ARTH 348 - Special Topics in Art and Film: Re-enactment

• M - 15:00-17:30
• EV-1.605
• INSTRUCTOR: DR. MAYA OPPENHEIMER

When Martha Rosler was approached by the Whitechapel Gallery in London to re-enact her 1975 video and performance piece, ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen’, for the 2003 exhibition ‘A Short History of Performance Art’, her initial response was to refuse. ‘It never occurred to me and struck me as a bizarre and therefore intriguing chance,’ she explained. ‘It is of course a revisiting of a period piece.’ Rosler eventually changed her mind due to, ‘the chance for an array of young women to get hands on with a work of a previous generation and make it theirs and then ours’. Opening up a parody on women’s commoditised place in the home to another generation of women via re-enacting and filming Rosler’s performance concept provided a process of opening a dialogue about politics, experience and gender.

This course will focus on artists using re-enactment as a method of recording performances, events, myths or memories via audio visual media to explore relationships to history, identity, experience and place. Re-enactment is a very distinct mode of visiting a subjective context in the past, and it is distinct from simulation, documentary and re-creation. In order to explore its particular authenticity (or lack there of), we will look at a broad range of staged works from artists, film-makers and citizens to get to grips with the politics and practice of witness and narrative, of designing a performance, of disseminating a documented duration, and of exploring the perspective of experience and participation. Each session will consider different works grouped around themes where re-enactment is used as a tool to investigate experience. From trauma to ritual, historical event to autobiography, sessions will pair key theories with key works and lesser-known examples. We will also consider what is specific as well as explicit to re-enactment on film by comparing aesthetic, historiography, anachronism, phenomenology and narrative in literature, photography, science experiments and criminology. In this sense, the course considers re-enactment in art and film in an expanded sense to better understand the particular choice of re-enacting a past experience. Above all, we will seek to understand what it means to tell stories by attempting to live them and gather tools to better discuss this area of work.