Center for Historical Reenactments: Is The Tale Chasing Its Own Tail?

Khwezi Gule surveys the work of the Center for Historical Reenactments, studying their twofold impulse to revive the past and stage their own death. Over the last decade, writing, art-making, historicising, teaching, archiving and curating have been engaged in various acts of mutual cannibalism, disrupting the insularity of disciplines such as art history. This is also patent in the arena of what I would term ‘memory work’, referring to the myriad forms of institutional engagement with the past that take place in the public sphere, from memorials to public art projects and museums; all such edifices have developed discursive components, such as research projects, processes of public consultation, the recording of oral histories and event programming, in order to legitimize the public benefit of their enterprises. As a result, memory work has become highly specialised, highly lucrative, highly choreographed and highly policed. Mind you, this is taking place in a climate where, as far as the rhetoric goes, processes are open, transparent, participatory and democratic. In this knowledge economy, memory work exists partly as a strategy to privatise collective memory, and it serves in many instances to cement the authority of dominant voices. In the same way that the privileged global subject remains the Western white male in a world that is supposedly more plural and polyphonic, so too the white male artist remains the privileged subject in the post-apartheid art system of South Africa; indeed, a cursory look at public art projects realised there after 1994 reveals that most of them have been executed and commissioned by white male artists.