Fun with Re-Enactments

What do you think of when you hear the word "re-enactment"? Do you think of a bunch of nut-jobs looking for an excuse to dress up in loin cloths and act like Neanderthals?



Perhaps you just think of some guy who's itching for an excuse to fly the "Stars 'n Bars" and act like a jackass?

Well, recently a bunch of academics got together at Cambridge University (see: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2006-7/reenacthistory.html) to wrestle around with re-enactments. Although, disappointingly, no one arrived in full period regalia, some interesting questions were on tap. That is, what exactly can any one learn about history by doing re-enactments? Is the experience of "doing it" a meaningful contribution to knowing about the past?



From Old Ken's point of view, some of the papers devoted to this topic were insightful and thought provoking. The first paper of the day was devoted to the film "United 93" as a re-enactment many times over. While the film itself is a representation of the events of 911 in close to real time, the director has described the movie as a "re-enactment" of the day as narrated in the 911 commission report. What is more, he used a mix of professional actors, actual participants and real air-traffic controllers who weren't really involved but were playing appropriate parts. The film also cuts between enacted scenes and actual CNN footage. Our interpreter, Jim Chandler, was not trying to make a strong case for this film as a meaningful re-enactment, but rather calling attention to its contradictions. So, this was an intriguing start.

However, other papers were much less successful: some were by convinced re-enactors whose enthusiasm for their craft seemed amusing, if a little crazy, while others were just so deeply skeptical about the enterprise that one wondered why they bothered to participate at all.

What was most interesting - - and perhaps symptomatic of the fact that this conversation was being put together by English academics who remain strangely iconophobic - - was the complete absence of serious engagement with art during the whole affair. On the one hand, many of the projects put forward by the participants as examples of re-enactments seem like they might equally, in not more compellingly, be described as works of art.



Whether or not we want to call "United 93" a work of art, examples like the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (depicted above) might certainly deserve this classification. And, if this is so, there are lots of lively conversations and traditions of thinking about what we can learn about the world from art and fiction more generally. What is more, increasing numbers of artists have been doing re-enact projects as Art. Marcel Duchamp's famous chess match with a naked woman (a performance piece from the 1960s) was recently re-enacted at Christie's, a conceptual artist named Jeremy Deller recently won Britain's Turner Prize for his re-enactment of a famous 1984 battle between stirking miners and the henchmen of the Thatcher government, and so on.

But, what was really interesting to Old Ken was the very strange overlap between the aesthetics attributed to re-enactments - - being there or being present, conviction, and empathy - - and an art theorist who would seem to have very little sympathy with projects of this kind: that arch advocate of Modernism, Michael Fried. Nonetheless, as we saw in a previous blog (http://www.nicebirdrox.com/2005/03/tale-of-two-possets-or-my.html), Fried's recent interest in photography has brought him almost to a position where he seems susceptible to the re-enactment, describing the "ontological pictures" of photographers like Jeff Wall as re-enacting and therefore recuperating fallen, literalist terrain of "the everyday" or, in his words, teaching us how to see the everyday in "the right way." Thus, as wielded by Wall or perhaps "United 93," all of the theatricality of the re-enactment gets turned around and into works of Art.

Now, of course, Old Ken could be wrong about this. But, it only begs the question: how can we talk about "affective knowledge" and learning from fiction without looking at art and aesthetics? Like living in a mud hut for months and eating only roots, it seems crazy.