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Tuesday, 06 January 2009
Originally published in Organum I on 16
January 2007; lightly revised here; an amplification of views expressed in
last
Friday's post.
Terror of the everyday and the necessity of glamour. The embrace
and worship of the everyday tedious and repetitive gesture suggest a
hatred, even abhorrence of extremity, of transgression, this hatred and
abhorrence born (as most hatreds and abhorrences) of fear: A
well-founded fear that these will undermine the security and
assurances of the everyday. (Tragedy doesn't provide health insurance.)
Never mind that this love of the quotidian is composed of a thin veneer of
self-importance and an unwarranted expectation of permanence. The
possibilities of experience that extremity and transgression invite are
drowned in tedium: the tedium of meaningless repetitive work to no end
except that of money and security (there is repetitive work in art, in
practice, essential to art's necessary precision, but its end neither
fiscal nor safe). The tedium of possession, again born of fear: new cars
and condominiums, things to anchor us more deeply into the phenomenal, the
dull but insatiable throb of its everyday desires. In their tedium is our
security. For some it is air and water, this security. For some it is a
drowning death-in-minimal-life.
Small pleasures, greater pains: nothing like the body in the throes of
death and decay. How self-absorbed, without explanation, the living
bodies surrounding those of the dead and dying. Clothed in bluejeans and
sneakers. These living bodies adorn their self-hatred with the
democratic casual.
Erotic tragedy is a glamorous art. It holds comfort and ease as
abominations. It's no wonder that it's so informed by luxurious clothing,
robes and well-wrought nets. Clothing fetishizes the body as the body
fetishizes the spirit, but the fetish provides access to the signified,
which stands beyond the object itself. (Costume has always been more
signifying than scenery. The eros of the mask, mask of the face as
costumes mask the body: tragedy is a clothed art.) Lush, beautiful
costumes, a couture by definition tailored to the individual body of the
performer who wears it. Hence the costume's individual expressivity, hence
it contains the self's loneliness and desire for union, its vulnerability
reaches for the Other. As far from tedium and the quotidian as can be
achieved.
Tragedy is not about sensible shoes, as Howard Barker suggested when he
discussed the meaning of costume in Gertrude – The Cry:
[Gertrude's shoes have] heels of such extravagant dimensions how can
you move except by dislocating your entire anatomy [...] should shoes not
enhance the action of our limbs should they not encourage us to act in
sympathy with the body's functioning not trick us into grotesque parody
... [the intention of] all nakedness in my own work where the gesture of
revelation is endowed with performance, above all, challenge to transgress
the social/political routine, to subvert the situation and thereby
disorientate, to force a collapse on the spectator (by spectator I mean
the opposite character in the play ...)
Couture, elegance, glamour are by definition theatrical and
presentational of the human body. Rediscovery of the expression of erotic
tragedy. The clothed onstage body to encourage in the spectator (by
spectator I mean the individual sitting in the audience) an unclothed
exploration offstage, in secret, conspiratorial and intimate; a new
self-awareness too in the public world: to render that world too a
place of beauty and elegance emerging from the phenomenal self. Instead
of, by encouraging that democratic casualness and comfort, murdering the
spirit through tedium and trivia that mask only boredom and despair.
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