| dc.description.abstract | This paper will discuss re-enactment as a relevant tool for practice-based research to investigate pioneering video performances and video artworks from the 70s and 80s from a theoretical, art-historical and curatorial point of view.
I aim to contribute to the debate on practice-based methodologies to investigate the nature, the status, and the definition of early artists’ video and new media performances.
Since the early 2000s, the re-enactment of artists’ performance has been growing as an art practice internationally and has been investigated in several studies and exhibitions.
In this paper, I will propose that the re-enactment of early video artworks can open up critical analysis on the original work - its nature, form and content - as well as on collective and personal memory and mediation.
Re-enactment becomes a research tool that investigates the nature of video, which was at the time a relatively new medium. Re-enactment informs the research into the original piece, its documentation, the relationships between the artist and the body, the work and the viewer. It investigates the effects of analogue video over the viewer and the artist in comparison with the digital video employed in the re-enactment and its documentation.
The paper will analyse case studies from the AHRC funded research projects REWIND, REWINDItalia and EWVA (European Women’s Video Art), DJCAD University of Dundee. It will include Videosonata (da “Giorni”) by Claudio Ambrosini (Zurich, 1979-2013; Glasgow 2015), Monitor Live by Stephen Partridge (Tate, London, 1975-2010) and Doppelgänger Redux by Elaine Shemilt (Nunnery Gallery, London, 1979/81-2016). | |
