...MATTERS?
'Humanity, to rejoin the past, must invent a second naiveté, without which the arts can never begin again.' (after Cioran: 45)
Theatre and art renewed with a certain entertainment that is almost unbearably kitsch, ridiculous, painfully irritating. Something one refuses to laugh at, barely entertain, that nevertheless erupts: an itch, a bout of giggles, an unwanted play of the senses. It comes and disturbs - in shock, anger and upset - the orderly gatekeepers, and however much you attempt to ignore it, it digs itself deep and deeper into your body.
'...the product of a process of deviation from the rule-governed and falsifiable practices, an overflowing (débordement) of the common in a particular position.’ (De Certeau: 5)
There was once a red haired man who lived in Central Square. There, in the main square, somewhere where he slept, the artist R. Lee Fuchs came. He came and asked the red haired man if he'd be a bear. A laughing bear for just one hour.
So the red haired man, who had no name, laughed for an hour. But he didn't stop. He went on laughing all day and all night and on until morning. Until someone arrived and punched him in the face. Punched him so hard that he stopped laughing. In fact he stopped everything and sat down to cry. There in the middle of the Main Square he sat, his face all red with tears, and the passersby crowded round. They crowded round him and laughed. They laughed at the red haired man. That little man who had thought - 'I was the laughing bear' - that stupid, red haired laughing bear.
'The argument here then,...is that theatre does not represent life so much as conceal and then, on more or less special occasions reveal it through us, rather than to us. ....life itself is an affect that performance makes manifest through a process of hide and seek, excitation and pleasure. This is why theatre is always a simultaneous binding and unraveling of instances of intimacy and engagement.' (Read: 69-70)
A feeling of hollowness, even of total rejection. Nothing can prepare yourself for it. Nothing undo the injustice, the sheer wrongness of the moment. The strange comedy, the pathetic turns of phrase, the embarrassment and humiliation. Dropping things, backing into objects, stumbling and turning.
'...what is important isn't his (Sartre's) intention per se, nor is it, as elsewhere, his attempt to correct 'non-knowing' with something more "rational" (a correction or modulation that Bataille doesn't simply repudiate). No, what is important here is that, obliquely and from a distance, as it were, Sartre approaches the necessity of thinking concealed thinking: the sense of this naked absence of sense that we ultimately know and share as our very nudity, humbly yet gladly, in the everyday or in what is truely exceptional.' (Nancy 2003: 47)
Opening a deadman's case and using a deadman's tools and drawing on his paper.
‘The mimetic element in language can, like a flame, manifest itself only through a kind of bearer [Träger]. This bearer is the semiotic element. Thus, the nexus of meaning of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears. For its production by man – like its perception by him – is in many cases, particularly the most important, tied to its flashing up. It flits past [sie hauscht vorbei].’ (Benjamin: 1999)
Performance
Enhancements and Permissions:
Licensed Pleasure?
Who decides whether we can touch the
merchandise, feel the cloth, prod the bread or taste any of the assembled produce? Who
gives us license to bargain, to run our hands over the garments displayed on
the long wheeled rails, or take off our shirt and exchange it for another one
more colourful, try on these boots for size and comfort, before we walk away?
And what permissions do we require to say exactly what we need to, or what we
feel, to rob the street of its orderly hubhub for a moment, calling out across
the street, crying out, even screaming? Across public spaces with their
interminable rules and regulations, with their semi-private and proscribed
communities of operations, the wandering body enters, searching for its place,
any place, some place, to play a part. A virus in the body politic, an
impermissible cancer, a stinking gorge of bile, come to disturb the consensual
peace. Or to perform an entertainment, a service toward the common good, in dissensus…
So here we gathered, a ragbag of individuals with all
their competing practices, for a few hours collected together with a common
goal, in a common space, overturning the commonplace with our affects. No one
gave us permission to take over the covered streets of the market, to enter
other stalls and jostle, to spill out onto the street and enter/taint. We
invited ourselves, enticed by the possibility of reaching a public, any public,
an improvised audience, who carried in them no particular prejudice, not yet
having cultivated that sense of distance required of the real consumer of art. We
came together tentatively, to nourish and cultivate a common space, in an
exchange with others, who were not completely jaded, or inoculated to the
potential in art to create change. In this way then, announced to all in its
founding principle – ridiculous in its grandness – the Commonist Gallery/Art
Agora, there is an echo of a promise, of another
way of doing, thinking and being, lurking behind the pretense; to gain a
purchase on the real and turn words into actions, actions into words, which
have the potential and effect of altering the actual material and meaning of
life. This is no longer commentary, no longer simply representing, but
altering, metamorphosing, struggling and:
“Its legitimacy
lies in its formal approaches to public discourse in the creation of an agora
that exists as a market for the trading of ideas, practices and initiatives;
providing proofs for the efficacy and relevance of certain artistic and
universal truths.” (Art Agora/Commonist Gallery 2010)
These artistic and universal truths,
whatever we claim, infect each other, intermingle, calling forth dissent and
argument. In this contamination between art and the everyday there is a questioning
of the very foundations, the authenticity and relevance of contemporary art
practices, that make a claim on the social space without acknowledging the
structures of power and privilege that have permitted such practices to take
place.
Performance enhanced - a theatre of
engagement:
“…art ‘out of
the gallery’ and apparently or even intentionally radical ‘edgy’ art becomes
marketable – a humiliation of the labour of the artist. Recuperation happens so
quickly… Freedom for anyone to make art is tied to other freedoms and
restrictions imposed through the systems of wealth/property ownership/land
enclosure. So, physical freedoms, of the body as well as time to dream…. who
has a right to occupy spaces for living, working, studio, study, learning and
so on.” (Anne Robinson: ArtAgora 2011)
How much allowance should we give to the
cyclist racing up a mountain after twelve days of cycling, belaboured by aches,
exhausted by the hundreds of kilometres already covered, and thinking ahead of
the thousand kilometres still to be negotiated. And all without injury, or
without appearing to be at the end of your tether, while racing at speeds that
the ordinary mortal cyclist can only dream of. Like automata they grind on, and
all their toilet stops, the feeding, the emergency repairs, vomit and diarrhoea
hidden from prying eyes, expunged from the media. All we hear and allowed to
see, is their heroic exploits. Yet do we not know, from the earliest
concoctions of cocaine, painkiller and caffeine, to the cocktails of amphetimine
and steroid, the deceptions in all the performance enhancing substances that go
into an efficient training regime? And even if we still pretend not to know, we
are not to be taken in, for we know what is permissible within the limits of
the sport, and can still enjoy the spectacle, feel the pain, the misery of
those who fall by the wayside, the small triumphs of that day’s winner, all
completed with the appropriate amount of performance enhancing drugs and
performance enhancing regimen.
But it seems eventually, inevitably that these
performance enhancements place the athletes in an impossible situation, whether
to carry on taking it, and taking us, the public in, or by saying no,
destroying the illusion of a sport built on courage, commitment, endurance and
selfless heroism. Who would allow themselves to tell the truth, the unvarnished
truth, and at what cost. In fact it is all about calculation and a certain
cunning, who has been given the right to win, who placed highly by dint of
influence, by seniority, and therefore who must keep going playing their part,
whatever the part, but some part, in the great machinery of the Tour de France
or the Tour de Italie or some such extraordinary human spectacle. You must not
be seen to be destabilizing the order of the game. For the game is to make it
seem all extraordinarily authentic, to engage all the tropes of a theatre that
not only reproduces the real, but is more real,
more extreme than the run of the mill, the mere everyday. And so we give our
consent to these gods, these masters of the universe, to go on and on,
enhancing their performances and our expectations with imaginary inhumane
feats. For how much freedom do any of us have, and if and when we do, how
should we exercise that freedom?
The effect of affect.
“This particular
reading of political theory as aesthetic discourse is flawed because it only
takes into account the end of times, it demands a state of immediate immanence
without any precursor. There need be no struggle only the enjoyment of all
things now that everything is permitted and nothing true. But this in not the
case, everything is not permitted, the revolution did not succeed, it was
co-opted, repackaged, and sold back to us. We have been tricked. The
disinterested blankness of the ironic pose permits everything except time and
commitment, enthusiasm is not allowed as the god is dead and will ride no
more.” (Jon Traynor: ArtAgora 2011)
This artwork made without permission, taken
outside the bounds of what has been ordinarily or exceptionally allowed,
shudders unannounced into the public realm. It is a clandestine art, that knows
its place is to be unplaceable, unlicenced, unpermitted, to go uninvited to
meet its public, whoever they maybe, and surprise, delight, confuse, engage (Thomas
Schlesser 2011). It must be given some light frame, some improvisation will do
or even some enthusiasm, but it requires no formal announcements, no
pre-marketing, no overt signposting. That would only give the game away, before
it had properly commenced. For it is not enough for it to exist, it must be
infiltrated into the rhythm and intensities of the street, into the virtual,
the semi public/private arenas of our interconnected disembodied lives. The
uninvited guest will perform for you now, and curiously it is more intense,
more consuming, more irritating – like illicit pleasures, stumbling upon
something impermissible, and yet entirely un/missable. The effect of these
affects is hard to quantify, but its quality is woven into the fabric of the
body, every body and it reverberates after and into the future, reminds us of
our frailty, joins us together, momentarily in micro-encounters of curious
affectivity.
We do not go to the theatre to see a copy of the real,
to experience the authentic but to see the illusory make an address to the
real. It is here, where the borders separating our common spheres of activity
are made most apparent, that a laying bare of the operations between dream,
fiction and actuality coalesce – where the lines both blur and fragment. We can
see anew… when theatre shatters the pretexts of our lives or when the real
bursts upon the stage in spasms of unstaged affect. The theatre’s lights
exploding in a thousand tiny shards, that pierce our eyes, skin and lips with
their stench of Otherness. Here then, in an unfamiliar redistribution of the
sensible, the illusion of social cohesion is confronted by the raw of affect.
CGTV ed. (2010/11) http://art-agora.blogspot.com/
(accessed December 2011)
Ranciere, J
(2007) The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. &
intro. G. Rockhill, continuum books
Robinson A, Traynor J. et al (2011) Commonist
Gallery Booklet 1. CGTV publications
Schlesser T. (2011) L'art face à la
censure [Relié] editions des Beaux Arts.
Benjamin, W (1999) ‘On the mimetic faculty’ in Selected Writings Volume 2, 1927-1934, Trans R. Livingstone, Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press.
