Reenact the History
In A Time of One’s Own, Catherine Grant introduces the concept of “anachronising” in feminism, which she explains, is to “foreground the strangeness of moments of time coming together.” The word could also be used to define the essential feature of reenactment in performance art — reenactment has the power to simultaneously echo the realisation of the contemporary moment and the reflection on the times past from its viewers, forming an illusion of chaos in time. Anachronism indeed creates a new branch in time in which the past and the present complement each other. The contemporary moment plays its “potential for illuminating moments in the past,” and the past reveals the possible direction of the present time. By blurring the line between the past and the present, reenactment in performance art re-presents historical moments within a contemporary context, inspiring both the participants and the audience to rethink their current moment when confronting history. Every reenactment includes “the decontextualisation and subsequent recontextualisation of the past in relation to the present.” As a performance strategy, it is simply a repetition of a past event rather than a reinterpretation or reconfiguration of history. In this essay, I will use examples, including William Pope. L’s Conquest, Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave and Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project to illustrate the decontextualisation and recontextualisation process of reenactment.
On September 21, 2019, commissioned by the Public Art Fund, William Pope.L presented his so-far largest group performance Conquest. A group of 140 volunteers participated in a five-hour crawl along downtown Manhattan streets. They wore specially designed uniforms, protective knee pads and blindfolds. The roughly 1.5-mile-long route started from the affluent West Village via the marble arch in Washington Square Park and ended by Union Square. The performance is a reenactment of the artist’s over 30 works titled Crawl. The first of the series took place in 1978 in Times Square. Pope.L, dressed in a brown suit and a yellow safety vest, moved through the crowds on his hands and knees and was followed by a photographer in some distance. The camera caught some interesting scenes of the street: tourists looked at the artist disconcertedly, local New Yorkers were uninterested, and a police officer attempted to urge him to walk on foot. According to Pope.L’s interpretation of his project, crawling “brings us back to basics”; through it, we are learning to be human-like small children. It reminds people of the “common struggle to be human.” By moving his body with a seemingly humiliating posture, the artist wanted to “make visible the sociopolitical realities of the economic inequities” in urban areas that people avoided seeing. His “body of work also deeply engaged issues of homelessness, marginality and dispossession.” Moreover, crawling was “primarily interpreted as bodily metaphors for the pain and struggle of the disabled and homeless.” Modifications to the performance had been made through the past 40 years, and the artist was meant to convey a more positive and healing message through the reenactment in 2019. The event became a relay instead of a solo act: participants were organised into groups of five, and each group would crawl 25 blocks of the entire route. Pope.L aimed to create an idea of community and interconnectedness among people by underlining the performance’s collaborative nature. For each participant, choosing to give up their physical privilege referred to their sacrifice of social and political advantage, which contributed to “a comic scene of struggle and vulnerability to share with the entire community.” The reenactment happened in the same city as its original piece, but the artist chose the route with careful planning. Although the starting point, West Village, is now one of the most expensive and exclusive neighbourhoods in New York, it was the home of bankrupt artists, poor immigrants and AIDS back in the 1970s. The crawling asked the participants to “identify and identify with homeless people” as the blindfold completely blocked their vision of the upscale surroundings. The crawling postures forced them to “walk” in an unordinary way on paths they might have known all too well. The volunteer group, consisting of New Yorkers of various ages, genders, nationalities, races and occupations, reflected the cultural and demographic diversity of the city. However, the commonality they all shared was their tight bond with the community and the fact that their life largely depended on the vitality of the city itself. Pope.L’s initial intention was to enable each participant of the project to learn something through making connections with the marginal figures who once suffered on this piece of land. The event undoubtedly “extended the richly layered metaphors around race, power and vulnerability in his solo crawls to further explore diversity, collectivity, struggle and achievement.” With a new perspective opened up, the participants began to reconsider their relationship with the city and the roles they were taking in the community.
Jereme Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave is a documentary released in 2001 that reconstructed the battle between miners and police officers during the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike taking place in South Yorkshire, England. As Britain gradually walked out of the haze of World War II in the second half of the twentieth century, the demand for coal dwindled, followed by large-scale closures of collieries. The Conservative government drove strong opposition toward a series of strikes led by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The miners’ strike depicted in the documentary is one of such violent movements. In subsequent media reports, these miners who participated in the strike were deliberately described as the “enemies” of the nation. In order to prepare for the shooting, the artist spent eighteen months looking through newspaper archives, watching video footage and interviewing policemen and miners who witnessed the event. Eventually, approximately 1,000 people, including former miners and policemen, local residents and professional actors, participated in the shooting. The site was set up as what it ought to be back in 1984; performers were dressed in appropriate costumes. Criticism had also been raised around whether the film could retain the historical authenticity of the original event. However, the artist’s purpose here was never to be authentic but to be educational and inspirational. Time was folded in the documentary, making the past present and the present appear as the past. By rendering an unusual experience of time, Deller created a practical entryway into the past for the audience, which drew their attention to an important event that might have been publicly discussed for years. He blatantly incorporated his political attitude towards the strike into the project. While watching the recreation of the historical moment, the audience would thus interpret it through a novel point of view that was determined by the production team. Deller wanted the reenactment to be taken not only as a “representative of the Miners’ Strike but also as individually worthy of commemoration.” With the wish to reveal the truth behind the biased information in the archive and to find out what really happened in history, he chose to approach the topic from the perspective of eyewitnesses. The documentary granted former miners an opportunity to express the pain and privation they had suffered before, during, and after the conflict and their “deep distrust towards the official truth.” “The inclusion of real miners in the performance challenged the stereotype inscribed upon them in 1984 and enabled the participants to control their own presentation” — they were no longer passive spectators of the past but active participants. The artist’s intention was to “openly acknowledge that any history is inevitably impure, highly mediated, and in need of being re-written.” He encouraged the audience to look back at the past through a new lens and to interpret it with a contemporary state of mind. The Battle of Orgreave brought people who had been hidden from history onto the stage; therefore, today, their experiences and opinions are remembered as part of history. It empowered individuals and social groups who were “demonised for their actions in the mainstream press and by the government.” On the one hand, the project reflected the change in public attitudes toward social and political issues over the past decades. Perhaps it was due to the out-of-context nature of the performance that allowed the audience to rethink the event objectively and unbiasedly. On the other hand, concerned that the influence of prejudiced recounts of historical moments would continue into the present, Deller appealed to the public to confront the history and dare to challenge it. By questioning the truth of what was heavily broadcasted in the 1980s, The Battle of Orgreave brought up the public awareness of “the reliability of images, over who has control over the presentation of historical events and over how the past is remembered.”
The Port Huron Project by Mark Tribe consists of six reenacted protest speeches from the New Left movements during the 1960s and 1970s: Coretta Scott King’s speech around anti-war activism in New York City in 1968, Howard Zinn’s speech about civil disobedience delivered on Boston Common in 1971, Paul Potter’s 1965 speech at an anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C., César Chávez’s speech of a demonstration in Los Angeles in 1971, Angela Davis’s speech performed at a 1969 Black Panther rally in Oakland, California and Stokely Carmichael’s speech in front of the United Nations in 1967 as a national mobilisation against the Vietnam War. The events took place at the exact location of the original speeches between September 2006 and September 2008 and were each presented to guests and passersby. The title of the project was inspired by the Port Huron Statement, a document written in 1962 by a group of American student activists for a Democratic Society. By titling his work “The Port Huron Project,” Tribe suggested that his work might maintain a form of continuity with the project laid out in this document. However, the project itself, as the artist believed, was not a political project — it was an art project that utilised history as its subject. It was about history rather than making history. Tribe did not aim to interpret and analyse the past but to re-present it by repeating a series of events from the past. The performance recalled a politically revolutionary period in history marked by the Vietnam War and the increasing class and social justice struggles worldwide. Besides, reenacting the speeches within a contemporary context was the artist’s direct response to the Iraq War from 2003 to 2011. The personal motivation drawn from historical reference thus became the conventional element that contributed to the construction of this reenactment. The project was presented as a pioneering demonstration of the current anti-war movement. While decontextualising the events from their original historical background and recontextualising them with contemporary moments, Tribe sought to find the similarities and differences between the present and the past. In addition, the performance “criticised the presidential campaigns that were happening simultaneously in the United States by considering the artists’ relationships with and reactions to the historical roots and practical manifestations of the American democratic tradition” and openly speaking for the leftist political standpoint. By deferring and displacing historical incidents, the reenactment caused “reflection of the mediatisation process” from the audience. Repeating the speeches from earlier protests, Tribe attempted to find out whether they would still have an impact on the current situation. Lessons learned from the historical periods provided clues and hints for people today to understand the essence and the purpose of their anti-war spirits. The six reenacted speeches brought people back to history and provoked them to reconsider the position they would wish to take in the current political circumstances.
Reenactment is never a forcible method to maintain the appearance of the original history. On the contrary, it is defined by its creative, enlightening and sometimes critical nature. In all three performances — William Pope. L’s Conquest, Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave and Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project, the audiences are able to experience a piece of the past while witnessing it being staged in a contemporary context. Through inspecting the historical moments from an innovative angle, reenactment creates contemporary evaluations of the past and conceptions of the present.
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