Book Section
Can reenactment both as reactivation of images and restaging of exhibitions be considered an alternative way of tackling the critical task to re-present art history (i.e., to present it anew) in the here and now, over and over and over again? The gesture of restoring visibility to something no longer present, reactivating or reembodying it as an object/image in and for the present, is here proposed as a (political) act of restitution and historical recontextualization. Examining the boundaries between past and present, original and copy (as well as originality and copyright), repetition and variation, authenticity and auraticity, presence and absence, canon and appropriation, durée and transience, the paper focuses on remediation, reinterpretation, and reconstruction as creative gestures and cultural promises in contemporary art practice, curatorship, and museology.
Keywords: re-presentation; contemporary art; postmodernism; curatorship; art history; Aby Warburg; museology
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 / Arianna Sforzini
‘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
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
Re-Presenting Art History
Subtitle
An Unfinished Process
Author(s)
Cristina Baldacci
Identifier
Description
Can reenactment both as reactivation of images and restaging of exhibitions be considered an alternative way of tackling the critical task to re-present art history (i.e., to present it anew) in the here and now, over and over and over again? The gesture of restoring visibility to something no longer present, reactivating or reembodying it as an object/image in and for the present, is here proposed as a (political) act of restitution and historical recontextualization. Examining the boundaries between past and present, original and copy (as well as originality and copyright), repetition and variation, authenticity and auraticity, presence and absence, canon and appropriation, durée and transience, the paper focuses on remediation, reinterpretation, and reconstruction as creative gestures and cultural promises in contemporary art practice, curatorship, and museology.
Is Part Of
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
4 January 2022
Subject
re-presentation
contemporary art
postmodernism
curatorship
art history
Aby Warburg
museology
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.
Language
en-GB
page start
173
page end
182
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. 173–82

References

  • Agamben, Giorgio, ‘Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films’, trans. by Brian Holmes, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. by Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 313–19
  • Agnew, Vanessa, Jonathan Lamb, and Juliane Tomann, eds, The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms in the Field (London: Routledge, 2020) <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429445637>
  • Baldacci, Cristina, ‘Reenactment: Errant Images in Contemporary Art’, in Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019), pp. 57–67
  • Baldacci, Cristina, ‘Recirculation: The Wandering of Digital Images in Post-Internet Art’, in Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019), pp. 25–33
  • Baldacci, Cristina, ‘For the Future: The Archive as an Artistic Gesture of Resilience’, in Present Archives: Reflections from a Collection of Prints, ed. by Beatrice Zanelli and Ersilia Rossini (Foligno: Viaindustriae Publishing, 2019), pp. 53–58
  • Baldacci, Cristina, and Susanne Franco, eds, On Reenactment: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools (Turin: Accademia University Press, forthcoming)
  • Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 217–51
  • Bolter, Jay D., and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999)
  • Bourriaud, Nicolas, The Radicant, trans. by James Cussen and Lili Porten (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009)
  • Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., ‘Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art’, Artforum, 21.1 (September 1982), pp. 43–56
  • Celant, Germano, ed., The Small Utopia: Ars Multiplicata (Milan: Progetto Prada Arte, 2012)
  • Crimp, Douglas, ‘Pictures’, October, 8 (Spring 1979), pp. 75–88 <https://doi.org/10.2307/778227>
  • Crimp, Douglas, ‘The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism’, October, 15 (Winter 1980), pp. 91–101 <https://doi.org/10.2307/778455>
  • Demand, Thomas, ed., L’image volée (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2016)
  • Franko, Mark, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) <https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199314201.001.0001>
  • Giannachi, Gabriella, ‘At the Edge of the “Living Present”: Re-enactments and Re-interpretations as Strategies for the Preservation of Performance and New Media’, in Histories of Performance Documentation: Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices, ed. by Gabriella Giannachi and Jonah Westerman (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 115–31 <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315645384-13>
  • Giusti, Francesco, ‘Passionate Affinities: A Conversation with Rita Felski’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 25 September 2019 <https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/passionate-affinities-a-conversation-with-rita-felski/> [accessed 25 February 2021]
  • Huyssen, Andreas, ‘The Search for Tradition: Avant-Garde and Postmodernism in the 1970s’, New German Critique, 22 (Winter 1981), pp. 23–40 <https://doi.org/10.2307/487862>
  • Krauss, Rosalind, ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition’, October, 18 (Autumn 1981), pp. 47–66 <https://doi.org/10.2307/778410>
  • Lyotard, Jean-François, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. by Rachel Bowlby and Geoffrey Bennington (Cambridge: Polity, 1991)
  • Ricoeur, Paul, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, Interpretation, ed. and trans. by John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)
  • Roelstraete, Dieter, ‘Make it Re-: The Eternally Returning Object’, in When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013, ed. by Germano Celant (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2013), pp. 423–28
  • Settis, Salvatore, Incursioni: Arte contemporanea e tradizione (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2020)
  • Settis, Salvatore, Anna Anguissola, and Davide Gasparotto eds, Serial / Portable Classic: The Greek Canon and its Mutations (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2015)
  • Warburg, Aby, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: The Original, ed. by Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil, in cooperation with the Warburg Institute and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2020)

Cite as: Cristina Baldacci, ‘Re-Presenting Art History: An Unfinished Process’, 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. 173-82 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-21_18>