On Repetition

Description

On Repetition aims to unpack the different uses and functions of repetition within contemporary performance, dance practices, craft and writing. The collection, edited by Eirini Kartsaki, explores repetition in relation to intimacy, laughter, technology, familiarity and fear – proposing a new vocabulary for understanding what is at stake in works that repeat. Drawing on psychoanalysis, philosophy, linguistics, sociology and performance studies – and employing case studies from a range of practices – the essays presented here combine to form a unique interdisciplinary exploration of the functions of repetition in contemporary culture.

Persisting Forever: Introducing Repetition 

Eirini Kartsaki

 

Chapter 1 - Of Secret Signals, Absent Masters and the Trembling of the Contours: 15Walter Benjamin, Yvonne Rainer and the Repeatability of Gesture

Swen Steinhäuser

 

Chapter 2 - All the Home’s a Stage: Uncanny Encounters Between Auditorium and Oikos 

Alan Read

 

Chapter 3 - Repetition as Technology of the Numinous in Performance: The Artist Is Present by Marina Abramovic´

Silvia Battista

 

Chapter 4 - When Is a Joke not a Joke? Reading (and Re-reading) Stewart Lee’s ‘The Rap Singers’ 

Emma Bennett

 

Chapter 5 - The Crying Channel 

Claire Hind and Gary Winters

 

Chapter 6 -The Cyclical Pleasures and Deaths of Symbolization: How to Become 117 a Cupcake/The Famous’ Adaptation of Frankenstein 

Lauren Barri Holstein

 

Chapter 7 - A Pointless Pastime? Early Nineteenth-Century Pin-Prick Imagery

Alice Barnaby

 

Chapter 8 - Repeated Acts of Intimacy and Harm in Andrea Brady’s Mutability: Scripts for Infancy 

Gareth Farmer

 

Chapter 9 -‘I Was Not HEARD’: Trauma and Articulation in the Poetry of Geraldine Monk 

Linda Kemp

 

Chapter 10 - Déjà-vu, Doubles and Dread: The Uncanny and Christopher Smith’s Triangle 

Ruth McPhee

 

Chapter 11 - Farewell to Farewell: Impossible Endings and Unfinished Finitudes 

Eirini Kartsaki

 

Afterword: Repetition or Recognition? 

Clare Foster

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• Théâtre
• ART
• General
• General officer
• Theatre
• Performing Arts

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783205790
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2016 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2016 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designers: Holly Rose and Emily Dann
Cover image: Richard Rocholl, from the series Pears from Philadelphia, 2014
Production manager: Amy Rollason
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
ISBN: 978-1-78320-577-6
ePDF: 978-1-78320-578-3
ePUB: 978-1-78320-579-0
Printed and bound by Gomer Press Ltd
Contents
Persisting Forever: Introducing Repetition
Eirini Kartsaki
Chapter 1: Of Secret Signals, Absent Masters and the Trembling of the Contours: Walter Benjamin, Yvonne Rainer and the Repeatability of Gesture
Swen Steinhäuser
Chapter 2: All the Home’s a Stage: Uncanny Encounters Between Auditorium and Oikos
Alan Read
Chapter 3: Repetition as Technology of the Numinous in Performance: The Artist Is Present by Marina Abramović
Silvia Battista
Chapter 4: When Is a Joke not a Joke? Reading (and Re-reading) Stewart Lee’s ‘The Rap Singers’
Emma Bennett
Chapter 5: The Crying Channel
Claire Hind and Gary Winters
Chapter 6: The Cyclical Pleasures and Deaths of Symbolization: How to Become a Cupcake/The Famous’ Adaptation of Frankenstein
Lauren Barri Holstein
Chapter 7: A Pointless Pastime? Early Nineteenth-Century Pin-Prick Imagery
Alice Barnaby
Chapter 8: Repeated Acts of Intimacy and Harm in Andrea Brady’s Mutability: Scripts for Infancy
Gareth Farmer
Chapter 9: ‘I Was Not HEARD’: Trauma and Articulation in the Poetry of Geraldine Monk
Linda Kemp
Chapter 10: Déjà-vu , Doubles and Dread: The Uncanny and Christopher Smith’s Triangle
Ruth McPhee
Chapter 11: Farewell to Farewell: Impossible Endings and Unfinished Finitudes
Eirini Kartsaki
Afterword: Repetition or Recognition?
Clare Foster
Notes on Contributors
Index
Persisting Forever: Introducing Repetition
Eirini Kartsaki
I n his 1985 essay ‘Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-modern Aesthetics’, Umberto Eco suggests that the modern criterion for artistic value is novelty, whereas the repetition of an already-known pattern is synonymous with a lack of originality, and considered typical of crafts and industry, but not art (1985: 14). However, twentieth-century fine art gives rise to a paradox: the avant-garde artist enacts originality in the form of repetition; artists such as Piet Mondrian, Josef Kelly and Sol LeWitt enact their originality through the form of the grid:
Structurally, logically, axiomatically, the grid can only be repeated. And with an act of repetition or replication as the ‘original’ occasion of its usage within the experience of a given artist, the extended life of the grid in the unfolding progression of his work will be one of still more repetition.
(Krauss 1996: 160)
The use of the grid in the early twentieth century reveals a shift in the way in which repetition is used; it starts to be thought of not as the discredited other half of the couple originality/repetition, but as an important element at work. It is in response to this shift that American art critic Rosalind Krauss poses an important question: ‘What would it look like not to repress the concept of the copy? What would it look like to produce a work that acted out the discourse of reproduction without originals?’ (1996: 168).
Steven Connor extends Krauss’ argument to think more specifically about the relationship between repetition and originality, drawing on Jacques Derrida:
Repetition is at one and the same time that which stabilizes and guarantees the Platonic model of origin and copy and that which threatens to undermine it. Repetition must always repeat originality, must always depend on some thing or idea, which is by definition pre-existing, autonomous and self-identical. Repetition is therefore subordinated to the idea of the original, as something secondary and inessential. For this reason, repetition is conventionally condemned in Western culture as parasitic, threatening and negative. But if repetition is dependent upon a pre-existing originality, it is also possible to turn this round and argue that originality is also dependent upon repetition. […] The question ‘How can you have a repetition without an original?’ brings with it the less obvious question ‘How can you have an original which it would be impossible to represent or duplicate?’
(Connor 1988: 3)
Repetition here confirms the value and existence of the original; although considered as ‘parasitic, threatening and negative’, it has in the wake of modernism, but also significantly even before that, acquired a different role: it is not only the necessary condition for originality, but is also appreciated in its own right. Samuel Beckett’s literary work, for example, takes into account modernism’s obsessive search for originality and contradicts it. Repetition here performs two key functions: it gives rise to ‘some real novelty amid the nothing new’ or to sameness, which ‘always inhabits or inhibits what may initially present itself as novelty’ (Connor 1988: 1). Repetition thus becomes generative of new ways of thinking and writing and is considered as the place ‘where certain radical instabilities in these operations reveal themselves’ (Connor 1988: 1). Artists such as Andy Warhol, the Judson Dance Theatre, John Cage and Yvonne Rainer, among others, draw attention towards similarity and invite the spectators to engage with repetition in innovative ways; as such, they mark an emphatic departure from modern modes of work.
Repetition has been discussed by key theoreticians such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. In his Difference and Repetition , Deleuze identifies two different types of repetition: the first type is a mechanical, ‘naked’ or ‘bare’ repetition, or a repetition of the same, which simply reproduces its original. The second type includes difference; it is a dynamic repetition, evolving through time (Deleuze 2004: 27). The differences emerging from repetition may be experienced imperceptibly, like a circle that is traced twice: ‘the same line is no longer exactly the same, the ring no longer has the same center’, Derrida argues (1978: 296). And, he continues, ‘once the circle turns, once the volume rolls itself up, once the book is repeated, its identification with itself gathers an imperceptible difference which permits us efficaciously, rigorously, that is, discreetly, to exit from closure’ (1978: 295). The exit from closure, as Derrida describes it, allows repetition to keep going and may stimulate a desire concerned with a sense of satisfaction. This sense of satisfaction is central to the experience of repetition. Derrida captures what seems to be one of the functions of repetition: ‘the book has lived on this lure: to have given us to believe that passion, having originally been impassioned by something, could in the end be appeased by return of that something’ (1978: 295). Repetition gives the impression that it will satisfy its promise and it is precisely on the grounds of that promise that repetition is able to keep going.
Performance Returns
Certain encounters with artworks may seem elusive, difficult to describe or hard to talk about. These may seem to escape from us, or disappear immediately after they take place. The use of repetition – in movement, language, gesture – although seemingly offering a technology of recollection, may in fact render these encounters even more elusive. Repetition as an element at work may accentuate the difficulty to experience and represent the encounter. Such works seem to contain an imperative: that of return. This book argues that works that use repetition in the above ways seem to demand a return to them in order to unpack their complexity, work through the difficulty that lies within repetition and unveil their radical instabilities. Such a return has been discussed by writer and curator Adrian Heathfield in his account of choreographer Pina Bausch’s repetitive gestures: ‘The use of gestural repetition and difference, cyclical events and relations, creates suspensions and returns in our experience’ (2006: 92–93). Repetition seems to demand a return to it in memory and in this writing. In doing so, one reproduces the work, creating at the same time an archive; such a movement of return backwards, which reproduces the work forward in time resembles Kierkegaard’s category of repetition, which is a recollection forward (1964: 131). The process of returning has an additional function: it documents the differences that take place in the encounter and re-encounter with the work, opening a dialogue with it, which is about the present context of the encounter. And the question arises: ‘What is it, fundamentally, I am returning to in this particular case? What is it I want to see again?’ (Clark 2006: 5–8). Something happens, art historian T. J. Clark tells us, ‘which cannot effectively be represented except by chronicling it as it happen[s]’ (2006: 8).
Returning to certain works seems to emerge as a function of repetition; the process of returning recognizes that repetition influences the representation of our experience. Going back to a performance, a painting, a comedy act, a film, again and again, is constitutive of repetition and the key argument of this book. Repetition in this case ‘persists in recurrence, it remains unresolved, haunting our memories, documents and critical frameworks’ (Heathfield 2000: 106).
On Repetition: Writing, Performance & Art considers repetition as a constitutive