On Repeat: Session 1

Session 1

Moderator

Simon During

In a modernity fated to enact the new and original, repetition is difficult to escape. Indeed the compulsion toward the new itself imposes repetition on the modern world, since the new and original can only be conceived of as exceptions to what comes first: the ordinary and the repeated.

The strange thing about repetition, then, is that it always beats originality. Even in domains where repetition seems most vulnerable to conquest by innovation—art and love—there’s no event that won’t fall foul to repetition. Falling in love with someone special or making a paradigm-breaking artwork end up falling into some sequence or other.

Which may be why philosophers have invited us to affirm repetition as a guiding principle for action. I am thinking specifically of Kant, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard.

Kant’s categorical imperative can be spelled out like this: always act as if what you do could be universalized; that is, repeated under the same circumstances by anybody. Your act is moral only if someone else could do it to you and others morally. And, Nietzsche, with his concept of eternal return, argues that if we are to acquire grace, we must act as if our lives will be repeated, endlessly.

Kierkegaard is more complicated. He tells a story about a man who falls passionately in love but soon realizes that it’s not an individual he’s in love with; it’s love itself. So he now has to orient himself to repetition—not to loving just one unique person but to loving person after person as surrogates for love, which remains on a transcendental level. He must orient himself not to recollection (to living in memory of love’s first flush) but to hope.

Maybe Kierkegaard is the theorist who best reconciles us to the modern scenario of repetition. He cleanly breaks with the repetition/originality opposition, and he does so by making a transcendentalizing move, in favor of something ideal that may not exist unalloyed on an earthly plane. Take the case of art. From a Kierkegaardian perspective, true art is not possible in this immanent world. But it’s just this impossibility that allows us to find value in the unremitting regress of origination into repetition that characterizes contemporary art. The serial flow of aesthetic production becomes a gift to art, in the absence of a transcendental Art to which it (or we) aspire.

Is Kierkegaard’s Platonizing line of thought practical at all? Are there senses in which today’s artists, in whatever media, use repetition and reenactment not as opposites of origination, innovation, or presence, nor as plays with art’s mirroring capacities, but rather, as we might say, liturgically, embracing repetition as enacting contact with a necessarily absent Idea of Art? It’s possible to view contemporary photographers of reenactment (e.g., Thomas Demand) or the recent rush of reperformance pieces in this way. But I’d invite the panelists to think about where else we can observe repetition removed from a thematics of haunting, mirroring, compulsion so to become a mode of celebration, especially celebration of unrealizable ideas.

PANELIST

Drew Daniel

In his provocative opening post, Simon During has flagged the deadlock induced by the originality/repetition dyad and attempted to head off at the pass a discussion, that has perhaps grown overfamiliar, on contemporary art practice as a self-reflexive meditation on art’s own weak memorial powers. Through the troika of Kant, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, Simon has prodded us to ask if there might not be a transcendental alternative to the melancholy aesthetic position lurking within the present moment: is there a “celebratory” yet also “liturgical” repetitive function that art could serve? Can repetition ever escape the omnipresent poetics of limit, finitude, and failure?

For an example of one such possibility, I want to turn to a somewhat implausible candidate: the extreme form of heavy rock music known as black metal, a subgenre defined by repetitious rhythmic patterns, machine-gun tempos, transgressive lyrical subject matter, and piercingly distorted instrumental sounds. Made notorious for acts of violence (murder, church burning) committed in the early 1990s by some of the genre’s founding members, black metal offers a rigid aesthetic of intractable atavism on behalf of a fanatical yet inarticulate agenda. Easily dismissed as a grab bag of Viking nostalgia, Satanic posturing, and dangerous racist fantasy, black metal would seem to epitomize the worst kind of reaction to the dilemmas of modernity: a virulently nihilistic refusal to be contemporary on behalf of an impossible, anachronistic pagan revolt.

Yet its agitation for a return to a past that never was seems to me to chime with Simon’s query about where, in contemporary art making, we might locate the utopian longing for “unrealizable ideas.” Here I want to mention in particular an American band actually called Liturgy, whose debut album, Renihilation (2009), seems to me to play out precisely the question of how to work through, and out of, the melancholy deadlock and cut the Gordian knot of originality/repetition.

Liturgy seeks to simultaneously fulfill and transcend the conventions of its chosen form. The tempos and sounds approximate black metal’s decades-old templates, churning and cycling around tightly cropped guitar and drum figures. Yet the emotional effect of this reenactment of a generic framework is reversed from within: relentless forward movement has been replaced by a spiraling blur of sound. Liturgy’s vocalist and guitarist Hunter Hunt-Hendrix recently published a manifesto titled “Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism” in (again improbably) the psychoanalytic journal Lacanian Ink. Hunt-Hendrix argues that traditional black metal is depressive, alienating, and hollowed out, whereas Liturgy’s music works through the deadness of its own form to reach a place that is “solar, hypertrophic, courageous, finite, and penultimate.” Neither a simple repetition of a past style nor an aggressive assertion of an impossible originality, Renihilation instead performs what the title invokes: the gratuitous, ludic gesture of killing what is already dead as a means of living in, through, and beyond that gesture. What looks like negativity (kitsch/pastiche) turns itself inside out and becomes a transcendent affirmation of potentiality.

PANELIST

John Malpede

Sometime after the original Godfather film, a friend of mine said something funny. We were hanging out when he asked, apropos of whatever we were talking about, “What do you get when you cross a semiotician with a mafioso?” “What?” “A proposition you can’t understand.”

Sometime within the last five years someone on the other side of the country told me the same thing. By then it was a joke. At the moment my friend made it up, it was just a funny thing but one that packed enough context with it so it was fit to travel. Because of that portability, it got repeated, traveled, got repeated, and found a place for itself in the culture so as to come back to me as anonymous, unattributable, but definitely a joke. In this case it took repetition for the utterance to achieve the status of minor artwork.

PANELIST

Amy Taubin

While I’d like to avoid philosophical argument, I’ve always thought that Kierkegaard’s “Platonizing line of thought” about love—and art as well—is a convoluted justification for the serial discarding of women (or works of art) on the grounds that they don’t measure up to an ideal. In any case, Simon’s opening post brings to mind a character who suffers from extreme “Platonism” in matters of romantic love and sexual desire: Scotty, the detective at the center of a film that resonantly evokes doubling, replication, and repetition-compulsion, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).

In Vertigo’s bifurcated, mirrored structure, a woman is made over into an image of ideal beauty not once but twice, by two different men. (The “original” woman is seen only for a second or two—as a corpse hurled from a church bell tower.) Regarded as middling when it was first released, Vertigo soon acquired a cult following among filmmakers, critics, and buffs. The film took on a fetishized status as Hitchcock withdrew it from circulation, forcing fans to seek out undercover screenings of privately held 16mm and 35mm copies of “the San Francisco film”—copies that became increasingly degraded by scratches, tears, and fading as the years wore on. In the 1980s Vertigo was legally rereleased, and in the decades that followed, a series of restorations appeared, each an “improvement” over the others thanks to digital technology. Some devotees longed for the damaged prints they first viewed, a material manifestation of Hitchcock’s vision of damaged and damaging love.

The film’s baroque plot has discouraged complete do-overs, but filmmakers from Brian De Palma to Alain Resnais have referenced Vertigo more than once. Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)—another film about fetishism, replication, failed resurrection, and murder—has inspired not only multiple sequels but an entire genre of films about knife-wielding killers, as well as works in loftier contexts. Gus Van Sant convinced Hollywood to finance his shot-for-shot Psycho remake. Yvonne Rainer placed a series of stills of the infamous shower sequence at the center of her Film About a Woman Who . . . (1974). And the artist Douglas Gordon appropriated Hitchcock’s film in its entirety, slowed to a speed of between one and three frames per second, in his 24 Hour Psycho (1993). In an interview Gordon told me that while visiting his parents he had used their VHS player to watch the movie in slo-mo, searching for a nonexistent image of Janet Leigh’s bare breast in the scene where Tony Perkins’s Norman Bates watches her through a peephole. Shall we now press pause to consider the effects of home video on repetition in works of art?

Or perhaps we should roll forward to Don DeLillo’s novel Point Omega (2010), which begins and ends in a museum where 24 Hour Psycho is installed. During the course of an unnamed viewer’s musing on his experience, couched in the third person, we have this: “Everybody was watching something. He was watching two men, they were watching the screen. Anthony Perkins at his peephole was watching Janet Leigh undress. Nobody was watching him. This was the ideal world as he might have drawn it in his mind.” Italics mine.

Comments

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Poppy wrote :

One small point of distinction to keep in mind might be that between replication and repetition. Replication implies (at least genetically, but in other arenas as well) a copying, or a reproduction in identical form. Recitations of the Iliad before it was codified in written form thus can be thought of as replications; it has been argued that although versions changed slightly, the overall goal was to preserve the original and hand it down intact with only minor variations through time. Repetition on the other hand can be thought of in terms of time itself. It is a reenactment. Repetition signals a going back, a duplication, but not a copying. The duplicate is itself temporary and must be repeated again. The danger in repetition, at least psychologically, is that it can be detrimental if not understood; repetition itself can be compulsive (note that repetition is not necessarily compulsion, it *can be* compul*sive*) and something that is not desired by the repeator. Replication, to me at least, has someone fewer negative connotations, but is actually entirely separate from repetition. Anyways, just some thoughts! Feel free to disagree/comment/etc.

Poppy posted on 06/21/10

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D. W. Spriggs wrote :

In the May 2010 issue of Artforum, reviewing the Whitney Biennial, Chus Martinez offered a nuanced discussion of the relationship between history and contemporanaeity. She comes at one point to focus on memory, in context of the work H. M. (2009) by Kerry Tribe. “To lose one’s memory is to lose not only the faculty of recalling information but the very capacity to imitate and hence to represent. In other words, mimesis is . . . history, since without a single stable representation of the present, the past would be impossible to grasp.”

I’d be curious to see if any of the panelists have thoughts on how we use repetition to frame the past and make it comprehensible to ourselves. In the Haunted exhibition at the Guggenheim, a good deal of the work makes use of these repetitive tropes—Sharon Hayes comes to mind, as do Demand and other reperformance works Professor During refers to. I feel as if I’ve rarely heard a clear articulation of possible impulses behind such works and their efficacies.

D. W. Spriggs posted on 06/21/10

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Larry Bole wrote :

In repetition, there is invariably variation: nothing is without change, even repetition.

Within the traditional technologies of art production, pretty much nothing these days can be done that hasn't been done in one way or another before. The best chance for genuine originality in art is the creation of new technologies, but even then, it's likely that some elements of the "original" art created with new technologies will repeat elements of existing art.

I will conclude with a stanza from Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "North Haven":

The Goldfinches are back, or others like them,
and the White-throated Sparrow's five-note song,
pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.
Nature repeats herself, or almost does:
'repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.'

Larry Bole posted on 06/21/10