Reviewed by:

• Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art by Mechtild Widrich
• Rebecca Jackson

Mechtild Widrich, professor of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, demonstrates in her scholarship the major overlap between performance studies and art history. Her first book, Performative Monuments (2014), expands traditional conceptions of monuments, theorizing that they work as speech-acts engendering community building, especially following historical atrocities. Her second book, Monumental Cares, is an appraisal of the materialization of public history through and by a multidirectional (as opposed to site-specific) approach that addresses how “real and digital sites overlap and connect in subtle, capillary ways” (34). Widrich’s conceptualization of art geographies (how the physical environment, culture, history, and social dynamics of a place influence the creation, interpretation, and representation of performance art) coupled with her discussion about transparency and opacity (via screens and mirrors) demonstrate how bodies (engaged in performance art) activate cultural memory as well as acts of commemoration and activism in twenty-first-century performance artworks. She is especially concerned with how we express public care and how we care about our monuments. Wid-rich’s work resides in the multidisciplinary realm of public history, performance, and contemporary art, and thus, she often infers co-performance without using that specific term. Instead, Widrich uses words like “co-produce” and “co-presence” to describe something that a performance scholar would label as “co-performance”—especially in alignment with Dwight Conquergood and D. Soyini Madison’s pioneering work on co-performance and critical ethnography. [End Page 261]

Monumental Cares contends that sites of contemporary art are also performances of history, activism, and commemoration and that these performances, as well as their documentation and ephemera, are the materials of history—the materialization of public memory and social justice. In crafting her thesis, Widrich engages with social justice activism, political art, performance studies, architectural studies, public history, and memory work under the umbrella of art history, theory and criticism. A brief introduction and a conclusion bookend six chapters that alternate between Widrich’s theories and her case-study analyses. The odd-numbered chapters, then, are quite dense with Widrich’s conceptions for how history materializes in public performance/contemporary art, and the even-numbered chapters are more easily digestible in her theoretical analyses of her well-chosen examples.

Widrich begins chapter 1 by arguing that acts of commemoration should carefully consider “the complex site-directedness of much recent public art” (55). She sets the stage to contend that site-specificity is relational and therefore should be viewed and understood from a multidirectional standpoint. Relational-site-specificity becomes a methodology for performing identity. Commemoration relies on embodied acts and material culture to strengthen historical narratives or memories of the past resurrected in the present. Our embodiment of public memory through acts of commemoration helps shape our cultural identities in the present. Wid-rich employs a theory of multidirectionality to explore how commemorative acts can be reexamined through mediation and interpreted in an expanded consideration of site discourse. Additionally, she urges the reader to contemplate how people come to a site, whether physically or mediated, a process she describes as a “shuttling between the physical and the digital public sphere” (33-34). “[A]ttending to this kind of layered directionality,” Widrich writes, “will allow us to understand how physical and virtual sites are entangled in our conception of time and space, materializing history on the ground, online, in reception and scholarship” (44). She is concerned with how bodies come to sites and how co-performing with these sites materializes public history.

Public history practices like museum curation, monument building (and visiting), representation in film and television shows, and commemorative acts create and sustain dominant narratives of history that also solidify cultural memories of the past in the present. Adopting a method of multidirectionality forces us to examine how people come to a site and how to “grapple with inclusions and exclusions, restrictions and opportunities, bodily representation and its material alternatives” so that we may glean...

 审阅者：

• 
  纪念性的关怀：历史和当代艺术遗址，梅希蒂尔德·维德里奇 (Mechtild Widrich)
•  丽贝卡·杰克逊

芝加哥艺术学院艺术史、理论和批评教授 Mechtild Widrich 在她的学术研究中证明了表演研究和艺术史之间的主要重叠。她的第一本书《表演性纪念碑》（Performative Monuments，2014）扩展了纪念碑的传统概念，理论认为它们作为言语行为促进社区建设，尤其是在历史暴行之后。她的第二本书《纪念性的关怀》（Monumental Cares）通过多向（而不是针对特定地点）方法对公共历史的物化进行了评估，该方法解决了“真实和数字站点如何以微妙、毛细管方式重叠和连接”（34） 。维德里奇对艺术地理学的概念化（一个地方的自然环境、文化、历史和社会动态如何影响表演艺术的创作、解释和表现），加上她对透明度和不透明度（通过屏幕和镜子）的讨论，展示了身体如何（从事行为艺术）在二十一世纪的行为艺术作品中激活文化记忆以及纪念行为和行动主义。她特别关心我们如何表达公众关怀以及我们如何关心我们的纪念碑。维德-里奇的作品属于公共历史、表演和当代艺术的多学科领域，因此，她经常在不使用特定术语的情况下推断共同表演。相反，维德里奇使用“共同制作”和“共同在场”等词来描述表演学者将其标记为“共同表演”的事物，特别是与德怀特·康奎古德和 D.索伊尼·麦迪逊关于共同表演的开创性工作相一致和批判的民族志。 [完第261页]

纪念碑关怀认为，当代艺术场所也是历史、行动主义和纪念的表演，这些表演及其记录和短暂的事件都是历史的材料——公共记忆和社会正义的物化。在撰写论文时，维德里奇在艺术史、理论和批评的框架下参与了社会正义行动主义、政治艺术、表演研究、建筑研究、公共历史和记忆工作。简短的介绍和结论分为六章，交替显示维德里奇的理论和案例研究分析。因此，奇数章节充满了维德里奇关于历史如何在公共表演/当代艺术中具体化的概念，而偶数章节在她对精心挑选的例子的理论分析中更容易理解。

维德里奇在第一章开始时指出，纪念活动应该仔细考虑“许多近期公共艺术的复杂的场地导向性”（55）。她奠定了基础，主张场地特异性是相关的，因此应该从多方向的角度来看待和理解。关系站点特异性成为执行身份的方法。纪念依靠具体的行为和物质文化来强化历史叙事或在当下复活的过去记忆。我们通过纪念活动体现公共记忆有助于塑造我们当前的文化身份。 Wid-rich 采用多向性理论来探索如何通过调解重新审视纪念行为，并在对现场话语的扩展考虑中进行解释。此外，她敦促读者思考人们如何访问某个网站，无论是通过物理方式还是通过媒介方式，她将这一过程描述为“在物理和数字公共领域之间穿梭”（33-34）。 “关注这种分层的方向性，”维德里奇写道，“将使我们能够理解物理和虚拟站点如何与我们的时间和空间概念纠缠在一起，从而在地面、在线、接待和学术方面具体化历史” (44)。她关心尸体如何来到遗址，以及与这些遗址的合作如何实现公共历史。

博物馆管理、纪念碑建造（和参观）、电影和电视节目中的再现以及纪念活动等公共历史实践创造并维持了历史的主导叙事，同时也巩固了现在对过去的文化记忆。采用多向性方法迫使我们审视人们如何来到一个地点，以及如何“应对包容与排除、限制与机会、身体代表及其物质替代品”，以便我们可以收集……