Why are we so afraid of ghosts? Is it because, like the characters in a Charles Dickens novel, we are scared by them under the cover of night? Do they remind us someone who was once living or remind us of our own mortality?  Ultimately this primal fear of ghosts is a fear of not being able to understand what once was. We are afraid of having the past elude us only to come back and haunt us. While it may seem like a stretch, the image of a haunting ghost is an apt metaphor for performance art. Conventional theories of performance dictate that unlike paintings or sculptures, performances die, relegated to a singular moment in time, then made to collect dust in the form of films and photo-documentation in the mausoleum of the museum archive. Each static black and white photograph – whether of Chris Burden nailed to a Volkswagen or Gina Pane breaking a mirror with her bare hands  - depicts only a split second of the actual performance and attempts to confirm the who, what, where, when and how of early performance. This documentation can never evoke the corporeal and tactile nature of the original live performance. However, some recent scholarship has salvaged performance documentation from its limiting qualities and champions its role in reactivating the experience of the performance for new audiences. Documentation is not merely a stand-in but itself constitutes the work of performance, thereby allowing the performances of the past to be actively engaging as they were in the present. Internet file sharing sites have further legitimated this new experiencing of performances through mediation, where sites like You Tube  allow video recordings of performances to be limitlessly accessed, watched and turned off. This discussion of documentation goes beyond the limits of this essay which focuses on another phenomenon that has received  a lot of attention recently: re-performance.

 

Re-performance is the ghost of performance art past that returns historical performances to a living state. The concept of re-performance is not wholly new. Fluxus artists have re-performed their work countless times without documentation and even encouraged the audience to re-perform their works from event scores. However, in the past decade, re-performance has generally taken the form of either historical recreation or reinterpretation of seminal performances from the 1960s and 1970s.  While the original performances can never be completely recreated, they can, as art critic Roberta Smith writes, "be pulled into the present, stripped of some of their mysteries and returned to living art." Yet, many remain skeptical as some insist that re-performance reduces performance art to mere mimicry. Such sentiment has played out in harsh criticism from a generation of artists who demand performance art take an oppositional stance against commercialization and, by extent, institutional pressures to conform.

 

In our contemporary culture information is easily accessible through digital and Internet technologies and, as a result, we fear forgetting.  We fear that we won’t get our forgetting right and we must bear the burden as creatures who could actually forget such things. Re-performance guarantees that we can experience things from the past. Performance artist Marina Abramovic (the self-proclaimed grandmother of performance art) has stressed that “re-performance is the new concept, the new idea,” otherwise performance would be dead as an art form. In an attempt to stop this untimely death Abramovic createdSeven Easy Pieces. The performance took place at the Guggenheim Museum in November of 2005 for seven hours on seven consecutive nights. The re-performanes included: Bruce Nauman, Body Pressure(1974); Vito Acconci, Seedbed (1972); Valie Export, Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969); Gina Pane, The Conditioning, first action of Self-Portrait(s) (1973); and Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965). Abramovic explored the possibility of representing and preserving performance by engaging audience members beyond the ontological limits of photographic documentation with performing, living bodies. The original performances are revived so that the audience’s gaze is directed back upon the body of a performer instead of on a static document.

 

These re-performances attempt to dispel any myth and uncertainty surrounding the original performances. However, each re-performance, because of its temporal distance, will never evoke the same experience as the original. These are wholly new experiences, as faithful re-performances are not possible. The original incarnations of the performance inevitably need to be altered to accommodate differences in location and audience experience. The most evident difference was that Abramovic performed in an established art institutionon a stage some four feet in height and was protected by dozens of security personnel. Most of the performances from the 1960s and 1970s were either in galleries or artists' studio where audience interaction and participation was necessary. The archive forSeven Easy Pieces is filled with emails and notes from the artist and Guggenheim curators discussing how to make the re-performance feel like the originals - a task they admit is not possible.

 

It seems that Abramovic’s commitment to re-performance will determine her legacy: “You have to have a vision. [. . .] Performance is fleeting. But this, this place, this is for time. This is what I will leave behind.” As such she devised a model for artists to follow in ethically re-performing the works of other artists. Her proposal for Seven Easy Pieces established a series of guidelines: “It is important that we: (1) Ask the [original] artists for permission (2) Pay the artists a fee (3) Perform a new interpretation of the original work (4) Exhibit the original material: photographs, video, relic, and etc. and (5) Exhibit materials documenting the new interpretation of the work.” Thus, re-performances did not take place if not agreed upon by the original artist or their estate - Chris Burden, for example, refused multiple times to have his performance Transfixed reenacted. Abramovic states quite clearly that this standard will morally guide the future of other re-performance practices both within and outside the art establishment: “But to me the idea is that performance has to live. If it doesn‘t live, it dies. And then it has to have the conditions on how to live.” In furthering this commitment to preserving art, she is slated to open in 2012 the Marina Abramovic Foundation for Preservation of Performance Art in Hudson, New York, where she lives.  This nonprofit foundation will be dedicated to the teaching and preservation of performance art, with artist workshops, public courses, a library, and a grants program. Audiences will be offered a timeless space where 20th century performances and re-performances of them will be in continuous dialogue. Abramovic's resurrection of performances of the past allows audiences to have tangible experiences of a past that otherwise would elude them.

 

Re-performance can also be understood as reinterpretation. Fluxus artists were, and those who are still living are, not interested in recreating earlier interpretations of their event scores. There have been dozens of re-performances of Alison Knowles's Proposition #2 (Make a Salad), however the salad ingredients vary at each performance and re-performances without the artist can be found on You Tube.Joan Jonas, while not affiliated with Fluxus, stresses that faithful re-performances are not possible; rather, performance should be revisited and translated at some point into another medium (be it video or installation). “There’s never a way that you could repeat the original thing; it just can’t be done,” she states, “so you have to think, ‘How am I going to deal with it if I’m going to show something of that moment?'” 

 

Reinterpretation was what Hauser and Wirth had in mind for their commissioned re-performances of Alan Kaprow's Yard for their gallery in 2009. William Pope.L, Sharon Hayes, and Josiah McElheny’s re-performances were part of the recent wave of attention given to Kaprow’s work following his MoCA Los Angeles retrospective in 2008. The original performance of Yard entailed hundreds of tires cluttering the gallery space. Participants were encouraged to rearrange the tires, making movement both complicated and playful. The artists at Hauser and Wirth Gallery were given full artistic liberty not only to re-perform but also to reinterpret Kaprow’s work. Pope.L altered the playful atmosphere with a deafening soundtrack that blustered inaudible commands to move the tires, interrupted by the sounds of foghorns and train whistles. The tires were accompanied by body bags filled with Vaseline-covered mannequins, wall to wall mirrors, and strobe lighting. His re-performance – titled Yard (To Harrow) – took a dark turn with political and social commentary more akin to his own oeuvre than to Kaprow’s more subtle social critique.