What It Was
Last night, Monday 15th March 2010, Chris Goode's one-off work 'Who You Are' set in Miroslaw Balka's How It Is in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern.
What might be called a 45-minute sound installation around Goode's response to the space and his preparatory thoughts on the audience.
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Where I'm At
Somewhere - - disappointed.
After a lot of walking, talking, thinking, strolling, rehearsing lately, I've been thinking about journeying and audiences. About thinking walking - about thinking as walking, a movement, but also about clearings, about Heidegger and revealing, dwelling, technique as techne, letting appear... Feeling also other journeys through acting work involving Viewpoints, Grotowski plastiques and the notion of self-penetration: acting as a deepening and stripping away - a technique of unravelling, of movement into the self, transforming the space of the body that is already there - the body as another Heideggerian clearing, showing us its boundaries and springing away from them.
Continuing to think about journeying last night, it strikes me that Who You Are did not travel into the deep corners, or rather, rejected a collective, metaphysical expedition through the vastness of Balka's great black hole. Definitely an in-stall-ation not an ex-plor-ation.
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Where It Was
Still walking-thinking a bit about Heidegger and audience journeys and self-penetration - surely the point of the exhibit is that it isn't a black box...it's actually quite light. It does transform and transmogrify its own distances; revealing unexpected qualities.
It's quite soft in places, hard and cold in others. The walls are deliberately different textures from the floor: they are invisible, glimpsed only in absence, whereas the floors give light, glow grey in patches, moulded by the shadows or shapes of others.
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What It Wasn't
Indeed, having a cast of silhouettes sharing the space does not mean that we are 'deprived' of sight, or that our attention to sound is vastly heightened, as the piece ironically notes during one 'scene' in which Goode and the familiarly parodic Tate 'Visitor Experiences' manager discuss why nudity is inappropriate 'in the dark' of How It Is.
Deliberately or no, it was quite difficult to hear anything with the balance of the speakers.
What's more, the sense that really needed to be arrested was touch....sitting against the almost furry soft-brushed suedeness of the back wall of the piece made me increasingly aware of how I would like to be made more aware of my own body and its relation to the constructions around it - other skeletons and bags. Telling us doesn't really do the same job.
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If It Weren't -
Another sense - that the piece did not feel intricately thought through - and at times it seemed to fall prey to a technique which too literally takes techne as letting appear and still prioritises the gaze - using nakedness (physical or emotional) as a shield.
After the dialogue with the 'Visitor Experiences' manager, its clear-cut play with the dark space and the imagination, bodies in the dark and the audience's implantation of sexual imagery amidst suggestive dialogue, Goode moved to a dimly-lit lectern on the edge of the open-end of the box, and began a self-interrupting torrent of personal testimony, biography, snatched memory.
The 'confessional', the foregrounding of the artist's honesty (an ironic thing to need foreground...), outpouring of personal detail, becomes a defensive shield. It protects the piece from examining a difference type of naked vulnerability, which is that of the audience and the relationship between performer and audience. It closes the gap between audience and performer, between audience member and audience member, by pretending there is no gap - no connection, just two sets of people in totally different worlds.
Almost antagonistic. Or rather, passive aggressive.
So such nakedness, the self revelation which could not feel like a revelation, instead presents, at poorly chosen junctures, a retiring back into the self - an almost-sentimental 'show' of passion and significance, whose show nearly succeeds in deflecting attention away from the emptiness behind it.
A closing of the gap between audience and performer - because that gap might be a door.
And the performer decides to shut it.
To not admit.
To think there is no light seeping in under the cracks.
When there is always light and shape in shadows.
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How We Are
It felt, then, that such a performance carried some un-considered assumptions about the audience and the dark.
Firstly, in shrouding the audience in mysterious impersonality, in reading us randomly-generated names of people who might (not) be watching in America, in telling us that we are scary, that he knows nothing about us, Goode missed out on a glimpse, a genuine connection, with the peculiar type of darkness that the audience experiences.
Yes we might all be strangers to you (though several of us are not) - but are we strangers to each other? Don't we often see familiar faces, or go to the theatre with a friend, a lover, a family member, a colleague? Aren't I here with several people I know - some I knew were coming, others who I happily bumped into?
Isn't the point that this darkness, this audience shroud, is not equalising or even totalising. Isn't it sort of suspending? Not like the shut door, not a deadening or rejection, not a push into nothingness: rather it is a shifting encounter within a fixed time and fixed space. We become aware that maybe we can't move - or we shouldn't move - but we want to. We might want some water but we can't really open our bag in the dark - can't make that noise.
Doesn't this suspension of chronological time, ticking life, reveal something to us? Does it not let appear certain relations, feelings, characteristics, boredoms, excitements? Sitting in the suspended dark with a friend can often make you more acutely aware of each other.
Maybe that someone keeps looking at you to check your reaction, or maybe you become nervously aware of your own position; maybe your own relation is suspended, allowed to play out or reveal itself in a new form. Perhaps this is just How I Am but this must then be a part of How We Are...
I couldn't feel much engagement with this real intimacy of the audience; the shape of the dark, the contours, much like the architectural fascination we find in In Praise of Shadows.
More than anything, this felt under-done, made resoundingly timid by the grandness of the space it took place in, a space whose work with experientiality should not be competed with but complemented and confronted, expanded: exposed, perhaps, with a flash of light, made actually, temporarily, vulnerable and naked, intimate and imposing. They very grinning photo Goode describes on his first visit to the box, amidst the snapping teenagers.
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Who It May
It strikes me that maybe sometimes Chris Goode is afraid of the audience...that he turns it into a thing, an 'enigma' and this is somehow scary - and so, to avoid getting entwined in this shadowy presence, it is safer to be almost aggressively, pre-emptively naked himself - to stop anyone else doing so.
But if we start to expect that 'nakedness' (in whatever form) from a piece of theatre, it ceases to be nakedness and starts to become a piece of artistic vocabulary: the dreaded nudity that Goode so deftly deconstructs in The Forest and the Field.
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Who I Are
But what shape has a shadow got? How much of performance is there for the performer - how much is there for the audience? What happens if these figures become embodied in the same person? How can performance be intimate without being private? Or particular without being personal? Should theatre play a therapeutic role?
Is that Who We Are? or Who You Are when I go to the theatre. Someone around me who might make me better.
Who is sick.
Who is curing.
Who You Are made me feel oddly impersonal, indifferent to two things in particular:
1) to the audience; even sitting between two friends I felt only myself without pushing further towards my own experience or into the experiences of my two friends either side of me;
2) to the space. I felt it could have taken place anywhere; what's more, it would have been more effective in a busy train station or underneath a bridge with a handjob, anecdotally.
Did it try to fit neatly into the dark. Did it not fit. Was it not dark?
Are we not in the dark.
Is that it?
Lowri -- thanks as ever for a thoughtful response -- one's grateful of course for any response -- but I wonder in relation both to this piece and to your earlier post on The Forest and the Field why it might be that the questions and problems that the work is attempting to sound so often show up in your analysis of that work as faults or weaknesses within it? Perhaps it's inevitable, I don't know, but I feel a little frustrated -- not just with you but with these tendencies wherever they appear (and they're not uncommon) -- at what appears to be a supposition that we're trapped in a two stage process where (i) the artist presents something resolved and (ii) the critic finds faults, or shall we less perjoratively say faultlines, that destabilize the artist's resolution. I think (i) misunderstands me (slash us, as artists), and (ii) comes across as weirdly tone-deaf as a result.
ReplyDeleteFor me, as regards the through-thinking of the piece, I was fascinated by how my experience of the installation was, at least, enhanced -- in some ways only made viable (or interesting) -- by the work's vulnerability, by all the ways in which it fails, both on its own terms and in the somewhat inflated claims made for it by Balka and by the way it has been staged, discursively, quasi-theatrically, at Tate M. Wanting to present some response to that vulnerability meant engaging with a bunch of questions that are interesting to me at the moment anyway, about the performance of weakness and the (unsought) recuperation of that weakness into a kind of pre-emptive strength or authority, a recuperation that seems to happen somewhere else in the circuit than the usual performer/audience flow. So there are some deep ambivalences in Who You Are -- you might say ineffectually presented, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree (the piece was after all made from scratch in a fortnight, and never rehearsed, not in situ, not anywhere -- an account of the material conditions under which work is made is often also missing from your responses -- obviously often those things are obscure to an audience but that's exactly why serious critics need to take them seriously) -- but they're at least consciously adopted relations, which you don't care to allow here. So, for example, the six-minute biographical blurt is of course doing exactly what you say it is, and I wonder what it is that -- and I mean this word very precisely -- prejudices your reception of that sequence, which presumes to diagnose as error or misjudgement is wholly intentional? In a way it's encouraging -- that you feel or think so acutely some of the things that I'm hoping to guide you towards -- but also, you know, exasperating -- the assumption, essentially, that I don't know what I'm doing, when I'd have thought a long track record of making work in these veins would at least elicit the benefit of the doubt on that score! ...
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[continued from previous]
ReplyDelete... This will feel I'm sure very self-serving of me, possibly specious even -- of course I'd say these things, wouldn't I? -- but it strikes me as odd (& will be amusing in a day or two when I'm less tired) that you seem to despise in Who You Are exactly the vulnerability and thwartedness and the admission (in both senses) of failure that in the next breath you seem to be craving. Not that I mind that at all in itself, but it amounts to a conflicted account of a conflicted piece whose conflictedness is presented here as a kind of shortfall.
In passing I'd note that this post is, tonally, way grander than anything the Balka actually does or that I was attempting to do: which is perhaps as it should be, or perhaps an oddity -- it would be interesting to read you trying to give that away. It might help with the misapprehension of scale.
But, as ever, thanks for thinking it through, and I hope this response doesn't feel inappropriate -- it just seemed like an opportune, if hopelessly self-invested, moment to raise a question that your critical work here has prompted several times, in this avid reader at least.
bests, Chris
ironic erratum!
ReplyDelete"to diagnose as error or misjudgement what is wholly intentional"
sorry
Just finally to subjoin a link, for anyone who's interested in the questions raised here, to my own account of what was going on last night:
ReplyDeletehttp://beescope.blogspot.com/2010/03/my-weakness-is-ideally-your-business.html
thanks, Cx
Chris,
ReplyDeleteThank you very much for your response. I'm sorry if some of the issues I was tackling in my own head came across to you as things I 'despised' in the piece: I didn't despise the piece at all. Rather I feel that my immediate responses were trying to tackle the knot of 'weaknesses' that you mention (without yet seeing that they were so) - understanding the deliberate overlaps or mesh of different types of failure, accounts of failure or admittance of non-closure.
I don't dismiss or despise that in any way; rather, my response was coming directly from my feeling as an audience member, and nothing critical. I am still not quite sure how to find an expression for how the piece made me feel, but I think my disappointment arose from my (always very high!) anticipation of your work, coupled with the space. I felt that somehow the physical situation which we found ourselves in did not necessarily make your development/experiment any more developed.
Knowing that the piece was not rehearsed in the space now makes a lot of sense to me - I did feel as if, in many ways, it would have better communicated these modulations of 'weakness' if we had been able to see each other and yourself - to actually see the games that were being played - or not played.
After all, the artist does have some power, some control, even when s/he does not want to think so; the nature of theatre is that barrier is there: even if the artist attempts to completely do away with it, I feel from experience that the audience member will try in some way to salvage it.
I actually enjoyed the six-minute biographical part the most - I did get an inkling, but perhaps not enough of one, that its purpose was to show and be vulnerability. Perhaps it is my own fault as an audience member that I could not feel the right way about it; yet I know you are not the kind of artist who expects people to 'feel the right way' - hence my general curiosity about that moment.
However I am still trying to figure out how your intention, and your own experience of the piece, might be different from and similar to the momentarily specific, and as you rightly point out (throughout Who You Are), unpredictable experience of the audience. Perhaps I didn't spot what you point out above because, in the few hours, or day, following the piece, my mind had not put all those pieces together.
I sincerely apologise if I seem to have been harsh, or just blindsided, but this critical engagement comes from admiration of you rather than prejudice, I hope. I think that a lot of the piece derived from some kind of intuition that I was not having the experience I should have, or might have wanted, or you might have wanted - and there we are, maybe that IS your point.
ReplyDeleteI think I sometimes struggle, especially when writing a piece retrospectively when the mind is already beginning to re-assess and intellectualise what is for me always a sensory process first, with conveying a fragment of how it is to be IN a performance - to 'fail' or 'succeed' in the moment of being a spectator. How am I supposed to convey what I am feeling when it is already changing - when the feeling seems to have gone away and the shards of memory are beginning to be woven together with a critical need for cohesion?
If there is such a thing as failure, such a way of showing and investigating it - then what would be the success? I suppose this is another thing the piece is subconsciously struggling with. I also feel that - as you have - my post could be seen as its own little performance of the conversant attempts, vulnerabilities and habits of one particular audience member, attempting to unite an individual and collective feeling. I think that's definitely how I see it; I am aware that, as the days go on and I think further, I would come up with a more precise critical analysis - but I am wary of attempting to always find an answer or a key to a piece of art. How it makes us feel is as surprising to us as it is to the artist.
Nevertheless, I never intended to make sweeping generalisations or to give the impression that what I wrote was some kind of verdict - it was, like my piece on The Forest and the Field, a slightly conflicted response to the relationship between my own prejudices, expectations, excitements and ideas.
ReplyDeleteI know that I would write different things now about the piece- indeed because each post is a different imprint of a different stage of development itself - so please do not take what I wrote then as any kind of 'conclusion' or condemnation. It was simply trying to find its way around.
Thanks,
L xx
How frustrating to have missed it and be unable to fully engage with this discussion. It's been too interesting to leave it entirely to the professionals, so I'll just wade in.
ReplyDeleteInteresting that the point of contention is not that Lowri *didn't get* the piece, but that how she felt about what she got wasn't what Chris hoped her to. Experiencing Chris's piece Glass House I felt very much in the presence of a theatrical intelligence which was second-guessing my experience of it, but this (secondary?) thinking seems in Who You Are to have been illegible to Lowri. I'd like to hear if other people have felt the same thing.
It is clear that there has been a failure, but whose responsibility is it? has this discussion become its (partial) embodiment? can it be shared?
I remain curious about Chris's interest in weakness, and would like to be persuaded by its virtues (in want of a better word), and I look forward to the rest of 2010's promised engagement with it.
I won't quote Samuel Beckett's 'Fail again, fail better', but it does seem that, if failure is essential to what we want theatre to be, within it resides a vast structure of ethical and aesthetic value judgements, and there is good cause for disappointment if today's failure is not as generous or beautiful as last week's.
Drunkenly reading Richard Schechner last night (always something you regret in the morning) I came across this:
ReplyDelete'As Eugenio Barba noted, performers specialize in putting themselves in disequilibrium and then displaying how they regain their balance, psychologically, narratively, and socially - only to lose their balance, and regain it, again and again. Theatrical techniques center on these incompletable transformations...'
And it struck me that there are many different words for what Chris terms failure, many of which we can locate in what theatre is. I was especially interested to see Chris equate failure with 'noise, ambiguity, conflictedness, multiplicity, proliferation'. Of course, what 'disappointed' Lowri cannot have been the multiplicity of the piece. (Being an enthusiastic reader of Deleuze & Guattari she knows unequivocally that multiplicity = good.) It does seem, in light of this discussion, that even if the piece attempted to reconfigure failure as multiplicity, what Lowri felt disappointed by was something singular.
The fourth wall has had a lot of bad press, on this blog as anywhere else where its existence is acknowledged, and it is rarely far from the word failure. Chris' post makes reference to it in a typically extraordinary way:
"The image I had in my mind as I wrote it was of someone kind of hurling their body against that invisible fourth wall, the edge of the huge vitrine that all gallery art and so much performance is trapped in, often not even knowing that that plane is there, still there."
A while ago Sam Ladkin (I think) said something about abstract art's parasitic relation to representation, and since then I've wondered whether experimental theatre has the same parasitic relation to the breaking of the fourth wall. In Chris' description, however, that fourth wall reappears as an emotional phenomenon: something the audience is complicit in constructing. Something to do with ambivalence, desire for safety.
And that's where I run out. Perhaps I should have kept my mouth shut.
The articulacy of the three of you gives me a hard on, a hope on.
ReplyDeleteMy two cents are coded and available at www.fallopianyoutube.blogspot.com - I think that glass wall, and our complicity in constructing or harbouring it, is at the crux of this work and its dialogue, from the personal push of being-together that segues tragically into alienation, and (hopefully) back again. x
ReplyDelete