ALWAYS THE SAME WITH REPETITION?
Conversation between Cornelia Sollfrank and Silke Wenk following the opening of the re.act feminism exhibition, Academy of Arts Berlin, in December 2008
[Inside the book, p. 82]
S.W.: Unfortunately, I wasn't able to be there for the dog action. But what I find fascinating is that certain feminist art performances can be called to mind again, as for example in the re.act feminism exhibition. So it can come into view again, what significance the works by various women artists had for opening up seemingly natural gender positionsÑas well as for critically questioning traditional notions of the work and the artistsubject. I am happy that these works are being recalled into the "collective memory" again. At the same time, though, a possible danger of museumization is also recognizable hereÑespecially when the works by women artists are de-contextualized, in other words presented separately from the social movements of those years. I find it problematic when these feminist interventions are assumed into an art historical canon as presumably closed works, merely supplementing the list of masters' names. But that is only the one hand.
On the other hand, I am also wondering: What is the other, the new that occurs when early feminist projects are re-enacted in the first decade of the twenty-first century? Surely it is also true for these kinds of re-enactments that something else is revealed with each repetition.
What is attempted here with re.act feminism can be seen as part of a broader movement: for some time now there have been recurrent attempts in different places to transfer art actions and methods, not only feminist ones, from the nineteen sixties and seventies to the present. I share this fascination and understand the wish that these kinds of art performances might have a similar impact today. However, some attempts at repetition or re-enactment seem to me to have more of a sobering effect, if not indeed a boring one. What is left is often a kind of nostalgia. I think it becomes clear that if a re-enactment wants to be subversive, it should also contain a strategic translation. What I mean is that it must also include a reflection on how the media environment or gender relations as well have changed since then, what shifts have taken place. After all, there have been tremendous developments over the last forty years, particularly as a result of the so-called "media revolutions" and the tremendously accelerated circulation of images resulting from them.
C.S.: First the question of audience experience: I wrote down several observations directly after the dog performance. For example, one is that the majority of the passers-by in the shopping mall where the performance took place immediately took out a mobile phone or even a digicam and filmed the performance. That means that the people no longer directly watched, didnÕt just expose themselves to the experience, but held a technical reproduction device between themselves and that what irritated them.
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