufacturing the object, period. What does this notion of re-enactment really add, since the very claim that its function is to transmit memory, even if modifying or interpreting it, can be made of any document, monument, or object from the past?

In the end, the term re-enactment has been made so extensible that it seems applicable to almost any work of art involving some kind of reprise; this both clarifies and further confuses the notion, since not everything involving a “re” automatically translates into re-enactment. For example, it seems difficult to think of Pierre Ménard’s project, imagined by Borges in his story “Pierre Ménard, Author of the Quixote,” as a re-enactment, since, according to the fiction, even though Ménard rewrote Cervantes’s novel down to the last comma, he is nonetheless the author of a work that is ontologically other and different, and not the same work simply rewritten, reproduced, or recopied by him. This is an important distinction — a recognition that re-enactmentimplies a reprising consequent to the same thing having already been done. In this sense, Ménard does not remake Quixote, he writes another novel.