History Redux

I visited a notable contemporary art institute in Berlin today called the Kunst-Werke to see an exhibition entitled History Will Repeat Itself: Strategies of Re-enactment in Contemporary Art. According to the exhibition's curators Inke Arns and Gabriele Horn contemporary artists have started to employ such 'strategies' in order to engage with past social events that are either overrepresented or underrepresented. Pierre Hugyhe, for example, focuses on the real-life events that were subsequently dramatized in Sidney Lumet's 1975 film "Dog Day Afternoon," whereas Jeremy Deller re-stages the famously brutal suppression of a Yorkshire miner's strike in 1984. In the case of Hugyhe's subject matter, the story of a young homosexual bank robber named John Wojtowicz who became a media celebrity in 1972 and overshadowed Richard Nixon's re-election campaign for a short while, the historical record is rich and the characters well-known, if only because they were immortalized in Lumet's film. Even before the film, however, John Wojtowicz and his accomplices/acquaintances were being interviewed on TV talk shows and in the press. Hugyhe 's installation includes news articles from the time period, reviews from the movie, excerpts from TV interviews and a contemporary re-creation of the event with Wojtowicz himself (who, after Lumet's movie came out, said that it was only 30% accurate). As a whole the piece is a meditation on the way in which historical events are filtered through the mass media and the entertainment industry, establishing a common perception of an event that may or may not be historically accurate.

Deller's subject, on the other hand, is not common knowledge and is in fact an historical event that most people, particularly the British government, would like to forget. I confess that I know very little about the 1984 Yorkshire miner's strike, known as "The Battle of Orgreave" (which is also the name of Deller's work), but one learns realizes quickly from the re-enactment that it must have been an extremely radicalizing struggle, given that Margaret Thatcher thought it necessary to send in thousands of police officers to put it down. Unlike Hugyhe's recreation, Deller's focuses on a traumatic event that received either no or only negative media coverage and has primarily been passed down through working class unions, history books and political activists.

Despite the differences in their subject matter, however, both Hugyhe and Delller seem to be interested in linking these historical events to today's reality. This is, I might add, a concern for all the artists in the show. The curators claim that, unlike popular historical re-enactments that stage events from the remote past or generalize from a particular period (think of Renaissance Fairs or Colonial Williamsburg), artistic re-enactments "do not simply affirm what has happened in the past, but question the present by taking recourse to historical events that have left their traces in collective memory." This may be true, but it also seems problematic to me for a number of reasons. One, it seems elitist to say that 'artistic' re-enactments are always critical and 'popular' re-enactments are not, as if the former are somehow inherently subversive or politically valuable. I highly doubt this is the case. Second, I am extremely skeptical when it comes to arguments that rely upon the idea of a 'collective memory'. What does this mean? Hugyhe's piece in the show is all about how our 'collective memory' of a historical event is always mediated by representations of that event, blurring (but not destroying) fact from fiction. Deller's piece is all about how some historical events are effectively erased from the larger 'collective memory' but live on in the memory of a particular social group--more about this later. It seems to me highly unlikely that a recourse to historical events ipso facto equals an effective questioning of the present by way of our 'collective memory'. What is not sufficiently acknowledged in this claim of the curators is that all these works are incredibly context-dependent. Without understanding exactly how these works engage with historical events and how the events themselves relate to the broader historical context in which they occurred, any critical relevance is diminished and the work comes dangerously close to fetishizing history (which, I would argue, is precisely what the curators' want to distance these works from by contrasting them to 'popular' historical re-enactment).

Back to Deller's piece, or rather, Mike Figgis's documentary about Deller's piece, since it was actually the latter that was on display. What I found most interesting was how in re-staging this single battle in a wider class struggle that took place more than 20 years ago, Deller tapped into an a simmering anger amongst the working class in Yorkshire that lives on to this day. Many of the men who played the miners in the re-enactment were these same miners or else knew these miners. When Figgis interviews these men, most have intimate knowledge of what happened, either because they were there or because they had friends or family members who were. Some even compare the social situation of 1984 to the one existing in 2001 (when the re-enactment took place). More amazing still is that, even though the re-enactment was choreographed and rehearsed to ensure safety, tempers flared and clear distinctions were made between those playing the miners and those playing the police officers. While one could argue that this is simply a reflection of cultural influence (nobody likes cops) or a brilliant confirmation of certain theories of performance (we become what we enact), I would say that it instead show the continuation of social instability and the potency of class struggle. This was an imagined class struggle, granted, but enabled these miners and workers to recapture an important episode in the history of that struggle and bringing that relevance home to their own situation. Whether Deller's piece accomplishes this as well I don't know (but I rather doubt it).

In any case, I found Deller's piece to ask the most interesting questions, particularly in connection to another work on display, the re-staging of the storming of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks in 1920. There was only a few pictures of this event in the exhibition, but according to the text panel a huge, choreographed re-enactment was staged to celebrate the third anniversary of the actual event. Whereas in 1917 the Winter Palace was taken by very few people, the 1920 re-enactment was a major spectacle with over 800 participants. In Lunacharsky's view, the head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Education) and one of the principals theorists behind the Proletkult movement, the audience attending the event were to also be the principal actors, thereby destroying any difference between the spectators and the participants (every avant-gardist's dream). By living 'first hand' this pinnacle event in Soviet history, so Lunacharsky claimed, the people would gain the necessary consciousness to become true 'proletariats'. The ridiculousness of this kind of engineered class consciousness 'from above' is obvious and, unfortunately, is taken as the example of the very idea of class consciousness. What would be interesting, nevertheless, would be to compare this early example of historical re-enactment for explicit political purposes to the 'artistic' re-enactments being produced for supposed implicit political purposes today.