Bodies, mimesis, history
So, I was on this panel this weekend and I was terribly concerned that this time, in fact, I was just going to bomb. I have been running around from panel to panel every weekend and I think they are slowly taking a toll on me. And unlike last year, where I gave the same presentation on the Interventionists each time, this year, I seem to be grasping at new subjects. So, I am always debuting a new series of hackneyed ideas and they often come out fairly garbled. I know that most people on here that have seen me do any of these recently, would have seen my utterly worst presentation in Chicago. The only redeeming thing about the Chicago presentation is that the ideas presented are on the top of my list of urgency (the talk was on building infrastructures of resonance and the growth of a culture of commodified subjectivities and how that effects the increasingly scene-like art/activist community). So, I guess, the level of urgency in my Chicago talk would balance it’s utter lack of organization.
But this last talk I gave was on my upcoming show at MASS MoCA, Ahistoric Occassion. Nice title I think. Kind of fun. Maybe annoyingly self-congratulatory (word play often comes off as self satisfied) but the word play is productive. It works. Anyway, the talk forced me to clarify some of the ideas at work in the show and also, publicly, witness some of its shortcomings. But isn’t it interesting that if one is capable of enduring the embarrassment that accompanies oneself thinking out loud in public, one also gains the invaluable insights that magically appear when anxiety is mixed with neurons firing. I learned some things about the show. And one of the most important ideas I would like to lay out now.
The idea came about because we were reflecting on the performance by an artist named Pia Lindman (and organizor of the panel). Dressed in a gray suit she enacted drawings taken from images from the New York Times of people grieving. Almost appearing as a mime, she would star at a pad of paper on an easel and position her body to capture the gestures exactly. Removed from their context, these poses were a bit bizarre, disconcerting and somewhat bland. They seemed to lose a lot of their umph and that was the point. But as I watched, it got me thinking how important the body was in trying to recapture these images. How these images had moved from bodies to mediation through the media, to a pad of paper and back into Pia’s body.
When we are on the panel, Pia asked why it is that this re-enactment is so important for people, particularly in relation to the work of Jeremy Deller who I had presented earlier. I then realized how much the idea of Guy Debord’s spectacle had to do with this. And how, the idea of spectacle particularly influenced performance today. The reaction to a mediated culture is an emphasis on meaning placed in the body. Thus you get all kinds of political rads groups emphasizing the role of personal interaction and embodied practice. And the manner in which folks attempt to recoup the meaning of historic events by placing their bodies literally in the role of history seems palpable and bizarre. I was imagining a world where the news of the day was told in elaborate performances of people enacting the different players. Where the movement of one’s body allowed one to better remember the past. This is the wild idea. What are the influences that spectacle has had on historical re-enactment?
There is a thing called muscle memory right. Can the muscles remember the civil war?
The lens of spectacle, and mediation, as it applies to collective memory and forms of memory that attempt to sidestep Benjamin’s art in the age of mechanical reproduction (in the hands of capital). This performativity as it applies to events that we personally do not have a connection to, is interesting and definitely a new idea for me. One that I need to chew on.
