Usually the genre of rehearsal appears as a documented performance of the ‘making of’ in the sense of a (re-)presentation of a prrocess-based ‘in-the-making’ (e.g. in the sense of a repetitive learning exerzise). Since the rehearsal offers an ideal presentation medium for artistic labor and thus a format for redefining work and authorship, it reveals ‘classical’ tensions between individual and collaborative as well as between studio- and (back-)stage related types of production. As such the staged and/ or documented rehearsal appears to offer a reflexive perspective on the inte rrelations between the changing forms of organizing and presenting art: Conceived as both, as a tool for common experimentation as well as a way to articulate hierarchical role plays, the topos of rehearsal addresses manifold conflicts and contradictions characteristic especially for those (avantgarde) practices that situate themselves at the interfaces of art and life: Interfaces that are constructed by transdisciplinary references to theater, cinema, and music performance. Since the topos of rehearsal implies an awareness of social (self-)control its ongoing popularity obviously lies in its potential to getting in touch with the internalized mechanisms of the (neoliberal) evaluation society. Regarding the complexity and abiguities the topos of rehearsal represents the paper will discuss exemplary artistic models that match both, its function as a experimental site of (collaborative) work as well as a site of value production.

Sabeth Buchmann is art historian and critic, Berlin/ Vienna, Professor of the History of Modern and Postmodern Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Regular contributions for magazines, reader and monographs as well as for art and exhibition catalogues. Since 1998 she is board member of the Berlin based art magazine Texte zur Kunst. Together with Helmut Draxler, Clemens Krümmel, and Susanne Leeb she co-edits PoLyPen. a series on art criticism and political theory, published by b_books, Berlin). The last published book: Co-ed. with Ilse Lafer and Constanze Ruhm: Putting Rehearsals to the Test. Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film. Theater, Theory, and Politics, Berlin/ Vienna 2016 (in the context of the exhibition Putting Rehearsals to the Test at the Leonhard and Bina Ellen Gallery (Concordia University), the SBC Gallery and VOX - VOX - Centre de l’image contemporaine in Montréal. Earlier publications: Textile Theorien der Moderne. Alois Riegl in der Kunstkritik (ed. with Rike Frank), Berlin 2015), Hélio Oiticica, Neville D'Almeida and others: Block-Experiments in Cosmococa. London 2013 (with Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz ), and Film Avantgarde Biopolitik, Vienna 2009 (ed. with Helmut Draxler and Stephan Geene), Denken gegen das Denken. Produktion – Technologie – Subjektivität bei Sol LeWitt, Yvonne Rainer und Hélio Oiticica, Berlin 2007; Art After Conceptual Art (ed. with Alexander Alberrro), Cambridge/ Mass and Cologne 2006.