“We need a history which does not save in any sense of the word; we need a history that performs.” (Jane Blocker) Discuss in relation to research on a work of art/performance of your choosing.

History is not made up of events which took place. History is the recording of those events; it is what we say about them and what we are told about them. History therefore can contain meaning and bias, it can be mistaken, and it can be manipulated and changed even though the original events it addresses, whatever they were, are beyond change. Jane Blocker gives an example of the purposeful manipulation of history in the re-telling of the Cuban ‘Venus Negra’ myth. (Blocker 1999, pp 113 – 129) This myth/history tells of the untameable ‘Black Venus’, the last of the Siboney Indians, who would not submit to the efforts of the Spanish colonists to civilise her, but instead, through passive resistance, insisted upon her right to and need for her native soil and the nourishment of its native foods. Whether any events resembling this account ever took place (which seems unlikely – why, in thoroughly colonised nineteenth century Cuba, would one, solitary, Siboney Indian remain, and how would she reach adulthood without ever encountering the colonists earlier?), the history is being used as a tool by the Cuban Creole population to claim both a pre-colonial right to land through some essential connection to the earth (such as the Indians were believed to have) (Blocker, 1999, p 120), and to distance themselves from the ravages of Cuba’s ecology by Spanish colonial agriculture (Blocker, 1999, pp 121-2). In the way they have recorded and passed on these supposed events, the Creoles have produced something new, with a meaning of its own
How do this changeability of history and its sometimes tenuous connection to the original events affect the history of art? Art history traditionally has not been faced with these difficulties to anything like the same extent as other branches of history because, with the obvious exception of theatre, art history has dealt with unchanging objects which have been preserved, such as paintings, sculpture, textiles and pottery. These objects can be revisited to verify opinions and conclusions which are made about them. Meanings can be interpreted and re-interpreted, but the original object of art is always there so that each new generation to check if the interpretations bear a clear relationship to what exists. There is no need to record the object as the object itself is the (necessarily accurate) recording, and what is left for history to do is classify, place in context, and thus legitimise the object as art. There is also a secondary, safeguarding role of making sure, if decay and damage occur, that the object’s original, intended state is known so that the artwork can be moved closer to this original state through restoration.
The art which has been produced since the Second World War, and particularly since the 1960s, has thrown a grenade into the peaceful waters of art history. Much of what is known as ‘post-modern’ art is concerned with the corruptible, with the absent, with negative space, with the unique, one-off experience – in a word, with that which is unpreservable. This presents great historiographical problems. As Blocker succinctly puts it, “What kind of history is it that does not save?” (Blocker, 1999, p 133) The art of both Ana Mendieta, about whom Blocker was writing, and that of Dan Flavin, form part of this ‘unsaveable’ category of art.
Two very clear examples of the difficulties posed by the new form of art can be found in Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series, and in ‘Untitled, 1982 – 84’. The latter is a drawing of a female form, not on canvas or paper, but on a fresh leaf. As a choice of medium, this was clearly not intended to endure very long. It has been preserved, in a glass box in the Galerie Lelong in New York (Blocker, 1999, p 133), but as the corruptibility, and hence the inevitable corruption of the artwork are inherent in the choice of medium, this aspect of the drawing was surely part of the original work of art, and therefore to attempt to preserve the leaf is to negate an important aspect of the art, depriving it of its essential meaning.
The Silueta series, on the other hand, are more obviously performance art. Mendieta made female forms out of the earth, filled a cavity within the form with gunpowder, and then blew them up. Photographs of these works exist, but they are not the work itself, merely a recording of the end result. Even if video footage had been taken, it would not have been equivalent to the artwork as the experience of seeing and hearing the Silueta explode, each for the first and only time cannot then be later replicated.
At first sight Dan Flavin’s works seem less historiographically problematic. The installations for which he is best known are displays of fluorescent lights, ranging from the ‘Icon’ series, sometimes only two or three fluorescent tubes placed together, to entire corridors of multi-coloured lights. Since fluorescent tubes are real objects which, unlike leaves, can be easily preserved, it would seem that the installations of lights are in themselves all the historical record that needs to be made. That, however, is not the case because it is not simply the physical fluorescent tubes which comprise Flavin’s artwork. There are two deeper elements to the works. The first is the way the lights and their positioning affect and “operate on” their surroundings, making corners invisible or emphasising them, making spaces seem larger or smaller, blocking off areas of space with ‘barriers’. Flavin often designed his installations specifically for particular galleries, adapting his works and placing them in conversation with the surrounding space. (Rauh, 1977, pp 24 – 28)
The second aspect which makes Flavin’s works with lights difficult to record historically is that it is not merely the objects, the light and the spaces which make up the work of art; it is also the reaction and experience of those who saw them. Flavin said of his work
“My installations are to be perceived on their own artificial terms as quickly as can be by those who care to participate. I am sure that some people must, with their experience; deal with it in a slower fashion than others. But I really mean what I issue to be understood very quickly.” (Scottish Arts Council, 1976, vol 1, p 1)
Flavin firmly rejected the notion that he was a sort of sculptor, writing to a museum director “please do not refer to my efforts as sculpture and to me as sculptor. I do not handle and fashion three dimensioned still works.” (Scottish Arts Council, 1976, vol 2, p 11) Flavin meant that what he dealt with were the UN’handle’able elements light and space, not the physical tubes which the light sometimes reduced to invisibility. As the first quotation makes clear, the viewers of his installations, by their perception and understanding of his work, participated in the works of art. So strong were Flavin’s views on this that he once wrote a vitriolic letter to an art critic who had dismissed one of his installations as “white fluorescent tubes arranged in vertical pairs (and that’s all)” (Scottish Arts Council, 1976, vol 2, p 12), and concluding that they did not constitute art. Flavin’s remark, that the art critic, Hilton Kramer, had not understood what he had seen, is telling. Since Kramer had seen “white fluorescent tubes arranged in pairs”, the area in which Flavin thinks the critic is wrong is in his comment “and that’s all”. The fluorescent tubes are not all, insists Flavin. They are merely the objects used as tools to manipulate light and space and provide a particular experience for those who attended the installation.
If that is the case, then as with the work of Ana Mendieta, it is not possible to “save” these works in the sense of preserving them. As Flavin said, “Nothing like an adequate photograph has ever been fabricated about an installation of mine.” (Scottish Arts Council, 1976, Vol 2, p 11) Should we, then, as Blocker asserts, aim to create a different art history, one which performs and reperforms rather than trying to preserve? This, however, creates more problems than it solves. Leaving aside the issue of how one reperforms a drawing on a fresh leaf which is bound to decay, let us look at the Restrospective of Dan Flavin which appeared in the Hayward Gallery, London, from 19th January to 2nd April 2006, as part of a tour of Europe and the USA. This would seem to be the perfect example of history as reperformance, since the works were placed in a context as close as possible to their original one so that the effect of the light on the space and vice versa should be the same as it was the first time around. But if, as Flavin asserted, part of the art of the installations is the reaction of the audience, then since all audiences are different, and since a retrospective in particular places a different perspective on an artists work due to knowing what came next, and then these same fluorescent tubes are not the same works of art. The tubes are the same but the “that’s (not) all” factor is unavoidably different. The same would be true of a re-performed ‘Silueta’. To re-perform is to create something new, however hard one tries to be faithful to the original.
Blocker stated that Mendieta’s art was problematic to art historians because it “asks history to do something that by definition it cannot do. That is, it asks history to let go of the past” making it necessary to use non-historic, “primitive” methods of preserving the past “through repetition rather than storage.” (Blocker, 1999, p 133) This rejection of history is a common feature of post-modern art, which includes a lot of performance or semi-performance art. However, the repetition method of preserving the past is inadequate since the different reaction of those who participate in performance art can radically change the experience which is the artwork. Patroka tells of the way her carefully managed reactions as a member of the audience at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum were dramatically altered by an encounter with two other viewers, former members of the Jewish resistance, whose story questioned the museum’s narrative of American liberation of helpless victims. (Patroka, 2003l, pp 88 – 89) In this case, despite efforts to make each member of the audience experience the same story, her experience, and therefore that piece of performance art, was different.
History still has the opportunity to “save” this current period of art by categorising and legitimising it as art, applying definitions such as “minimalist” or “feminist”, and combining artworks with others which are seen to share the same methods or meaning, however much this categorising may be resisted by the artists. (See Dan Flavin’s views on being labelled a Minimalist, Scottish Arts Council, 1976, vol 2, p 13) Whether this is helpful in creating context, or unhelpful in leading to skewed judgements based on connections which do not exist, it is a matter which will continually be up for debate. In the sense of preserving, however, history can neither save nor truly reperform such works of art. They have successfully rejected history. This period in art will surely be recorded to the best ability of art historians, but the works themselves, with their intrinsic resistance to repetition and preservation, cannot be saved in any sense of the word.