Critical Karaoke

BERLIN—It’s March 2007, and the artist collective Art & Language is holding a conference at unitednationsplaza, an experimental art academy in Berlin. As the speakers fill thoughtful pauses by sipping on their Evian, every swig of water generously magnified by the sound system, the audience watches closely. The event, titled Theses on Feuerbach (after Marx’s famous text that concludes with the line “Philosophers have only interpreted the world . . . the point is to change it”), addresses “institutional critique as institution.” But the language is of a more demanding, tortuous bent than what the audience is accustomed to, and over the course of some 80 minutes we struggle to keep up. And yet we’re practically mesmerized; never before has high theory, the rustle of paper, or a throaty cough been so fascinating; for the gentlemen onstage are actually the Jackson Pollock Bar, a Freiburg-based performance troupe that have been reenacting panel discussions for some 15 years, producing what they term “playback performances of aesthetic discourse,” or “theory installations,” at a host of venues, including Documenta 10 and the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

It so happens that the artworld is experiencing a vogue for re-creating speeches and conversations, so the Jackson Pollock Bar are not alone in revisiting such events, with New York and London–based artist Warren Neidich restaging interviews with art-historical icons, or the New York–based collective Continuous Project conducting patient readings from extensive scripts, including lengthy court trials. Sometimes the artists reach gripping results because of the political urgency of the content, e.g., the “Port Huron Project” in New York, organized by artist Mark Tribe, a series in which civil rights speeches from the '60s are reenacted, or David Thorne, Katya Sander, Ashley Hunt, Sharon Hayes, and Andrea Geyer’s five-hour reading of transcripts from the Iraq war tribunals for their collaborative project 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, at Documenta 12 this summer.

In this spate of interest in performing pedagogy, the panel discussion in particular would seem ripe for examination. A stalwart fixture in academia and beyond, it’s rarely successful at creating the right balance of frisson and erudition; talks and seminars are expected to convey maximum knowledge with minimum means, while the actual effect is usually akin to the opposite. The intellectual significance, aesthetic attraction, and peculiar entertainment value of reenacting panel discussions, meanwhile, are more closely linked to the contrast between the words and ideas being expressed—knowledge in its supposedly unadulterated state—and the uncontrolled body language, voice pitch, sheer rhetorical gusto, and improvisational talent of the speakers. By transfiguring even the most profane and trifling of cultural events into historical landmarks, such reenactments not only explore the notion of discussion as institution, and the reworking of discourses into typologies and role-playing games, but also prove the mind-numbingly bleak panel to be a source of ritualistic mystery. (Anyone who has scrutinized the documentation of a roundtable or conference will know each brings to light unseen micromelodramas of conspiracy, conflict, humiliation, and withdrawal, of which even the protagonists were only partially aware.)

Reenactment naturally raises the issue of loyalty to a precedent. But in the light of unmanageable verbal stimuli, as well as the unpredictable relationship of parody and homage—always jointly at play in a reenactment—difference in repetition becomes inescapable and obvious. From discussion panels to Passion plays and “onboard safety” demonstrations on airplanes, and even Sonic Youth replaying entire LPs onstage, it’s far more helpful, not to mention far less depressing, to consider even the most stringent reenactments as hapax legomena (words that appear only once in any given language or text—for example, Dadaist neologisms), i.e., as one-time occurrences rather than picture-perfect repetitions of standard routine. It’s the very impossibility of seamless replication that confirms the passing of time and reassuringly highlights the specific-ity of one’s own historical context. All in all, the very notion of reenactment is perhaps too vague to accommodate the variety of practices it currently tags, from intellectualized costume drama (Jeremy Deller) to art-historical deference (Marina Abramovic) to radical adaptations from one genre to another (Gerard Byrne), to name but a few of the more famous examples.