A (lot) Few (hopefully not too meandering) Clear Thoughts with a Title:

The Pratfalls of Resurrection

Since 2015, my ongoing research and projects have centered on re-performance and resurrection. Not resurrection in the ecclesiastical sense, but in a more George A. Romero way: the walking dead, and all the connotations that go with that. Zombies, on account of their cerebral dissonance, get a fairly bad rap: to be called a “zombie” is to essentially say, “you’re brainless.” Yet, the walking dead surround us, and they appear to be perfectly functional, some downright brilliant, or at least called so on paper. Let’s consider Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces a performance series in which the artist covered the canon: Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure  (1974); Vito Acconci’s Seed Bed (1972); Valie Export’s Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969); Gina Pane’s The Conditioning (1973); Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) (the other two pieces, were, in a fit of assumed modesty among this group, Abamovic’s own). Abramovic’s rationale for doing this series: "There's nobody to keep the history straight…I felt almost, like, obliged. I felt like I have this function to do it."[i]

When the history seems to be out of control the compulsion is to get out the broom and dustpan and tidy it all up. Of course, this is to assume that there is a mess that needs cleaning to begin with. In the case of Abramovic, it’s unclear what, other than an (admittedly pretty boring) post-structural stroll in the park was being achieved – who wasn’t safely keeping the legacy of these performers straight (with the exception of Export, who, like most female artists, gets historically overlapped by their male counterparts)? That Abramovic had to go through estate approval to perform these pieces is a testament to just how preserved these works are and how their gestures have changed over the course of art history (read: institutionalized). Yet, all the problems with Abramovic’s motives doesn’t make her gesture worth inquiry. That she feels the need to pluck into history and try to sort it out is a maneuver that increasingly finds artistic practices sharing space with art history.

Hal Foster, who wrote the influential “Archival Impulse” in the late 1990s writes of archival artists as an avant garde today today:

Not heroic, this avant garde will not pretend that it can break absolutely with the old order or found a new one; rather it will seek to trace fractures that already exist with the given order, to pressure them further to activate them somehow. Neither avant nor rear, this grade will assume a position of immanent critique, and often it will adopt a posture of mimetic exacerbation in doing so…Perhaps, the paranoid dimension of archival art is the other side of its utopian ambition - its desire to turn belatedness into becomingness, to recoup failed visions in art, literature, philosophy, and life into possible scenarios for alternative kinds of social relations, to transform the no place of an archive into the new place of a utopia.

To sum up: the archive lives and breathes for revision and revisiting. Which is why we see things like Kanye West tinker with his new album – if it can be called such a thing given its elasticity – for the foreseeable future, or the headlines of articles change throughout the day, or why composer Glenn Gould, who re-performed classical music from the comfort of his home, disavowing live performance for the recording, have his works programmed into a player piano, where a sold out audience watched a ghost play music by very dead composers. 

All of this amounts for what I would consider as a condition – not in a negative sense, but one that is popularized through our archival daily (social media, camera phones, etc.). What I’m looking at when I think about re-performances or revisiting old styles or works of art, while I, as some sort of art historian, walk what feels like Philippe Petit on his tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center (itself now ghosts that walk among the United States as harbingers of fin-de-sicle 21^st century hubris/the end of late capital/infinite partisanal squawking that bankrupts American propensity for ingenuity), the game of peddling preservation acts vs. responsible caring for the canon, deciding the worth of what art gets talked about and what doesn’t, enlightenment idea(lism) vs. the struggle of the real, etc.

Hippie Modernism had the brilliant subtitle: “the struggle for Utopia.” Perhaps on account of the failures of the utopic movements and moments of the 1960s and 1970s – bringing us the focus group, individualism that somehow still doesn’t account for black lives but wraths enough anti-authoritarian to posit Donald Trump as a viable presidential candidate, not to mention co-opting such maneuvers into new types of freedom as the basis for selling us shit, or making fast food choices easier, etc. – we don’t believe in utopia anymore, or sincerity, or that there can actually be anything mined out of the 1960s that doesn’t just jettison us into a cynicism. But this is, of course, a generalizing at worst, a standard argument from the Left at best. Re-peformance or revisiting or archival impulses or dipping into the canon or social practice art or net art or resurrection, zombie or no, shouldn’t be discounted strictly as an ouroboric postmodernism. Doing these things act as a break of sorts, even if they are failed from the get-go or derivative. What I mean is, as Foster aptly points out, there’s potential in recouping the losses of the past, even if it ultimately leads to a wall – like Abramovic’s Beuys or Gould’s reanimation. The struggle for utopia is not just limited to hippie modernism, or a psychedelic aesthetic, but it’s likely the call for our today. I don’t know how to break the cycle of jadedness that comes with 40 plus years of postmodernism, or why, when we see someone cry over a tree being chopped down, it’s pretty damn funny. The hope is that, through constant reconsideration, the art historian’s task, but increasingly, more and more present in art making (whether the artist may know it or not), we inevitably stumble over something new, our consider a utopia plausible again.

With this in mind, I’ll accidentally advertise while simultaneously invite:

Tentatively, May 11^th, will be the final installation (at least for this current term) of my organized series Expanded Art History for Plants, a lecture series generously given hosting allowance by Aaron & Grace (Uptool) at the UIC Greenhouse. The night’s iteration will be titled “The Sounds of Utopia” and amongst other speakers, I’d like to open with a non-cynical performance of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are-A Changin.’” It would be my privilege to ask anyone in this class, or reading this, or who knows a guy who knows a guy, to perform it with me, be it in voice, banjo, harmonium, some kinda old Renaissance era harp, an old jug, whatever. The reason for this song is its prescience as well as the reminder of the time of which it originated, as well as its pertinence for my own personal research projects: can we summon the ghosts of the past, no matter how jaded we might be with their message, and make them feel sincere, or that they still matter? We clearly want to, so why not?

If the 11^th doesn’t work we’ll try try try try again for a different date.

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[i] New York Times in an interview published in early November 2005.