Book Section
The essay engages with a screenplay by Michel Foucault, written in 1970 for a film, not realized during Foucault’s lifetime, about Pablo Picasso’s Las Meninas, a series of 58 paintings that the artist made in 1957, taking up, updating, reinterpreting the famous painting with the same title by Diego Velázquez (1656). This screenplay is at the same time an example of critical reflection on reenactment in art history and itself a reenactment practice of sorts: the filmic repetition of an artistic repetition. It invites a reflection on the role of repetition as a critical operation: how doubles, reenacted images, and ‘counter-mimesis’ can become creative gestures and opening movements of transformation through plays of refraction, duplication, and multiplication of the realities and subjectivities at stake in them.
Keywords: double; repetition; representation; mimesis; Foucault, Michel; Velázquez, Diego; Picasso, Pablo; criticism
Rights: © by the author(s). Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Part of Over and Over and Over Again Containing:
The Reactivation of Time / Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, Arianna Sforzini
From Re- to Pre- and Back Again / Sven Lütticken
The Reenacted Double: Repetition as a Creative Paradox
‘The Reconstruction of the Past is the Task of Historians and not Agents’: Operative Reenactment in State Security Archives / Kata Krasznahorkai
The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders: Reconstruction as ‘Democratic Gesture’ / Pio Abad
Insistence: The Temporality of the Death Fast and the Political / Özge Serin
‘Interrupting the Present’: Political and Artistic Forms of Reenactments in South Africa / Katja Gentric
Resounding Difficult Histories / Juliana Hodkinson
Archival Diffractions: A Response to Le Nemesiache’s Call / Giulia Damiani
Archival Reenactement and the Role of Fiction: Walid Raad and the Atlas Group Archive / Roberta Agnese
Unintentional Reenactments: Yella by Christian Petzold / Clio Nicastro
Everyday Aesthetics and the Practice of Historical Reenactment: Revisiting Cavell’s Emerson / Ulrike Wagner
Speculative Writing: Unfilmed Scripts and Premediation Events / Pablo Gonçalo
Reenactment in Theatre: Some Reflections on the Philosophical Status of Restaging / Daniela Sacco
Re-search, Re-enactment, Re-design, Re-programmed Art / Serena Cangiano, Davide Fornari, Azalea Seratoni
In the Beginning There Is an End: Approaching Gina Pane, Approaching Discours mou et mat / Malin Arnell
Performance Art in the 1990s and the Generation Gap / Pierre Saurisse
Re-Presenting Art History: An Unfinished Process / Cristina Baldacci
Reconciling Authenticity and Reenactment: An Art Conservation Perspective / Amy Brost
UNFOLD: The Strategic Importance of Reinterpretation for Media Art Mediation and Conservation / Gaby Wijers
Unfold Nan Hoover: On the Importance of Actively Encouraging a Variable Understanding of Artworks for the Sake of their Preservation and Mediation / Vera Sofia Mota, Fransien van der Putt
Living Simulacrum: The Neoplastic Room in Łódź: 1948 / 1960 / 1966 / 1983 / 2006 / 2008 / 2010 / 2011 / 2013 / 2017 / ∞ / Joanna Kiliszek
‘Repetition: Summer Display 1983’ at Van Abbemuseum: Or, What Institutional Curatorial Archives Can Tell Us about the Museum / Michela Alessandrini
‘Political-Timing-Specific’ Performance Art in the Realm of the Museum: The Potential of Reenactment as Practice of Memorialization / Hélia Marçal, Daniela Salazar
‘We Are Gathering Experience’: Restaging the History of Art Education / Alethea Rockwell
Title
The Reenacted Double
Subtitle
Repetition as a Creative Paradox
Author(s)
Arianna Sforzini
Identifier
https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-21_03
Description
The essay engages with a screenplay by Michel Foucault, written in 1970 for a film, not realized during Foucault’s lifetime, about Pablo Picasso’s Las Meninas, a series of 58 paintings that the artist made in 1957, taking up, updating, reinterpreting the famous painting with the same title by Diego Velázquez (1656). This screenplay is at the same time an example of critical reflection on reenactment in art history and itself a reenactment practice of sorts: the filmic repetition of an artistic repetition. It invites a reflection on the role of repetition as a critical operation: how doubles, reenacted images, and ‘counter-mimesis’ can become creative gestures and opening movements of transformation through plays of refraction, duplication, and multiplication of the realities and subjectivities at stake in them.
Is Part Of
Over and Over and Over Again
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
4 January 2022
Subject
double
repetition
representation
mimesis
Foucault, Michel
Velázquez, Diego
Picasso, Pablo
criticism
Rights
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Language
en-GB
page start
19
page end
27
Source
Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, Cultural Inquiry, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 19–27

References

  • Bataille, Georges, La Part maudite (Paris: Minuit, 1949)
  • Bataille, Georges, La Notion de dépense (Paris: Lignes, 2011)
  • Blanchot, Maurice, Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, transl. by Brian Massumi and Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Zone Books, 1990)
  • Deleuze, Gilles, The Logic of Sense, trans. by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990)
  • Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)
  • Foucault, Michel, ‘Ariane s’est pendue’, in Dits et écrits, I: 1954–1975, text no. 64, pp. 798–99
  • Foucault, Michel, ‘Le Langage à l'infini’, in Dits et écrits, I, text no. 14, pp. 287–88
  • Foucault, Michel, ‘What is Enlightenment’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 32–50
  • Foucault, Michel, ‘Theatrum philosophicum’, in Dits et écrits, I, text no. 80, pp. 885–908, English as ‘Theatrum philosophicum’, trans. by Donald F. Brouchard and Sherry Simon, in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. by Paul Rabinow, 3 vols (New York: New Press, 1998–2001), II: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. by James D. Faubion (1998), pp. 343–68
  • Foucault, Michel, Dits et écrits, ed. by Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 2001)
  • Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. by Matthew Chrulew and Jeffrey Bussolini (London: Routledge, 2002)
  • Foucault, Michel, ‘Les Ménines de Picasso’, in Michel Foucault, ed. by Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Frédéric Gros, and Judith Revel, Cahiers de l’Herne, 95 (Paris: L’Herne, 2011), pp. 14–32
  • Foucault, Michel, Boîte 53, Foucault Archives, Bibliothèque nationale de France (NAF 28730)
  • Le Subtil Oiseleur, Foucault de Velázquez à Picasso, dir. by Alain Jaubert (Éditions Montparnasse, 2020)

Cite as: Arianna Sforzini, ‘The Reenacted Double: Repetition as a Creative Paradox’, in Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, Cultural Inquiry, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 19-27 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-21_03>