Obscene Jester

"look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

Marina Abramović is, without a doubt, an art-world superstar who has made her name pushing her mind and body to the limits in performance with relentless abandon. She surrendered complete control of her body in Rhythm O (1974) and recently continued her meditative, endurance-testing quest by having numerous face-to-face encounters (silent) as the capstone to her retrospective, The Artist Is Present, at the MoMA in 2010. To relinquish control of one’s self, to welcome unknown dangers into the work, and to risk losing authorship and intent, are hallmarks of Abramović’s career.

But there seems to have been a shift in Abramović’s focus in recent years, beginning with her re-performances in 2005, Seven Easy Pieces. It’s a welcome shift: is it perhaps more dangerous to relinquish control of one’s story, the narrative of one’s life, than that over the body? While the threat to the body and psyche is certainly more immediate, visceral, and thus relatable, a scar on the stomach lasts only as long as the flesh itself, whereas the impact upon history and culture is written to last for generations and, in special circumstances, millennia. Which is more barbaric: scarring one’s self or, following Walter Benjamin, writing the narrative of the scarring?

 

This is not to hold Abramović up as the beacon of twentieth-century art necessarily, as some already have, but rather to bring some new perspective to Abramović’s concerns. Now an official “senior citizen” in the States, she is clearly becoming more and more aware of her legacy, understanding that she will only have so long to control and write the history, a practice that her work once defied and questioned. The ephemerality of body and performance art is folding into its traces in the critical and historical accounts of art and performance, and the stakes of who writes these accounts is getting an increasing amount of attention from historians, critics, and artists alike. In the best cases, the concern over history transforms into a stunning, thought-provoking encounter with the very definitions of performance art, aesthetics, and cultural legitimacy, as it did with Seven Easy Pieces. At worst, it devolves into absurd totalitarianism that flies in the face of what was so revolutionary about the work in the first place, as it does with the new Marina Abramović Institute, or Abramović’s face-off with “performance artist” Jay-Z earlier this year. At moments such as these latter examples, Abramović risks becoming the Metallica of the performance world.

Somewhere in the middle of this spectrum is the recent Life and Death of Marina Abramović at the Park Avenue Armory. A veritable super-group of artists, the piece features Abramović, Willem Dafoe, and Antony (who also composed some of the beautiful music for the piece) among a talented company of performers under the direction of Robert Wilson. This is the sixth time Abramović has surrendered her biography to another artist, allowing them to do with the stories as they please, with no ostensible interference from the biographee. Of course, Wilson cannot take just anything from her biography, as it is limited by the information available, such as newspaper articles, critical features, published interviews, and the artist’s own narrative; these are a highly selective, edited series of stories to choose from. In other words, the authorship of this piece is not entirely under Wilson’s control to the same degree that Abramović cannot entirely relinquish control. This fact is made palpable in performance by the presence of Dafoe, who spends most of the performance on a separate platform downstage left, surrounded by stacks of papers and fileboxes, reading from randomly grabbed papers. Each piece supposedly contains one line of text: a year followed by one thing that happened that year. The gesture to the summation of a year in one line, which is then clearly catalogued, points to the highly selective art of writing history.

What is incredibly intriguing about Life and Death is the fact that the two driving forces—Abramović and Wilson—are two of the greatest models of high modernism of the 1970s and 80s, not to mention beyond. They both struggled with the Theatre of Images and body art as a means to thwart conventional modes of art making and spectatorship. In this performance, however, the focus is upon Abramović’s personal history—psychoanalysis by way of Wilsonian stage pictures. The audience is presented with the artist’s father abandoning the family, Abramović’s adolescent angst over her large nose, or the loneliness following her separation from life/art partner, Ulay. All of these are certainly significant events to the formation of Abramović as a holistic person—it’s just surprising to see it staged in the bizarro universe of Bob Wilson. For a good portion of the performance, Abramović plays her own mother, whose footsteps resound through the Armory as though they were those of a giant. Paging Dr. Freud, indeed …

Most significant for the performance itself is the fact that my reaction was similar to many others: if you like Wilson’s aesthetic, this is a fine piece—beautiful, meditative, tedious, and powerful. There is nothing blatantly “wrong” or “bad” about Life and Death. Dafoe is committed as ever, entertaining and even heartbreaking in the final moments of the piece; Antony, his singing, and his music are gorgeous and ethereal; the company—performers, musicians, technicians, and designers—are all on top of their game; and it is fascinating to see Abramović as a part of a larger project, not the entirety of the piece. Am I glad I went? Of course.

But this is where the praise ends—a fine performance. Did I learn anything about Abramović, aside perhaps from her teenage insecurities? Did I see into an artistic abstraction of her soul? Did I learn something new about performance or what it can do for the audience? Did it add anything significant to the Abramović or Wilson oeuvre? Not really.

The program for Life and Death of Marina Abramović is a faux newspaper, The Seventh Regiment Gazette, whose front-page headline reads, “ARTIST MARINA ABRAMOVIC DIES AT 67: Pioneered Durational Performance Art with the Body as Her Medium.” Not only does the medium of the newspaper playfully signify the objectivity of history making, but it also brings us to the most provocative aspect of the piece: the death of the artist. The opening image is of three white figures lying in state, an allusion to the fact that Abramović wants to be buried simultaneously with three effigies of herself around the world; the ending image is of the Abramović ascending to Heaven, angel wings and all, a possible path for the artist after her death, but perhaps more a not-so subtle canonization of the historical figure of Abramović, self-proclaimed patron saint of performance art.

Jean Baudrillard, my old friend, once wrote that, “In order for ethnography to live, its object must die.” By subjecting her life to this type of artistic representation, Abramović seems determined to have a hand in the construction and, more significantly, control of her story, significance, and legacy. She seems to embody an early-twentieth-century panic over the challenges that performance art faces with regard to artistic control and estates, financial security, documentation, critical reception, and, of course, preservation of and credit for historically significant cultural events. But as she writes these histories, Marina Abramović is concretizing herself increasingly to the point where her art is less concerned with exploration, provocation, or even relevance. Dafoe, emerging from his fortress of files which now lay in chaotic disarry, joins Abramović center stage and sings, “Why must you cut yourself? / Don’t you know it hurts me to see you suffer?” The cut can come as the slice of a razor blade or the editing of a pen or a few keystrokes; both can inflict irreparable damage. Is Abramović suffering as she struggles to define her life and career for herself and the audiences who paid handsomely to see her? It’s hard to tell these days. Instead, The Life and Death of Marina Abramović is a success with regard to the artist’s approach: a beautiful museum piece. But one has to wonder, as Shelley did about Ozymandias, whether the struggle over legacy is more important than the life lived well.

Related articles

Marina Abramovic Stages Her Own Death, and Life

Watching "The Life and Death of Marina Abramović" Over Director Robert Wilson's Shoulder

the thin black and blue line

Black Wizard/Blue Wizard at the Incubator Arts Project is a delightful take on contemporary ennui and the search for meaning in a post-recession, celebrity-conflict-obsessed culture. Equal parts Tolkien, MTV game show, Ziggy Stardust, and John Hughes movie, the piece is presented by our two referees (the generous and hilarious Nikki Calonge and Mikeah Ernest Jennings) as a necessary battle between the titular wizards in order to save the universe from “The Great Mediocrity” (which is always accompanied by the “so-so” hand gesture). Why these two need to fight and how that produces our saving grace is never addressed, nor does it really matter. What does matter is that the contest seems to have been dreamed up by the performers less to prevent the audience from The Great Mediocrity than themselves—and I mean that in a good way.

The text and music, by Eliza Bent and Dave Malloy (who are also our wizards), are shape-shifting satires of genre: the characters are never in the place they want to be, never satisfied with the relationships in and with space and time, their genre of the moment peters out as quickly as it is presented. When the wizard challenge is to fight in the (U.S.) Civil War, they merely play cards; when they are presented with the “Bus Stop” challenge, they cannot simply wait for the bus by discussing the weather or staring into space—they must make literary allusions and outdo one another with pizzazz. When the wizards simply refuse to cooperate, our other-worldly, bombastic referee becomes “Nikki” and storms off in frustration, explaining that she agreed to work a double just so the four could work together. The performance refuses to stand still, moving from an intergalactic contest to a slice of life drama essentially about quarter-life crises, to a Brechtian dance party, to a love story. The abstraction of worlds makes it unclear as to whether the performers are Dunkin Donuts employees who have created this fantasy world to keep themselves happy, sane, and/or distracted, or if they exist in a string-theory ruled universe of infinite power and banality, or if this is all a literary gesture to the corollaries among these worlds. The movement of the piece helped by a Greek chorus of varyingly engaged astronaut-esque backup singers and dancers adds to the welcomed confusion.

This sense of defiance is served well by the direction of Dan Safer, whose wonderful experiments are infamous for their indeterminate structures, game-like challenges, and playful, but precise movement. What makes Black Wizard/Blue Wizard distinct is that, while the contest is presented as randomized (the referee plunges her hands into a bowl full of dice and coins, sometimes asking an audience member to toss a coin of Hanukah gelt), I can say with 99% confidence that this is for metaphorical purposes in this piece, and does not actually change or affect the outcome of the performance in any way. To very purposefully gesture to indeterminacy and then immediately quash it seems delimiting and defeating, not necessarily in a good way. Much like our wizard-donut slingers, I want my experiences to be rife with possibility and danger; to remove that from Black Wizard/Blue Wizard doesn’t reinforce the power of The Great Mediocrity, but rather tames the performance. Wizards everywhere have just got to free.

on marionette and metonymy

Theatre history is glutted with practitioners and theorists who hold puppets and performing objects up as an ideal, as the utopian future of acting and theatre itself. Craig had the übermarionette, Kleist the marionette theatre (and fencing bears—natch), and Moholy-Nagy had the mechanized eccentric. Many critics working today discuss new technologies in animation and virtual reality as the new wave of this idealization.

But these theories usually concern themselves with the actor alone—the puppet is the performer void of ego, emotional and physical error. It may be entirely controlled. And this has nothing to do with why I return happily to Labapalooza at St. Ann’s every year.

For me, what makes puppet theatre some of the most interesting and innovative work is its reworking of the very materials conventionally associated with performance. Actors may become puppets, but scenes become miniaturized and manipulated, attention is drawn to unexpected elements, and the use of metaphor and metonymy is at its most considered and refined. And this year was no exception.

The Lab’s emphasis on the works-in-progressness is wonderful as well, exceptional even for most performance the public is let in on. I only saw one program this year with four incredibly diverse pieces.

The most stunning for me was Daniel Burnam’s and Erica Livingston’s “Interference and Collapse,” a piece most improbably about the murder of Sam Cooke, childhood memories, and quantum physics. Burnam and Livingston remain behind a glorified DJ booth for most of the performance, where the turntables function not only as soundtrack, but also as stages. Each mini-set is divided into three, with each division symbolizing the same place in a slightly different dimension. The very possibility of quantum theory has made the question of “What if…” almost more tragic and mournful. Not only do we make bad decisions, but, in a slightly different place, we have made the correct ones. The course of our histories radically alter, but we have no access to them. What if Cooke had lived well into old age? The duo plow through the text, Burnam with the cold pat of a scientist, and Livingston with barely concealed childlike frivolity under a veneer of professionalism. All their scenes are augmented by video camera’s projecting the tiny, revolving action up on high.

Retta Leaphart’s “Far from the Tree” is a sweet rumination on childhood as well, only from the much more direct perspective of growing up in Montana. The protagonist is a large mason jar with limbs and head as bugs and secrets are collected and released from within.

The hilarious “The Pigeoning” by Robin Frohardt was clearly adored by the audience, the most basic and stunning example of the audience’s almost desperate desire to empathize with these objects. Here, we follow Frank, expertly played by as many as four puppeteers at once, a schlubby office drone with an irrational (or highly rational, depending on where you stand) fear of pigeons. That is, until the day he realizes that the pigeons are communicating with him. His world falls apart, and the audience erupts into great cheers for the slightly morbid conclusion. But Frank is happy, and so are we.

Last and certainly not least is Joe Silovsky’s “Send for the Million Men.” I’ve written about Joe in general and about his last piece here, and he brings Stanley the Robot back to help him narrate a (piece of) the story of infamous anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. In his usual puppetry-by-way-of-vaudeville style, we’re treated to a messy and discombobulated lecture that utilizes transparencies, opaque projectors, and a cadre of controls for Silovsky to play show-and-tell with. Joe’s continuing efforts to layer and nuance his works while maintaining his charming sense of humor and irony constitute the playfully sophisticated work that I love from this genre.

One hundred years after the publication of Craig’s ideas concerning the übermarionette, we are no closer to realizing it, if you ask me. And I like it that way. Vivent les blagues des marionettes!

 

[for charity]

Normally, I don't push for charities in a forum such as this, but I couldn't resist commenting on the new project, Cage Against the Machine. The concept is simple--get a bunch of celebrities together to record John Cage's masterpiece, 4'33", and donate all the proceeds to charity.

Admittedly, the idea is hokey and has been overdone by numerous parties, from revivals by Tudor himself to my own undergraduate students (love you guys!).

The idea gets complicated and much more intriguing, however, when you begin to discuss issues of celebrity and record charts, and account for the cultural divide--the top Christmas-week single is an American-Idol-huge deal in the UK.

Exhibit A: many of the recent toppers have been the winners or contestants of X-Factor, Simon Cowell's pop show there.

Exhibit B: revisit Love Actually. Or don't, and just remember the burnt-out rocker storyline, also admittedly lame but illustrative for our purposes here.

I'm a bit of a humbugger myself, and although it's not exactly a stroke of brilliance, CATM a cheap and fun way to give this season. And Billy Bragg coughs on it, by Thor. I'll pitch in for that.

a haunting in los angeles

Once this house was alive, it was occupied once. In my recollection it still is but by shadowy occupants like ghosts. Now they enter the lighter areas of my memory.  —Tennessee Williams, Vieux Carré

The Wooster Group’s version of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré, now at the REDCAT in LA is surprisingly revealing, both on behalf of Williams and the Wooster Group itself. The form of Williams’ uneven memory play brings out many of the most brilliant themes, devices, and resonances, both for Williams and the Group.

Vieux Carré was recently claimed by historians to date back much further than initially expected. Although Williams polished the play off and produced it for the first time in 1977, the notes, sketches, and drafts can be seen dating back to the period when Williams was living the story in a French Quarter boarding house in the early 1930s. In other words, the play is a filtration of raw memory, refined over decades, and revised with experience, maturity, a bit of cynicism, and hindsight. What a rare opportunity it is to access memory in this way, whether ours or someone else’s.

And it’s exactly this lengthy incubation process that makes Vieux Carré so uneven as a play. The Writer (Williams’ avatar) seems to grow from closeted greenhorn to over-sexed and exhausted man in a matter of acts for the audience and months in the world of the play. It’s as though Williams translated a piece of his sixty-something self to the arc of his twenty-something self, almost as if he has condensed the life of all his memory plays into one series of dramatic action. It’s confusing, disjointed, episodic, by all accounts a bad Tennessee Williams play. But it also contains some of his most potent lyricism and concentrated impressions of the city he loved so much, and it features multiple Tennessee Williamses—permutations of his young self set upon by layer after layer of an aging, less successful playwright.

Leave it to the Wooster Group, then, to exploit this point and bring the piece a wealth of new meaning, sympathy, and power, Employing techniques they’ve used in past productions, this version is one of the most amazing interpretations of how and why we remember, beyond the playtext. Their main theme is a sense of ghosting, haunting—words that they could easily use to replace an empirical sense of memory. So it’s inevitable that Williams knew a character like the Nightingale, an old queen, slowly dying of TB, or Tye, a homophobic (and of course curious) strip club barker and junkie in the boarding house. But it’s also clear, with the help of Scott Shepherd’s brilliant turn as both characters, that they are aspects of Williams himself—how these men-turned-memories became a piece of the playwright. Or, one could argue at the very least, that these memories haunt the playwright constantly. Scenes occur with characters who aren’t physically present, with characters who never existed, and sometimes with doubles of characters, a surplus of memory. Kudos to Andrew Schneider’s video design and Jennifer Tipton’s lighting to help this ethereal feel. Video screens contain simple white curtains, gently billowing with the breeze, and rain is projected onto the characters as static, a televisual presence of absence.

Watching the play, I was transported to my own memories of earlier Wooster productions: the plasma TVs on beams, fragmenting the body in To You, the Birdie! and cueing physical action in Poor Theatre, the layering and mixing of live and recorded on televisions, mixing the performance and past art as in Hamlet. It became clear to me that all of the Wooster productions are investigating the nature and complexities of memory, remembering, and, vitally, recounting and retelling. To use Vieux Carré makes this painfully obvious—and I don’t mean this in either a laudatory or derogatory sense. If anyone can get away with superficiality in presentation, it’s these artists.

As always, there’s way too much meat to chew on here. I am constantly frustrated and thrilled by the infinite wealth of ideas that speed through my mind when thinking about the Wooster Group (good thing they’re in my dissertation!—oy). I get a little overly excited: driving home, I went on an unsolicited diatribe to my car-mate(/prisoner) about Why would anyone in their right mind want to stage naturalist performance when that is possible?! Why would people want to watch it when they could be engaging with this?! WHY?!

But to leave you, I’ll start at the beginning, as the wonderful Ari Fliakos sits at his keyboard, attempting to begin a chronicle of his time in the French Quarter, listening to the bickering of the landlady (Kate Valk) and Nursie (Kaneza Schaal). The three characters are all present on stage and on screen, but as they set the scene, it becomes somewhat noticeable that the audience’s eyes and ears cannot be trusted: the image on the video screen is not the live stage action, the sound, is not coming from the actors’ mics. Our impression of what’s happening—filtered through the Wooster Group’s collaboration, through the text, through the muck of forty years of separation and consideration, through Tennessee Williams’ experiences—is unreliable, untenable. But it certainly does haunt.