The Lure of Re-enactment and the Inauthentic Status of the Event

Signalled by the rise of theories and practices of performance specifically addressing temporality and repetition, the notion of re-enactment is in the air. Scholars have developed a critical discourse pointing to the impossibility of a single act existing in plenitude (the act is always already contingent on our experience of it, and on the various modes through which we remember and historicize it), but some artists, curators, and increasingly popular culture re-enactment societies in Europe and North America promote the idea of re-enactment as a means of retrieving the truth of the past.1 1  - See Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains in Visual Culture: Essays on Re-enactment (New York & London: Routledge, 2011).

While the term re-enactment has gained new purchase since the turn of the millennium, with new concerns about our relationship to history, it has been argued that history itself, all culture, even human experience in general, are necessarily based on a logic of re-enactment or redoing. As Adam Mendelsohn argues, “[u]nderpinning re-enactment art is the implication that the activity of making art itself, participating in cultural production, is itself a kind of historical re-enactment — an activity that preserves heritage through ritualized behavior.” Or, as Robert Blackson puts it, reflecting on the phenomenon of false memory in relation to artistic re-enactments, “memory, like history, is a creative act.”² 2 - Adam Mendelsohn, “Be Here Now,” in Art Monthly 300 (October 2006), 13 — 16; Robert Blackson, “Once More… With Feeling: Re-enactment in Contemporary Culture,” Art Journal, Vol. 66, no. 1 (Spring 2007), 31. Notably, in the 1950s, British historian R.G. Collingwood argued that history can only be retrieved by “re-enacting” it through identification; see Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 215.