Publications

Ansuman Biswas reviews Who You Are?, Chris Goode’s response to Miroslaw Balka’s How it is, as part of ’Experiences of the Dark’, 15 March 2010, Tate Modern, London.

My first feeling, waiting by the great maw of the black space was awe. The hugeness and openness inviting me into nothing but my imagination. Awe is a coruscating mix of both fear and excitement, but perhaps inevitably it has a shadow too. Disappointment. I'd heard so much about the darkness of this piece, but walking into it what I found was just an insipid half-light. Perhaps I've been spoilt. The more I've got to know live art the more dissatisfied I've become with artifice. After the real thrills and spills of actual, messy, dangerous situations, the make-believe of theatre feels like a childish dilution, a compromise, a broken promise. Chris Goode played brilliantly with this unsatisfactoriness. There is a grey area between the white cube of the art gallery and the black box of the theatre studio. Goode plonked himself firmly and equivocally in this twilight.

Reading about Miroslaw Balka's installation I'd imagined something a little similar, in negative perhaps, to Anthony Gormley's cloud installation at the Hayward Gallery in 2007. In fact How it is is much less emphatic than Blind Light either in presentation or erasure. There is no pitch blackness, no velvety blankness, no consequent heightening of every other sense. Instead there is just a slightly awkward negotiation with a bunch of shuffling strangers all peering around for the best place to sit.

But after a while I got over what this wasn't and began to appreciate what it was. Acknowledging my wariness - which I take to be the audiences' - our host started off with small talk. He began in banality, testing the radio-mic, waving at us to identify his silhouette, seeming casual and unprepared, to the point of answering the phone he'd absent-mindedly forgotten to switch off. It became quickly apparent that all this was tactical and diversionary. Soon it was difficult to know if he was actually speaking. At first he clearly was, but ambiguities began to proliferate. Christopher became Christine. Voices were electronically manipulated and interchanged and played down the phone, and soon the figure we were originally introduced to began to appear to be a cardboard cut-out, a puppet. As the texts nested and multiplied I wondered how much was pre-recorded and how much memorized or improvised. His silhouette continued to move and gesticulate throughout, dandling us between certainty and doubt.

Undercover of darkness what this figure kept creeping back to, from various angles, was a question. What do we really know of each other? He turned this jewel under his loupe and watched it refract the darkness into rainbow colours. Goode's response to Balka was to bring a poet's eye to the shadows, and with a dramatist's social sensitivity, draw out a narrative on the effect of darkness on our relationships. Being in the dark alone is one thing, but sharing it with others is quite another. We are each alone in our worlds and see others at a distance, but perhaps being together in the dark reveals what is invisible in the light of the sun. Concealment and exposure, veiling and nakedness, the hidden and the revealed begin to seem intimately, even symbiotically, related.

Having acknowledged the hesitancy that an audience may feel, Goode goes on to reveal his radical insecurity as a performance maker, never quite knowing with whom he's talking until they are before him, hidden in the darkness of the auditorium while he is exposed on stage. The performer cannot know his audience until the moment of communion. It appears only at the moment of performance. Last week, or even this morning, it had not arrived, and even in the bar afterwards it has already gone. Goode uses the background recitation of a random name generator to try to imagine a possible audience, realizing that this can only ever be a chimera. The real audience, and the real relationship can never be accurately predicted or permanently held.

But then later he tells us we are leaking data. We leave drips and stains everywhere. Just the fact that we are here now places us in a social group. Surveillance cameras, credit card companies and ISP's trap us, though we imagine we are free. "What are you doing with your privacy?" He asks me at one point. (Well he asked the audience, but I took him to mean me.) As though I have a responsibility to use such a precious resource wisely.

Then again, in this installation the customary theatrical gaze is reversed. Inside Balka's box, facing the bright opening, the audience can make out only silhouettes. The performer meanwhile, facing in, sees much more of his audience than they of him. Nevertheless he cannot know what is within us, in the darkness of our feelings. And we cannot know what he has prepared to show us. So what has Chris Goode been doing with his privacy? He's been observing his nakedness, hanging out his dirty laundry, screwing up the courage to stand under the spotlight of our attention. And alone in a room, which he later describes to us in intimate detail, he's been preparing to sacrifice himself to our voracious gaze.

In a final breathtaking confessional spoken at breakneck speed, he strips away all modesty, cataloguing himself exhaustively, down to bank balance and sexual fantasies. He lays himself bare. It's a blast of light. I wonder if there is anything important he chose not to reveal and, if so, why. In the honesty of this monologue he transcends the mere pretence of an actor who portrays some fictional character. The greater fiction is Truth. By presenting all the facts about himself he gives a gift which can be given only by the most enlightened and the most generous - the willingness to eschew the safety of anonymity. This gift of vulnerability frees us all from loneliness. In this performance Chris Goode exposes himself, the smell of his nakedness, and ultimately introduces us to ourselves. I refer to the smell of his nakedness only because he started it. In a hilarious pre-recorded scene, supposedly an interview with a Tate official, Goode discusses his proposal to include nakedness in his piece. The conversation begins in a quite reasonable, business-like manner but gradually turns into a discussion of how you can possibly know that someone is naked in the dark (by smell?) and eventual spirals into an uncomfortable and irresistable erotic encounter. It is a wonderfully comic evocation of the assertion that the largest sexual organ is the brain.

Imagination is the power that populates the void with demons and apsaras. Nothing is more powerful than the imagination. I know the truth of this very well indeed. During my own performance, CAT, I lived for 10 days in a sound-proof, light-proof box and found that my own dreams and waking thoughts melded to such an extent that I couldn't tell whether I was awake or asleep without touching my eyes. But the real lesson for me in that piece, about my work as an artist, concerned my relationship with the audience. I experienced the proof of the old dictum that 'Nature abhors a vacuum'. Most of the art is knowing where to leave space. Lacking any information about my actual state inside the box, people's imaginations rushed in to supply their own narratives. Narratives of exaltation or depravity, always driven by the pressures of their own fears and desires.

Who you are? celebrated this space of not knowing, while doing everything possible to fill it. The climactic image was a vindication of the half-light that had initially disappointed me. It made perfectly clear that this was not real darkness but a metaphor of darkness, a poetic, theatrical representation of it. The image was a twisting of that moment in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when people walk out of the mothership. This time I, the audience, was inside the ship. Twelve figures walked slowly up the ramp towards us and stood at the opening of the box. It could just be made out that some of the silhouetted figures were clothed, some naked. They stood there simply facing us. Revealing all and yet hidden. We were being introduced to ourselves.

About 'Experiences in the Dark'

We often fear and relish the dark in equal measures for all the unknown it can conceal. As children, we are introduced to darkness with fairy tales, and we enjoy them because they allow us to experience the thrill of the unknown and the shadows without any real exposure to danger. We associate the absence of light both with sleep and more sinister connotations.

The dark, by limiting visual clues that we usually rely on in order to make sense of the world, leaves us open to all possibilities, from the fantastic to the terrifying. How It Is invites us to embrace these potential experiences by plunging into darkness in the company of other visitors. Strangers and friends, emptiness and obstacles, time and space blur into new categories.

'Experiences of the Dark' was a series of short talks, performances and workshops taking place in and around Miroslaw Balka's How It Is in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern curated by Martine Rouleau. They outline and generate different experiences of the dark that aim to expand our understanding and our appreciation of it.

www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/talksdiscussions/experienceso...

About Ansuman Biswas

Darkness has been a recurrent theme in a number of his works. He lived for ten days at the South London gallery in a soundproof, lightproof black box. He spent three days blindfolded in an unknown place with nothing but a video camera which was handed to those he met.

He was closely involved in a season at Battersea Arts Centre called 'Playing in the Dark' which consisted of theatrical pieces without any visual component. He has also made pitch black interactive performances in venues around the world, including, Headlands Centre for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club in London.

Biswas' participation to this event was kindly supported by NAN through Tate.

Ansuman Biswas

Artist whose practice straddles text, music, theatre, visual art and performance.

First published: a-n.co.uk March 2010