13 June
1807 birth of Marquis de Leborde
1886 death of Ludwig II
2004 feast of Corpus Christi (Otto's confession)
space [architecture]
1999.06.13 14:56
second solstice site
Gothic Rock Creek
Piranesi exhibit
feelings
1999.06.13
agenda
2000.06.13
Sagacity Virtually Carved in Stone
what to do with Quondam right now?
2001.06.13
Pluck Slide
Selection Process
Women
The More Things Change
Last Century's Mess
Objects of Desire
Plus Three Oranges
There Are Always Mistakes
Holy Innocence
Slightly Untitled
Ghost of St. Helena?
Spots and Dots
Glory Glory
2002.06.13
Come and get your dollar.
2003.06.13 15:42
beware of rugs that don't lie.
2003.06.13 15:47
Re: Götterdämmerung?
2003.06.13 16:05
Re: the David Rimanelli
2003.06.13 16:18
the true answer is false?
2003.06.13 17:27
cloning architecture - a global search
2004.06.13 09:28
Happy 118th Deathday
2004.06.13 09:48
Blicks from Moravia
2004.06.13
Walter Benjamin
2004.06.13 13:59
Re: Art Basel a good place for finding a gallery?
2004.06.13 14:21
2004.06.13 14:21
2004.06.13 15:18
2004.06.13 16:39
Brideshead Revisited
2005.06.13 13:55
2005.06.13 14:41
2005.06.13 15:04
2005.06.13 16:12
koolhaas' Junkspace
2005.06.13 20:00
foam follows form
2006.06.13 19:15
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The answer is that to re-enact the past in the present is to re-enact it in a context which gives it a new quality. This context is the negation of the past itself. Thus, the historian of poetry, reading Dante, re-enacts the medieval experience himself which that poem expresses: but while doing this he remains himself: he remains a modern man, not a medieval: and this means that the medievalism of Dante, while genuinely revived and re-experienced within his mind, is accompanied by a whole world of fundamentally non-medieval habits and ideas, which balance it and hold it in check and prevent it from ever occupying the whole field of vision.1
Therefore, the performance can never end or even progress in the conventional sense of dramatic plotting; it can only be the cyclic restatement of a single theme: creation and destruction irrevocably interlocked, endlessly reenacted.2
[The campus of Columbia University] is rather an architectural reenactment of a Renaissance reenactment of a dreamt classical city believed to be real, and because it is a city in connotation it can and does emblemize the city it is part of.3
 4
The paper concludes, moreover, that the making of the Campo Marzio interpretively re-enacts the original imaginative founding of the Eternal City and, as such, constitutes an attempt to re-found Heroic Rome.5
When I first began to redraw Piranesi's Campo Marzio using CAD [in 1987], I was doing so to get as close to Piranesi as possible; essentially, I was reenacting his act of drawing as best I could. For me, this exercise, this reenactment, has provided enormous insight albeit it took several years of continual work for this vision to develop. I am certainly not Piranesi, nor do I contend to possess his superior creative talent and imagination, but I deliberately attempted to do some of the same things he has done, and in so doing I honestly believe I removed several degrees of separation. Perhaps reenactments then are always a play with degrees of separation, sometimes seeing how close one can get to the 'original' and/or sometimes seeing how far one can "stretch the truth," to name the extreme cases. 6
It is no accident that the New in the arts always announces itself in the guise of a revival, Hadid's career starts with the reinterpretation of Malevich's Teltonik, and her early work has indeed been (mis-)understood as neo-Constructivism. In a similar fashion, Peter Eisenman is said to take off from early Le Corbusier and Terragni. Revivalist appropriation is the easiest and most immediate option to articulate dissatisfaction and resistance towards a dominant practice. However, this has nothing to do with repetition. For instance, to pick up the unfinished projects of modernism on the back of postmodernism cannot be simple re-enactment, even if one initially works with direct citations. 7
...where the New York-based Clifford Owens performs the work of Fluxus member Benjamin Patterson; and where the collective Continuous Project reenact art-world panel discussions from decades before, as they did in the recent exhibition "Wieder and Wider: Performance Appropriated" at Vienna's Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig--to say nothing of more general gestures toward art history by Lucy McKenzie and Paulina Olowsja in their salon-cum-bar and performances evoking the early modernist avant-garde, and by Daria Martin in her films reflecting the strong influence of modern performance and dance
In fact, the past few years have seen a flurry of exhibitions devoted to this phenomenon. "Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art," at Rotterdam's Witte de With in 2005, queried the status of such representations of historical actions and events, and to this end included Sullivan's aforementioned piece along with, for instance, the earlier example of Andrea Fraser's own performance of a drunken speech once given by Martin Kippenberger.8
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1. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), p. 447.
2. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (1978).
3. Arthur C. Danto, "Building Metaphors" in PRECIS: Beyond Style (Rizzoli, 19884), p. 99.
4. Michael Benedikt, For an Architecture of Reality (1988), p. 29.
5. Robert Aitken, "PIRANESI - VICO - Il Campo Marzio: Foundations and the Eternal City" (McGill University: Master's Thesis, 1995).
6. Stephen Lauf, "reenactment" (design-l listserv, 1999.11.09).
7. Patrik Schumacher, "Mechanism of Radical Innovation" in Zaha Hadid Complete Works: Texts and References. p. 65.
8. Melanie Gilligan, "The Beggar's Pantomine" (Artforum, Summer 2007), p. 428.
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