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Thursday, 04 June 2009 Of the spirit. The Christian conception of fleshed word as a
means of access to spirit (through the bodied god, his sacrifice, rituals
such as the eucharist in which flesh is taken into flesh; though
Christianity is not alone in this conception, it is among the most recent
Western exemplar) finds unique aesthetic equivalence in theatre. Here it
is the actor and dramatist who explore these roads to access, as does a
musical performer, who allows a musical composition to pass through her
body
(without the body, even that of the synthesizer operator or the composer
in a recording studio, unheard), sacrificing
its cultural and social position to the aesthetic position: an offering to
the individual audience member, which differentiates aesthetic performance
from the organized church. The physical and perhaps emotional discomfort
and suffering of the performer in a Samuel Beckett or Sarah Kane play, for
example, is an act of sacrifice offered up to the individual auditor, who
may be expected to either share in it, contemplate it, or find offense in
it: the discomfort and suffering transcended in the grace of its
performance towards a spiritual end. Instead, however, of these ecstasies
offered to god and to the witnessing of fellow celebrants (for the church
audience is well- And beyond words, the noumenal always beyond the panel discussion ... Wednesday, 22 April 2009 The theatre is my representation. There is no
more certain
knowledge, once achieved, than this: that the theatre, like the world, is
a re- Although once this realization, with all its horrifying, isolating,
exhilarating and ecstatic possibilities, has been experienced, it cannot
be unexperienced, unlearned, unrealized, and it will color all my theatre
and theatrical experience from then on. Only the hard press of voluntary,
willful ignorance – and this is not uncommon, for some of us fear our
own bodies and desires more than anything else in this world – will
be able to eradicate this realization from my consciousness. I remain a
member of what is called the collective of the audience, or the collective
of the experience, but I now define myself as simultaneously a constituent
and opponent of it. I gauge my reaction, consciously and unconsciously,
from within that collective, from my privileged unique perspective. I am
also aware that my own perspective is colored by the culture of that
collective: not merely the aesthetic and cultural perceptions with which I
enter the theatre, but as an individual body amongst other individual
bodies, sharing perceptual tools such as the eyes and the ears. Though
ultimately it is not through their eyes and ears with which I witness the
play, but through my own. Like Creon, Antigone and the chorus of
Sophocles' tragedy, I am empathetic and antipathetic to the collective
simultaneously (any chance of ultimate reconciliation between these is
illusory; violence unutterably and always follows upon violence, whether
Creon or Antigone's perspective is privileged, the play would end in
slaughter in either case, witnessed by the silent and in any event
illusory gods). I am always a unique and individual object, when
alone or with others, but the collective is a mere abstraction and does
not exist without the voluntary or involuntary gathering of several
individual bodies within one space at one time. For this reason my
individual perspective becomes primary, the primus inter pares in
the individual/ If I were a performer rather than an audience member, I would still experience the theatre as my representation, and whether I am an individual member of a theatrical company or a member of the audience, this experience is identical. On stage I move my body through space among objects and other bodies, and my movement and perspective remain unique. His lehrstücke, Brecht insisted, were learning plays not for the audience (at least not primarily for the audience), but for those who performed in them. As cast member too I remain individual. If the theatre remains my representation, we have an understanding of the perspective of cast members of Richard Foreman's plays, for example, many of whom have told me they feel no more utterly and fully themselves as individuals than when they appear in one of his plays. Finally there is the evidence of performers of other contemporary work, which demonstrates the untapped resources that can be called into practice once (but not before) the realization of the theatre as my representation occurs. My theatre is then charged with desire, disgust, fear, ecstasy,
possibility from each moment to each moment. The origin and nature of this
charge will become clear later in this work, but it is a charge which both
unites and separates auditor and audience, spectator and performer,
performer and performer, in a process of seduction. Theatre is there and
not there, always passing, explicit and present only in my representation
and my body's status as privileged object. What differentiates the theatre
from the world is its disciplined self- [The theatre is] a fraudulent institution that never pretends to be anything but fraudulent, an institution which calls forth what is not, that signifies absence, that transforms the literal into the metaphorical, that evacuates everything it represents. Once evacuated, the imagination rushes into my representation. Possibilities form, and all else necessary is the courage to explore them. Wednesday, 28 January 2009 For Marilyn These works are a series of acts best comprehended in groups or as a continuity. Except as a created revelation, a new experience, they are without value. It is my desire that they be kept in groups as much as possible and remain so. ... So I am in the strange position of seeking an environment for the work and the small means wherein I'll be free to continue the "act." Houston's Rothko
Chapel is a small unremarkable building set just off a suburban
corner, adjoining a series of plain, low houses and a college campus.
Within it, however, is a world entirely itself, as real as the houses and
classrooms surrounding it but an enclosure of myth and tragedy. The
fourteen maroon- Insofar as the subject is the artist, however, he has already been released from his individual will, and has become, as it were, the medium through which the one truly existent subject celebrates his release in appearance. ... Only insofar as the genius in the act of artistic creation coalesces with this primordial artist of the world, does he know anything of the eternal essence of art; for in this state he is, in a marvelous manner, like the weird image of the fairy tale which can turn its eyes at will and behold itself; he is at once subject and object, at once poet, actor, and spectator. Within this chapel, and within the bodies of work by artists such as Wagner, Syberberg, Beckett, Feldman, Rothko and Barker, we find a new definition for the tragic epic. Ordinarily the word "epic" is treated as genre, or formal description, but more precisely it is the representation of the will's noumenal cosmology through phenomenal means. In this sense "epic" ties Homer's poems to Beckett's. As a cosmology the body of work is necessarily precise and detailed, requiring more than a mere story or anecdote – or a single painting – for its full expression. It requires that imaginative extension besides. Lest we balk at the word "tragedy" itself as mere genre, let us
consider it here as a dynamic, a consciousness, a perspective, rather than
a form. The epic artist insists upon tragedy's expression through lengthy
duration in time and and expansive extension in space. (Leaving aside for
the moment the idea of "comic epics," which will have far more numerous
defenders, unlike the tragic epic, which in post- Extension through space may be another matter. As impressive as it is,
the Rothko Chapel is not a large building. In a letter to Dominique de
Menil, Mrs. Gifford Phillips reported on a conversation she had with
Rothko: that Rothko had described to her his project of one- I have discussed before my affection for small spaces, for the
fifty- These artists invite us in to these cosmologies, these worlds. In the case of Rothko's Chapel, these cosmologies are shorn of traditional figuration to reveal the essence of tragedy: beyond names and story (so many artists make the mistake of thinking that a mere recycling of a story or the use of a name like Oedipus is a means of confronting the tragedies that lay behind these stories and figures; these artists lay claim to them in a desperate attempt to lend their own work significance), but inherent in the very real instruments of the art form: the pigment, the canvas, the body, the sound. The substance lies in the real, the world of the phenomenon. Rothko warns of this fetishization of story and name: If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas. They are the symbols of man's primitive fears and motivations, no matter in which land or what time, changing only in detail but never in substance. ... Our presentation of these myths however must be in our own terms which are at once more primitive and more modern than the myths themselves. ... The myth holds us, therefore, not thru its romantic flavor, not thru the remembrance of the beauty of some by gone age, not thru the possibilities of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves, as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give them life. In his late work, Rothko's titles too were shorn of mythic resonance, often mere descriptions of the colors within the painting. But he still insisted upon the tragic resonance. And his work was prone to the same kinds of misunderstandings as Beckett's. Once, an observer called Rothko's canvases of bright yellows and oranges optimistic "celebrations." Rothko responded that these colors, to him, were the colors of an inferno. (This is something I must remember the next time somebody describes the "hope" that Beckett's work elicits from them.) The contemporary epic, tragic vision is rare. The comic can be sold;
everybody likes to laugh and have a good time; I do too. But the more
lacerating self- |