is the text more fixed and determinate
while the body of the actor more fluid?
the body
less the product of institutionalized regulation
potentially more subversive? yet
if the body is analogous to a text
subject to
ideologically encumbered cultural logic of other texts
then it is difficult to perceive
the body as somehow more liberated
more capable of being an agent of subversion
.
Hamlet 2.3
shortly after the arrival of the Players
the First Player fulfills Hamlet’s request
performing a speech detailing the death of Priam
in the voice of Aeneas speaking toHecuba
tears gather in the eyes of the Player
his face loses color
when he is once again alone on the stage
Hamlet condemns himself
the Player could energize his emotions
on the basis of a fiction
while he
Hamlet
“has the motive and the cue to passion..
(to) drown the stage with tears”
has been unable to rouse himself to action
this incident
confounds Hamlet’s earlier dichotomy
between being and seeming
complicating the simplicity of the distinction
because an act of seeming
the implementation of
“actions that a man might play”
can stimulate the body to respond
as though the stimulus was actual
rather than a fiction
actors understand the phenomenon
of experiencing a physical reaction to behavior
an imitation of experience
rather than the experience itself
of having the body react to its own performance
is such a reaction
not closely analogous
to the experience of a spectator
whose identification with the situation
provokes tears or some other physical reaction?
in some neurological mechanism
that I do not wholly understand
as the imagination processes the data of a fiction
data that if real would produce a physical response
the system suppresses
the information that reveal this data to be false
the kind of framing information
that inhibit the physical response
allowing the spectators body
to respond as if the stimuli were real
if the actor’s body
however
responds to the situation as if it were real
if the actor’s behavior
triggers an emotional response within the actor’s body
the aesthetic lie
–the fiction–
is transmitted by signifiers that are
in themselves
truthful
in this case
is the signifier true
and the signified a fiction?
the physiologically real manifestation
produced by an actor’s body
functioning as referent
to an unreal situation
and the unreal body of the fictional character?
it may be useful to use the term displacement
conceive of a real stimulus to emotion
that
in the process of building an imitation
is displaced from the actor’s psyche
into the fiction
in this case the signs of emotion
the signifiers
would be authentic
the signified would also be authentic
and the overall image produced by the actor
a fictional
inauthentic
unreal
fueled or enabled in some way
by the authenticity of the actor’s emotion
whose source lies in the actor’s own experience
in any case
this would be the case in only some instances
and the spectator would be unable
to determine the source of the actor’s emotion
what enables the actor
to produce the signs of emotion
remains in the process of perceiving the aesthetic event
outside of the spectator’s concerns
the source of the actor’s emotion
is not available to be “read”
remaining part of the inaccessible real
the gap of inaccessibility that divides
beholder
from the actual body of the actor
in the same sense
while the chemistry of processing and using pigment
or the techniques of execution in bronze casting
amplify my understanding of the artist’s work
these issues do not inform directly
my experience of painting or sculpture
one of the principal conditions
of a work of art
for me
is its accessibility
through a perception
of whatever external surface
it presents to the beholderaI should note, however, that in modernist drama, as in modernist painting, one of the subjects of aesthetic work is the process of making art. Pirandello’s theatre trilogy works within his general paradigm of the illusory and the real but these plays use the theater itself as a structural metaphor to display the formation of illusions and their fragility. Brecht’s drama displays the mechanics of the theater in order to enable the spectator to see that the playwright and the actors are using the fiction to comment upon it, to foreground the discrepancy between the intellect of the actors and the ethical choices of the fictional characters. However, in both Brecht and Pirandello the theatricality I discuss is not the exposure of the processes in which this aesthetic event has been formulated but the theatricality is, instead, a performed artifice, an enacted unconventionality written and designed. The Brechtian actor’s comment on the behavior of the character is a displacement of the playwright’s comment. If the actor’s judgment of the character differed from the playwright’s, the playwright’s evaluation would prevail.
…
I should note, however, that in modernist drama, as in modernist painting, one of the subjects of aesthetic work is the process of making art. Pirandello’s theatre trilogy works within his general paradigm of the illusory and the real but these plays use the theater itself as a structural metaphor to display the formation of illusions and their fragility. Brecht’s drama displays the mechanics of the theater in order to enable the spectator to see that the playwright and the actors are using the fiction to comment upon it, to foreground the discrepancy between the intellect of the actors and the ethical choices of the fictional characters. However, in both Brecht and Pirandello the theatricality I discuss is not the exposure of the processes in which this aesthetic event has been formulated but the theatricality is, instead, a performed artifice, an enacted unconventionality written and designed. The Brechtian actor’s comment on the behavior of the character is a displacement of the playwright’s comment. If the actor’s judgment of the character differed from the playwright’s, the playwright’s evaluation would prevail.
…
Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free. Rumi
As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, When the hot water gives out or goes tepid, So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady. Ezra Pound, The Bath Tub
Rebecca Ormiston Artist Weather Cloud Talk Bathtub Performance Art
Oct 14, 2015 | Categories: Collusion | Tags: bathtub | Comments Off on Artist Weather: Cloud Talk #2
It’s about trying to frame something. And draw attention to it and say, “Here’s the beauty in this. I’m going to put a frame around it, and I think this is beautiful.” That’s what artists do. It’s really a pointing activity. Chris Burden
On October 9th, 2015 Rebecca Ormiston, Ryan Tacata and myself created an experimental piece for Artist Weather TV that incorporated a text fragment from one of Sophocles’ lost tragedies: Sophocles Fragment #137. Informally, the piece is called Cloud Talk. This work is part of a larger project called IOTA that brings to life the remaining textual fragments of the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
The Fragment
The oaths of a woman I write in water.
at 2:45 p.m. on October 3rd, 2015 I performed a site specific theater piece
of the only remaining fragment from Aeschylus’ The Argo in the hold of the schooner C.A. Thayer at San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park. Aeschylus The Argo is part of a larger project called IOTA that sets out to perform the existing fragments for the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
the weather was partly cloudy with a temperature of 74℉.
The duration of the performance was on one minute for an audience of 5.
based on Aeschylus’ The Argo
adapted and directed by Jamie Lyons
The early stages of the Argonaut expedition
perhaps even its very beginning
The Argo was constructed
by the shipwright Argus with the help of Athena
In her prow a piece of timber
from the sacred forest of Dodona
spoke prophecies
In the end
Argo was consecrated to Poseidon
then translated to the sky
into the constellation of Argo Navis
The Fragment…
The holy speaking beam of the Argo
groaned aloud
In 1895, Danish-born Hans D. Bendixsen built C.A. Thayer in his Humboldt Bay shipyard.
Between 1895 and 1912 C.A.Thayer sailed from E.K. Wood’s lumber mill in Grays Harbor, Washington, to San Francisco. She also carried lumber as far south as Mexico and occasionally even ventured offshore to Hawaii and Fiji.
After sustaining serious damage during a heavy, southeasterly gale, C.A. Thayer’s lumber trade days ended and she entered the salmon trade.
Each April from 1912 to 1924 C.A. Thayer hauled 28-foot gill-net boats
bundles of barrel staves and tons of salt from San Francisco to Western Alaska; returning each September her hold stacked with barrels of salted salmon
When World War I broke out, C.A. Thayer carried Northwest fir
and Mendocino redwood to Australia.
From 1925-1930 C.A. Thayer made yearly voyages from Poulsbo, Washington to the Bering Sea codfishing waters (off the Alaskan coast).
In addition to supplies she carried upwards of thirty men north.
After a decade-long, Depression-era lay-up in Lake Union, Seattle,
the U.S. Army purchased C.A. Thayer from J.E. Shields (a prominent Seattle codfisherman). The Army removed her masts and used the ship as an ammunition barge in British Columbia.
After World War II, Shields bought his ship back from the Army, fitted her with masts once again and returned her to cod fishing.
With her final voyage in 1950 C.A. Thayer entered the history books
as the last commercial sailing vessel to operate on the West Coast.
The State of California purchased C.A. Thayer in 1957 and she was ultimately transferred to the National Park Service in 1978 designated a National Historic Landmark in 1984
He who opens a school door, closes a prison. Victor Hugo
MAPP is a community and a series of arts, music and activist events operating in The Mission for over 14 years. Their events are happenings in common places within The Mission that include live music, Spoken word, Performance art, Film screenings, BBQ’s, garage sales, and unorthodox conversations.
performance exposes the fact I view the body of the performer as a constructed image
I am trained through the intensely mediatized nature of cultural experience to respond to all stimuli as though I were receiving that data within a media event
the boundaries between technologically experienced information and information received without that frame have become permeable sometimes seamless
mediatized images operate within the consciousness as the real
example no. 1 the body of the actor playing Oedipus in Sophocles‘ tragedy the singular site of two forms of self and civic identification the language spoken by the actor identifies his body as that of the Corinthian stranger who has become the First Citizen of Thebes after the anagnorisis his identity expands to include information that the Corinthian stranger began his life as the child of Laius and Jocasta the Corinthian stranger is indeed the Theban the biological child of his wife – Jocasta the adoptive child of Merope
the tragedy builds itself on the incompatibility of these Corinthian and Theban identities
example no.2 Aeschylus‘ Orestes is identified and identifies himself as the celebrated savior of Argos who avenged the assassination of his father – Agamemnon at the same time he is an abhorrent criminal guilty of matricide
in performance the body of the actor (a singular, unified image) becomes the site of a conflict between identities or forms of identification
the tension between the stability of the image of the actor’s body and the instability or equivocation of the language of the text depends on the perception that as a signifier the body is a more simple a direct instrument of communication in comparison with the complexity fluidity transforming nature of language
the image of the actor’s body within the theories of people like Judith Butler becomes much more like a text like a folio sheet that accepts the inscription of my writing
theories that textualize the body suggests that the actor and the actor’s language are both instabilities indeterminate and subject to deconstruction within a spectator’s response to that image
Oct 03, 2015 | Categories: Speculation | Tags: Notes | Comments Off on an image is an image is an image…
Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows, Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet1.Prologue
they perform the text playfully as a speculation a trial an experiment without the constraints of an official performance where interpretative unity may mask the multivalence
in rehearsal the work of the actors, designers, crew can be deliberately speculative proceeding from trial to trial interjecting commentary and repetition without a need to perform
where the sequence of work adds up to nothing other than experiment
I suspect that this difference is the reason why I find myself increasing more comfortable attending rehearsals rather than witnessing conventional performances that seem to labor toward encompassing a unity of interpretation that overlays and therefore masks the ways a text a performance space or artist contend with itself or themself
Sep 03, 2015 | Categories: Speculation | Tags: Notes | Comments Off on a collision of readings
No, a true seeker, one who truly wished to find, could accept no doctrine. But the man who has found what he sought, such a man could approve of every doctrine, each and every one, every path, every goal; nothing separated him any longer from all those thousands of others who lived in the eternal, who breathed the Divine. Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Aug 16, 2015 | Categories: Solipsism | Tags: sunset | Comments Off on accept no doctrine
Let me way this. I was 22 when I came to prison and of course I have changed tremendously over the years. But I had always had a strong sense of myself and in the last few years I felt i was losing my identity. There was a deadness in my body that eluded me, as though I could not exactly locate its site. I would be aware of this numbness, this feeling of atrophy, and it haunted the back of my mind. Because of this numb spot, I felt peculiarly off balance, the awareness of something missing, of a blank spot, a certain intimation of emptiness. Now I know what it was. and since encountering you, I feel life strength flowing back into that spot. My step, the tread of my stride, which was becoming tentative and uncertain, has begun to recover and take on a new definiteness, a confidence, a boldness which makes me want to kick over a few tables. I may even swagger a little, and, as I read in a book somewhere, “push myself forward like a train.” Eldridge Cleaver to Beverly Axelrod Soul on Ice, 1968
Blue moon, you saw me standin’ alone Without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own Blue moon, you knew just what I was there for You heard me sayin’ a prayer for Someone I really could care for Blue Moon, Rodgers & Hart (1934)
A place is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. … It implies an indication of stability. A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984).p.117
Unlike reproductions of other types of artworks, photographs of performances, by virtues of their focus on artist’ body, allow the viewer to engage with the artist in a haptic, as well as a visual sense. Encountering the shared ontology of the bandy makes the viewer mindful of his or her own physical presence as witness to the pictured event (even if it well after the fact. Kathy O’Dell, Contact with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s
Just as the ancients danced to call upon the spirits in nature, we too can dance to find the spirits within ourselves that have been long buried and forgotten. Anna Halprin
When it comes to the Civil War, all of our popular understanding, our popular history and culture, our great films, the subtext of our arguments are in defiance of its painful truths. It is not a mistake that Gone with the Wind is one of the most read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a need for palliatives and painkillers, an escape from the truth of those five short years in which 750,000 American soldiers were killed, more than all American soldiers killed in all other American wars combined, in a war declared for the cause of expanding “African slavery.” That war was inaugurated not reluctantly, but lustily, by men who believed property in humans to be the cornerstone of civilization, to be an edict of God, and so delivered their own children to his maw. And when that war was done, the now-defeated God lived on, honored through the human sacrifice of lynching and racist pogroms. The history breaks the myth. And so the history is ignored, and fictions are weaved into our art and politics that dress villainy in martyrdom and transform banditry into chivalry, and so strong are these fictions that their emblem, the stars and bars, darkens front porches and state capitol buildings across the land to this day. Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
