Reenactment Introduction by Marina Abramovié Creative work has value; whenever | use, or take, or build upon the creative work of others, 1 am taking from them something of value. Whenever I take something of value from someone else, 1 should have their permission. The taking of something of value from someone else without pemission is wrong. It is a form of piracy.” In the seventies, performance art was a young discipline in Europe. We performed mostly in altemative spaces and private stu- dios in front of a very limited audience that consisted mainly of friends. The performances were mobile in time and space and so the public had to make a commitment to be mobile as well. The first performances in the early seventies were not even document- ed because most of us believed that any documentation—by video or photos—could not be a substitute for the real experience: see- ing it live. Later on, though, our attitude changed. We felt the need to leave some trace of the events for a larger audience. | lived in Yugoslavia and it was very difficult to get informa- tion about performance events from abroad. All I could get at the time were Xeroxed images. Occasionally, there were also bad qual- ity plrate video recordings. Most of the time, testimony was just word-of-mouth from witnesses who claimed they saw the perform- ance or said that they knew somebody who had seen it. If every- Lawrence Lessing. Pee Cute The Nanue and Pune of Creativity, New Yorke Penn, 2004, p18. 9 Tee Moning Abutweyi 3 2085 pisos 1 Viti, Charts, 004 | yp. -N- }body who claimed to see the performances had actually been present, then thousands would have witnessed body art events. In reality, though, if twenty people showed up, the perform- ers could consider themselves lucky. Most of the time there were only about four or five friends there. The unreliability of the docu- ments and the witnesses led to the total mystification and misrep- resentation of the actual events. This created a huge space for projection and speculation. 1 feel the need not just to personally fe-experience’ some performances from the past, but also to think about how they can be re-performed today in front of a public that never saw them. In this manner, | can open a discussion about whether we can approach performance art in the same way as @ music com- position. Can we treat the instructions of the performance like a musical score—something that anyone who is properly trained can replay? 1 also want to open a discussion about how a performance ‘can be preserved. What is the right way of documenting it? How can it be shown in museums after the event? And in what kind of conditions can a performance be repeated? Today, there are so many young performance artists who repeat different performances from the seventies without giving credit to the original source. Even the fashion and advertising industries consciously or unconsciously use images from well known performances. After thirty years of performing, | feel like it is my duty to re- tell the story of performance art in a way that respects the past and also leaves space for reinterpretation. By performing Seven Easy Pieces, | would like to propose a model for reenacting other artisis' performance pieces in the future: ioConditions Ask the artist for permission Pay the artist for copyright. Perform a new interpretation of the piece. Exhibit the original material: photographs, video, relics. Exhibit a new interpretation of the piece. This proposed new model could give performance art, which started as a transitory movement, a stable grounding in art history. It would lead to better dialogue between different genera- tions of performance artists and would guarantee a clearer posi- tion for performance as a more artistic discipline. In Seven Easy Pieces, | reenacted seminal works that had been performed by my contemporaries in a prior time and space. My focus was on performances that took place in the late sixties and seventies. | interpreted them as one would a musical score. The project confronted the idea that documentation rarely existed in the critical early period of performance history. One often had to rely on testimonial witnesses, poor quality video recordings, and photo negatives. Due to the dire conditions of performance art documentation, these substitutable media never did justice to the actual performances. The only real way 10 document a perform- ance art piece is to re-perform the piece itself. Seven Easy Pieces was performed for seven hours, each day, over the course of one week, from November 9 to 15, 2005 in the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Seven Easy Pieces examines the possibilities of repre- senting and preserving an art form that is, by nature, ephemeral. ll