Repo history : DIY history and counter signs

There were calls for a new historiography. 
We would emphasize 
“an understanding of history 
as something that is created and
 transmitted by the people” 
along the lines of Howard Zinn’s 
“A People’s History of the United States”.^[1]

REPOhistory, short for Repossessing History^[1] was a collective founded in 1989 in New York that aimed to question the writing of history. Made up of artists, writers, teachers and activists working in conjunction with historians, this group was active from 1989 to 2000 and produced around ten collaborative and site-specific projects in New York and other cities in the United States.
For over ten years, they developed writing and transmission strategies through collective and participatory action that challenged the “classic” ways of writing historical narratives.

Initially, this research revolved around discussions with former members of the group so as to understand the context out of which REPOhistory had emerged and which had prompted its development. It then went on to analyze the methods tried out by the collective, focusing on projects in the public space. A series of interviews were therefore held in New York with Betti-Sue Hertz (artist and working now as an art curator), Neill Bogan (artist), Tom Klem (artist and President of the Association of American Magicians), Gregory Sholette (artist, writer, teacher and activist), Todd Ayoung (artist, teacher and activist), George Spencer (artist), Mark O’Brien (artist and lawyer) and Jim Costanzo (artist and teacher). These eight^[2] people who helped to create REPOhistory made up what might be called the group’s “steering committee”. Although interviewed individually, they were all asked a set of identical questions^[3], which were then varied depending on the speaker and the conversation. This was primarily to be able to appreciate the context and to give a voice to the different people in the group, with their areas of common ground and collective differences.

In this article, additions in grey on the right-hand side of the pages are notes – other possible approaches to context, source or action – collected for the most part during these interviews or found in the archives given to the Fales Library of the University of New York in 2000 by REPOhistory and stored since then in its “Downtown Collection” ^[4].

I – SIGNIFICANCE, HYPOTHESES AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS 

Given the profusion of current art practices concerned with history, historiography and memory, and artists’ use of appropriation, re-enactment and archival images, it appears significant to look more closely at the work of this collective, which consistently called for new ways of representing history in the early 1990s, in order to understand its context of utterance and operating methods.
Through its ten years of public art activity, the group‘s various projects can perhaps shed light on the artistic, social, political and economic context of the time and help to explain why a need to “repossess” history was felt since the late 1980s.
The first working hypothesis is that 1989, the year that saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the “official” founding of REPOhistory, could have been a key factor in the creation of the group. The second hypothesis is that the collective’s working practices in the public space offered direct interaction between local people and so-called”minority” and/or “community” histories that had been forgotten for various reasons. If historiographical practice is discursive, contextualized and above all interpretative, is it possible to consider other ways of recording history? And if there is not just one way but many ways of writing history, then what methods, forms or formats were used by REPOhistory? Do these methods contribute to the writing of historical narratives?
If we define curatorial practice as the production of connections (between different pieces, artists, contexts, places etc.), more than as collection, organization and communication, what is important here is to try to comprehend the group’s practices and the context of its emergence in order perhaps to gain an understanding of contemporary artistic practices.

II – HISTORICAL CONTEXT

“The proliferation of alternative spaces and groups was time – and context -based. A convergence of socioeconomic factors fostered cultural production in New York City. These factors included an abundance (some would say an overabundance) of artists; a culturally, racially, and ethnically diverse urban population in flux; the political context of various civil rights and liberation struggles; the availability of affordable residential and commercial rents; a plethora of neglected or underutilized urban sites – spaces and places in transition; an unrestricted public sphere (as compared to the present); the growth of public funding for culture; and the city’s status as a powerful art center.”^[5]
Taking advantage of very cheap rents or vacant sites, spaces like Apple, El Museo del Barrio, Printed Matter and the Women’s Interart Center, among others, started up right at the end of the 1960s in a city then on the edge of bankruptcy. Places such as the Alternative Museum, dedicated to political art or works on social themes, Franklin Furnace – for the “promotion of the avant-garde scene” – or ABC No Rio, a center committed to political and social activism that supported a range of projects and political activities (the latter two are still active today), emerged in the mid-1970s and gave artists, regardless of race, gender or nationality, the opportunity to exhibit their work in spaces designed and run by artists.
Politically engaged groups such as Carnival Knowledge (a pro-abortion feminist art collective) or Artists’ Call against U.S. Intervention in Central America^[6] were also set up at the same time and published newsletters, realized public art projects and formed Punk or Rock bands, while groups such as COLAB or the Guerrilla Art Action Group produced politically-motivated artistic work. It was in this context that the art historian and activist Lucy Lippard, together with the artists Irving Wexler, Herb Perr, Gregory Sholette, Elizabeth Kulas and Jerry Kearns, among others, formed the group Political Art Documentation and Distribution (PADD) in 1980. Defining itself as “a progressive artist’s resource and networking organization seeking to provide artists with an organized relationship to society and demonstrate the political effectiveness of image making”^[7], PADD published about ten issues of its newsletter over the course of eight years. Defending the work of artists’ collectives, questioning education in schools (through actions such as the experiment led by Tom Rollins with K.O.S. in the Bronx^[8]) and rebelling against the rapid gentrification of Manhattan at the time, PADD was a mouthpiece for many artists and organized various projects and exhibitions in the public arena in parallel with the publication of its newsletter. After PADD was wound up in 1988, certain members continued to meet and some helped to form the collective the History Group, soon renamed REPOhistory in 1989^[9].

III – REPOHISTORY

Between 1989 and 1992, REPOhistory (which had between six^[10] and around fifty members depending on the projects) was mainly a study group that met regularly at the home of Carin Kuoni (curator) to read the theories of Karl Marx, Gilles Deleuze, Edward Said, Eduardo Galeano, Hayden White and Michel Foucault and more particularly to study the texts “On the Concept of History” by Walter Benjamin and Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”, major reference works for the collective.
Between 1992 and 2000, the group realized six major public art projects (The Lower Manhattan Sign Project in 1992 and Queer Space in 1994 in Manhattan, Entering Buttermilk Bottom in 1995/96, followed by Voices of Renewal in 1997 in Atlanta, Out From Under King George Hotel in 1998 in Houston and Civil Disturbances: Battle for Justice in NYC in New York in 1998/99), as well as two exhibitions in New York: Choice Histories: Framing Abortion in 1992/93 and Circulation in 2000, which was the group’s last project.
Although the group’s interest in history and its representation was as diverse as its members, two contextual factors could be seen as key to the emergence of the REPOhistory collective. First, the report “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform”, commissioned in 1983 by Ronald Reagan, US president from 1981 to 1989, painted a devastating portrait of the education provided across the country. Especially critical of high school education (23 million illiterate adults and less than 50% of seventeen year olds could write an essay in 1983), this report catapulted education into the media spotlight, and large-scale reforms of school textbooks were launched throughout the country. Some REPOhistory members who were also teachers or educators concerned by these issues, followed with interest – and not without some skepticism – the surrounding debates and the development of the new textbooks (notably for history) in the state of California, the first state to adopt the reforms in 1989. The second important factor was the exhibition “Points of Reference 38/88” organized by Werner Fenz in Graz, Austria, about which REPOhistory had heard through Hans Haacke, a former teacher of some of the members, who was taking part in it. In 1988, Werner Fenz, then curator of the Neue Galerie in Graz, was asked to organize an event to take place during the “Styrian Autumn” festival – the theme of which was the 50th “anniversary” of the annexation of Austria by Hitler in 1938 – with fourteen artists being asked to participate. “Points of Reference aims to challenge artists to confront history, politics, and society, and thus to regain intellectual territory which has been surrendered to everyday indifference in a tactical retreat, a retreat that has been continual, unconscious, and manipulated. […] Points of Reference would like to avoid spectacular, artistic decorations of the city; it considers public space not as a museum without walls but as an intellectual space of action, so that technocratic-normative control can be resisted, at least temporarily.”^[11]
In line with the thinking of the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, Fenz defined urban space as a political and social space, not just a standardized, industrialized space, where one can only consume or promote consumption, but a political space where interaction with history, be it engraved in squares or on monuments, would be possible.

IV – STRATEGIES   

In 1992, when REPOhistory carried out its first public art project, it defined its action as follows:
“REPOhistory is a collective of visual and media artists, writers, performers and educators of diverse backgrounds. Our name comes from the notion of “repossessing history”. We work to reclaim the past and re-present it as a multilayered, living narrative that includes the untold stories of those who have been marginalized or disenfranchised because of their class, race, gender or sexuality. Histories are written by specific individuals who represent a particular class, ethnic group, or political interest. REPOhistory seeks to question how history is constructed, to demystify the official versions, and insert the stories, peoples and events which have been omitted. Our intent is not to substitute “our version” for “their version” but to provoke critical and multiple readings.”^[12]
This declaration was followed by a list of questions, used on all of the group’s communication supports: “How do you know the past? Whose history is remembered? Do other stories go untold? Is this an historic site? Who makes use of this history? Is history truth or desire? Can memory be colonized? What does this place mean to you? What meanings do you bring to this place? Is history progress or power?”

The emergence of postcolonial studies in America in the 1980s, which subsequently gained ground in the 1990s, also appears to have influenced the collective and encouraged its members to rethink the historical heritage of their country and identify power relations at work in the public space. It’s therefore clear that they were also familiar with Spivak’s thinking on the issue of historiography and minorities: 
“As a postcolonial, I am concerned with the appropriation of alternatives history or histories. I am not a historian by training. I cannot claim disciplinary expertise in remaking history in the sense of rewriting it. But I can be used as an example of how historical narratives are negotiated.”^[13]
Through taking into account the “marginalized” aspects of historical narratives, excluded because not connected to the place where they originated or to the identities present, REPOhistory provided the opportunity to put into practice the thinking of Michel De Certeau through the return of “ “survivals” or delays that discreetly perturb the well-ordered line of “progress” or of a system of interpretation”. ^[14]
Consequently, it was less a question of re-writing historical narratives than of opening up discursive spaces in the public sphere. By presenting minor histories in the streets of New York, the members of REPOhistory were confronted with what Werner Fenz spoke of in 1988 during the exhibition in Graz: the public arena as a political space that excludes “neither a connection with the past nor a projection into the future, nor a confrontation with the present.” ^[15]

Mention should also be made here of the text (found in the REPOhistory archives) by the American sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod “On the Remaking of History, How to Reinvent the Past,” published in 1987 to coincide with a program of readings, debates and conferences on the difference between historical and sociological narratives. “The lesson for historical investigation is clear. Any history of “the other” or of a “world system” written from the perspective of only one actor or society can be only a partial telling of the storia, regardless of its erudition.”^[16

V – METHODS: HISTORICAL MARKERS AND COUNTER SIGNS

The group’s first ideas for public art projects are quite entertaining and belong to the “anti-monument” genre (which could be defined as actions or performances that reject the notion of the memorial as an emblem of power, whether state-controlled or otherwise): “Create a mobile counter-theme parks”, “adding our own “subversive” texts to “official sites” or “create inflatable counter-monuments and inflate as guerrilla action”.^[17]
In 1990, after much debate, the group finally decided to adopt the following course of action:
“We propose that the group coordinate a project that would play off the plaques put up by the NY Landmarks Preservation Foundation which designate “historic districts”. The existing markers are generally hung on lampposts, and have a text on one side explaining the history and the architecture of the neighborhood. The reverse side has a map. […] we would fabricate and install our own alongside these, or we would add new counterpoint to the existing text or we could insert missing historical information.”^[18] Although public art projects were not particularly new, given that Jenny Holzer, Gran Fury or the artist Edgar Heap of Birds, among others, had already carried out actions in public spaces in New York before REPOhistory, it was the idea of producing identical copies of “official” historical markers that made REPOhistory unique.
For each project, through a kind of “parasitic strategy”, they set up a network of historical markers, which, though conveying real facts, would have been considered too specific and too community- or politically-oriented to be installed as “official” historical markers by a city or a state. Expressing clearly subjective viewpoints based on their own backgrounds or experiences and set in a given time and space, the members created an ephemeral commemorative system, using their own display methods.
Except for the two exhibitions, the group deliberately chose to carry out their actions outside the usual art venues so that they could speak directly to a district’s residents and workers, as well as to tourists, REPOhistory’s primary audience. Although this course of action enabled them to reach a greater number of people, it was perhaps also partly responsible for their lack of public recognition sixteen years later^[19], making their actions and forms difficult to identify outside the specific context for which they were created, often being classed as political activism.

VI – AN EXAMPLE: CIVIL DISTURBANCES: BATTLE FOR JUSTICE IN NYC

Civil Disturbances: Battle for Justice in NYC was one of the projects that best reflected the collective’s use of historical markers as a means of “disturbing the present”. A collaborative project between REPOhistory and the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, (one of the first non-profit, public interest law firms in New York), “Civil Disturbances commemorates both the achievements and unfinished work in the battle for social justice in the City of New York. The project consists of twenty signs containing images and text that have been posted at pertinent sites around the City of New York. The signs commemorate landmark public interest law suits and a number of legal struggles still under way.”^[20]

The twenty signs were put up in Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, depending on the cases chosen by the REPOhistory artists, and a copy of each was also installed near the different courthouses in CentreStreet and Chambers Street in Manhattan between 1998 and 1999. On the actual morning of the opening, the Giuliani administration (mayor of New York from 1994 to 2001), tried to suppress the project, asking REPOhistory to remove the signs. As the permit had already been issued by the New York City Department of Transportation, the project eventually took place but not without some difficulty: it took three months of negotiations with the city, as well as the threat of legal action and of extensive coverage in the local press. Out of the twenty artists’ projects involved in the project, a dozen disappeared from circulation in the weeks following their installation.
The sign designed by the artist Marina Gutierrez, “Ending Discrimination in Public Housing: Williamsburg Fair Housing v. NYCHA”, commemorated a series of lawsuits filed over the previous twenty years by the Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation against the New York City Housing Authority. 
“Since the 1960s, the NYC Housing Authority and other subsidized housing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn have used quotas to ensure that up to 75% of tenants were Hasidic, even though white families make up less than 10% of the waiting list”, thus establishing a very large Hasidic Jewish community at the expense of other ethnic groups in the Williamsburg district. This panel was installed right where the quotas were being implemented, making the area’s residents particularly uncomfortable and local politicians furious.
Signs put up in other districts also posed problems. Neill Bogan and Irene Ledwith’s marker commemorated one of the first HIV/AIDS discrimination lawsuits in the heart of Greenwich Village (a district that now has one of the largest gay populations in New York), while the sign by the artist Janet Koenig commemorating the law enacted by the Bush administration in 1990 that prohibits discrimination based on disability in all public institutions and services, indicated that the Empire State Building had finally been equipped with an elevator in 1994. The former sign was highly unpopular with local inhabitants, while staff of the Empire State Building took down the second.

Despite the fact that these projects were discussed in advance with local community organizations, and that no Civil Disturbances signs accused anyone personally, merely relating facts, tensions ran high throughout the year in which the signs were displayed. “Civil Disturbances also revealed something basic to what I think REPOhistory was trying to accomplish. As if to illustrate Walter Benjamin’s thesis that “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” REPOhistory discovered that it could be politically provocative in the present by invoking the past.”^[21]

VII – CONCLUSION 

The significance of focusing on the projects that REPOhistory carried out in public locations lies in the fact that they gradually perfected a DIY approach to history. Although the artists checked the accuracy of the facts given on their signs with historians, or asked them for advice on historical research methods and where to find different sources, they worked with a freedom of means, subjects, hypotheses and formats that was unthinkable for historians.
Influenced particularly by DIY, which emerged in the 1970s, along with the punk movement and postcolonial studies – as evidenced by the texts and conversations found in the archives – REPOhistory sought to visually and spatially represent localized narratives, which, though sometimes anecdotal, nevertheless influenced people’s interpretation of the history of a district or community and provoked some fairly violent reactions. Drawing inspiration from their daily lives or from news items for their questioning, the artists proposed art projects in the form of “mock institutions” in reaction to the under-representation of certain segments of the community in historiographical narratives.
It was therefore not so much the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing end of the Cold War that influenced the group but more the social, political and above all artistic context of the day in the United States. It is interesting to note that the 1990s were a fertile ground for such practices, since in 1992/93, the same year as REPOhistory’s first public art action, the German artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, responding to a call for projects by the city of Berlin, designed “Places of Remembrance”, the installation in the public space of a decentralized “memorial”, comprising eighty metal signs, hung from lampposts, bearing condensed versions of anti-Jewish Nazi rules and regulations passed between 1933 and 1945. Although they used the same strategies as REPOhistory (public spaces, places of remembrance, appropriation of “official” markers) at practically the same time, though in a completely different context, the two groups were unaware of each other’s existence, and emerged simultaneously with similar strategies.

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^[1] The name of the collective was inspired by the “punk” film Repo Man, directed in 1984 by Alex Cox and whose main character is Otto Maddox, a young punk rocker and typical loser living in Los Angeles. He’s hired by a repossession agency to seize cars and other goods from people who can no longer afford their repayments. Based on this scenario, REPOhistory wanted to invert the repossession tendency by taking the place of these “repo men” to collect and take possession of unofficial stories and then re-insert them publicly into history. “Repo-men, and women, are the bane of the working class, which is today synonymous with the “indebted” class. They work for collection agencies that repossess automobiles and other items from people who cannot keep up with their monthly payments. Our idea was to invert this concept by becoming the “Repo” men and women of un-official history, including working class and women’s histories. We would scout-out those narratives that have dropped out of, or have been suppressed by, dominant history, temporarily take ownership of these omissions, then re-insert them into a common, public setting.” Extract from an interview with Gregory Sholette by Dipti Desai, History that disturbs the present: An interview about REPOhistory with Greg Sholette, New York, April 2007, p. 11

^[2] Missing from this list are artists Lisa Maya Knauer and Janet Koenig, two founding members who have not so far been interviewed.

^[3] The following questions were asked: “I’m interested in the history of REPOhistory; the who, what, when, where, how and why? What was the economic, artistic, social and political context of the time and did this have an impact on REPOhistory? What was the relationship with what later became known as the “downtown art scene”? How did the group function? How and why did you become involved in it? Is it true to say that REPOhistory’s “mission” was to “develop site-specific and informative work about unknown or forgotten stories of working class men and women, minorities and children”? How did you proceed? Why question the writing of history? Why use historical markers, make and distribute free city maps and use the mass media? Why did you work in the public space? Can any historical markers still be seen in New York today?”

^[4] “The Downtown Collection, which was founded in 1993, documents the downtown arts scene that evolved in SoHo and the Lower East Side during the 1970s through the early 1990s. During this time, an explosion of artistic creativity radically challenged and changed traditional literature, music, theater, performance, film, activism, dance, photography, video, and other art practices.” Source: http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/fales/downtown.html 

^[5] Julie Ault, Alternative Art New York, 1965-1985, ed. Julie Ault, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2002. p. 6

^[6]  A mobilization of artists and intellectuals protesting against the US government’s economic policies and military intervention in Central and Latin America

^[7] Julie Ault, “Alternative Art New York, 1965-1985”, ed. Julie Ault, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2002. p. 61

^[8]  Tim Rollins & K.O.S. (Kids of Survival), a collective founded in 1980, developed a socio-political approach to education and art, through which “at-risk” students produced artworks based on their readings of English language literary classics, thus creating a dialogue between traditional and street culture, between erudition and spontaneous work.

^[9] On this subject, Lucy Lippard says in a conversation with Julie Ault that she couldn’t talk to an artist at that time without founding a collective.

^[10] The founding members, or those involved in most of the projects and/or the running of REPOhistory are considered to be: Gregory Sholette, Tess Simony, Tom Klem, Carin Kuoni, Todd Ayoung, Betty Sue Hertz, Lisa Knauer, Janet Koenig, George Spencer and Neill Bogan.

^[11]  Werner Fenz, Protocols of the Exhibition, “Points of Reference 38/88”, October (spring 1989), vol. 48, p. 71; translated from the German by Maria-Regina Kecht

^[12] The Lower Manhattan Sign Project, June 27, 1992 to June 30, 1993, ed. REPOhistory, New York, 1993, p. 14

^[13]  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Who Claims Alterity?” in Remaking History, ed. Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (Dia Art Foundation, Discussions in Contemporary Culture 4, Seattle, Bay Press, 1989), p. 269

^[14] “”survivances” ou des retards qui troublent discrètement la belle ordonnance d’un “progrès” ou d’un système d’interprétation.” Michel de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, éditions Gallimard, Paris 2007, p. 17

^[15] Werner Fenz, Protocols of the Exhibition, “Points of Reference 38/88”, October (spring 1989), vol. 48, p. 72; translated from the German by Maria-Regina Kecht

^[16] Janet Abu-Lughod, “On the Remaking of History: How to Reinvent the Past”, in Remaking History, ed. Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (Dia Art Foundation, Discussions in Contemporary Culture 4, Seattle, Bay Press, 1989), p. 112; in Box 10, S. IV, Folder 24, Fales Library, New York

^[17] REPOhistory record, version II, May 1999, G.S, REPOhistory archives, box n°13, folder 12, Fales Library, New York

^[18] Ibid. 

^[19] Apart from a few articles in the New York press at the time, an interview with Dipti Desai, (“History that disturbs the present: An interview about REPOhistory with Greg Sholette”, April 26, 2007, New York) and a few exhibitions (notably “The Power of the City / The City of Power” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in which the group participated in 1992), REPOhistory’s work is still not widely known, either in the United States or Europe.

^[20] Matthew Diller, Introduction to Civil Disturbances: Battle for Justice in New York City, Fordham Urban Law Journal, n°5, May 1999, New York, p. 1317

^[21] Dipti Desai, History that disturbs the present: An interview about REPOhistory with Greg Sholette, New York, 2007, pp. 13-14.

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^[1]  Lucy Lippard, “Anti-Amnesia”, The Lower Manhattan Sign Project, REPOhistory, New York, 1993, p. 7