History As An Experience To Be Had

“Beginning in the fall of 2011, the Getty’s massive initiative, Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 (PST) hit Los Angeles, unearthing with its powerful momentum a complex and generally dormant history of collaboration, collective energy, and performance. The context for a restorative project such as PST’s is fraught, at once raising questions about the critical potential of reperformance, the broader possibilities in re-visiting history, and the shifting function of curatorial practice, in which the production of experiences increasingly has come to be understood as a form of economic output. Looking to the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) programming for the exhibition, performance series, and publication project Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance Art in Southern California 1970–1983 (LAGL) as a key site for re-performance activity, my line of inquiry begins with the following question: How can the LACE commissions be understood as symptomatic of shifts in how histories, memories, and meaning are produced today?1 In short, how are we ‘feeling’ the world around us?”

In an extensive review of the sprawling performance program organized by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Hoetger takes up the concept of reperformance and the art historical discourses and market-oriented debates surrounding it.