Staging decadence. Real decadence, not the Instagram thing where somebody arranges twelve cupcakes in a spiral and calls it sin. It needs an edge on it. That nerve-jangling quality where you can’t tell whether you’re supposed to laugh or flinch, and the honest answer is both at once, which the human body doesn’t come with a setting for.
Gombrowicz knew. The guy built grotesque courts and social rituals so stiff they can hardly move, all that European formality buckling under its own ridiculous weight, and then he dropped one silent girl into the middle of it. Ivona won’t play. That’s the entire bomb. Won’t flirt, won’t charm, won’t do the small automatic thing everyone does to keep the machinery turning over, and the court comes apart because it cannot survive a single person declining to perform. One. Not a rebellion, not a movement, one mute kid standing there being unbearable.
So you’ve got a play about people devouring themselves with their own pretensions, and you have to put something on frosted plexiglass. What goes up there? Not a meal. A meal is a trap, a meal is set dressing, and anyway everybody has seen a meal. You show them eating. That obscene abundance that curdles, the place where pleasure goes compulsive and the mouth keeps working long after the hunger quit.
The lit-from-within table is the move. Light pushing up through the surface instead of falling down onto it, so everything reads as more lustrous and more fake simultaneously, embalmed in its own surplus. Bodies feeding and fondling and consuming inside a backlit aquarium. (I lost most of an afternoon to whether that glow should be warm or cold. It’s cold. Warm turns it into a dinner party, and a dinner party has manners.) It’s beautiful, sure. Beautiful in the slow-motion car crash register, which is a different animal from pretty and you know the difference in your gut.
Projection carries a remove built into it, that flatness, so you’re getting appetite from behind glass, already converted to image before it arrives. Which is exactly the con Gombrowicz runs with his court. He makes you watch people enact their hungers instead of having them.
Here’s what gets me, and this is a tangent except that it isn’t. The thing implicates you. You sit there while food goes frankly pornographic, an orgy of surface and texture, and you do not look away. Can’t, won’t, the distinction stops meaning anything around minute four. You’re uncomfortable and you’re staying. The discomfort is the ticket price.
The Woolf quote does something adjacent. Manufactured intimacy, that we’re-all-in-on-it hush, candlelight making masks out of faces. Same sleight of hand. Ceremonial distance that pulls you closer instead of holding you off.
And video for Gombrowicz, for that specific play, is the whole argument. Modernity is mediation. Nobody gets excess direct anymore, we get it filtered and thrown on a wall and packaged into something you can take in from a safe chair with your coat in your lap. The royals can’t simply be. They have to keep performing royalty until the performance goes pantomime and the pantomime goes grotesque. Your orgy on plexiglass runs the identical operation: appetite becomes image, feeding becomes theater, and the audience becomes voyeurs at a banquet nobody is allowed to taste.
That’s the nerve it hits. Not shock. Shock is cheap, shock is over in eight seconds and then people check their phones. It’s the queasier recognition underneath, that every supposedly authentic thing we do is the same hollow routine with better lighting.
The decadence was never in the food. Wasn’t in the bodies either. It’s in the fact that we needed the setup at all.
Video projection for Collected Works‘ projection for Witold Gombrowicz’s Ivona, Princess of Burgundia at Performance Art Institute.