Amongness Besideness Withness Duke 2017 (original) (raw)
Historical reenactments, Identity and Leisure
This article discusses the heritage re-enactments created, experienced and understood differently (or similarly) in various cultural contexts and by different groups. The text analyzes some cases from Hungary and Lithuania and examines the questions like the individual and the collective forms of constructing the past, of forming identities and the politics of remembrance and its uses in the leisure time.
Reproducing the Past, Alienating the Body-Digital Time and Reenactment
… realities: being syncretic: consciousness reframed-the …, 2008
Relationships between space and time have been turned upside down from early modernity to now. Whereas time was widely intendend and run in spatial terms in the age of classical capitalism, the present knowledge capitalism needs to gain control over time (both individual time and social time), and that’s why space is nowadays understood in temporal terms. One of the most striking examples of this new central position of time in contemporary art is the great number of reenactments designed and played in the last ten years all over the world. These are not only reenactments of historical or cultural events (as in pageants), but also repetitions of artistic events and performances. Reenactments are grounded on a linear construction of time, but moreover confound history with geography, and treat time’s linearity and continuity as an achitectural site, as a stage animated by new players. But while in the society of the spectacle every reenactment is rather a way to alienation (both alienation of the actor’s bodies and alienation of audience’s gaze), in many artists’ intentions reenactment tend to regain control over time (see for instance Peter Watkins’ “docudramas”, Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory and most of Rod Dickinson’s work). This is specially true for reenactments which are also “remediations”, as in Janez Janša and Eva and Franco Mattes, which reenact historical artistic performances in Second Life. From this point, reenactments can be viewed as an attempt to create what Walter Benjamin called a “Jeztzeit”, a now-time: a time full and meaningful, triggered by “dialectical images” in which history can have its place. Against the postmodern idea of history as eternal and meaningless repetition, artists’ reenactments tend to assert the idea that every repetition brings in it a difference, that doesn’t exist such a thing like an “absolute art” or “absolute action”. The artist’s body has no warrented inviolability: perhaps it’s not true that “everyone is an artist”, but for sure “everyone is an actor”. Key words: Time, Reenactment, Digital, History, Repetition
Heritage, 2020
In Reenactment Studies Handbook, ed. Agnew, Lamb and Tomann. Routledge, 2020.