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>> Rod Dickinson has talked about history as a type of mind control and has consistently made re-enactments of controversial moments in recent history. In his pieces Jonestown Re-enactment, 2000, The Milgram Re-enactment, 2002, and Nocturn, 2004, Dickinson uses re-enactment as a way to confront history actively, making the past into a site or spectacle for viewing.
During the 90s, a handful of contemporary artists were making restagings or re-enactments as a way to gain further understanding of the present through the lens of the past. More recently, re-enactments – a hybrid of performance, theatre, folk art, Conceptual Art and video art – have gained momentum as a trend in contemporary art. Just this summer Mass MoCA mounted a show titled ‘Ahistoric Occasion’ which is made up of work by artists ‘exploiting the material of history to shape and give new meaning to the present’ and includes work by Paul Chan, Jeremy Deller, Allison Smith and Yinka Shonibare among others. One work that stands out from the show is by Felix Gmelin who re-enacted his father’s 1968 march through Berlin waving a communist flag – a fairly radical statement of protest and activism at the time, but which is rendered amusingly out of synch and silly today. Another statement of 60s protest and activism was revisited at this year’s Whitney Biennial where Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija recreated the Artists’ Tower Against the War in Vietnam, 1966. It is hard to imagine Peace Tower, which seems rather tame now, as ever having been thought of as controversial when it was originally erected. Both pieces are successful in demonstrating the shift in what is perceived as radical behaviour even when conditions throughout the world are arguably comparable. Although Gmelin’s piece is performative and essentially video art – both pieces fundamentally rely on documentation, positioning archival material as the primary source for making this type of art. Interrogating history is itself the acknowledgment that much of what we know and who we are as people and societies is dependent on second-hand, mediated accounts of the past. In 1980 Allan McCollum wrote, ‘Again, we must question our everyday beliefs concerning how successfully we may know anything the evidence for which we receive by way of language, symbols, imagery, and so forth.’ Eyewitness reports, written records and audio-visual materials combine to paint the most persuasive version of what really happened; something that is potentially always open to interpretation since we can never physically travel back in time (at least not yet) to witness what happened ourselves. Perhaps the popularity of historical re-enactments,

weekend restagings of important battles by hobbyists, is because this is an activity that meshes history with fantasy and offers the next best thing to actually having been there – minus the real-life consequence of violence. Jeremy Deller employed just such re-enactors for his epic piece The Battle Orgreave in 2001. In 2005, ‘Life Once More – Forms of Re-enactment in Contemporary Art’, curated by Sven Lutticken for Witte de With, Rotterdam, was one of the first group shows that recognised re-enactment as an established artistic project and included work by some of its major proponents, Rod Dickinson, Barbara Visser, Robert Longo and Andrea Fraser among others. Further, ‘Life Once More’ cited performance as a critical strategy for reinterpreting history: ‘Performative art thus serves as a duplication and an interrogation of a nostalgic event culture; it becomes an attempt to fight repetition with repetition, to break open and recharge the past.’ In particular, Dickinson has consistently made re-enactments of controversial moments in recent history. In his pieces Jonestown Re-enactment, 2000, The Milgram Reenactment, 2002, and Nocturn, 2004, Dickinson uses reenactment as a way to confront history actively, making the past into a site or spectacle for viewing. Dickinson has talked about history as a type of mind control. Although the works exist as films, and you could argue that what Dickinson ultimately produces is video art, the performative element – using an audience as witness and participant – is crucial to understanding the work. Intrinsic to The Milgram Re-enactment is the nature of Stanley Milgram’s original experiment carried out at Yale University between 1960 and 1963 which examined forms of social obedience. Milgram’s experiment relied on an artificial environment for the successful collusion of its participants. Milgram stated: ‘With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perception, and the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter’s definition of the situation.’ The Milgram Re-enactment uses artifice as a means to illustrate what is essentially the goal of distinguishing the true from the false and draws a rather useful parallel with the enduring issues raised by representational and non-representational art. Similarly, Artur Zmiljewski recreated social psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s landmark 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment (See AM288). Where in The Milgram Reenactment Dickinson was more concerned with documenting a live historical re-staging witnessed by an audience, Zmiljewski, in Repetition, 2005, was more interested in creating a historical simulation to test whether or not Zimbardo’s original experiment could be successfully repeated today. Both pieces are simulations of simulations, but where The Milgram Re-enactment faithfully reproduced the outcome of the original experiment, Repetition recreated the conditions of the original experiment which allowed for unscripted results. Shown in the Polish Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale, Zmiljewski’s Repetition is a remarkable example of the

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Rod Dickinson The Milgram Re-enactment 2002 in collaboration with Graeme Edler and Steve Rushton

intersection where art meets real life and uses re-enactment to explore complex ethical issues and to weave a compelling narrative out of historical precedents; the evidence for which is anchored to archival materials. The connection between historical re-enactment and ritualised violence is not a flimsy one. Robert Longo, cited by Ian Aitch in ‘Doing it Again’, has said: ‘The whole idea of re-enactment, you can trace it back to the ritual of violence and sacrifice, tragedy and theater. Re-enactment is like mass in a church.’ One of the things that Dickinson’s work and Deller’s piece The Battle of Orgreave, have in common is that they revisit violent moments in history. Deller became interested in historical re-enactment for its status as a kind of representational folk art, adopting it as a form to create The Battle of Orgreave. Filmed in June 2001, it was a live re-enactment of a violent dispute between picketing miners and the police at Orgreave in South Yorkshire. Some 800 historical re-enactors took part alongside locals, some of whom were involved in the actual confrontation in 1984. Broadcast on Channel 4 in 2002, the film met with varied responses but highlighted most successfully the way in which the participants were given a deeper insight into what took place through their participation in the re-enactment. A kind of cathartic, interactive theatre whose accuracy and effectiveness is nonetheless dependent on the mediated accounts of witnesses and the eye of a photographer or film director. Many seminal moments in the history of performance art rely solely on photographs and oral accounts, from Yves Klein leaping from a window, Chris Burden shooting himself in the arm, to Marina Abramovic ´inviting an audience to use surgical tools on her. The imperative of actually being there, to witness these performances first-hand, was addressed last year in Performa 05 where seminal

performance art classics – works by Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Valie Export, Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys and Abramovic´ – were re-performed (see AM293). The question of whether these one-off, past performances were devalued or shed some of their mythic status for being repeated demonstrates the link between event culture and nostalgia, a by-product of imagination, longing, eroded memory and educated guesswork. Nostalgia, event culture, artifice, spectacle and fantasy all mesh together in Slater Bradley’s video art. Central to Bradley’s work is the integration of personal history with mediated, public histories. Specifically, Bradley has used archival footage of iconic rock stars Kurt Cobain and Ian Curtis to make performances. In Factory Archives, 2002, Bradley created a sort of bootleg video, casting an actor to play himself as lead singer Ian Curtis of post-punk band Joy Division. Factory Archives, which is a fictional video, has since been successfully absorbed by actual Joy Division archives. Essentially, what Bradley does is to create layers of uncertainty and competing fictions. Bradley’s performances examine the anxiety of navigating lived experience versus hand-me-down experience, something Richard Prince called ‘counterfeit memory’. Like Dickinson and Deller, Bradley’s work rides a knife edge because it demonstrates how the fabrication of evidence, the manipulation of perception, and the construction of believable environments can create a kind of false credibility – a dangerous notion that threatens to topple faith-based systems. Hopefully, the work encourages us to approach history as a living breathing thing, and that our acceptance of what we know requires us constantly to verify and confirm how we know what we know. All three artists’ work articulates the fine line between falling prey to persuasive

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