the play of panic and grace

‘I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But show the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them’ … Walter Benjamin

 

Since the summer of 2017, the performance maker and visual artist John Rowley has produced a substantial and compelling series of mask photographs on Instagram (@john.rowley.17). To date there are over 500 of these images, each of them a ‘self-portrait’ wearing a particular mask of his own devising, a new and different ‘face’ layered over his own face. The photographs are almost always taken in the same location, by the back door of John’s house in Cardiff. The framing reveals John’s body from the middle of his chest to the top of his head; his torso is naked, throwing our attention up towards the facial sculpture of the mask. The collection of images in this book represents a selection from this brilliantly eccentric catalogue of playfully performed, possible selves.

 

With great economy and humour, all sorts of practices and categories are teased at and critically questioned in this body of work. The self and its proliferative performance in the time of the ‘selfy’. Photographic portraiture and its enduring claim to register the real.  Social media as a site for creative practice. Negotiating and recycling a culture of acquisition and disposal, consumption and waste. And the status of a mask today. This series was underway long before the pandemic and its rolling lockdowns; but in the contested light of the enforced restrictions of Covid and its protective masks, these images assume a further critical charge, as an emancipatory realigning of our relationship to the mask, and of imaginative ways to people our isolation.

 

Cumulatively as a series, the images reference a wide range of art and cultural practices, consciously or otherwise. For example, there are comic resonances with Renaissance portrait paintings and the composite fruit’n’veg heads of Archimboldo, with Hieronymus Bosch, modernist visual art practices (particularly Surrealism and Dada collage, Constructivism, Picasso, Francis Bacon) and body art, as well as the work of certain photographers, including Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman. There are also buried echoes of British folk art practices, of Oceanic and African mask art, and tongue-in-cheek renderings of traditions of masked theatre: ancient Greek drama, commedia dell’arte. More explicitly and insistently, the images draw joyfully on the tropes, stereotypes and material traces of popular culture: B-movies, TV, sci-fi - clunky representations of early hominids, ancient warriors, assorted monsters and animals; cartoons, children’s drawings, doodles; amateur dramatics and school plays; perhaps even the construction of scarecrows and bodgy backyard snowmen.

 

Some of you will be familiar with John’s work over many years as a live performer, with Brith Gof, Mike Pearson and National Theatre of Wales, good cop bad cop, Forced Entertainment, Heiner Goebbels and others. And to my mind he brings some of his characteristic attributes in those experimental theatre contexts to these stagings of masks – the very sign of theatre. Above all, a profound tonal ambiguity that straddles the apparent opposition between laugh-out-loud-funny and not-funny-at-all. His performances consistently affirm a willingness to embrace and inhabit the desultory bare life of the browbeaten, wounded, pathetic, limping, lonely and broken; he knows how to adopt the shape of the ache of loss, dereliction and abjection. At the same time, these dented wasteling figures possess an enduring resilience, and present us with a resistant self who’s still standing, looking back, doggedly life-ful. A wilful spark glimmers in the eyes of these Beckettian clowns, their ‘pilot lights’ still ablaze, triumphant and still playing in the face of despondency and failure; although it’s a precarious balancing act, somehow they avoid being consumed by the mess of it all. In this way, John becomes a kind of suburban trash shaman, or a redemptive bouffon, buoyed as much, it seems, by a greasy bacon bap as by Francis Bacon. At times there’s also a whiff of that naughty attention–seeking kid at school pratting around with pencils up his nose, elastic bands scrunched around his ears, fingers distending his mouth – making faces for silly laughs, for the shock of it, pushing things just a little too far. Funny-haha/funny-peculiar.

 

When I have seen John perform, I have often been struck by his animation of these ambiguities, his recurrent ability to conjoin a poignant, hunched, lurching fragility with a stroppily upright ongoingness. It feels as though we are witnessing a layered and complex creature happening right here and now in all of its uncertainty, its fucked-up-and-yet-ness. I have come to think of John the performer as a defiant, playfully purposeful celebrant picking over the brokenness and waste of a culture, mirroring it back at us. A shapeshifting survivor finding a way through the chaos, all too aware of it, with his eyes locked on ours. And I am reminded of the American director and writer Herbert Blau’s description of how, through performance, he was always trying to work out ‘some liveable unison between panic and grace'. I see something of that brave juggle-dance in both John’s performances and in these photographs.

 

As with the creative ‘messing around’ that devising performances entails, John’s approach to these masks involves bricolage and montage. His aesthetic is rough, artisanal, home-made, his decision-making swift and intuitive. Found materials, the abandoned and forgotten by-products of domestic everyday life - the use-less remainder, a kind of living dead - are reclaimed and repurposed in new combinations that leak a mysterious potency and affect. Excavate, retrieve, accumulate, select, experiment, improvise, reinvent. Sometimes these combinations are minimal (three pieces of string - #barelyamask - tied tight around the face to rearrange it, one eye stretched wide, the nose flattened, the mouth stretched uncomfortably to somewhere between wince and growl); sometimes they are cumulative, stratified and elaborate. Specific materials are selected from whatever’s at hand in the home: food, packaging, clothing, soft furnishings and toys, decorations, objects and products from the kitchen, bathroom, garden and shed, junk mail, celeb magazine covers - including an astonishing series of ‘shredded’ politicians - and other found images. These elements are combined, attached to the face or draped over it, then recorded on a phone camera and uploaded with a slew of comedy hashtags, in this way transforming both raw materials and face into a new temporary ‘persona’ (the Latin term for a mask, and for the self presented to others, one’s social ‘role’). Compositionally, these constructed faces are knowingly arranged around the eyes, or occasionally John’s glasses, a comically effective stand-in for the eyes as well as a practical means to hold the mask in place.

 

John’s images make me think of the subversive power of children’s play, an experiential ‘becoming-worldly’, as conceived by Walter Benjamin: repetition with infinite variants as the organizing principle presiding over the rules and rhythms of the world of play, which in its world-making can propose a disorderly threat to the prevailing order: and Benjamin’s affirmation in his Arcades project of history’s ‘ragpickers’, scouring the debris of the residual dream-worlds of obsolete commodity fetishism, making use of the rags and the refuse, enabling them to take (a) place and to do their work. And I think of Roland Barthes’s reflections on the body, and how to write it: “Neither the skin, nor the muscles, not the bones, not the nerves, but the rest: an awkward, fibrous, shaggy, ravelled thing, a clown’s coat”.

 

Traditionally, masks have been conceived of as instruments of concealment, a deceptive covering deployed to withhold the self. Paradoxically, however, the best masks seem to reveal and expose something that’s hidden; they enable an archetypal shape, a ‘soul portrait’, to seem to flare into appearance. However, in John’s non-illusionist images the seams of seeming never quite disappear. Although we recognise a typology of different kinds of being-in-the-world in these masks, we never lose sight of their made-ness, the edges and joins, the string and tape, John’s skin and body. And in this ambiguous aggregation of John/not-John, invariably John is partially present AND temporarily elsewhere. His masks are presentational, to-be-looked-at, but more often than not he also looks back through the architecture of the fiction, through the cracks in the made thing. Of course his capacity to see is what’s needed in order to be able to take a photograph, but it also has the effect of making the mask both proximate and held at a slight distance, like a role in the theatre of Brecht, never all-consuming as a seamless illusion. And within this gap there is a critical friction, a give, a space for play.

 

Given that these images are named as self-portraits, where’s John in all of this? He presents us with a series of arrested, temporary identities, ludic signs of a plural, mutable and unstable self-in-process made up of fragments of our culture. The others who are us. In the ruins of the notion of an essential self and of a single, fixed, ‘true’ mask, perhaps that’s what a contemporary self is: an ongoing and unfinishable series of ephemeral identities, a parade of the borrowed and constructed, the hilarious and the tragic. Fleeting shapes that emerge and are encountered, before they melt away again, like the tips of passing icebergs. For we know that there is always more to this than meets the eye. And that there will be others still to come, hopefully …

 

Introduction to John Rowley's  'Ludic', a book of mask/self-portrait photographs, designed & published by Terraffoto, 2022. There's a large format, limited edition, hand-crafted risograph edition, and a digitally printed version. Big thanks to John for inviting me to write something to accompany his brilliant images ...

only you

1.  Dominique Mercy, in Pina Bausch’s Nur Du (‘Only You’), viewed from the wings backstage at the Barbican in the summer of 2012, just prior to his entrance for his final solo, the final sequence in the performance

He spends three or four minutes in the wings offstage silently marking the solo-to-come in a very reduced, minimal fashion, while smoking throughout. He wears a brown suit, open jacket, white shirt, tan leather shoes. As he goes through the solo in distilled form, the movements barely bubble up to the surface; the focus is internal, on what is to be done. So, for example, what will be a wide arcing sweep of an arm is here just a soft unfolding of a wrist and hand. Then a slow flexing of his neck and shoulders, and one last check of his shoelaces, ensuring they are perfectly taut and neat. A pause, cigarette still in hand. Then, at the moment of his entrance into the performance space, he takes one final long drag of his cigarette, stubs it out in an ashtray on a table just offstage – then walks into the performance space blowing smoke directly in front of him. So that as he appears in the lights, he moves into and then trails a luminous grey-blue cloud around his face and shoulders. In this way his own exhalation creates a dynamic medium which is stirred by his movement through it. It parts and folds in wisps behind him. As if he were carried by it, floating. 

 

2.  Al Pacino, in David Mamet’s American Buffalo, London in the early 1980s

His entrance for his opening scene is through the door of the junk shop from the (fictional) ‘street’ beyond. The shop bell jingles and there he is, palpably in character: nervous, edgy, ‘difficult’. Immediate and unrestrained applause for the actor, who has now paused at the top of the stairs leading down into the space. He drops out of his character, his body changes shape and energy as he acknowledges the applause, a small bow and hand acknowledgements. As silence gradually returns, he then folds seamlessly, mysteriously back into character and begins to walk down the stairs to start the scene. But after two or three steps he trips and falls, slipping down a couple of stairs on to his ass. An audible intake of breath from the audience, a collective whince. This second fall out of character produces a slightly different body shape; another Pacino appears, momentarily ruffled, vulnerable, disarmed. He gets up quickly, then smiles self-consciously at some relieved laughter and scattered applause from the audience, sympathetic, willing him on. He dusts himself down, and carefully moves down the remaining stairs, settles again. Some fresh applause, supportive, expectant. As silence returns, he folds back into character, precisely and legibly the same architecture and fidgety energy as at the top of the stairs when he first appeared, and the scene is underway again …

  

3.  Patti Smith, Pyramid Stage, Glastonbury Festival, June 2015

In an amorphous noise transition between ‘Gloria’ and a cover of the Who’s ‘My Generation’, with the Dalai Lama and his entourage watching wide-eyed and smiling from one side of the stage, she runs across the stage trailing her long white hair, a wild teetering edge-of-balance kind of run. She trips and falls heavily, spilling the mic - then surprisingly quickly gets back to her feet, retrieves the mic, spits copiously, and shouts as she lurches back towards the middle of the stage: ‘I just fell on my ass, but I don’t give a shit cos I’m a fuckin’ animal!’ Then it’s unstoppably into a ragged, clattery ‘People try to put us d-down …’, before she starts to rip out her guitar strings one by one, yanking them off with her bare hands, grimacing; they make little strangled electric wails and pops. It looks like it must really hurt.

 

Texts invited by Vlatka Horvat for her performance Third Hand, commissioned as part of the Goat Island exhibition and archive ‘We have discovered the performance by making it’, Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in Fine Art, Chicago (April 2019), IN>TIME Performance Festival; and at the Chicago Cultural Center, June. Supported by City of Chicago’s Year of Theater program. Photo of Dominique Mercy by Ari Rossner

night flying

Night Flying: a performance conceived, devised and performed by Jane Mason and David Williams. Dramaturgical support from Luke Pell, Paul Carter and Wendy Hubbard. Lighting design: Mark Parry

Residencies at The Point, Eastleigh; Pavilion Dance, Bournemouth; Mark Bruce Company, Frome; Dance4, Nottingham; The Phoenix, Exeter; Exeter University

Premiere at Exeter Phoenix, then Bristol Old Vic, and Siobhan Davies Studios, London (as part of the ‘Open Choreography Performance’ programme 2019). Further touring in spring 2020 (Plymouth, Cornwall, London) - details to follow

For a review of Night Flying in Bristol, by Ian Abbott, see here

Photographs in tour pack (above) by Benjamin J Borley, Aaron Davies, Tessa France. Post-performance photograph below by David Williams

botched taxidermy (FE365)

Throughout 2014, the 30th year of Forced Entertainment's existence, the company made an open call for people to submit texts "describing, thinking around, considering, marking or in any way remembering the company’s work in the three decades from its beginning in 1984". The only rule, that they be "exactly 365 words long, the final objective being to make a selection of texts totaling 10,950 words, one word for each day of the group’s collective work in the field of contemporary performance". In March 2015, 30 of the texts originally submitted - one for each year - were selected and published online as a pdf, with an introduction by Deborah Chadbourn and an afterword by Tim Etchells. This and the following post, texts I submitted, were included.

*****

In his book The Postmodern Animal (2000), Steve Baker explores a variety of contemporary art practices involving animal representations, where ‘things appear to have gone wrong with the animal, as it were, but where it still holds together’. He describes strategies of imitation where disguises are tawdry, compromised, incongruous conjunctions coming apart at the seams, active reminders of difference and perhaps of a certain shame. With reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s word rater (to spoil, ruin), he coins the term ‘botched taxidermy’ for such makeshift, imperfect practices. Related to assemblage and bricolage, and the knowingly open display of ‘faulty’ or ‘inexpert’ technique, Baker suggests that such creative procedures in the generation of the provisional, the informal and the recycled are ‘questioning entities’(Derrida).

‘Botched taxidermy’ seems useful in relation to Forced Entertainment’s work, not only for thinking into all those dodgy animal disguises and uncertain animal/human hybrids in the performances: the panto horse in Pleasure, gulping whisky through an eye socket and cans of lager through the join between the two halves of the costume, before dancing in its own beery piss; the recurrent gorilla suit with or without head; or Cathy’s tatty, amateurish ‘dog’ costume in Showtime, on all fours with only the dog’s head and an old overcoat - a hilarious irritant messing with the show’s already troubled coherence, as well as a bittersweet failure of cynocephalic transformation. ‘Botched taxidermy’ also informs the structures and tonalities that characterise so many of these shows. Irreverently playing with received, overly-familiar or overlooked representational forms, displacing and defamiliarising them, turning them inside out and on their heads. Messing with their anatomies, abusing them, taking them apart, ‘stitching them up’ and reanimating them as comic, pathetic, psychotic, narcoleptic, drunk, incompetent, conspiratorial or inventive revenants in a different context here-now.

In Forced Entertainment’s shows, things often stagger on the lip of falling apart, yet somehow it still holds together. This core ambiguity and complexity in the work might be called a ‘fucked-up-and-yetness’. The ‘and-yetness’, which is political in its invitation to possibility and connectivity, takes many forms aesthetically and affectively, from the melancholic, the poignant and the corrosively comic, to the most astonishing micro-events of a flaring into appearance.

For all of the FE365 submissions in 2014, as well as the pdf download, see here. Contributors to the pdf selection include Mike Harrison, Alan Read, Gerry Harris, John McGrath, Matt Fenton, David Tushingham, Tim Crouch, Andy Smith, Richard Gregory, Kate Valk, Claire Macdonald, Dan Rebellato and Mark Etchells. 

five interiors (palermo)

From the top: pop-up gallery in abandoned building by Quattro Canti, Via Maqueda, Palermo; Cala Rossa, Norman Palace; Capella Palatina; Teatro Massimo (rehearsal); Santa Maria dello Spasimo, La Kalsa

nothing but theatre (for the time being)

‘And now in the twenty-first century, what we’re calling an age of terror, it would seem for the time being, which is the time of theatre, that the perilous tension is worse, even more ambiguous, with innumerable bodies dying […]. Whatever the reasons for it […] the paranoia is growing, what with tunnelled networks, stateless, like dreadnaughts spreading dread, with conspiracy theories and secrecies, homeland security dubious and everything out of sight. If you really think it over, how does any theatre, by whatever theatrical means, really match up with that, or the pervasiveness of seeming that, in the material world, not virtual at all, appears in actuality – now a perversion of seeming? - to make it nothing but theatre’

(Blau 2006: 243).

In recent days, as another year comes to an end and a new one begins, I have been re-visiting more than a decade’s worth of issues of Performance Research, from ‘The Temper of the Times’ to ‘Lexicon’. Perhaps inevitably this immersive return has stimulated a great deal of reflection: in particular, on performance and theatre (the latter so often constituted as performance’s shameful ‘other’, to be denied or repressed); on the nature of the ‘event’ and the im/possibility of its inscription; and on events in my own life and in the wider world that run parallel to and inform my evolving involvement in the journal and other sites for research, collaboration and purposeful play.

In this time of apparently ‘nothing but theatre’ in the theatres of international politics and war, nonetheless all sorts of other performative events insistently leak into embodied experience and histories from the policed parameters of pervasive and perverse ‘seeming’. The ‘nothing but’ in Blau’s ‘nothing but theatre’ knowingly summons the ghosts of ongoing anti-theatrical prejudice, from Michael Fried to Marina Abramovic (at least until recently with Marina). Like most prejudices, it unwittingly constitutes phantasms of the particular modes of practice being rejected, while overlooking other modes: in this context, other ‘theatres’ hosting their own critique, other economies of representation aware of the disastrous paraphernalia of pretence (‘To Hide, to Show: that is theatrality’, Lyotard 1997: 282), and of the enabling possibilities of playing or flirting with mimesis’s seams and its inevitable compromise. And it is precisely these other theatres in an expanded field of performance, in themselves ‘anti-theatres’, that Performance Research has endeavoured to create critical spaces for. The five essays that follow employ diverse modes of writing (into and after) the event, in order to unfold the ‘nothing but’ and touch on the particularities of some of these other practices, including work made by Boris Nieslony, Victoria, Forster and Heighes, Ernst Fischer, Needcompany, Einar Schleef, Christoph Marthaler, René Pollesch, Kattrin Deufert and Thomas Plischke.

For my own part, in re-reading these past issues I am thrown back on memories of ‘temporary zones of meeting’ (Allsopp) over the past decade that ghost my psyche still; and they track me, dog me ‘in the material world’. Most of them are traces of encounter events in localised, ‘marginal’ contexts – catalytic flarings into appearance of the sublime and unpredictable, the anomalous and interruptive, the polyphonous and contradictory, the untimely in the everyday, the heart-quickening, the disorienting, the irrecuperable, the not-yet-known, the more-than-one, the so-much-more-than-me. If my enumeration of some of them here seems narcissistic, ‘nothing but theatre’, forgive me, my intention is elsewhere, far from ‘me’. As occasions of and provocations to identity and difference, interaction and exchange, the dramaturgies of these active vanishings seem to me to stage performative topographies of hopes and fears, desires and incredulities aplenty. ‘Seized with the promise of alterity’ (Kear), they ‘strike’ me, and prise ‘me’ open to the world. And the proliferative ambiguities, indeterminacies and oscillations of these momentary and momentous razor kites over the ‘mountain of dust’ (Deufert & Plischke) demand the fidelity of an attentive self-in-process.

***

Bush fires en route to the horses near Perth in Western Australia, the fireball that shot across the road in front of us like a missile and incinerated a small wooden bridge. 

Watching Australian Rules Football at the MCG in Melbourne with Mark M, who taught me to see artistry and choreography - to paraphrase the sports writer Richard Williams describing Zidane, to perceive the ways in which certain playmakers have the capacity to see ‘time and space and angles where we see only confusion’. 

Tracking Pete Goss’s astonishing catamaran leaving Dartmouth for the last time on its first and final voyage, flying jauntily past Start Point in full sail towards the horizon and its fate. 

Squatting with a group of others over a pavement-level grating in Barcelona to glimpse odd fragments of Boris Nieslony’s mysterious and profoundly unsettling actions in an underground space. 

Sliding a block of ice through the streets of Barcelona to Las Ramblas with Gregg and Gary, in an attempt to re-member the river that once ran down to the sea. 

The breakdown into a state of dis/grace finally triggered by Lars Von Trier’s film The Idiots, followed by a month of sub-Blakean wanderings, visions and encounters around Britain. 

Fainting during a question about ethics at the end of a paper on animals and the event of alterity that I had just presented at PSi in Aberystwyth. 

The humbling clear-sightedness and courage of Jane, Tom, Rosemary, as they prepared for death while their bodies were consumed by cancers. 

The ‘shock and awe’ of watching lumbering B52s taking off from a Gloucestershire airbase at dusk, en route to Baghdad to bomb the Iraqi people into ‘democracy’, our every move tracked by a night-vision-equipped soldier on the other side of the perimeter fence. 

Witnessing the extinguishing of a belching fire in an industrial workshop on the outskirts of Exeter during an early morning drift with the members of Wrights & Sites. 

Being herded with other audience members towards our seats by a gaggle of no-nonsense geese before a Théâtre Zingaro show at Aubervilliers in Paris. 

Holding the hand of a fearful friend as together we watched live feed images of the cauterisation of anomalous cells on her cervix on a colour monitor. 

The rolling thunder of the moon’s shadow, the umbra, racing across the Devon countryside along the ‘path of totality’ during the 1999 eclipse - it swept away my legs and knocked me to the ground, literally. 

The excessive responses to the foot and mouth outbreak in Devon, the pyres and mass burials. 

The uncertain pleasures of watching my 78 year-old father playing a disorderly drunk in an amateur production of a play appropriately called Kindly Leave the Stage in the civic theatre in Maidstone. 

Anne K showing me the scar tissue where her breast had been, in her luminous flat overlooking the West Pier in Brighton, not long before she died. 

Admiring the elegance of the way Pina Bausch smoked her cigarette outside the stage door of Sadler’s Wells. 

Playing a tape of a nightingale’s song to a lion in the Zagreb zoo, holding it to its ear on the other side of inadequate looking bars, then smelling its breath as it turned and fixed me with its eyes. 

Standing on top of a vast rubbish mountain near the suburb of Novi Zagreb with Croatian performance artist Damir Bartol Indos, as he conveyed his desire to make a performance right there atop the tip, amongst the methane explosions, feral pigs and gulls. 

Instinctively ducking to avoid a burning barrel bobbing towards me through the packed crowd on the back of a man running blind in Ottery St Mary. 

Hurriedly texting Alan Read and other Londoners on the morning of the London bombings, my mind full of dread-ful possibilities. 

A nocturnal electrical storm over the bay of Castellamare, west of Palermo, burning ephemeral images of coast and sea and sky onto my retina, and my failed attempts to photograph the lightning. 

Instances of the compassion, generosity, violence and pride of Palermo, its palpable sense of loss and possibility; and then the energy expended by so many Palermitans enacting Lampedusa’s paradoxical contention in The Leopard that ‘everything must change in order for things to stay the same’. 

The wide-eyed man in combat fatigues who burst into our living room late one night during Match of the Day, a bloodied kitchen knife held out towards me in his open hand, his jacket blackened with blood from his stab wounds. 

Throwing water over Gary’s torso, steaming in the cold Devon night air, while we sang: ‘Oooh baby baby it’s a wild world’. 

Shivering with Sue in the hide at dawn on the Somerset levels - then the sudden roar of more than six million starlings taking off, the blackened sky, the deafening vortex of this unimaginably complex, surf-like ‘murmuration’, and its gradual dispersal into silence.

***

In addition, perhaps these fragments and the following texts in this section relate to a performance epistemology of the kind outlined by David George in the very first issue of Performance Research:

‘As an epistemology, performance offers a rediscovery of the now; relocation in the here; return to the primacy of experience, of the event; a rediscovery that all knowledge exists on the threshold of and in the interaction between subject and object; a rediscovery of ambiguity, of contradiction, of difference; a reassertion that things – and people – are what they do’ (George 1996: 25).

However, beyond or beneath the neat knowingness of this analysis, some genuine mysteries remain for me as to why these memories now, and what kinds of performance interventions they seem to invite. To quote the words of that celebrated cartographer of modes of knowing, former US Secretary of State for Defence Donald Rumsfeld:

‘There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are the things we don’t know we don’t know’ (quoted in Zizek 2004: 9).

As Slavoj Zizek points out in his book about Iraq, Rumsfeld forgot to add a crucial fourth term: ‘’the unknown knowns’, the things that we do not know that we know’ (ibid), in other words, the unconscious: ‘the knowledge which does not know itself […] the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not aware of adhering to ourselves’ (ibid: 10). They are uncontrollable because there is no awareness of their existence. Perhaps immersion in certain activities – talking, listening, writing, playing, dreaming, the eruptive event of encountering another, attention to ‘intensities and irritations’ (Primavesi) of all kinds – can generate frictions and short-circuits to unsettle or jolt them a little, to allow us to glimpse their dynamic contours out of our peripheral vision, to know something of them ‘feelingly’. If my engagement in Performance Research as an editor and writer has taught me anything, it is this: perhaps one can learn how not to know fully what one is doing and still keep on doing it, knowing that all sorts of provisional knowledges flicker and take shape, for the time being, and that ultimately the unconscious will always make a fool out of the expert.

References

Blau, Herbert (2006). ‘Seeming, Seeming: The Illusion of Enough’, in Alan Ackerman & Martin Puchner (eds), Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 231-47

George, David (1996). ‘Performance Epistemology’, Performance Research 1:1 (‘The Temper of the Times’), Spring, 16-25

Lyotard, Jean François (1997). ‘The Tooth, the Palm’ [1977], in Timothy Mottram (ed.), Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary Thought, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 282-8

Zizek, Slavoj (2004). Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, London: Verso

___________________________________________

This text was first written in January 2007 as my preface to a group of essays on theatre to be included in an anthology about contemporary performance, A Critical Decade: The Performance Research Reader. Some years down the track, it now seems unlikely that the Reader will ever be published, although this text resonates for me still …

Photograph of starlings over Rome by Richard Barnes

witness of time

Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh
Adrian Heathfield and Tehching Hsieh
Live Art Development Agency / MIT Press, 2009

Let’s start by revisiting the bare bones of the performance projects by Taiwanese-American artist Tehching Hsieh, realised between 1978 and 1999. Six projects in all, beginning with a series of five year-long performances. First, one year of solitary confinement in a sealed cell with no communication. Second, a year of punching a time clock on the hour every hour and photographing this action: 24 frames a day for 365 days. Third, a year living rough outside on the streets of New York, drifting and seeking shelter, never going inside. Fourth, one year tied at the waist with a rope to the performance artist Linda Montano, with a prohibition on touch. Fifth, a year spent abstaining wholly from art, its making and its spheres of influence. Finally, a 13-year project in which Hsieh proposed to make art without ever showing it in public, a project during which he effectively disappeared. On New Year’s Eve 1999, at the cusp of the new millennium, in a brief event at the Judson Memorial Church to mark the project’s ending, Hsieh simply told those who had gathered that he had succeeded in keeping himself alive …

The publication of this superb monograph is timely indeed. To date very little of substance has been published about this most remarkable artist and his profoundly unsettling body of work, despite the fact that its contours and challenges are etched indelibly into the psyches of so many involved in contemporary art and performance. We know these deceptively simple shapes, the sculptural forms of the bare bones outlined above, and they are as honed as the shapes of some of Beckett’s most economical work. Or rather we think we know them, for they linger on in unresolved reverberant forms within us. In reality, individually and collectively these works confront and resist claims to knowledge: about art and its parameters; about the passage of time, meaning, identity, freedom; and ultimately about what really happened in the seconds and minutes and hours and days and months and years of these extraordinary ‘lifeworks’.

In a brilliant opening essay, ‘Impress of Time’, Adrian Heathfield contextualises and unfolds the implications of Hsieh’s ‘life lived at limits’ (58) with consummate sensitivity and thoughtfulness. He treads lightly and respectfully throughout, refusing to explain this work away in any singular and inevitably reductive ‘reading’, instead approaching each work in turn not as a referential or symbolic narrative structure but in terms of what it does. In this way, he seeks to articulate something of the affective ‘force’ of this body of work as a ‘constellation of enduring ideas, echoing in the present’ (58).

As well as providing detailed descriptions of each of the projects in turn, Heathfield explores a wide range of such ideas, including: Hsieh’s conception of art and life as simultaneous processes; his embodied instanciations of radical paradox, including the ambiguity of relations between constraint, solitude, freedom and thought in his work, and his deconstructive ‘binding together of activity and negation, production and redundancy’, public immersion and isolation, movement and stasis (45); the differing temporalities of photography and film, and the unstable epistemological status of documentation; Hsieh’s embodied stagings of an ethics of alterity, relationality and civility; his recurrent engagement with aspects and structures of ‘the law’ (he cites Kafka as a core stimulus), set alongside his vulnerable status as an illegal immigrant in the US; his decelerative ‘wasting of time’ in non-productive and uneventful works of extreme duration, and the critical frictions his ‘use-less’ slowness seem to propose within the accelerated temporalities of late capitalism. En route, Heathfield also traces relations with Conceptualism, Performance Art, Body Art in the West, and connections with a range of other artists including Bas Jan Ader, Harry Houdini, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Abramovic and Ulay, and, perhaps most startlingly as a deterritorialising line of flight, the tightrope walker Philippe Petit. These connective genealogies are invariably and finely attuned to differences, and Heathfield resists collapsing this relational cartography into any homogenising empire of the selfsame.

The bulk of the book (pp. 63-315) is given over to Hsieh’s exhaustive documentation of each of his ‘lifeworks’. Scores, flyers, maps, punch cards stamped and signed, legal documents attesting to Hsieh’s own ‘rules’ having been respected (cells and ropes sealed and unbroken, punch cards stamped etc.), and thousands of photographs. Hsieh also includes calendars registering minor breakings of his strictures, such as hours missed in the punching of the time clock: 133 absences in the total of 8,760, each one catalogued in relation to one of three possible ‘reasons’ - ‘sleeping’, ‘late’, or ‘early’.

Many of the beautifully reproduced images comprise lengthy series of stills cumulatively registering the passage of time, in dated punch cards, say, or gradual hair growth. It’s intriguing to revisit the hourly photographs of ‘Time Clock Piece’ in this print context, laid out on 31 consecutive pages, each page containing 12 vertical columns / film strips of 24 images (i.e. one day per strip, 12 days per page). The lay-out produces an uncanny juddering temporality, and at the same time foregrounds the sheer enormity of the (t)ask. Its astonishing difficulty is somewhat elided in the high-speed, suppressed-hysteria energetics of the 6-minute stop-motion animated film version, within which each day – each column within the book - is condensed into a second (see Hsieh 1999). On the page one can skim and flick, or endeavour to accept it as a kind of meditation exercise: an invitation to engage with the im/possibility of paying attention to each image, to the rare blank spaces when Hsieh failed to make it, and to the infinite blank spaces of the unimaginable 59 minutes or so between each image. The labour of attempting to ‘read’ it as a (ruptured) continuum takes time and real effort. Cumulatively it’s incapacitating, one soon struggles with a kind of ‘blindness’ and defaults to skimming; and in the end we come no closer to understanding what really happened. One recognises Hsieh’s absolute clarity of purpose and will-ful integrity in the work, but ‘he’ is always elsew/here.

Ultimately, Heathfield locates Hsieh as ‘a sentient witness of time’ (11), engaged in practices of ‘aesthetic duration’, with each work ‘a sense passage in which corporeal attention is drawn to (a) time reforming’ (22). Each of Hsieh’s ‘untimely’ projects constructs a space of severe, self-imposed privation and constraint within which time passes and thinking happens. Each performance elaborates a rigorously precise architecture for the event of thought as art; but none of those thoughts are communicated. The internal life of the being in human being - Hsieh’s lived experience of brutalising bare life in extremis - is forever withheld in an economy of denial that serves to create empty spaces for our own projections and dealings with incomprehension. As Tim Etchells puts it in his letter to Hsieh, the extensive documentary traces of the work that survive ‘show everything but tell nothing’ (357). Hsieh moves implacably towards the self-erasure of ever greater illegibility, invisibility and silence to leave us confronted with ‘a sculpture of nothingness’, and we are pulled back endlessly to ‘a face off with the void’ (360). Or, as Hsieh puts it with characteristic economy and lack of sentimentality: ‘Living is nothing but consuming time until you die’ (335).

The book draws to a reflexive end without closure in a long and engaging interview/exchange between Hsieh and Heathfield (‘I Just Go On In Life’), and a series of open letters to Hsieh by Peggy Phelan, Marina Abramovic, Tim Etchells, Santiago Sierra, and others from Hsieh’s personal archive. The latter include a hand-written note from an irate and anonymous Chinese person – ‘Artist? UGH!’ (354); and a delightfully formal letter of support from a (real) estate agent in Michigan – ‘I don’t totally understand exactly what you are doing but I do think it is very important. Keep on with your good work…’ (350). The letters allow different modalities of writing to open up other more intimate perspectives on and creative responses to the work, most effectively to my mind in the exquisitely performative contributions of Peggy Phelan and Tim Etchells. Finally, Carol Becker writes back into and out of the book in an elegant summative post-script, in which she applauds Heathfield’s approach to the curation of these materials. His framing, she suggests perceptively, creates ‘a safe holding environment where the work can rest … The intent of the pieces appears intact, allowed to exist in its emptiness and silence, still elusive even after so much has been said’ (369).
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Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh
Adrian Heathfield and Tehching Hsieh
Live Art Development agency / MIT Press, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-262-01255-3 383 pp. £29.95

Hsieh, Tehching (1999). One Year Performance Art Documents, 1978-1999, DVD-ROM. For further details, see here

Also available through the Live art Development Agency’s online Unbound: see here

This review of Out of Now was first published in Performance Research 14:2 ('On Training'), June 2009: issue edited by Richard Gough & Simon Shepherd

shuttle: intro to elsew/here

"Never did faraway charge so close" (Cesar Vallejo)

Miss Atomic: "Good evening, pagans, Vegans, insomniacs, gorgeous lizards, hospitality peddlers, sweethearts, assassins. Grab your drink, baby, we're gonna be here for a while. We are desert people. We make our homes in impossibility. We hallucinate regularly. We might have magic lamps, or we may be the type, myself included, to play the genies ..." (The Team, Mission Drift, London: Oberon Books, 2013)
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Over three weeks in the summer of 2013, I uploaded daily posts here as a remote contributor to SHUTTLE: mobile desert performance, at the invitation of Mick Douglas, and as part of his Performing Mobilities Network. For the project website, with further details of those involved and a map of the itinerary – an anti-clockwise loop from Tucson to Tucson, via Utah and California - see here. Other contexts are outlined briefly below.

At the outset, as the crew assembled in Tucson to begin their journey, I only had loose hunches and fragmentary thoughts about what to post in coming days. As I began another week of work in London, circulating in my mind was a slightly bewildering constellation of material related to deserts, in particular those of the American south-west: driving, dust, sand, light, heat, water, geological ‘deep’ time; ‘emptiness’ as a convenient fiction for the open secret and ‘dirty wars’ of military research; silence, silencing and the toxic sublime; writings by Rebecca Solnit, Mike Davis, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Dillard, Bradford Morrow, Leslie Marmon Silko, JG Ballard, Iain Chambers, Trevor Paglen, P. Reyner Banham, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, John Beck, Lawrence Buell, Stephen Muecke, Erin Hogan, and others; art works by James Turrell, Walter de Maria, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Paolo Soleri, Richard Long, John Wolseley, Richard Misrach, Edward Burtynsky, Francis Alÿs, Oguri, Tess de Quincey and others; films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Wim Wenders, Nicholas Roeg, David Lean, John Ford, Werner Herzog, Gus van Sant, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Sergio Leone; assorted music, from Calexico and Gillian Welch to Ali Farka Toure; and distant memories of my own journeys through the central deserts of Australia in the mid-1980s.

At this stage I didn’t know what of this would emerge in coming days, in posts uploaded on the hoof in the gaps between my ongoing work commitments here - and quite what it would amount to. Hopefully traces of a virtual, associational journey in parallel, a slight re-directing of the geometry of attention that allows for passages between the close-at-hand and the faraway, the actual and the possible … 

Maybe think of them as a bunch of balloons released in to the air. Although most of them might well drift off forever into the sky, the odd one might just be held on to and bob along with you for a while.

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Email to Mick Douglas, 3 June 2013 

Dear Mick

Thanks again for sharing the SHUTTLE details, and for your kind invitation.

For a virtual contribution/ participation, I'd like to propose something along the following lines: on each of the 21 days of the Shuttle project, 17 June – 7 July, I will post something online – some resources, perspectives, materials related in particular to deserts. These may include propositions or questions, found texts and my own writing, images, sounds/songs, reconstructions, etc. So – traces of a parallel 3-week journey of accompaniment during which my attention here, for a section of each day, will be given over to your group, the route, imaginings of landscapes there, traces of environments here. Cumulatively, therefore, an archive of 21 posts, comprising small invitations and gifts from afar that hope to encourage the possibility of further conceptual and imaginal links, leaks, flows. Associational ripples, modest frictions, 'winds' from elsew/here.

Daily materials would be posted on my blog site skywritings by midnight UK time, each one entitled SHUTTLE and numbered accordingly (day 1 etc.). Along the way, Sue Palmer may contribute some materials about desert flora.

My best to you,
David 
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SHUTTLE 
Mobile desert performance
17 June – 7 July 2013
www.performingmobilities.net

Ten crew open to encounters. Four thousand miles from Tucson to Tucson. Twenty days. A Chevy van. Sonoran, Great Basin and Mojave Deserts. Known and unknowns. 

A collection of international artists, designers, performance makers and researchers journey through the deserts of the American south-west performing an exploration of the aesthetic, political, cultural and environmental resonances of desert ecologies. As a temporary travelling community interested in movement, environment, and performance, the project crew intend to generate new creative practices and works that shuttle between registers of knowing and unknowing by exploring performances of mobility.

In a journey through seminal land art works, ancient settlements, desert conditions, and transit spaces, SHUTTLE will perform daily processes of creating ephemeral conditions and generating encounters. An initial landing event and a subsequent returns event in Tucson, Arizona, welcome public interaction – including collecting offerings from Tucson residents for SHUTTLE to carry forth. SHUTTLE presents an interval at the Performance Studies International ‘Now Then’ Conference (PSi 19) at Stanford University in Palo Alto, and will inform the development of PSi21 ‘Fluid States’ globally distributed events planned for 2015, in particular the Australian project ‘Movement Forms of an Island Continent’. 

Mick Douglas, Beth Weinstein and crew 
Twitter: @SHUTTLEcrew @SHUTTLEbase 

We gratefully acknowledge the support of University of Arizona, Tucson Museum of Art, Exploded View, RMIT University, University of Melbourne, PSi Performance Studies international 
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Journey 
June 17: SHUTTLE encounter: projective conversation + SHUTTLE landing in Tucson

June 18-20: en-route encounters: Chaco Canyon
June 21-24: en-route encounters: Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover
June 26-30: SHUTTLE interval at PSi 19 Conference at Stanford Palo Alto
July 1: en-route encounters: Culver City’s CLUI
July 2-4: en-route encounters: Joshua Tree area + cultural laboratories (CLUI, High Desert Test Sites)
July 5: SHUTTLE returns at Tucson Museum of Art
July 6: SHUTTLE encounter: reflective conversation in Tucson 
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SHUTTLE crew 

Grzegorz Brzozowski is a director and script writer working on a PhD at University of Warsaw researching modern festival communities through the lens of anthropology of performance and sociology of religion.

Mick Douglas is an artist making socially-engaged art and performance, senior lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne, and initiator of journey-based projects that explore the performance of mobilities.

Andrea Haenggi is a New York-based choreographer, visual artist, performer and artistic director/founder of Dance Arts Company AMDaT, who recently established 1067 PacificPeople in Brooklyn New York.

Fiona Harrisson is a landscape architect, horticulturist and senior lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne, exploring the role that citizens’ relation to landscape plays in the crisis of our times. 

Didier Morelli is an interdisciplinary performer and artist investigating the body as a site for change, exchange, identity and belonging. He is an MFA student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

James Oliver is an artist-researcher and Graduate Research Coordinator at the Centre for Cultural Partnerships of Melbourne University developing performative methodologies of practice-as-research. 

Meredith Rogers makes theatre and performance in mainstream and independent settings, is an honorary research associate at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and co-editor of Australasian Drama Studies. 

Sam Trubridge is a performance designer, artist, scholar and artistic director with New Zealand company The Playground who is currently researching nomadic philosophies and practices. 

Unknown Persons may be given passage during the course of SHUTTLE. 

Beth Weinstein is an architect and Associate Professor at the University of Arizona working between architectural and choreographic practices, and research of American Southwest land art and water issues. 
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SHUTTLE remote crew (artists on board in other locations) 

‘Touring SW American deserts & communities online’: Visual artist Alex von Bergen tours online whilst operating the shuttle base. 

‘Vella vehicle accumulations + Vella Piss Takes’: Visual artist John Vella collaborates with Shuttle crew to collate, collect and respond. 

‘Elsew/here (shuttle days 1-21)’: Writer/performance-maker David Williams is blogging shuttle daily from London. 

‘Postcards’: Neal Haslem sends postcards to lost time in the desert. 

‘The Sustained Doodling Project’: researching the challenges of art in space through a creative collaboration between SHUTTLE and Melbourne artist Annalea Beattie.

Photos, from the top: David Lean during the filming of Lawrence of Arabia (1962); still from Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana (1971); still from Gus Van Sant's Gerry (2002). 'The Desert of Culture' cartoon by Biff (The Guardian)