"Fur die Ewigkeit": Jet.Performance art used to be resistant to history. A reaction to commodification Commodification (or commoditization) is the transformation of what is normally a non-commodity into a commodity, or, in other words, to assign value. As the word commodity has distinct meanings in business and in Marxist theory, commodification , performances could not be sold; nor could they be stored in a museum archive for future study. Surveys of the medium had to rely on scarce remains, whether salvaged props or blurry photographs. But recent years have seen livelier attempts to capture this ephemeral history. In 2001, Kunst-Werke's "A Little Bit of History Repeated" invited younger artists to restage the classics, like actors in a repertory theater; and Whitechapel Art Gallery's series "A Short History of Performance," initiated in 2002, invited the pioneers to reenact their original works. Now, such projects having become commonplace, reenactments are serving the commodification once reviled by performance artists. The Wrong Gallery brought Gino de Dominicis's Second Solution of Immortality: The Universe is Immobile im·mo·bile adj. 1. Immovable; fixed. 2. Not moving; motionless. im mo·bil , 1972, back to life at the Frieze
Art Fair Frieze is an annual international contemporary art fair held in October in London's Regent's Park. The fair is staged by Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, the publishers of frieze magazine. , while Art Cologne Art Cologne is an art fair hold annually in Cologne, Germany. Art Cologne is Germany's leading art fair and was established in 1967 as the World's first Art Fair. It bills itself as the "world's oldest art fair", although in fact the 57th Street Art Fair was founded in 1948, almost revived Jannis Kounellis's untitled
installation of twelve horses from 1969. Perhaps as a reaction to this
market trend, "Fur die Ewigkeit Die Ewigkeit is the second release from German band Relatives Menschsein. Track listing
The first response comes from artists who eliminated a once crucial element: the audience. This collective living witness is replaced by other spectators and testimonial traces. For Yorgos Sapountzis, it's a webcam, which watches him unfolding several black banners one snowy night outside Berlin's Deutsches Historisches Museum The Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM), German Historical Museum, was founded in 1987 by the chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl and the mayor of Berlin, Eberhard Diepgen on the occasion of the 750th anniversary of the founding of Berlin. in Yeti-Lines, 2006. Danh Vo's audience in trug ky-danh vo rosasco rasmussen, 2002-, is the state, producing a string of bureaucratic portraits for him, from a shoplifting Ask a Lawyer Question Country: United States of America State: Florida caught shoplifting at sears 12/05/05, first time, 20yearsold, have no criminal record. charge to two marriage certificates (and two divorce certificates). These "unmanned" performances suggest that spectacles no longer need a public to thrive. Actual viewers and their concerns--entertainment or ethics--have become superfluous. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As a second response, other artists staged contemporary performances to look like historical ones. The resulting documents are about as old as a fresh pair of stonewashed stone·wash tr.v. stone·washed, stone·wash·ing, stone·wash·es To wash (garments or material, usually denim) in large industrial machines with pumice pebbles to soften and abrade the material by friction. jeans. To get that '70s feel, Hayley Newman's "Connotations--Performance Images (1994-1998)," 1998, are photo sessions masquerading 1. (networking) masquerading - "NAT" (Linux kernel name). 2. (messaging) masquerading - Hiding the names of internal e-mail client and gateway machines from the outside world by rewriting the "From" address and other headers as the message leaves the as public performances. For his Performance, 2006, Simon Dybbroe Moller opted to use a slide projector, repeatedly showing the same image but with different cracks for a touch of aged authenticity. Pernille Kaper Williams showed After Christine Kozlov, 2006, an antiquated tape reel; even if one could hear--and understand--the Danish-German recordings, what difference would it make? David Lamelas's 1974 portrait of himself as a rock star demonstrated that even the performance of a performance, however inauthentic, has value and history. "For Eternity" accentuates a growing generational gap in the treatment of the past, like last year's "Mercury in Retrograde" at De Appel in Amsterdam and "Again for Tomorrow" at the Royal College of Art Galleries, London. If artists used to rescue historical documents from oblivion, their successors are happy to make them up, alter them, or add a futuristic twist. Compare Christian Boltanski's archive to that of Walid Raad, or Andreas Slominski's belated artifacts artifacts see specimen artifacts. with David Maljkovic's space-age heritage. Far from willfully willfully adv. referring to doing something intentionally, purposefully and stubbornly. Examples: "He drove the car willfully into the crowd on the sidewalk." "She willfully left the dangerous substances on the property." (See: willful) misrepresenting the past, today's artists (and curators) accept that mediation eliminates distinctions between real and fake. Moreover, instead of facing the losses caused by totalitarianism, this generation enjoys a previously unimagined surplus of memories, along with endless means to store, manipulate, and distribute them. We know something about how gender and identity are performed from, say, Judith Butler's theory and Madonna's practice; now it is clear that history itself can be performed with just as much complexity. |
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