Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
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A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Home > Archives Thursday, 22 April 2010 From the archivesOriginally written in 2006; from Organum I. Let x equal x. In Negative Dialectics Adorno retracted what he'd said earlier about the possibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz. "A perennial suffering has just as much right to find expression as a victim of torture has to scream," he wrote. "For this reason it may have been wrong to write that after Auschwitz poetry could no longer be written." ("Poetry" a stand-in for artistic expression generally, Adorno engaging in synecdoche here: plays no longer staged, music no longer composed, dance no longer choreographed, paintings no longer executed.) We might be tempted to excuse Adorno's earlier hyperbolic, mandarin edict from the mountain as a reaction to the circumstances of sudden exile, not only from Europe but also from the Enlightenment that Europe represented. But he was right in both respects; the poetry and culture that came after the events of the 1940s could not but recognize those events as symptoms of a new, dark culture, the portal into the dark through which the race as a whole had willingly stepped. (And Wagner, and Brecht, and Schönberg, and Webern, and Schiele, and so many others foresaw this step, and we are still unwilling, many of us, to grant them that: the artists of Weimar become urgent messengers of what is being lost.) To say that these events were mere repetition of events of the past is a willing suspension of historical consciousness itself (never mind a suspension of disbelief, this is a suspension of belief): to posit that the cannon, the gallows, the single-shot rifle, the guillotine and the musket were only the death camps, the Ukrainian famine and the atomic bomb writ small is a value- and history-free conclusion that has excused all the continuing suffering that has followed in its wake: the development of napalm, Cambodia, Darfur, and I speak here only of the suffering that humans have visited on other humans, let alone the life of nature generally. That the bureaucratic, post-capitalist corporation, in the form of business and government entities, had taken the place of the church and the feudal system in organizing this suffering along lines laid out in organization charts, rationalized by advances in the social sciences, was a qualitative, not quantitative, change in the culture that the race had built up around it. It seems to be generally recognized that the consciousness that created the suffering of the 1940s must be radically realigned if that suffering is to be prevented once again. But even as we repeat the cliche that it must not happen again, the culture industry burrows the race deeper into darkness. It also makes the division of ideologies, the labelling of ourselves as progressive, or liberal, or conservative, or reactionary within that consciousness, a rearrangement of deck chairs on the Hindenberg, already alight and burning. If it hasn't crashed yet, its destruction is inevitable. Or we engage in the algebra of suffering and amelioration, looking at science and culture as a continuing quantitative balance: let x equal the suffering that science has brought to the race, y the amelioration of suffering via medicine and agriculture. Is the product of 2x (x representing here the summary execution of a homosexual, or Gypsy, or Shiite Muslim, or an afternoon at Abu Ghraib) equal to that of 1.5y (y representing here a mother's love, or the courage of a man who leaps upon another who has fallen into the path of a subway train, or the boon of digital communication)? This is a Swiftian endeavor straight out of the third book of Gulliver's Travels. It fails in that it ignores historical consciousness entirely, a historical consciousness that is a proper element not only of culture, but most certainly of theatre, music, dance, poetry, and painting. This isn't to say that all post-Holocaust art must somehow reference the Holocaust. But it must look back to that suffering and our role in it, and not merely in our ancestors' and our roles as victims, but as torturers as well. To paraphrase Adorno: You desire evidence as to the darkness of the world that culture has created; now you have the twentieth century. What more evidence do you need? "The concept of a resurrection of culture after Auschwitz is illusory and senseless," Adorno continues, "and for that reason every work of art that does come into being is forced to pay a bitter price. But because the world has outlived its own demise it needs art as its unconscious chronicle." (Emphasis mine -- GH) The poet, composer, performer elicits this unconscious in the service of recognition: the expression of suffering is a form of remembrance of its victims past and acknowledgement of its victims present. Or the poet, composer, performer buries that unconscious more deeply, in trivia and spectacle and the detritus of a culture industry that is peppered through it, the artist excusing its presence as a form of contemporeity or youth, in denying historical consciousness again: not only rewriting history, but erasing it, as Soviet newspaper editors, with their airbrushes, erased inconvenient personages from archival photographs. A new revived consciousness, an exploration of unconsciousness, may provide hope, even if it's illusory, even if it's impossible. But all conventional morality and ethics and culture, which we have pretended to rebuild since 1945, as if this same morality and ethics and culture didn't lead directly to the events of 1945 themselves, will need to be undermined and overturned, from the most basic unit of human contact and communication (that between two human beings) to the most complex (that between individual and community). Art its expression, irreducable to alegbraic equation. (A corollary: Use of language, sound, body in art must also be ruthlessly re-examined, changed, shorn of ease and convention. A post-Holocaust art will not sound or look the same as pre-Holocaust art, in any case; it can't, if it's to provide that unconscious chronicle of what has changed, is changing: through our bodies, what passes through them, and the sounds we make, the words we use, the images we paint. Intelligibility of artistic expression is the construct of culture as well.) Those who call themselves artists need to take all this into consideration at every moment of creation. An apology (or apologia), then, for dour seriousness, or for an anti-illusory aesthetic. But I think I was right. The stakes are higher now. Posted in /Archives Home > Archives Tuesday, 02 March 2010 From the archivesFrom Organum II, originally posted on 22 April 2009. Lightly edited. The theatre is my representation. There is no
more certain knowledge, once achieved, than this: that the theatre, like
the world, is a re- Once this realization, with all its horrifying, isolating, exhilarating
and ecstatic possibilities, has been experienced, it cannot be
unexperienced, unlearned, unrealized, and it will color all my theatre and
theatrical experience from then on. Only the hard press of voluntary,
willful ignorance — and this is not uncommon, for some of us fear
our own bodies and desires more than anything else in this world —
will be able to eradicate this realization from my consciousness. I remain
a member of what is called the collective of the audience, or the
collective of the experience, but I now define myself as simultaneously a
constituent and opponent of it. I gauge my reaction, consciously and
unconsciously, from within that collective, from my privileged unique
perspective. I am also aware that my own perspective is colored by the
culture of that collective: not merely the aesthetic and cultural
perceptions with which I enter the theatre, but as an individual body
amongst other individual bodies, sharing perceptual tools such as the eyes
and the ears. Though ultimately it is not through their eyes and ears with
which I witness the play, but through my own. Like Creon, Antigone and the
chorus of Sophocles' tragedy, I am empathetic and antipathetic to the
collective simultaneously (any chance of ultimate reconciliation between
these is illusory; violence unutterably and always follows upon violence,
whether Creon or Antigone's perspective is privileged, the play would end
in slaughter in either case, witnessed by the silent and in any event
illusory gods). I am always a unique and individual object, when alone or
with others, but the collective is a mere abstraction and does not exist
without the voluntary or involuntary gathering of several individual
bodies within one space at one time. For this reason my individual
perspective becomes primary, the primus inter pares in the
individual/ If I were a performer rather than an audience member, I would still experience the theatre as my representation, and whether I am an individual member of a theatrical company or a member of the audience, this experience is identical. On stage I move my body through space among objects and other bodies, and my movement and perspective remain unique. His lehrstücke, Brecht insisted, were learning plays not for the audience (at least not primarily for the audience), but for those who performed in them. As cast member too I remain individual. If the theatre remains my representation, we have an understanding of the perspective of cast members of Richard Foreman's plays, for example, many of whom have told me they feel no more utterly and fully themselves as individuals than when they appear in one of his plays. Finally there is the evidence of performers of other contemporary work, which demonstrates the untapped resources that can be called into practice once (but not before) the realization of the theatre as my representation occurs. My theatre is then charged with desire, disgust, fear, ecstasy,
possibility from each moment to each moment. It is a charge which both
unites and separates auditor and audience, spectator and performer,
performer and performer, in a process of seduction. Theatre is there and
not there, always passing, explicit and present only in my representation
and my body's status as privileged object. What differentiates the theatre
from the world is its disciplined self-
Once the representation is evacuated, my imagination rushes into it. Possibilities form, and all else necessary is the courage to explore them. Posted in /Archives Home > Archives Wednesday, 02 December 2009 From the archives: Rothko ChapelRecently my daughter celebrated her first birthday, and to mark that occasion I wish to repost below an entry from the Organum, which was originally published on 27 January of this year. It has been slightly revised. For Marilyn 
Houston's Rothko
Chapel is a small unremarkable building set just off a suburban
corner, adjoining a series of plain, low houses and a college campus.
Within it, however, is a world entirely itself, as real as the houses and
classrooms surrounding it but an enclosure of myth and tragedy. The
fourteen maroon-
Within this chapel, and within the bodies of work by artists such as Wagner, Syberberg, Beckett, Feldman, Rothko and Barker, we find a new definition for the tragic epic. Ordinarily the word "epic" is treated as genre, or formal description, but more precisely it is the representation of the will's noumenal cosmology through phenomenal means. In this sense "epic" ties Homer's poems to Beckett's. As a cosmology the body of work is necessarily precise and detailed, requiring more than a mere story or anecdote – or a single painting – for its full expression. It requires that imaginative extension besides. Lest we balk at the word "tragedy" itself as mere genre, let us
consider it here as a dynamic, a consciousness, a perspective, rather than
a form. The epic artist insists upon tragedy's expression through lengthy
duration in time and and expansive extension in space. (Leaving aside for
the moment the idea of "comic epics," which will have far more numerous
defenders, unlike the tragic epic, which in post- Extension through space may be another matter. As impressive as it is,
the Rothko Chapel is not a large building. In a letter to Dominique de
Menil, Mrs. Gifford Phillips reported on a conversation she had with
Rothko: that Rothko had described to her his project of one- I have discussed before my affection for small spaces, for the
fifty- These artists invite us in to these cosmologies, these worlds. In the case of Rothko's Chapel, these cosmologies are shorn of traditional figuration to reveal the essence of tragedy: beyond names and story (so many artists make the mistake of thinking that a mere recycling of a story or the use of a name like Oedipus is a means of confronting the tragedies that lay behind these stories and figures; these artists lay claim to them in a desperate attempt to lend their own work significance), but inherent in the very real instruments of the art form: the pigment, the canvas, the body, the sound. The substance lies in the real, the world of the phenomenon. Rothko warns of this fetishization of story and name:
In his late work, Rothko's titles too were shorn of mythic resonance, often mere descriptions of the colors within the painting. But he still insisted upon the tragic resonance. And his work was prone to the same kinds of misunderstandings as Beckett's. Once, an observer called Rothko's canvases of bright yellows and oranges optimistic "celebrations." Rothko responded that these colors, to him, were the colors of an inferno. (This is something I must remember the next time somebody describes the "hope" that Beckett's work elicits from them.) The contemporary epic, tragic vision is rare. The more lacerating
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