In the same way that the idea of the \u201cperformative,\u201d borrowed from J. L. Austin\u2019s linguistic pragmatics, entered the performing arts in order to account for certain practices while simultaneously demonstrating the limitations of the d\u00e9tourn\u00e9<\/em> 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<\/em> signifies re-making, re-playing or re-acting (performing an act again); and replaying Kurt Schwitters\u2019s Ursonate<\/em> or Oskar Schlemmer\u2019s 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<\/em> replayed and Ursonate<\/em> 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 \u201cenact\u201d 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<\/em> 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\u2019s house (designed by Adolf Loos) as a re-enactment of an object (Ines Weizman\/Andreas Thiele, 2008) in Mythologies of Re-enactment<\/em> at the Royal Academy of Arts was a trick of language, despite its being an architectural success. The announcement read: \u201cThe process of re-enactment\u200a\u2014\u200athe act of restaging a performance or recreating an object\u200a\u2014\u200ais 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.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - http:\/\/www.royalacademy.org.uk\/architecture\/future-memory\/mythologies-of-re-enactment,1961,AR.html<\/span> 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?<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
In the end, the term re-enactment<\/em> 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 \u201cre\u201d automatically translates into re-enactment. For example, it seems difficult to think of Pierre M\u00e9nard\u2019s project, imagined by Borges in his story \u201cPierre M\u00e9nard, Author of the Quixote,\u201d as a re-enactment, since, according to the fiction, even though M\u00e9nard rewrote Cervantes\u2019s novel down to the last comma, he is nonetheless the author of a work that is ontologically<\/em> other and different, and not the same work simply rewritten, reproduced, or recopied by him. This is an important distinction\u200a\u2014\u200aa recognition that re-enactmentimplies a reprising consequent to the same thing having already been done. In this sense, M\u00e9nard does not remake Quixote<\/em>, he writes another novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Closer to our concerns, artistic re-enactments of more or less serious, violent, or important historical subjects often divert the idea of what they really signify, as was first suggested by English philosopher and historian Robin G. Collingwood. In all that is written or said about art, few authors refer to his book The Idea of History<\/em> (1946), which contains a number of chapters2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Robin G. Collingwood, The Idea of History<\/em> (1926-1935), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994 [1946]. See, Epilegomena<\/em>, 4: \u201cHistory as Re-enactment of Past Experience.\u201d<\/span> dedicated to the problematic of re-enactment. In Collingwood\u2019s view, it is not only impossible to \u201cre-perform\u201d facts or events, but, beyond that, a re-enactment deals with the ideas, thoughts, and concepts of history\u2019s actors and not with the facts. We cannot have any empirical knowledge of the past; the witnesses are not reliable and the knowledge available through copies and reproductions is limited. What took place cannot, in any rigorous way, be redone<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201cWhat\u2019s done cannot be undone,\u201d as Lady Macbeth said. When Collingwood defends the re-enactment, it is, for him, a question of re-thinking the ideas and conceptions of the past and, above all, reading them critically, making value judgments, and bringing forward historical proofs of what we are claiming. The re-enactment is thus a historical operation that critiques, judges, and ultimately modifies the past as it is apprehended in the present; it is likely to modify the present and the future of history (and not only art history). In his re-enactments (The Battle of Orgreave<\/em>, 2001), Jeremy Deller is perfectly aware of such stakes, but this is not the case for a great majority of artists who confuse \u201cre-enactment\u201d in Collingwood\u2019s sense with a simple, banal \u201cremaking.\u201d Repeating, documenting, verifying, reinterpreting, citing works or history\u200a\u2014\u200athese processes have been practised since art became art; we did not wait for the term re-enactment<\/em> to be adopted in contemporary art circles to reperform or reconstruct works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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