Sites and Recreation
Conceptual varieties of the reenactment experience.
The other day I realized that 2023 marks 30 years of my first public performance art piece, presented in Chicago on October 8, 1993. That year I was beginning to grapple with performance art, having produced some initial works that were closer to tableaux vivants and primarily an exploration of my own family history. I had become obsessed with old family photographs and was influenced by postmodern games of fiction by various artists. So I came up with the idea of doing a large historical reconstruction of a photograph buried in a family album that marked a rather commonplace, forgettable, and business-like social event: a Rotary Club breakfast in Xochimilco, (Mexico City) in 1943, a time when my grandfather, Ignacio Helguera, was president of that club. The event was organized to welcome the international president of Rotary at the time, which has always been based in Evanston, IL. The project consisted in building on that mild Mexico-Chicago connection by making an elaborate fictional story about the gallery space having been the executive offices of Rotary in the past, and the idea that we would honor that historical coincidence by recreating that photograph 50 years later. I asked my father to sit in the same exact place where he was in the original photograph. The piece sets as a rule that the photograph should be recreated again on October 8, 2043.
As it often happens with art works, I wasn’t entirely clear as to why I decided to make this recreation. But looking back now I can say that it certainly had to do with the search of my own identity and past as a recent Mexican immigrant who did not necessarily identify with the dominant iconography used to communicate the Mexican American experience; and secondly, trying to use performance art, fiction and museum education as mediums to figure out questions about how we officialize and interpret historical and personal narratives. Mainly, it had to do with homesickness: I felt deeply displaced and was desperately trying to find myself in Chicago and thus the work was a ritualistic attempt to ground me there— to, in a way, symbolically justify my presence in that place as if it had been planned all along by fate.
Ever since that spontaneous and almost entirely intuitive early work, I have paid all the more attention to the works of artists who have used the historical reenactment as a medium. One of them is Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory (2000), a video featuring the famous bank robber John Wojtowicz as narrator, walking the viewers through a reconstructed set of a bank where he masterminded a successful heist later reconstructed in Sidney Lumet’s film Dog Day Afternoon (1975). In that video, as in the spirit of my 1993 performance, fiction becomes entangled with reality— in the case of the Huyghe video, to the point that even the protagonist (Wojtowicz) gets at time confused as to what really happened in the actual heist versus the story told in Lumet’s film.
Some works are important referents for social practice, such as Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave (2001), reenacting an important battle between the miner’s union and the British government, Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project (2006-2008) consisting in the reenactment of protest speeches of the New Left during the Vietnam War era, or far more recently, Dread Scott’s Slave Rebellion Reenactment (2019), an 1811 uprising of self-liberated, formerly slave people as they tried to seize territory in New Orleans.
Yet foremost in my mind has been an artist and friend who I admire and whose work has dealt with the social, historical, political and geographical realities in the form of reenactments: Claudia Joskowicz.
Joskowicz, who was born and raised in Bolivia, came —like me— to the United States at 18 and, after a decade of being here, started thinking about Bolivian history. “I started becoming aware of the ways in which we consume history, how it is told in school texts, but mainly who when memory and history fuse together and nothing feels real”— meaning that tangled official and personal narratives tend to adhere less and less to reality the more they are retold.
In 2007 she embarked in the production of a trilogy of videos documenting historical events in the Bolivian territory. The first one, Drawn and Quartered (2007) is a reenactment of the gruesome public execution of Túpac Katari, an indigenous Aymara leader who headed a major insurrection in colonial-era Peru (now Bolivia) and was executed by quartering in 1781. The second video, Vallegrande, 1967, (2008) is a reconstruction of the famous photograph of the display of the Che Guevara’s corpse for the press after his execution by the Bolivian army. For the third work in the trilogy, Joskowicz picked a shootout and subsequent death of Wild West outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which historians believe took place in the small town of San Vicente, Bolivia. The video, loosely based on the 1969 Hollywood film that made the American outlaws famous, is titled Round and Round and Consumed by Fire (2009) and is based on the last scene of the Hollywood movie, which ends in a freeze frame.
In all these re-enactments there is no pretension of exact visual or even historical accuracy: in Drawn and Quartered, for example, the quartering scene of the indigenous leader is performed with Honda motorcycles instead of horses. Furthermore, in Round and Round and Consumed by Fire, Joskowicz was working with a Hollywood mimicry of reality. She notes that the Hollywood film made “a very poor representation of the Bolivian territory and it is based on a northerner’s idea of that a mining Bolivian town of the turn of the century would look like— it looks more like a town in the border of Texas than anything else I have ever seen.” So to be faithful to a fake representation didn’t make any sense. “Instead” Joskowicz says referring to the quartering episode and the Bolivian shootout, “of being faithful to the original sites, I am more interested in confounding them and thus turning them into the new site of the events through the re-enactment.” The exception is Vallegrande, 1967, which is actually filmed in the exact location of the events, but even there Joskowicz does not seek to create an exact replica of the famous photograph, nor try to hide the fact that the video is being filmed 40+ years later, as evidenced by the deteriorated walls and the contemporary graffiti on them.
I was seeing these works through the lens of my own relationship with the history of Latin America, which is to say from the perspective of a Latinx artist in the United States. I asked Claudia if, for her, this trilogy had to do with the subject of reclaiming lost memories or recovery, similar to the way that I saw the idea of reconstructing a family scene as a way, futile as it might be, to bring back something that had been lost. But she had a differing view. “For me— she replied— it was not about recovering something, but rather to learn something about my country.”
What I find most interesting about Joskowicz’s work is not just the specific selection of those historical Bolivian episodes, nor just the skilled use of the camera work (i.e. the slow tracking shots that characterize Joskowicz’s work) in the construction of powerful tableaux that seem to freeze a monumental episode in amber forever. It is the way in which she is playing with the reconstruction game, as it were— namely, taking moments that have been heavily narrated, fictionalized, romanticized and even sensationalized by history, moments, like Joskowicz herself says, “become so mediatized that they become something else.” The best example is perhaps Vallegrande, 1967, based on one of the most iconic Latin American photographs of the second half of the 20th century, as well as one whose composition has been many times described as an unintentional recreation of a historical art work— both Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp and Andrea Mantegna’s The Lamentation of Christ. By making the image to become an art work again, Joskowicz makes a re-staging of an unintentional recreation, but also trying, as she also added, “to capture the recreation in the precise moment in which it becomes something else.” And that “something else” might ironically end up being more real than the original recreation. For example, In the Round and Round and Consumed by Fire the resulting work is also a recreation of a faulty recreation, but this time it is paradoxically more authentic because of it being staged in Bolivian territory.
In some ways, the work by Joskowicz and other artists who work in the subject of re-staging presents an interesting paradox: traditionally, historical reenactments are made to commemorate an event, to render it tangible to the living. But these artists work with the clear awareness that the very re-staging they are engaging in inevitably mythologizes and distorts, transforming the original event into something related but ultimately new, and while we might learn more and see that event with a new critical perspective, every recreation distances the original event from us even more, like the configuration of two facing mirrors creating an infinite reflection. Yet these artists understand is that these works are not about the yesterday but about the today. While we know we can’t ever bring back the past, the very reenactment of those images, summoned from the very physical sites that once served as the stage for those events, might serve the best means to see a reflection of ourselves in the present.