The Tensile: Repetition, Reperformance, Rearticulation

Peer Reviewed Proceedings of 5 th Annual Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ), Hobart 18-20 June, 2014, pp.184-195. ISBN: 978-0-646-93292-7. 2014 GEORGIA BANKS University of Melbourne The Tensile: Repetition, Reperformance, Rearticulation ABSTRACT Marina Abramovic s 2005 performance Seven Easy Pieces in which she reperformed six seminal performance works from the sixties, and also an original piece initiated a dialogue regarding reenactment in performance art. Abramovic has said that the foundation for her piece was to re-enter poorly documented works from the sixties and seventies into a contemporary art dialogue. While she has been successful in her intention the larger question remains, is reperformance interesting? Is it redundant to precisely reperform an existing performance work, or should it be common practice as it is within music and theatre? This paper addresses these questions, as well as using the preexisting dialogue as a springboard to explore the concept of tensility within performance art practice. Tensility defines how far something is capable of being stretched or drawn out; within this context it refers to how far from the original a reperformance can be, both visually and conceptually, before it becomes an original work. This paper also attempts to define the difference between reperformance and rearticulation. KEYWORDS Performance Art, Reperformance, Repetition, Marina Abramovic, Archive INTRODUCTION In 2005, the self-confessed grandmother of performance art, Marina Abramovic, performed Seven Easy Pieces, and initiated a dialogue within the contemporary art world regarding reenactment in performance art. The piece consisted of Abramovic recreating six iconic works from performance art history; Bruce Nauman s Body Pressure, Vito Acconci s Seedbed, VALIE EXPORT s Action Pants: Genital Panic, Gina Pane s The Conditioning, First Action of Self Portrait(s), and her own Lips of Thomas. She also created a new work for the show, Entering the Other Side. This work provoked dialogue regarding performance art and repetition. In a number of other creative practices, such as music, it is a time-honoured tradition, but in the world of performance art, where transience was an integral part of some of the

Georgia Banks best-known work from the 1960's and 1970's, the idea of replaying pieces as if from an orchestral score has usually been seen, if seen at all, as heresy. Abramovic s work has prompted an interesting topic for critical conversation; the relevance of a historical truth surrounding an epochal performance piece, and whether it is limited to believe that the remnants of the original performance are more authentically art than a reproduction. It also demonstrates that the reproduction of a work is impossible, as even the footage of the original performances cannot convey the reality of the work, and first person accounts are affected by memory and subjectivity. It is also worth noting that even if an entirely reliable document of the work existed, copying it to the point of exactness is not humanly possible. While Abramovic s reenactments raise interesting points regarding repetition, the larger question remains, is reperformance interesting? This paper addresses these questions, as well as using the pre-existing dialogue as a springboard to explore the concept of tensility within performance art practice. This paper also attempts to define the difference between reperformance, rearticulation, and appropriation, and proposes that it is within this space that the future of reperformance lies. THE URGE TO ARCHIVE: ABRAMOVIC S SEVEN EASY PIECES Abramovic said she chose to reperform due to the lack of documentation of seminal performance works as a result of their having never been adequately documented, saying one often had to rely on testimonial witnesses, poor quality video recordings, and photo negatives. Due to the dire conditions of performance art documentation, these substitutable media never did justice to the actual performances. The only real way to document a performance art piece is to reperform the piece itself 1. In this paper I would consider whether Abramovic is able to successfully, as she calls it, document the easy pieces, as they are directly based on the documentation that has been generated by the original performances. Is Abramovic reperforming the original performance, or merely reproducing the documentation in a live performance context? Art critic Hal Foster posits that the artist s urge to archive stem from a desire to decontextualise historical information, lending it a physical presence 2. Seven Easy Pieces certainly does that; the historical works are literally physically present. However, Foster then goes on to say that the archival artist blurs and complicates the idea of originality and authorship 3. This is not synonymous to Abramovic s stated intentions or her relationships with the pre-existing works. Abramovic makes it very 185

The Tensile: Repetition, Reperformance, Rearticulation clear that it is important to her that each original artist is credited, and paid for copyright 4. Foster also describes artists working with the archive as being driven by a sense of disconnectedness; it is hard to imagine Abramovic as being disconnected from a movement of which she was an integral part! Rather than labeling Abramovic s work as archive art, it is perhaps more accurate to describe her urge as one of generating documentation. That is, Abramovic is not attempting to organise a number of historical artifacts or, in this case, performance artworks within a contemporary context; rather, she is interested in contributing to the narrative, and to the physical aftermath, of the originary event. 5 The documentation Abramovic has produced is not archival, while it is related to the archive, and draws upon an archive, it is not using it to create an ordering or a logic to a collection, rather it repeats and multiplies it. Within this context, the documentation operates as both a contemporary art object and a mode of historical and theoretical interpretation. It stands to reason that Abramovic s reperformances now inform contemporary audience s experience of these works as much as the originals informed Seven Easy Pieces ; if you search for any of the six pieces Abramovic reenacted online, her images will appear just as often as images of the original, and oftentimes her work will be listed first. Although Seven Easy Pieces engages with the idea of the archive, rather than being a piece that reorganises information, it creates a symbiotic relationship, in which each now is equally important to the other. WHY REPEAT? Abramovic s work raises the question, is repetition interesting? As we can see below, there are two incredibly similar images, the first is Austrian born artist VALIE EXPORT s original work Aktionshose:Genitalpanik which translates to Action Pants: Genital Panic, a series of images that are purportedly the documentation of her performance Genital Panic ; the reason for the use of the term purportedly will be addressed later. The second is Abramovic s reproduction, and part of Seven Easy Pieces, which was a live performance of EXPORT s photograph that took place over seven hours. The performance consisted of Abramovic posing statically, altering her stance occasionally in accordance with EXPORT s photographs. Does the repetition achieve anything that the original does not? Does it add anything to the preexisting dialogue surrounding the original work? Reperformance does create an interesting discourse concerning its own impossibility if you spin in a circle, then do it again, 186

Georgia Banks there s no way those two movements could be exactly the same. There will always be a slight difference; therefore, arguably even a repetition of a work is in some way an original. From Left to Right: VALIE EXPORT, Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969. Image from Perform Repeat Record, edited by Adriana Heathfield and Amelia Jones, Chicago: Intellect Ltd., 2012. Marina Abramovic, Performing VALIE EXPORT s Action Pants: Genital Panic, 2005. Image from Seven Easy Pieces, edited by Marina Abramovic, Jennifer Blessing, Nancy Spector and Joan Young, New York: Edizioni Charta, 2007. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze mirrors this view; citing Hume s work as an example, he writes as an example that within the repetition of something such as AB, AB, AB, A each event is independent from the others. The reason he gives for this is that although individually each AB is the same, the state of the mind in which the viewer interprets them is altered. Subsequent to the first occurrence, whenever an A appears the reader anticipates a B, as that is the pattern it has previously followed; the mind is simultaneously referencing the history of the event, and anticipating the future. Deleuze goes on to say it is within this paradox that repetition exists. Although it occurs in the present, it operates within the past and the future; the past in so far as the preceding instants are retained in the contraction; the future because its expectation is anticipated in this same contraction 6. And so, arguably, each repetition of a performance work, such as Abramovic s of EXPORT s, is independent from the 187

The Tensile: Repetition, Reperformance, Rearticulation original as it operates in the space between precedence and anticipation. Although they function as a set such as AB, AB, AB each work is also autonomous from the others. It is interesting that rather than completing the pattern Deleuze chose to leave the last AB unfinished, thus rupturing the relationship between memory and expectancy he is discussing. Feasibly it is here that repetition within performance art becomes more interesting; the place in which the A is not followed by the B. That is to say, when the viewer s expectations of the reperformance are ruptured somehow, and a new element is introduced. DIFFERENCE IN REPETITION; ONO S CUT PIECE AND ACCONCI S SEEDBED An example of how reperformances can differ is Yoko Ono s Cut Piece, which she performed first in 1964, and then again in 2003. In this work, Ono sat passively, and members of the audience were invited to come and cut away a piece of her clothing, until she was left naked. The differences between these two performances are very distinct; the most marked difference being that in the 1964 version of the piece Ono is sitting cross-legged on the floor, whereas in the 2003 rendition she is sitting in a chair. This immediately creates a different relationship between herself and the audience; when Ono is sitting on the floor she seems vulnerable, in a position of weakness, giving the people cutting away her clothing a sense of power over this woman, and lending the work a more vicious atmosphere. While the height of the chair positions Ono at a more equal station with the participants, and her age and strong stance lend her a matriarchal air, almost giving the sense that the audience is privileged to be a part of this performance artist superstar s project. When discussing the first work Ono describes herself as innocent 7 ; the undressing of the female body is being used as a way to demonstrate violence toward the female body, against its will. Whereas the second work, according to Ono, is a work born of life experience, an expression of her having learnt that you can do what you want to do, without having to control what other people do to you 8. This demonstrates that even an artist reperforming her own work could not, or perhaps would not to, exactly replicate what has come before, both aesthetically and conceptually. In addition, the same performance can have a completely different reading with each performer, for example, Vito Acconci s performance Seedbed and Abramovic s reperformance of Seedbed. Abramovic s rendition of Seedbed is 188

Georgia Banks almost precisely accurate, but there is one difference; Acconci is a male, and Abramovic is a female. Seedbed consisted of Acconci lying under the floorboards at Sonnabend gallery in New York for 10 days, 8 hours a day, masturbating. While he was masturbating, he would verbalise fantasies about the audience members, who he could see through the cracks in the floor. These fantasies were then played through speakers into the space. Although Abramovic s reperformance is very close to the original, the implications of this work, such as how the audience members feel, and the references it makes to voyeurism and fantasy are instantly different when performed by a woman instead of a man. REPERFORMANCE AND THE DOCUMENT; PRESENCE VERSUS ABSENCE When discussing reperformance the issue of the document becomes prevalent; is it possible to accurately reassemble a work based on what documentation is available, without having been present for the original performance? Before continuing it is worthwhile to discuss the term documentation and what it encompasses. Within a performance art context, it is fair to say that documentation refers to any paraphernalia pertaining to the work, including but not limited to photos, videos, and interviews with the artist, first person accounts from audience members, and exhibition reviews. Following Abramovic s Seven Easy Pieces, questions were raised regarding whether it was possible to accurately recreate a work based on documentation alone, without having had the opportunity to experience it live. While it may appear that younger performance artists exploring the concept of reperformance are limited to documentation, I would argue that presence is equally limiting. In other words, while experiencing a work through images, video, or text is clearly different to experiencing it live, neither understanding of the piece is at an advantage regarding historical accuracy. Historian, critic, and curator Amelia Jones mirrors this belief, drawing from her own experience as a performance art theorist who has had to rely solely on documentation of works from this era she writes that there is no possibility of an unmediated relationship to any kind of cultural product, including body art 9. She then goes to say that even more contemporary works, which she has been able to see live, are then viewed through a memory screen, essentially becoming a form of documentation itself. Thus, while these relationships with the work may be different, 189

The Tensile: Repetition, Reperformance, Rearticulation neither is superior to the other; even Abramovic s reperformance of her own Lips of Thomas will have been affected by hindsight, as well as the historical framework it has since been embedded in. The undertaking of reenactment marries these two supposedly divergent experiences; reperformance comprises of our desire to understand and contextualise the past, while also providing a live art experience to contemporary audiences. It is both representational and live 10. REPERFORMING MYTHOLOGY; EXPORT S ACTION PANTS: GENITAL PANIC EXPORT s Action Pants: Genital Panic is a particularly interesting piece to discuss with regard to reperformance and documentation. As mentioned previously, there is a certain mythology surrounding EXPORT s iconic work. The story goes that in 1969 VALIE EXPORT marched through the aisles of a pornographic cinema in Munich, wearing a pair of jeans with the crotch cut out, toting a rifle. EXPORT s intention was to confront the men in the cinema with real female genitalalia, as opposed to the airbrushed product being presented to them on the screen. What remains of this action are a number of images of EXPORT, sitting both in her studio and outside, holding the gun, staring aggressively into the barrel of the camera. These photographs were not taken during the performance, nor do they try to recreate the events of the performance; rather they act as an embodiment of the objective of the piece. There are also a number of accounts of the action that EXPORT has given; in 1979 EXPORT stated the work was as described above. However, twenty years later, she stated that there was no gun. Then in 2007, EXPORT indicated that the theatre might not have been pornographic 11. It is also worth noting that in 1970 EXPORT published one of the images from this piece in an anthology of Actionist works, along with a text from the planning stages of the work containing the phrase should happen. Conversely, the German term for should happen, sollte, can also be read as an imperative 12. Due to fact that there is no documentation of the piece, and so many contradicting accounts of the work, raises the question, did it ever happen at all? Arguably, whether or not the performance in its original description occurred is of no importance. In his essay, The Performativity of Performance Documentation, Philip Auslander describes two different modes of performance art imagery, documentary, and theatrical. He defines the documentary category as being the tradition style of performance art documentation, in which the artist 190

Georgia Banks performs, and stills or moving images are taken, and are exhibited or archived as a form of evidence. The theatrical category consists of what is commonly referred to as performed photography ; Auslander explains it as being cases in which performances were staged solely to be photographed or filmed and had no meaningful prior existence as autonomous events presented to audiences 13. When EXPORT s photographs are read as existing within the latter category, the question of the existence of an original performance becomes obsolete. Taking this idea further, the statements EXPORT has made about the performance also act within the field of theatrical documentation. Although these statements may or may not be true becomes unimportant, as they are now a part of the performance; in other words, the photographs and the mythology surrounding the work are, in fact, the work. Abramovic states that the reason she chose to reperform the photograph rather than the description of a (perhaps) non-existent performance was due to the numerous accounts of the piece, making it difficult to accurately reproduce 14. Whereas I believe that through reperforming the photograph, it is possible to also reperform the story of the original work, as well as all of the stories that follow, to reperform the mythology of Genital Panic. THE PROCESS OF TENSILITY Let us go back to Delueze s theory of repetition, in which he explains repetition as putting the audience in a state of both remembering what has just been, and anticipating what is to come through the pattern of AB, AB, AB, A. While discussing this concept, I briefly touched upon the significance of Deleuze choosing to end his pattern unfinished, an action that breaks the audience s said state. This is the crux of the tensile. The term tensility defines how far something is capable of being stretched or drawn out before it breaks or no longer functions. Within the context of reperformance, it refers to how far from the original a recreation can be, both visually and conceptually, before it no longer references the original, and becomes entirely its own work. The point where the pattern is split and the connection between the old and new is no longer present. While the process of tensility does contain both the most similar of repetition, and the point of breaking, or of a new work, what I believe to be of the most interest and perhaps the most challenging aspect of tensility is the space between these two points. That is, the space where a reperformance is different from the original while still referencing it, 191

The Tensile: Repetition, Reperformance, Rearticulation therefore contributing to the context of the work in a new way. It is within this space that rearticulation exists. I would liken rearticulation to what is often referred to as appropriation within a number of other artistic disciplines. While appropriation signifies the act of using a preexisting art object in order to initiate a new dialogue, often regarding the idea of ownership or authority, the term rearticulation exists specifically as a part of performance art practice. Although it does raise similar issues to appropriation, it is meant to operate beyond that; while reperformance is concerned heavily with the concept of authorship, rearticulating a work is about the process of stretching the work to its limits, and discovering the spaces in which a new work can exist inside the context of the old. To take this idea further, if we imagine AB, AB, AB, A to be reperformance, where the unfinished pattern is the inevitable differences that will arise, no matter how intentional or unavoidable, then rearticulation could be described as AB, AC, AD, AE and so on and so forth. Within this pattern each progression is exploring a new facet of the work, and being stretched further and further, while still connecting with the original work; A. Within this analogy AZ would be the point at which the work is furthest from the original whilst still referencing it, and therefore the point of most interest. BEYOND REPERFORMANCE; BURDEN S SHOOT AND LADUKE S SELF INFLICTED BURDEN Below are two images; the first is a photographic document of Chris Burden s Shoot, in which the artist organised for a marksman friend to shoot him in the arm with a.22 rifle at F Space, in California. There is also roughly thirty seconds of video footage available of this event taking place. The second image is Self-Inflicted Burden, a sculpture created by Tom LaDuke. The sculpture is three feet tall, and depicts the artist inspecting a gun shot wound identical to Burden s. These two works encapsulate the trajectory of working with the tensile, that of original to rearticulation. 192

Georgia Banks From Left to Right: Chris Burden, Shoot, 1971. Image from Perform Repeat Record, edited by Adrian Heathfield and Amelia Jones, Chicago: Intellect Ltd., 2012. Georgia Banks, Chris Burden Reperformed, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist. Tom LaDuke, Self Inflicted Burden, 2004. Image from Angles Gallery, Los Angeles. LaDuke s work operates as a rearticulation because, even though it is based on Chris Burden s Shoot, it is different from the original in a great number of ways. The size LaDuke s sculpture, along with the artist s appearance LaDuke is portrayed standing in his sweatpants and slippers; his skin is waxy and there are visual blemishes in a way minimises a monumental performance work. Viewers can physically stand over a rendition of a work that conceptually and theoretically has taken on colossal size. While this work is a sculpture, it is also exhibited with a how to manual titled Instructions for Assembling Self-Inflicted Burden. The two page, low cost pamphlet instructs readers on how to assemble their own Self Inflicted Burden sculpture. It is worth mentioning that this manual includes the image of LaDuke that the sculpture is based upon. Although LaDuke did not capture the event of his being shot on film, or perform it in a live art context, this image is representative of his own ephemeral event, operating as a sort of talisman animating 193

The Tensile: Repetition, Reperformance, Rearticulation the event in the mind of the viewer 15. The inclusion of this talisman creates an explicit link to the performance art discourse, and therefore to rearticulation. REFERENCES 1 Abramovic, Marina. Reenactment. Introduction, in Marina Abramovic: Seven Easy Pieces, exhibition guide, (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: 2005), 11 2 Foster, Hal. An Archival Impulse, October, Vol. 110, 2004, 4 3 Foster, 22 4 Abramovic, Marina. Reenactment. Introduction, in Marina Abramovic: Seven Easy Pieces, exhibition guide,(new York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: 2005), 11 5 Santone, Jessica, Marina Abramovic s Seven Easy Pieces: Critical Documentation strategies for Preserving Art s History, Leonardo, Vol. 41, No. 2, 147 6 Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994): 71 7 Yoko Ono, Interviewed by Miranda Sawyer, Yoko Ono s Cut Piece Still Shocks, BBC News World Radio and TV, uploaded 03/08/2012, http://www.bbc.com/news/worldradio-and-tv-18959341, 1:14 8 Yoko Ono interviewed by Miranda Sawyer, 1:19-2:11 9 Jones, Amelia, Presence in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation, Art Journal, Vol. 56, No. 4, 1997, 12 10 Jones, Amelia, The Artist is Present : Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence, The Drama Review, Vol. 55, No. 1, 2011, 20 11 Widrich, Mechtild, Can Photographs Make it So: Repeated Outbreaks of VALIE EXPORT s Genital Panic since 1969, in Perform Repeat Record, ed. Adrian Heathfield and Amelia Jones (Chicago: Intellect Ltd., 2012): 92 12 Widrich, 101 13 Auslander, Philip, The Performativity of Performance Documentation, in Perform Repeat Record, ed. Adrian Heathfield and Amelia Jones (Chicago: Intellect Ltd., 2012): 49 14 Marina Abramovic Interviewed by Amelia Jones, The Live Artist as Archeologist, in Perform Repeat Record, ed. Adrian Heathfield and Amelia Jones (Chicago: Intellect Ltd., 2012): 550 15 Bedford, Christopher, The Viral Ontology of Performance, in Perform Repeat Record, ed. Adrian Heathfield and Amelia Jones (Chicago: Intellect Ltd., 2012): 84 194

Georgia Banks CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Georgia Banks is an MFA candidate at Victoria College of the Arts, working primarily with video; also extending into photographic and live performance practice. Her work is predominantly concerned with the collision between violence and eros, specifically within regard to female sexuality. Her most recent project explores the concept of tensility within performance and reperformance. SUGGESTED CITATION Banks, G. (2014), The Tensile: Repetition, Reperformance and Rearticulation, Peer Reviewed Proceedings of the 5th Annual Conference Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ), Hobart, Australia, 18-20 June, 2014, P. Mountfort (ed), Sydney: PopCAANZ, pp. 184-195. Available from http://popcaanz.com/conference-proceedings-2014/. 195