What The Matter Is

Not sure where this is going, but listen to this:

“A taxicab drives up outside the theater. A man gets out of the cab and draws a gun. Across Twenty-third Street another man, a pedestrian, stops, kneels by a streetlight, and draws a gun. Between them flows the actual traffic of a busy Manhattan street. A few drivers and passengers duck as they see men with drawn guns on either side of the street. In typical New York fashion most cars don’t stop but drive through this battle zone. Inside the theater, a woman performer draws a gun and takes aim at the gunman who had arrived by taxi. She shoots, he falls, but the glass between them is not shattered.”

This is part of a production by Squat, a performance group operating in the 1970′s and 80′s in New York. Their stage backed onto a ground floor shopfront window looking straight out across the pavements and traffic of Twenty-third Street, and this gunman episode typifies the group’s incorporation of the everyday life outside into their staged productions. The description above is from Between Theater and Anthropology, Richard Schechner (Penn, Pennsylvania: 1985) p.304. Schechner continues:

“Again a system is revealed. The taxi = ‘life’ and belongs to Twenty-third Street. The gunmen in the street are ambivalent. They belong both to the realm of art and to what we have increasingly become accustomed to as life in the streets. To passing pedestrians and motorists, the gunmen are ‘life’. Then the woman drawing her pistol and shooting from inside the theater makes clear that the two gunmen outside are ‘art’. The blank shot that drops a person proves the point. But to whom does it prove it? The people just passing on Twenty-third Street see a man with a gun fall. Maybe they think they didn’t hear a shot. Or maybe they assume a movie is being shot. Or maybe they don’t think anything but just move through minding their own business.”

The work of productions like these is to ‘intentionally confound’ the categories of ‘art’ and ‘life’.

They set about it in quite a different way from the lifelike artworks of their contemporaries Allan Kaprow or Tehching Hseih. Nevertheless Schechner’s description sounds just the same as a Kaprow write-up: the tone of engaged retrospection, the factual but stealthily literary prose that seems to stand back but in fact constitutes the entire event for most of us, who missed the thing when it was live. Kaprow often wrote his own write-ups, and even wrote descriptions of exemplary happenings that never really happened; Schechner came to Squat from outside and writes from even further outside, at the distance of a fieldworker now reintegrated into the literature of anthropology. Did Kaprow do anthropology?

The question of artist studios keeps coming back. This is what I’m thinking about at the moment:

In 1964 Lucas Samaras moved the contents of his studio-bedroom into a gallery space where it was displayed as an artwork entitled Room #1. Every component of the original room was transferred into the gallery with their original arrangement exactly reconstructed in the new space, creating what the artist called “as complete a picture of me without my physical presence as there could possibly be”. Provocatively, he has described the gesture as “the most personal thing that any artist could do” [1].

It’s a provocative statement because it implies that the flesh and blood intimacy of the original room has accompanied the room’s material components into the gallery space, and that it maintains currency there. On the contrary: what is presented in the gallery is intimacy suspended, intimacy in inverted commas, intimacy under display – and under display, the replication of casual disorder presents the dead weight of deliberateness. Here the physical business of packing, shipping and unpacking literally isolates the room from the surrounding ground with which it was once continuous: the original building, the man’s life, the daily passing of time. Samaras’ statement serves in the end to highlight the annihilation of what was once personal about the room. What shows is not personal, it is the word for something personal.

Considered as an act of naming, Room #1 offers tools for opening up the relationship between word and thing. Blanchot writes:

A word may give me its meaning, but first it suppresses it. For me to be able to say, ‘This woman’ I must somehow take her flesh and blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being – the very fact that it does not exist. [2]

When Blanchot says “this woman”, the word gives him the woman deprived of her being. He has possession of the word in lieu of the thing. Meanwhile the thing – her being – still exists in all its flesh and blood reality and remains at large, resisting absorption into discourse. At the point of naming, the thing-in-itself recedes out of view into its “unnameable otherness” [3]. The word stands in for the absent thing, and allows the thing to sustain the integrity of its otherness outside of discourse.

With Room #1, meanwhile, the word (the display) stands in for the absent thing (the studio-bedroom) and yet both are composed of the very same material substance. For the duration of the gallery installation the studio-bedroom remains dissembled and, unlike the named woman, it does not physically exist at large elsewhere in its original state. At the point of naming, although the word operates as a trace denoting the thing’s absence, thing and word are visibly conflated in a singular form.

I’m preparing an article this month for a performance writing journal and these things are going to come into it one way or another. I want to bring in broken things/machines/utensils (Blanchot, Heidegger, Breton, Barthes) but it might be too much of a stretch this time given the word count.

[1] Lucas Samara, quoted in O’Doherty, B., Studio and Cube. FORuM, New York 2007: p. 4.

[2] Blanchot, M., The Gaze of Orpheus. Station Hill Press, New York 1981 (first published 1943, translated Lydia Davis 1981)

[3] Schwenger, Peter. (2001). Words and the Murder of the Thing. Critical Inquiry, 28(1), pp. 99-113: 102.

Tonight’s the Tate Britain! Things are mainly calm, thanks to very many to-do lists with actual tick boxes I’ve drawn on myself.

Anthony the conductor (Anthony-the-conductor) and I are arriving much too early on purpose so nothing can take us by surprise. I’m bringing with me a schedule that cuts the whole evening into five to fifteen minute slots, which is also over-the-top. With all these excesses there’ll be no thoughts left to have when we actually get there, that’s the idea anyway. I’m just straightforwardly looking forward to it now.

Come and say hello! Late at Tate is free of charge, 6:30-9:30pm tonight at Tate Britain.

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/eventseducation/lat…

Just found out John Smith’s 1976 Girl Chewing Gum will be screened on Friday night at Tate Britain while Anthony’s performing Musica Practica.

I’m very happy to discover this – Smith’s film was a steady reference point for me when I was beginning to develop the conducting performance. I wrote a bit about these parallels in March last year (with Rowan Atkinson thrown in too..) – the fictionalized conceits of each are quite different, as is the relation between instruction and action, so I think they’ll complement one another well, both showing at the same place and time. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

http://www.tamarinnorwood.co.uk/three-models-of-co…

Here’s the updated Late at Tate line-up:

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/eventseducation/lat…

I’m writing this purely to avoid doing my tax return.

Yesterday I met with Anthony the orchestra conductor and we chose a tailcoat for next Friday at the Tate. The man in the shop unspokenly seemed to think it was for our wedding and that I was his bride to be, and gave me tips about adjusting the waistband. I will not be sewing anything thank you.

We wondered afterwards if they might have given us a discount if we’d said BUT THIS IS FOR A PERFORMANCE AT THE FAMOUS TATE BRITAIN. We could have offered to put up a sponsorship banner behind Anthony so when people thought The Home of British Art they would think Moss Bros too.

Given all the preparation, it feels strange that we haven’t rehearsed. We’ve talked in depth about how the performance will differ from the original Southbank event, we’ve decided how he should step onto the podium, pause, pause and step off it again, we’ve decided when someone has to step in if something goes wrong, and what constitutes going wrong, and I’ve written a very pedantic schedule of what will happen between each of the seven performances – but no actual rehearsal.

The Southbank performance went equally unrehearsed and I think was stronger because of it: it was an exploration both for the conductor and for the passing audience. There’s no way of rehearsing a thing like this without actually performing it at the same time – and certainly no way of practicing the scenario in advance, as the scenario will continually renew itself moment after moment.

I think the important thing will be to keep all the practicalities clear and out of the way, so that in the end there’s nothing to do but the performance. In light of that, it’s nice to reflect that the performance itself will consist entirely of practicalities and their mirrored responses.

Oh the matter.