I read this article from the NY Times and thought is touched on Site Specific work. Three artist are going to recreate Kaprow’s ‘Yard’, one artist William L. Pope is going to recreate(or in Pope’s words he is going to reinvent) this in the actual site. Here is an excerpt about the curator:
“Helen Molesworth, the curator of contemporary art at the Harvard Art Museums, the three-pronged project raises intriguing philosophical questions, like how such reinventions relate to Kaprow’s legacy. Kaprow, who died in 2006, welcomed the re-creation of his works by others. He regarded his ephemeral productions as musical compositions that could be performed repeatedly by different players, and was happy for others to add their own improvisations. He himself reproduced “Yard” several times in other locations.“
The article also questions these 3 recreations, “what if Kaprow condones these reinventions?” and is this just a publicity stunt? (Which is something Kaprow avoided with his own work.) Pope’s reinvention of this piece entails a voice similar to Obama’s reading Kaprow’s instructions, which in my opinion is adding an entirely new element to the work. Even Pope himself is a politically charged individual, his presence changes the work. Kaprow wanted to create work outside of the context of the museum and gallery, although Pope is recreating the performance on the original site, today the site is a “Swiss mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth.”
I have been thinking about this notion of reinvention/recreations, I just heard in a lecture on Social Sculpture a few weeks ago at the BMoca, someone has recreated Joseph Beuys ‘7000 Oaks’ somewhere in America. Which is great because now we will have 1400 oak trees planted but is it the same thing as Beuys did? Does it have the same aura or essence? How many times can one art work be recreated? What if someone does Duchamp’s ‘ 1 mile of string’? Cornelia Parker did so by wrapping a mile of string around Rodin’s “The Kiss”, so can this be re-reinvented a second time?
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