By Thomas Asmuth

If nature in late capitalism is the spectacle and the commodities that are in circulation than mimesis of the spectacle is the natural starting point. 

-G.H. Hovagimyan, "Re-Staging, Re-Enactment, Remix and Mimetics"

The scene on the online player window is a pleasant and bright Summer afternoon. Dozens of American Flags wave gallantly to the right under steerage from a light breeze on the Washington DC mall. A young man reads at a small podium and microphone upon a stage. His unstyled medium length brown hair and crudely worn light blue Oxford shirt and jeans are ruffled by the wind and belie his eloquence and sophisticated message. The small crowd is filled with spectators in casual attire as well as those who seem to be in route to business meetings or church. Cameramen are occasionally caught in the video frame taking shots of the crowd and speaker. They all stand on the grass and listen while occasionally peppering the young man's message with applause:

"Most of us grew up thinking that the United States was a strong but humble nation, that involved itself in world affairs only reluctantly, that respected the integrity of other nations and other systems, and that engaged in wars only as a last resort. This was a nation with no large standing army, with no design for external conquest, that sought primarily the opportunity to develop its own resources and its own mode of living. If at some point we began to hear vague and disturbing things about what this country had done in Latin America, China, Spain and other places, we somehow remained confident about the basic integrity of this nation's foreign policy. The Cold War with all of its neat categories and black and white descriptions did much to assure us that what we had been taught to believe was true."1

The crowd continues to grow larger with pedestrians, exercise fanatics, and tourists. They are drawn in by his unassuming air and passion:

The President says that we are defending freedom in Vietnam. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of the Vietnamese. The first act of the first dictator, Diem, the United States installed in Vietnam, was to systematically begin the persecution of all political opposition, non-Commumist as well as Communist. The first American military supplies were not used to fight Communist insurgents; they were used to control, imprison or kill any who sought something better for Vietnam than the personal aggrandizement, political corruption and the profiteering of the Diem regime."2

As the speech continues, it becomes abundantly obvious that this speech written for another war from another era. Instinctually and observationally, the evidence in the quality of  image and audio, the participant-audience's clothing, and the brief glimpses of the technical equipment tell that this video was produced within this decade. Uncannily, the words are profoundly appropriate for the contemporary conflict with which the United States currently wrestles. The text begs for the an exercise in nomenclature replacement to supplant "Diem" with "Hussein" and "Communist" with "Islamic Fundamentalist".

This speech, "We Must Name the System", was authored by Paul Potter of the Students for a Democratic Society and was originally delivered on April 17, 1965 to 25000 Vietnam War protesters. This reenactment is part of a larger project from a group of political activists and artists at Brown University, the Port Huron Project led by Mark Tribe. Tribe has organized three of these reenactments to date, one originally delivered by Howard Zinn and the other by Coretta Scott King. The speeches are re-created on the original historic public sites encouraging the participation by those who might pass through the event. These open re-creations may seem superficially as ironic or wry demonstrations on the contemporary hegemony but, in fact lie within a field of historic re-creationism and reenactment as aesthetic practice. The Reenactment as Performance Art has gained a sense of presence and power beyond mimesis and simple satire. This momentum deserves inspection to suss out the cultural function of this historical mimesis.

When contemporary discussions turn toward history, the admonition 'those who don't remember are doomed to repeat it' looms. This warning is exasperated by the flattening of time through instantaneous global communication. The analysis of the externalization of memory through the network and how it fosters the death of history or how it simply unties the human mind from memory seems too shallow to explain the power of the reenactment praxis. Reenactment can be a meaningful point of re-authorship in a culture beset by the flattening of time and the politics of history.

The conservative function of the history discipline is to develop understanding of the lineage of events and ideas and their hegemonies. The narratives and contexts, at best, are interpretive; they are dissolved, shifted by time, and skewed by the politic of the archive in which they are inscribed. This is the second admonition: "history is written by the victor". Contemporary context cannot help but invade the present reading of an already interpretive impression and precludes an impartial record.

Reenactment participants often refer to the uncanny sensation of the "real and unreal" while re-creating.  The reenactor automatically engages a conceptual negotiation of a dual context. This duplicitous context is formed in the interpretation of the historic event and how its' meaning has changed over the course of time. Additionally, this engagement is genesis to a form of agency, where the recreated act creates a conduit to transaction. This path evolves from the re-creationist act in which a historic setting, time, and hegemony try to simultaneously displace the present and create a new conceptual site. The reenactment cannot entirely replace the present; a competition evolves between the two. Reenactment is thus sited at an interstices of past and present.

The surreality of this site arises from competition of the politics of history and present. The actor mimetically engages in the contingencies of the reproduced duration at the same time moments in the present pass. Rather than instilling a sense of detachment and independent observation, reenactments collapse the historical-present relationship imbuing agency in and of both times and the necessity to transact in both economies. Somatically, the reenactment functions as an autonomic historiography.

In the project Revolutionary Days, Portland based artist collective, Red76  doesn't simply reproduce the presence of revolutionary historic figures Ginsberg and Trotsky as much as they escorted the spirit into contemporary Philadelphia and also it's historic narrative.

"I myself chose to be Allen Ginsberg that day. I didn't look much different, except for the fact that I did a lot of chanting. So I suppose I acted a bit different. I bought a dove from a market off of South St. and released it in front of Independence Hall. My friend Adam was Leon Trotsky. He wore small wire framed glass and a burly red coat. Zefrey was Ian Mackaye from the band Fugzai, among others. Zefrey didn't look too much different than he normal does, though he kind of looks like Mackaye anyhow. We all broke in and out of character. Talked about our lives as Beat Hippy Avitars and Red Army commanders. We ate breakfast. Trotsky and Mackaye discussed the finer points of the early eighties Washington D.C. Hardcore scene. Did we stand out from the crowd? If so, why?"3

Leon Trotsky on the streets of Philaadelphia, PA circa 2007.

All reproductions do not function this way. Simulation, repetition, and reproduction can all occur without a meaningful negotiation of both temporal politics (Blackson, 2007)5. Recordings do reproduce aspects of the events but, in the separation of author from object, the simulacrum loses the authority that reenactment expresses. It is dubious to claim that a recording of the symphony replaces the performance or viewers presence. The aesthetic politics of documentation further complicate the historic through implicit aesthetic. Bernadette Sweeney has written about the inadequacies of the document:

"In this way of thinking, visual documentation, whether it is video or photography, brings with it an ideology and an aesthetic which prevent it from functioning simply as evidence. Every photo you see here was taken by a particular viewer, at a moment they chose, and framed and printed the way they thought best. Each photo and video therefore has its own aesthetic values, and its own purpose. They interfere, like static, with the perception of the performance itself... The visual becomes suspect: it is no longer evidential, but contentious." 6

The document occludes the event and reinforces a politics in aesthetic and narrative in the same manner historic narrative draws around events. Perhaps, one could surmise that if enough technological savvy were brought to bear a recording could simulate the experience to the senses but, the fact that the timeline can be manipulated at the whim of the audience such as TiVO, paused and rewound again and again, unhinges the duration of reenactment's site and presence of object/subject jumble. The document fails achieve the mimetic nature or site of reenactment.

The political frame that is drawn is powerful, influential, and contentious. In 1970, the United American Indians of New England (UAINE) declared Thanksgiving as a Day of Morning. That year, participation of Wampanoag leader Frank B. Wamsutta, was cut from the 350th commemoration program when it was discovered that he was going represent the perspectives of the Native Americans at the time of the first Thanksgiving. Like a photographic document, the contention created by the alternate narrative frame has resulted in a yearly protest and boycott of the Plymouth reenactment by Native American groups since 1970. Thanksgiving holds a sacred place in the origin myth of Plymouth and the nation and thus the hegemony has refused to allow participation in the officially recognized reenactment . Subversively, this marginalization of the protesters continues and highlights the history of marginalization of native Americans.

Reenactment as a impressively motive as well as threatening force can cut the other way as well; Blackson recounts the story of a Lewis and Clark reenactment that has been blocked many times by Native Americans:

"To honor the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, a group of reenactors named Discovery Expedition, led by Peyton "Bud" Clark (the great-great-great-grandson of William Clark),  is retracing the historic journey. However, they have been stopped numerous times by Native American tribes. These tribes claim that the reenactment is disrespectful to the plight of Native Americans struggling to reclaim their land rights. The Lewis and Clark reenactors brought with them a Tomahawk Peace Pipe in hopes that the tribes might smoke it with the reenactors and call a truce from their protesting. The Native Americans refused.'8

Complicity in the reenactment of manifest destiny would reinforce a less than whole history (i.e the contentious document) surrounding the 'discovery' and subsequent colonization of the American continent.

Smithson's Site/Non-Site strategy reinforced the Spectacle and the culture of infinite reproduction. If the document is contentious, how are we to negotiate the fluvial culture of the network without simply engaging in reproductions of the contentious . G.H. Hovagimyan addresses this flattening with: "A recent bit of oral whit , a meme if you will has been making the round of the information class. People are saying, "There is no there, there." I would extend that to say, "There is no now, now."9

And yet he fails to consider time that reenactment performance demands. The site of aesthetic reenactment is the body or the site of the actor's embodiment but is equally dependent on Bergson's notion of Duration in that the reenactor must weave their way through the contests between Contemporary and History during the performance.

Realtime strategy, particularly medieval based, games such as Koei and The Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms have leveraged historic reenactment to build narrative into the platform. These two games focus on China's historic saga of Three Kingdoms, a highly romanticized but relatively short period, approximately 75 years, was a tumultuous epoch of war for the heirship to Emperor. Some estimates set the number of lives that were lost at 40 million.  These ramifications of these event have been influential on many cultures in Asia and spawned many Chinese heroes and mythic warriors.

This influence can be seen in how, Warcraft III has been used to recreate historic battles of the Three Kingdoms saga by a group of enthusiasts in China.10 The Warcraft platform is a highly romanticized medieval-esque fiction; version III of the game incorporated tools to sculpt the landscape, numbers of factions, the number and type of warriors in each faction, etc. The players inserted the names and characteristics of the heroes of the Three Kingdoms period onto the game heroes for the reenactment and sculpted historically accurate populations and geography. This intervention allowed for a synthesis of game tools and historical narrative displacing the game engine and folding in of historic factions, time spans, narratives, etc. into the synthetic world of the game. The players can reenact and engage in the duration of realtime decision making and strategy. It also allows the reenactors to adjust to the reinterpretations of the history as they change.

SCA Arab Intervention (2004). Eddo Stern. Digital photograph. 20"x"15".

One of the defining features of the SCA is the live contact engagement by the warrior class.  In this engagement, the weapons are couched by the negotiation of the present, trading steel for rattan and foam. Live contact necessitates actual armor to be fabricated, often, with period proper materials. A deep social pressure exists amongst members to apply "period" appropriate methods and materials in all aspects of society participation encouraging the members to achieve historically accurate clothing, food ingredients and preparation methods, etc despite the complications and "distractions" of the contemporary. Obtaining a high degree of authenticity is rewarded with societal sanctification creates a highly competitive and continuous re-reading of period histories by the members to earn these honors and privileges. When Stern yells in Arabic over a megaphone at the European war reenactment, he calls into question the inadequacies of these highly polished  historical readings/experiences. A re-reading of the history of and current conflicts between Europe and the Mid-East manifest immediately from his intervention.

The attempt to mimetically displace the politics of today with those called historic forces a reconsideration if not analytical site to form in the competition. It appears that even mythic or less than whole narratives can somehow engage in a better understanding of culture and the inescapable politics.

1.  Potter, Paul. "We Must Name the System." Transcript of Paul Potter Speech, Washington, D.C., April 15, 1971. Accessed September 2007.
https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Transcript+of+Paul+Potter+Speech
%2C+Washington%2C+D.C.%2C+April+15%2C+1971

2. ibid.

3. Gould, Sam. "Revolutionary Days." Accessed September 2007. http://www.red76.com/revolutionarydays.html

4. Stiles, Kristine . "Performance." Critical Terms for Art History, Second Edition. Ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. 75 - 97.

5.Blackson, Robert. "Once More . . . With Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Art and Culture." Art Journal v. 66 no. 1 (Spring 2007):  28-40.

6. Sweeney,  Bernadette. "How is Performance Documented?" Visual Practies Across the University. Accessed September 2007. http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:adLagb7xhTMJ:www.jameselkins.com/Texts /visual-literacy-sweeney.pdf+%22how+is+performance+documented%22&hl=en& ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

7. Day, Leila. "Native Groups Mourn on Thanksgiving Day. IPS." November 21, 2001 CommonDreams.org Newscenter. Accessed November 2007. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1121-03.htm

8. Blackson, Robert. "Once More . . . With Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Art and Culture." Art Journal v. 66 no. 1 (Spring 2007):  28-40.

9. Hovagimyan, G.H. "Re-Staging, Re-Enactment, Remix and Mimetics." http://post.thing.net/node/1474

10 . http://98.to/n/

11. http://www.eddostern.com/sca-arab.html

12. The society is decidedly Euro-centeric due to a strict abeyance to only study cultures that were involved with feudalism between 800 and 1200 CE a few upstarts follow Japanese personas because of the overlap.  

By Danielle Siembieda 

In October 2007 CADRE students had the opportunity to meet with Natalie Jeremijenko, during the FUSE lecture series. Her background can be summarized with credits in science, art and activism. Her visit, which included an informal salon-adventure with CADRE students as well as a lecture, introduced new perspectives of rhetoric, activism and art. Jeremijenko's critical analysis of rhetoric common to the activist communities is integral to her vision of a participatory culture and how participation can be fostered through the repurposing the methods of bio art and net.art.   Her message pushes for new thought and action for artists and environmentalists. She changes perceptions by awakening commonly unnoticed issues within environmental health, art and activism. 

The boundaries between artists and activists can be blurred and often times the two are the same. What I have known activism to be is an effort amongst like-minded people attempting to influence others by educating them or making them aware of an issue through actions and critique. Artists often take the statistical information given to them by the scientific community and create a visual piece to make the public aware of an issue.  This time-honored tradition in activism and art has become ineffective, because although people may know the issue and most may be like-minded, many are not action oriented. Actions would involve changing of systems; behaviors and truly resolving a problem where that one solution does not create another nor does it isolate another group. During Jeremijenko’s visit she created a dialogue that stumped some CADRE students by questioning and objecting to a vocabulary used so often by social issue organizing groups. This questioning of rhetoric especially influenced this author’s foundation in social action and community organizing.

Collaboration, consumption and conservation are words often used by many social justice and activist groups. “Whenever I hear the word collaboration, I reach for my gun,” said Jeremijenko in a salon interview during her visit to SJSU. She prefers to use the phrase structured participation. She sees this as an algorithm of recognition in that everyone involved needs to take responsibility, acknowledge credit and see a true benefit to them personally. The structure itself does not allow the participant to take a passive role. The second word consumption or consumer also is on the X-list for Jeremijenko. The message sent out today involves ways to consume less which in fact does not solve the problem it creates a token excuse for not doing any action. Consumption is a minimal part of our daily activity when the rest of the day we take no action.  Again she confronts our tendency towards passivity and being somewhat lazy about fundamental personal responsibility. Jeremijenko does not see our focus on consumer spending the right direction for artists to spend their time and energy. The third word conservation also falls in line with a token excuse. Is it really proactive to preserve and conserve wetlands, energy or forests? Is that all we can do? We are at a point where we need to move beyond rhetoric and into meaningful action. What forms of meaningful action are open to the artist?

If the role of the artist is no longer just to make people aware by visualizing the scientific data laid before them then what is the artist’s role in science? According to Jeremijenko the artists can contribute using both their methods of material evidence and most importantly that the artist can stand for the “every-man.” Artists are not going to be credited with the scientific evidence but they can translate and communicate with a common person. In truth is whom most artists want to talk to. For artists to move from a visual representation of an issue to a participatory method new practices have been created to make it possible using net.art and bio art.

Jeremijenko’s art moves beyond awareness to participation and re-purposing. In a net.art example of How Things are Made Jeremijenko’s students create a visual essay dissecting an object of interest and de-reifying the object so that the labor and process are shown. The essay is then posted and updated with students from several universities. This project also re-purposes the labor and process by enticing students to improve of their chosen commodity. Ernestine Daubner, professor at Concordia University in the Department of Art History, comments on other work by Jeremijenko that prequels her recent projects. “Such post-structuralist underpinnings coincide with the artist's social activist mission: to transform public perceptions and to alter the social and material realities of communities. Actively engaging the public, her artworks facilitate an open-ended, community-based knowledge that puts ‘empirical evidence in the public sphere. As such, her representational strategies serve to shift the structure of participation from a passive consumptive model of received information to one that facilitates active interpretation” (Daubner).  Jeremijenko makes people think about her work pushes them to explore the underlying issue or theme.

Through example, Natalie shows us how to re-purpose. Her recent bio art project has repurposed the common health clinic from a plain vanilla concept of a rigid institutional setting to a problem presenter-problem solver-public participant center. Jeremijenko describes the common mentality that the way we can contribute to the environmental crisis is through the role of the consumer as Global Anxiety Disorder. The Environmental Health Clinic allows for people to present a real problem concerning an issue like water pollution while a group of artists, engineers and more works on solutions to the problem. Trying to resolve environmental issues politically can make a person inpatient so the clients of the EHC are called “In-Patients”. The public can then use the results of the EHC in order to create real change. This sort of approach challenges our public systems and questions why we cannot take these similar concerns or issues we are confronted with and resolve them through creative, proactive and cross discipline manners.

Cadre students had a first hand experience with Jeremijenko during a Geocaching walk around the Guadalupe River Basin. The structure of the river basin is an example of a problem that might be resolved in the EHC. Jeremijenko describes the design of the basin as militaristically engineered. The Guadalupe River Basin is an example of why we need a group such as the EHC to actively resolve a public health issue such as water resources in a creative, participatory and proactive manner.

An alternative structure would be to create the water at eye level in order to change an individual point of view. Often we look down at the water, as it becomes more of a reflection. How would our perception change if we looked eye level at the surface? What would we see? The illusion a body of water can give can be so powerful. Its reflection can awaken or subdue a person. It is like the myth of Narcissus in the Ovid tale where he is punished after seeing his reflection in a pool of water. "What he has seen he does not understand, but what he sees he is on fire for, and the same error both seduces and deceives his eyes." (Ovid) It is this concept of ones position with a body of water thats purpose serves as part of a social system that feeds, cleanses and destroys. Such examples could be of reservoirs,  sewage treatment plants and the Guadalupe river basin. What does it mean if the water is at eye level? Can you confront it? Can you change it? What is the basin telling you? "The myth also revealed the combined power of water and mirrors to erase the borders between reality and illusion, self and other, life and death, and open up a whole world of images." (de Pontfarcy, 25)
 

The artist’s role in social change needs to move beyond an awareness level. No longer can it be acceptable to band-aid issues on the environment. Natalie Jeremijenko has created a stir amongst artists, environmentalists and scientists and other disciplines that have long standing traditions. Jeremijenko’s ability to cross disciplines and boundaries have been demonstrated through her use of net.art creating environments that are not limited to gallery space and participatory spaces where common systems are repurposed, rethought and action.  Jeremijenko’s visit to SJSU’s CADRE lab since has ignited students to review the etymology while looking at what is important about their art and if it is there to serve a purpose for change, how active will that change be?


REFERENCES

Daubner, Ernestine. "Natalie Jeremijenko’s Clones and Robots: Repetition/ Difference and Other Subversive Representational Strategies." Parachute p 92-106 no 112 2003 www.parachute.ca

de Pontfarcy, Yolanda "The Myth of Narcissus in Courtly Literature" Echoes of Narcissus. Berghahn Books. NYC, New York. 2001 pp 25

Environmental Health Clinic
http://www.environmentalhealthclinic.net/environmental-health-clinic/ 

Fuse Podcast of Natalie Jeremijenko
http://cadre.sjsu.edu/fuse/conversation/n_jeremijenko.html

Ovid. "Echo and Narcissus." Metamorphoses.
MythFolklore.net October 10, 2007 http://mythfolklore.net/3043mythfolklore/reading/ovid/pages/13.htm