craig darryl peade's le petit mort

...submission of honours caper...

2007-05-08T05:03:00.000-07:00

...what RELIEF...devoid of pride...the "contextualising document" is submitted in...becoming a "thing-in-itself"...traumatic...flawed...somehow incomplete...and unfulfilled...an attempt at a 'close reading' of Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek (Welcome to the Desert of the Real) with Le Petit Mort...a necessary failure...despite the intentions of former Routledge proofreading supervisor Dr Barry Laing...oh well...what now?...keep working...

...say LOVE...LOVE...song dedications...to...YOU...

2006-12-01T02:52:00.000-08:00

...FRIENDS...FAMILY...KINDRED(studios)...all the staff...TINPOT(cafe)...DoctoR Barry Laing...for implaccable...assiduous...lion-like salvation...i mean SUPER-VISION...for this here rabbit...THE PHANTOM Ben Cittadini...the ghost who walks...being...direction...and...a target...Victoria UniversiTy...especially my surrogate supervisor...and...the inspirational...for listening...and encouragement...

...first contextualizing document...

2006-11-27T20:14:00.000-08:00

In the book “39 Microlectures in proximity of performance” Matthew Ghoulish asks the question “what is a work?” and goes on to define a work as that which is: -

“…infinite and singular. By infinite…I mean that the singularity of the work…is itself comprised of infinite events”.

He goes onto divide these events into two kinds of infinities :-

an “infinity of micro-events …anything which is noticeable must be made up of parts which are not” (that is to say not noticeable, invisible or absent)
2. an “infinity of macro-events, that are happening in our present, and that have happened in our past…temper and shape our perceptions of it, and our responses to it.”

After demonstrating with an example of viewing the painting “The Conversion of St.Paul” by Caravaggio at Chiesa Santa Maria del Popolo church in Rome, Ghoulish finally answers the question with the conclusion that a work is that which is “overflowing it’s frame, converging into a series…each overflowing their frames…becoming events, each moving in the direction of their own infinite singularity and difference.”

He goes on later to summarize that “We are not speaking of closure, but infinite convergences…in which everything happens. But not everything, only my particular thing…not to say that there is nothing outside myself…” that it is to say subjectivity (99-102, Ghoulish).

So, get ready, because here we go.

This definition of what is a work mirrors my fascination with Lacan’s positing of the Mobius Strip (the inverted three dimensional figure eight which evokes infinity as in mathesis universalis, quantam mechanics and chaos theory).
as an image of subjectivity.

Elizabeth Grosz in her book “Volatile Bodies” takes up this model as a “way of problematizing and rethinking relations between inside and outside the subject-ivity, it’s psychical interior and corporeal exterior by showing not their fundamental identity or reducability but the torsion of the one into the other, the passage, vector or uncontrollable drift of the inside into the outside” and vice versa (xii, Grosz).

“The doubling sensation creates an interface or borderline not unlike the boundary established by the duplicating structure of the mirror” (36, Grosz). This mirror again evoking Lacan and his psycho-analytical “Mirror Stage” concept in which one’s subjectivity is split and divided from what was previously a sense of wholeness and unity upon the subjects gaze at its own reflection.

This project’s title “Le Petit Mort” (“The Little Death” in it’s English translation) is derived from the French term for the orgasm. Typically of the French language, this for me is a beautiful poetic phrase. One which like the Mobius Strip is all encompassing in it’s evocation of the present just past and it’s allusion to the future by pro-creation and mortality. It also just happens to be the language that Antonin Artaud struggled so much with.

To me, Antonin Artaud haunts the arts like a spectre and his presence throughout it is an immense, elusive shadow. In the process of discovering that which is described “performance”, Artaud’s name pierced the literature that I investigated and yet he was never “touched” by the lecturer’s at the academic institution I was in attendance.

Perhaps this became a part of his lure.

Susan Sontag described Artaud in her essay “Artaud” which appears in “Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings” (edited by her) as a “cultural monument”( lix, Sontag)- (Sontag herself could be described the same thing) and later that to read his work was “nothing less than an ordeal”(lvi, Sontag).

He was subsequently incarcerated in a sanatorium and diagnosed as schizophrenic. The nature of the performance field is one of self as “multiplicity” and this “madness” of Artaud was perhaps what made him unapproachable for an academic institution who is no stranger to witnessing encounters of unfettered, excessive delirium in the work produced and whose funding is preserved by a conservative system of conformity.

It wasn’t until my final year when a lecturer by the name of Barry Laing came along with the subject “Contemporary Performance Theory” that the subject of Artaud was broached. This became the formation of my initial research project question “How does the notion of presence in performance make present a past, memory, or trace and how does this signify an absence which may be distributed, or communicated, to a spectator or audience?”.

By grappling with this question I felt I could approach Artaud and make him an originary positional point to depart from. And in doing so, allude to the problem of separation that so plagues the human condition. Again, this existential crisis of Artaud’s mind and hence his body seduced me in my identification with his thought. A line of thought as a mode of being appropriated by the French philosophers Gilles Deluze and Felix Guattari who with Michel Foucalt sort to incite a spirit of perpetual revolution after the “failure” of May 1968.

I was born to my parents in the western suburbs of Sydney in Blacktown Hospital from memory, after my mother’s nine year struggle to conceive again after an accident in which she fell down a steep flight of stairs. Upon her arrival at the bottom of three stories of concrete steps, she had miscarried and was diagnosed as having irreparable damage to her reproductive organs.

Perhaps my existential anguish and grief is the result of my being haunted by mother’s prior dead foetus.

Is that the dead weight I carried in an infantile form whilst conducting an improvisational acting exercise exploring the archetype of “the orphan”?

Arms outstretched, I cried and then walked…

I was raised in an economically and socially “disadvantaged” town called Mount Druitt. A place whose closest relation to a mountain is ironically a hill, Rooty Hill – the Las Vegas of the west. In fact this flat, barren pastoral land is most (in)famous for it’s high school which I attended from 1983 to 1989.

In 1996 the entire class failed their Higher School Certificate and the tabloid now known as the “Telegraph Mirror” published their school year photo on their front page. Realising that their children had little in the way of prospects let alone being splattered across the front page of a Rupert Murdoch News Limited paper in Australia’s biggest city, Sydney. The kids went to the New South Wales Supreme Court to sue for defamation and won. (See ABC’s Radio National website for their 2nd October 2005 story “Class Act –No Longer Failures”). And in their exposure, the community including the surrounding local academic institutions came to their aid in providing opportunities which may or may not have assisted in their escape.

Despite my economics teacher and personal friend Mr Butler’s protestations, I became a god-damned bank employee in the delusional belief that my passion for economics and art might lead me to become an in-house graphic designer due to the organisation’s scope. Suffice to say I should have believed in the confidence he tried to instil in me that I was indeed worthy of something more.

After an extended period of working with morons, numbers, dollars and statistics as a “personnel officer” with forays into the sheer tedium of accounting (whose only subject-“business psychology” interested me as a “platform” to espouse my subjective views on cigarettes and alcohol) - and fraud my life became about music and art.

During this transformation I was touched in a co-mingling of “true” love, sex and death.

In 1999 with godspeed’s infinite desire, fear, hope and regret in our hearts, the musical entity known as “2 litre DOLBY” who I co-founded playing drums re-located to Melbourne. We speeded towards a future that was “still bleak, uncertain and beautiful”, more “artistic”, more “political” and to await the four horseman of the apocalypse (and flee the romantic ideals of hungry ghosts haunting broken-hearted lovers and the reconstruction of Sydney for the “best games ever” of Samaranch’s 2000 Olympics).

The end result was inevitably failure and separation.

As far as music was concerned the heightened state of being, under the gaze of an-other had become my fascination.

And so 2001 saw me embark on this other, new found journey of “performance” at Victoria University Footscray campus.

In May of that year just before my 29th birthday I undertook my first performance with the assistance of Carla Yamine, Matthew Chapman, Phillip Romeril and his friend Natalie at Dario Vacirca’s “happening” called “Spart” on what was known as the Northcote Bowling Club.

Entitled “This Monstrosity Called Life” inspired by the Anna Swir poem “Poetry Reading”in Czeslaw Milosz’s “A Book of Luminous Things” the performance was generated from a university exercise in foundation facilitated by Kate Kennedy and adapted from “The Wooloomooloo Cuddle” by Remy Charlip.

I wore grey garments on a slightly raised platform. Stimulated by the event of S:11 protests commencing on September 11 the year prior (2000) at the Crown Casino’s World Economic Forum. I hung behind me a tablecloth painted as a crude symbolic flag of United States imperialism. The pervasive “Stars and Stripes” had become “The Union Jack, Southern Cross and Stripes”. Beside the flag, dressed in black, a guardian stood at attention with feet apart, a grinning gold face and black gloved hands which were clasped firmly behind the back in a tight grip.

It was drizzling as the haunting drone of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “Dead Flag Blues” began to fall in and out as a sub-hum sound. Beyond above in the night sky dark clouds lie illuminated by the city lights. As I began my movement sequence, someone within the audience began sniggering. The snigger became a smug laughter. The smug laughter became arrogant and judgemental. From out of the audience came a figure of an imposing, threatening physicality and a maniacal grin. Suited in white, this man entered the space clutching a bag of something.

He came over and looked down surveying me. Standing face to face with this madness, he presented a bleeding heart and began to crush it into my face. As I lay down he began to throw and pelt them at me as if they were insults.

The guardian of the flag with the grinning gold face now stood with one arm raised and with hands aflame set fire to the possibility of a sacred, symbolic cloth. The oppressive, monstrous material begins burning in flames. And a mother dressed in black, mourning loss, abhorring the sight and taste of once a living, now dead flesh, rushes forth from the recoiling throng who act as if they are witnesses to such perverse spectacles.

On her knees she begins gasping, grasping the horror of these crushed bleeding hearts. The tears she cries dissolves into the blood of these still bleeding hearts separated from their bodies which are now clutched, held close evidently close. Next to her still beating heart.

The performance has transformed into an apocalyptic hell on earth. And the mother grapples with the stray dogs of all the unwashed idealists for these still bleeding hearts. The dogs run off and away with the still bleeding hearts to the appalled mirth of the community of masterly owners.

I am a ship that has become unstuck from its moors. Untethered, anchorless I am adrift crying, screaming desire, hope, fear, regret. With godspeed you! Clichés.
Defeat.

Again and again.

This is a performance project of abject failure.

When I described this performance to Barry Laing at our first meeting regarding this project with him as supervisor he told me how “Artaudian” it sounded.

To which I replied “I know, and I didn’t know who even the fuck he was!”.

This is a performance project of abject failure.

A tradition of failure that my friend and my prophet of whom I am a maddening disciple, Artaud stands accused by Sontag herself in her essay but yet is redeemed in her preceding discussion and quotation of Jean Cocteau – “the only work which succeeds is that which fails”(xix, Sontag).

Hell, Tim Etchells the director of one of my favourite performance groups “Forced Entertainment” and Matthew Ghoulish (see above p1) have dedicated a an institute that exists as a website to the documentation, study and theorisation of failure.(www.institute-of-failure.com).

Fourteen months prior to the performance I was experiencing re-curing dreams of a world ending with me in a shopping complex and a car park at the base of a building. Trampled and crushed under the weight of a concrete roof that had suddenly collapsed with such a tremendous violent force, I was dead in my sleeping dreams.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, the year 2000 was not brought in with a bang but a whimper. No “millennium bug” struck. No apocalypse. No end of the world as we know it. As I counted down in the intimate company of my musician friends, Leo Mullins, Georgina Ward and Genevieve Blackmore we stood out the front of Leo’s house in Newman Street (which just lies around the corner from Sutherland Street whose significance in my life was yet to play it’s fateful card) in the west of “multi-cultural” Brunswick.

No drama occurred except for someone (I assume intentionally with good humour) simply turning the streetlights off for a moment, and with a pause turned them back on again. For a split second our hearts were in our mouths agape with a wonder, awed, wide-eyed in darkness. Then the light was summoned and with a sigh we were gone.

Twelve months later and five months prior to that performance (and at this stage I have no idea what I am going to do with my self and the year) I am in a car with Phil and Matt on New Year’s Eve at Lake Eildon. A place that I would return to nearly three years later with Jill Orr. Struck by the lack of water, the terrain had been transformed into Mars albeit with a museum dedicated to all the aluminium and steel drink cans discarded recklessly that littered the dry, barren and desolate landscape. We performed around a fire, camping under the stars with kangaroo claws that were not afraid of our shadows echoing nature. This was a being becoming sacred. I realised with Jill’s “controversial” and affecting performance of her 7 hour durational performance piece “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” at the venue Forty-Five Downstairs in Melbourne that clothed in a stained white butcher’s apron, surrounded, covered in the life-removed-red of blood and bone that she was like a shaman.

A witch.

One of Artaud’s daughters of the heart.

Like some modern day Joan of Arc.

Signalling through the flames that were fresh killed flesh.

Her hieroglyphic movement hypnotising me into her trance.

Transfixed like Artaud with his Balinese Dance-r’s .

It’s past twelve o’clock.

Everyone’s passed out asleep after exploring, walking, drawing, eating and drinking mushroom tea.

Trying to maintain a warmth against the cold, we huddle together listening to the sounds of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “Moya” from their “Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada” recording and its ominous presence comes looming out over the dark horizon, passes the surface of the bonnet.

In through the windscreen, across the dashboard and fills the interior of our ears.

It is the sound of a future waiting to happen.

The beginning of end.

A future that is ours.

One that is my favourite piece of graffiti scrawled on a wall in Fitzroy North around the corner from where I live as I write this – or it writes me….

A future that is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful.

Nine months after this moment in time and four months after the aforementioned performance I am in the studio improvising with Kate Kennedy and some others. Kate is struck by the quality of the dying afternoon light. The sunsets with a strange unsettling wind. And the clouds look portentous in their appearance and colour.

Black. Red. And grey.

Lying in bed later that night I am tucked away in my untidy room watching ABC television. The program is the fantastic documentary “When We Were Kings” about Muhammed Ali and George Foreman’s classic “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in Zaire. Text (which from this moment will be known as “tickertape” and will irritatingly accompany what is commonly referred to as “the news” ad nauseum) begins entering the frame across the top of the screen and it says something about an accident.

A plane hitting a building.

One of the World Trade Centre Twin Tower’s in New York City.

My pulse quickens as I think of my once “true” love in that city.

Upon turning the channel I come across these images that send me out from the nest of my cluttered messy bedroom and into the world of the lounge full of others. This is where our hearts beat rapidly in our throats and jaw drops with mouths agape.

I wander in and we all stare at each other, then the screen with perverse grins in wonder and disbelief.

Fascination fascinated.

The pleasure of destruction.

Hollywood’s myths becoming reality.

Is this the end we wanted?

To desire.

Will.

Now, this is shocking and awing.

The images of these poor fucks standing on the observation towers.

Helpless.

Hopeless.

I pondered, like them, their fate.

In praise?

Or blame?

Over and over again.

I wondered, like them, how the fuck is this going to turn out?

Repeat.

Over and over again.

How the fuck can that fire be put out?

Repeat.

Over and over again and again.

What the fuck is going on?

Repeat repeat.

Repeat.

Over and over again and again.

And again.

In ignorance.

And helplessness.

What fire brigade for the love of god could possibly extinguish that burning hole eighty stories up in a one hundred story building?

Why the fuck do we need to build skyscrapers for?

My heart sunk when one of these stupid phallic testaments to man’s folly and arrogance began to sink, transforming, disappearing into a mushroom cloud.

New York City of dust.

The confusion of those trying to comprehend exactly what was happening was flabbergasting.

Seduced into these destructive images live from thousands of kilometre’s away and across the other side of a world, I knew what was going on.

The Return of the Same.

The Fall.

A modern day fable.

A myth was being constructed before my very eyes.

Live.

On television.

History in the making.

The day the world was changing.

In our decrepit lounge room.

For free.

I thought penny’s dropped like that first tower.

America’s empire’s crumbling.

And we are all going down.

Now I felt like I knew what that recurring dream was and that first, original performance.

Is this hell?

I think that was when I may have begun to cry.

Terror was truly instilled into my being with the plight of those poor, miserable fucks condemned to a repetition of the same spectacular end.

One, they themselves, like us, had just witnessed.

Only we are safe.

Aren’t we?.

A mirror of life’s being becoming death.

Oh the horror.

O!

the humanity!.

Herbert Morrison’s crying words as he reported the arrival of the zeppelin the Hindenberg as it burst into flames over in New York.

Spooked I rang my mother who was watching those images.

I know.

Those poor sick fucks.

And then I am thinking what poor fuck is going to pay for this transgression.

Am I?

Where did it start?

Like this?

How or where will it end?

Where did this begin?

I tried to call Sarah but the lines were down or congested.

Days later after the opportunity for lustfull revenge is unleashed in bombing nothing to speak of Afghanistan, we speak, strained.

I think that the evil sham representative of the free world is irresponsible with its power.

She snaps thinking she is still breathing the air of vaporized bodies.

A postmodern 9/11cannibal.

Post human inhaling metal, glass and debris.

The next morning, up all night, not sleeping from watching this same violent hypnotic repetition I tried to glean some kind of knowledge and understanding.

Some form of meaning from the event.

In the shocked intimacy of the tram, suspicions and theories are being posited.

Was it those people from the Crown Casino at the World Economic Forum protests last year?

The tension being felt within the presence of those who could be an-other that is against US.

The gaze judges.

If you see something report it.

When my Sri Lankan friend arrives some months later the fear, tension and suspicion is palpable.

Some people frighteningly thought it was a Hollywood blockbuster film.

Others don’t even know about it.

I wonder is that ignorance or bliss?

Or both?

All I know is that it is one hell of a way to represent the body like a middle-eastern Futurist, utilising Western technology, to turn in on itself like a malignant cancer.

Or moebius strip.

The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen considers “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos”.

Is this just like the Matrix ?.

Welcome to the desert of the Real.

...25/11 le petit mort performance...photograph brother leo mullins from "the small knives" ...

2006-11-25T21:20:00.000-08:00

..."what do i have to do?"...to satisfy you...die...?...satisfaction... just out of reach...the art of dissatisfaction...the grass is always greener...on the other side...growing on graves...if only there was enough...corpses...death...blood...water...love...go on... say it...go ahead...make someone's day........

le petit mort live performance

2006-11-08T04:34:00.000-08:00

Image for performance...by David Quirk-comedian extraordinaire...

Where:KINDRED STUDIOS 212a Whitehall Street (corner of Harris-across from the park)YARRAVILLE- MELWAYS REFERENCE MAP 42 - c7

Dates:sun 12th nov critical preview, sat 18th nov, sun 19th nov, sat 25th nov, sun 26th nov...

Time:all shows 8.30pm SHARP!!!...

Duration:45-60mins

Cost:free-gold coin donation

WARNING:PERFORMANCE...strictly "MATURE" ONLY...

German Composer Karl Stockhausen ..."...the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole entire cosmos..."....

Robert DeNiro ..."...the intimate portrayal of a life and death struggle for survival...a true story...still the language is rough..."...

Anonymous Victoria University lecturer ... "...something to roll your eyes to..."...

...performing "OR"...infiltrating Victorian College of the Arts for "Territorial Paranoia"...curated by Iuean Wineman...photograph Ben Cittadini...

2006-11-01T21:23:00.000-08:00

...THE FINAL ABSTRACT...!!!...

2006-11-01T21:00:00.000-08:00

ABSTRACT

Le Petit Mort is a live solo performance and expositional materials exploring notions of the highly contested concept of ‘presence’ in performance including absence and memory.

It is the aspect of memory (and its possible re-constitution) in the explicit presence of the performer that might imply absences to be signified to others. This something that is absent, invisible or unseen is what performance can make apparent, seen, visible or present.

An extensive array of literature (and professional performance practice) explores ‘liveness’ – its force of life – in the phenomenon of ‘presence’. Beginning with the work of French artist Antonin Artaud as a departure point, my own research attempts to trace a line of thought (whilst inventing a performance practice and outcome) traversing many theoretical frameworks including Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek, Paul Virilo, psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan et al, performance theorists Peggy Phelan, Bert O States and practicing artists Maria Abramovic, Romeo Castelluci and Forced Entertainment.

A live performer literally is dying before us, due to performance’s essentially ephemeral nature in the passage of time passing. In this presence of being-there, present, an audience might experience an awareness of their own mortality in the reciprocal gaze between performer and an-other. Thus, performance is a kind of ‘death’.

In the context of a repressive, futile quest for immortality by the seductive words and pervasive images permeating landscapes of a post-human-9/11 technological age, this is a death that contemporary culture fears. The power of live performance is marginalized where time is frozen in the uniformity of the image. The live performing body in Le Petit Mort presents the necessity of mortal actions at play, performing in the moment-here-now as a doing-speaking being against this uniformity.

...abstract...abstract...

2006-10-30T04:47:00.000-08:00

Le Petit Mort is a live solo performance and expositional materials exploring notions of the highly contested concept of presence including absence and memory in performance.

An extensive array of literature (and professional practice) explores “liveness” – its force of life in the phenomenon of “presence”.Beginning with the work of the French artist Antonin Artaud as a point of departure, the research attempts to trace a line of thought (whilst inventing a performance practice and outcome) traversing many theoretical frameworks including Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek, Paul Virilo, psycho-analysis in Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan et al, performance theorists Peggy Phelan, Bert O. States and practicing artists Maria Abramovic, Romeo Castelluci and Forced Entertainment.

It is the aspect of memory (its possible re-constitution) in the explicit presence of the performer which might imply absences to be signified to others. This something which is absent, invisible or unseen is what performance can make apparent, seen, visible or present.

A live performer is literally dying before us, due to performance’s essentially ephemeral nature in the passage of time passing. In this presence of being-there, present, an audience might experience an awareness of their own mortality; thus performance is a death.

This death contemporary culture fears in a futile quest for immortality by the seductive words and pervasive images permeating landscapes of a post-human-9/11 age. Time frozen in uniformity of the image marginalizes the sacred power of live performance.

Honours Progress Report

2006-10-26T12:49:00.000-07:00

The progress of the Honours Research Project undertaken entitled “le petit mort” is difficult to quantify in words, particularly those that are articulated in a written form.

For me, an awakening or realisation has occurred which has transformed the work from its original beginning point stemming from the question “How does the notion of presence in performance make present a past, memory, or trace and how does this signify an absence which might be conveyed to others?”.

This was formulated on a hypothesis that performance might be considered a death of sorts in its ephemeral nature. And thusly, alludes to a physical, corporeal mortal body that is marginalised by the triumvirate of Western science-technology, Christian religion and late-capitalist culture in an artificial immortality via the image. Hence the title translated into English from the French as “the little death”.

A juxtapositional counter-point of departure or reference began the research by incorporating the event of New York City’s World Trade Centre’s Towers terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001. Due not only to just a personal but what might be described as a collective fascination with traumatic images that at once discloses or reveals –and yet veils and conceals- a repressive fear of death. Thus a sociological analysis might be enacted and documented as a problematic relation that bleeds from the personal into contemporary political-cultural ideologies.

In conjunction with sculpting a proposal, references were sourced beginning with literature that grappled with these subjects such as Peggy Phelan’s article “Seeing the Invisible – Marina Abramovic’s “The House with the Ocean View”in Adrian Heathfield’s “Live: Art and Performance”, Bert O.States “Performance as Metaphor” in Theatre Journal 48.1 (1996) pages 1- 26, Christine Poggi’s “Dreams of Metallized Flesh:Futurism and the Masculine Body” from the journal “Modernism/Modernity 4.3 (1997) pages 19-43 and Antonin Artaud’s “The Theatre and Its Double” – a veritable mystical performance bible.

Pursuing these notions simultaneously extended in opposite ways.

Firstly, what might be deemed as an away or outward movement from me into the domain of culture. That is to say towards the general, and this included the role of art – performance- in society as a sacred ritual evoking religious spirituality- its reverence and fervour.

Secondly, a return, folding, back in on itself motion, due to the desire for definitions to be contained within prescribed, scrutinized borders (whether physically or in language) and the threat experienced upon breaching these boundaries resulting in a sense of identity- whether masculine or feminine- ill at ease, threatened in chaos, crisis or war.

Thereby it was concluded that ultimately what was at stake is, power manifesting itself in subjectivity, and one that is particularly vulnerable; me; and our narcissist tendencies to placate the ego, the driving, maddening desires of the Id and power plays of the authoritative Superego which manifest themselves in pathological neurosis and psychosis.

Once upon this path an awareness of the relevance in psychoanalytical concepts was apparent whilst pursuing philosophical lines of thought. In particular, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings on the role of art in culture (specifically the early Greeks (Homer) repetition of violent images and their pleasure in destruction); fellow-German Carl Schmitt’s notion of the political, being either friend or foe – enemy; that of the father of psychoanalysis- Sigmund Freud from Vienna’s concept of the compulsion to repeat a traumatic event that has been experienced as if one were an absent witness and thus remember in order to forget; his French psychoanalytical protégé Jacques Lacan and his positing of subjectivity models as “proper” and a mobius strip; and Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of rhizomatic inter-connections, territorializations and becomings.

From here a phenomenon had been identified; the aestheticization of violence in culture by repetition.

Upon following this trajectory it was evident that the time had finally come to address the Christian Holy Bible as an artefact of a cultural birth or beginning, and the use of technology and the image in war – particularly the geo-political wars of the 20th Century not only in its sheer, physically brutal force but also in its mental or psychic propaganda.

And the abuse, emotionally?

A given.

It was about this time it was realised that the research had begun with a stereotypically naïve Honours Student perspective and that one had “bitten off more than one could chew” (let alone swallow!) and that it was actually a PhD length research project requiring at least 3 years (if not a lifetime) or as the supervisor of the project Barry Laing succinctly put it “Well there is your next 500 performances…!…”.

Whilst in discussion with aforementioned supervisor, it was brought to my attention that what I had proposed within the timeframe was “unreasonable” – not too mention “unmanageable”- and that I should refer to the work of Slavoj Zizek – in particular the book “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” in which he transposes psycho-analytical and philosophical-political concepts as well as elements of contemporary pop culture such as film and advertising onto the geo-political stages with events like the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks on the Twin World Trade Centre Towers in New York City.

Around this time- April- May; I began to become concerned that I was indeed being bogged down within an impossible quagmire of sourced references that was only amounting to a chaos and confusion akin to the currently down-ward spiralling state of Iraq.

And so, I entered the studio to commence constructing practical material for performance.

With the locus of the work on “performance as a death”; the influence of the Artaudian post -World War II Japanese dance form, butoh, with its strong physicality playing between beauty and grotesque monstrosity and its philosophy of the artist not making the work, but the work making the artist would be inevitable. And so, I sought to evoke the model of the mobius strip and to be open but acutely aware to the possibilities of material that INSISTED they be incorporated.

By tracing the present to the past in memories of experience that inhabit the performing body as words or movement, I found myself re-visiting material to develop.

The first being the motif of a chair as a central point or fulcrum in which circular movements revolved as if an eternal return of the same repetitions but with difference. This movement evoked the “terrorist” inmates of Guantanomo Bay as well as an attention on masculine-phallic sexuality. Evolving into a mobius strip-figure 8 patterns and gradually accelerating, the Bert O. States article “Performance as a Metaphor” and illusory transitivity from Wittgenstein’s language games theory was incorporated. The idea of the alphabet as a continuous mobius strip in which all the letters related to each other, entirely, and thus words and the meaning of language.

The language of letters in words evoked Artaud and his obsession with thought or a mind-body split and his insistence of theatre as a violent instrument in bridging the meta-physical gap between the two. One that evoked a “cruel” psychical, physical and emotional transformation through his concepts of “Affective Emotional Athleticism” with the breath and body as sacred, primal hieroglyphic. It also brought into consideration the existence of a god-almighty creator and in Artaud’s case one that might be Gnostic. The duality in the notions of “good” and “evil” and “Self” and “other” insisted the connection to the Christian Holy Bible. The state of a religious-holy war manifested in the “clash of civilizations” equating American Economic and Cultural Imperialism to the Crusades and 9/11 as jihad made it apparent the beginning of this had to be interrogated.

Fascinated since childhood, despite being agnostic bordering on the irreligious (Church of England-Anglican-United-Whatever) I have always obsessed with the possibility of a god and death. A god, a father, who possibly forsaked his son, a sacrifice for “our sins of the flesh” in the violent crucifixion image of the disputed “mad” prophet Jesus Christ and if so, might HIS? presence in images of death and destruction be glimpsed. For is this not the same god whose vengeful wrath began with “The Fall” of man due to a serpent “more crafty than any wild creature that the LORD God had made” and a woman whose “eyes would be opened” and “be like gods (plural) knowing both good and evil” and that she “saw that the fruit of the tree was good (like a certain almighty god who “in the beginning of creation…saw it was good…”…)…pleasing to the eye and tempting to contemplate…the eyes of both…were opened…and they were naked ”. Banished from Eden’s garden that was “pleasant to look at” and driven into a world as a castaway that “will certainly die” and suffer with increased labour and groaning in which one shall bear children after being “eager for your husband, and he shall be your master”. Yet this is the “help (yikes!…what?…) of the LORD…brought a man into being”. And thus mortal life begins with Eve being “eager” for Adam her “master”, subsequently giving birth to Cain and death with the murder of Abel, his younger brother.

The rest is history.

So, “In the beginning of creation… When all things began, the Word already was (OR The Word was at the creation). The word dwelt with God, and what God was, the Word was. The Word…was with God at the beginning…children…not born of any human stock, or by…fleshly desire of a human father, but the offspring of God himself. So the Word became flesh…” created in man as “his likeness…the image of God…”.

Who’s word is word?

A word that passes through the Old Testament and is re-modelled in a New Testament of inter-textually collaged Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. This Word that was at the beginning of creation and finds itself snaking, a winding way onto the tips of contemporary tongues in mouths that realise The Fall of man project in “knowing good and evil” and obfuscating meaning in obscure terms such as “collateral damage” and “repetitive administration”.

This collage technique evokes the spirit of African arts in its heterogenous materials, the “libre mundi” – a book of the world, Constantin Stanislavski’s “peasant spectacles” in a montage of scenes from Tolstoy, Turgenov, Chekov and Gorky, Fillipo Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto advocating “parole in liberte” – words in freedom, and following from the Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Poland’s Jerzy Grotowski, East Germany’s Heiner Mller and his “synthetic fragments”, the United States’ Joseph Chaikin, Charles Marowitz, Wooster Group and Great Britain’s Forced Entertainment is me.

Regardless, the practical material now had a beginning with the so-called beginning of a Christian God creating and dominating the world.

I began filming alone with the idea of capturing my body; naked, speaking a perplexing alphabet, dismayed, yet chuffed on learning, singing, shouting, screaming this “ABC” song of letters in words and a terror in this birth of being, a body within a language-inspired by Comedy Central's "Crank Yankers" character "Special Ed". Ending in a maddening triumphant exaltation. Celebrating learning this knowledge by rote and making meaning from abstractions in symbols and sound until finally the terror of being born to scream the sound of the voice’s static white noise, in a white void, on a blank perfect screen, as if a desert landscape - to project images, after images acting like uncanny ink blots. The absent past projected onto the present of desire awaiting an unknown yet somehow familiar future.

This then became interspersed with an annoying camp, comedic voiceover introduction, as if a commercial television advertisement, influenced by the ridiculous absurdity of Forced Entertainment.

Book-ended by a tall, thin, tree-like white constructed metal object with a cardboard sign stating the bleeding obvious - “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” – scrawled in homage again of Forced Entertainment and a red pulpit for sermonising (whose need became apparent upon subsequent researching of the Bible in the story of The Fall in conjunction with British poet Ted Hughes’ “Crow” whose work has powerfully resonated since I first read it, in particular “Apple Tragedy”) a “satisfying” mis-en-scene whose aesthetic qualities was reminiscent of a Samuel Beckett -Societas Rafaello Sanzio- Robert Wilson meets Grotowski’s “Poor Theatre” had been created.
.

This “Apple Tragedy” of Ted Hughes’ poem is appropriated to take place in a public bar (The Garden of Eden), where God relates the “new game” he has invented to the serpent.They then start drinking apple cider and get drunk with Adam and Eve, seducing each other, until everything starts going awry-well, to hell.

Movement was developed for the serpent by equating “The serpent…more crafty than any wild creature that the LORD God had made.” with a repetitive endurance piece previously performed based on the slimy, snake-like personality of influential Sydney media mogul Alan Jones. Legless and only travelling raised on forearms, images of paraplegics or war-victims were also evoked before decaying into the slithering of the snake in film director Shohei Imamura’s “Japan” segment of the film “11’09”01”.

After the study of a murder of crows on the Victoria University Footscray Park campus, I visited Melbourne Zoo as an assignment for an improvisational acting class with Ranters Theatre’s Adriano Cortese and observed birds. Here a peculiar madness was identified in their lack of freedom. One, which seemed, somehow to concur with the poem’s predicament and existence, being in language.

The discovery of god appearing before Abraham to relay how his covenant shall be kept through the circumcision of the flesh of the foreskin of the PENIS! in the Christian Holy Bible was appropriated as well as the projection of his future as father with his wife (whose name Sarah just happens to coincide with my first “true” love who has been residing in New York City since 1997)and that they would be the parents of all nations.

A desk was now placed with the chair; a place tabled for surgery upon the body as well as reading and writing of language upon it with a white sheet evoking Renaissance paintings.

Personal writings from Artaud to his lovers Genica Athanasiou and Cecille Schramme were appropriated for a static, frenetic reading with the intention to introduce a confessional factual-auto-biographical element in stillness.

The footage was edited together for presentation to the supervisor of the project Barry Laing.

It was at this time the footage was also viewed by master director Ben Cittadini who would become known as “The Phantom-(…the ghost who walks…directing without detecting his presence…”) who offered his services in order to develop the work with a different perspective.

Our first meeting was one of much trepidation on my part, for such is the esteem held in regard to this man borne of Italian blood. We discussed my intentions and the content of the work and its concepts. Concluding that a linear narrative would not indicate how the past remains present in future actions. Thus, it became apparent shifts should occur, constantly by utilising improvisational impulse techniques with the modes of being thus far; serpent-crow-me-Craig-man-mad-god-son.

In approaching the work this way, it would keep the performance, alive and fresh in the moment whilst perpetually revealing a past that is haunting this now, currently happening, being propelled into the future.

The text has to be re-learnt.

These states were proposed as a certain shape shifting.

It was suggested I find an action to play at the audience- “I want them to carry me”.

Struggling with the difficult problem of becoming a shape shifter was akin to learning percussion in which one must separate yet integrate multiple actions simultaneously.

The idea of forming this language and finding it in the physicality of the mouth and tongue was introduced. To receive letters from an improvisational impulse that comes from the gut.

“First the belly. It is the belly that silence must begin…on the spot of hernial obstructions, the place where surgeons operate…It is in the
belly that the breath descends and creates its void from which it hurls it TO THE TOP OF THE LUNGS…Now, from the void of my belly I have reached the void which menaces the top of the lungs…the void on the belly…brought forth in me the image of that scream armed for war ( the war I want to make comes from the war that is made on me.), that terrible subterranean cry.
For this scream I must fall…”

This is a Masculine, NEUTERed (“heavy and fixed”), attempting “a terrible feminine (“thundering and terrible, like the baying of an incredible mastiff, squat as the cavernous columns, dense as the air that immures the gigantic vaults of the underground cavern.
I cry out in the dream,
But I know that I am dreaming,
And over BOTH SIDES OF THE DREAM
I make my will prevail.

…

But with this stricken scream, to scream I must fall.
…Into a tunnel and…I can never get out.
Never again into the masculine.” )The cry of the revolt that is trampled underfoot, of anguish armed for war, of the demand for justice.
It is the groan of an abyss that is opened: the wounded earth cries out, but voices are raised, deep as the bottom of the abyss, voices which are the bottom of the abyss crying.

…

It is the scream of the wounded warrior who brushes past the broken walls with a drunken sound of glass.

I fall.
…but I am not afraid,
I give up my fear in the sound of rage, in a solemn roaring.”
From Artaud’s “Theatre of the Seraphim”.

What is this “heavy and fixed”, threatening, ominous, sensual, sexual, mad retarded feeling, I cannot clasp, grasp, come to grips with?

I struggle to find the beginning, this beginning, the first words-“this is a fucking sad story”-which are not mine, which I thought had ended or closed and have now been cracked apart, wide open. Like a wound. THE PHANTOM remonstrates me “WHY THE FUCK IS IT A SAD STORY…AND WHO GIVES A FUCK…WHO WOULD?…WHY GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU?…you cannot assume how we are going to feel…”

This is really starting…to really hurt.

Really.

I thought it was before, alone.

Now, it is just humiliating.

A challenge requiring real courage and will of engagement.

This is now the work.

And it is just the tip of the ice-berg of this process.

The action changes - “I want you, the audience, to thank me…”- it is suggested with a sense of wonder…no, THE PHANTOM replies, “try shame, because you think you will save us, all the audience, that you want to save everyone a lot of time, but then again, what the fuck would you know?”

My confidence is shattered and my faith is in doubt.

I am falling.

I fall.

Into despair.

Kiekergaard’s sickness unto death.

The Phantom Ben Cittadini is seemingly frustrated with his energy thwarted by my tired lethargy.

What is this listless unwillingness?

Where is the energy?

Its intensity?

Drop into it

Just be.

Let all that other shit go.

Forget habits.

Remember to break rythms.

Stop moving and speaking as a just- doing-something as a distraction, from fear.

Do not feel there is a need to fill the void.

It is not empty with nothingness.

LET IT EXIST.

For in it, you will find yourself, as a mirrored reflection of us.

All.

Do. Not think.

Do not be afraid.

We get there.

I .DO.

Now, for a second act.

Something is insisting itself- in its non-existence.

Artaud’s short play “Jet de Sang”(Spurt of Blood”).

A second act is discussed to a point of stillness.

Prior images are suggested, summoning fucking gyrations, a birth, a cosmic soup, finger tips showering the body, sensual, sexual kissing, sucking, a scream that might be silenced, a metamorphosis- Kafka’s bug, Roger Callois’s praying mantis, a figure blinded with hands that want to touch and not see, a fascist drawing a long bow whilst slitting throats, a dead madman grasping, clasping at what?…things, symbols, letters, words, language, numbers, names, ideologies, vacant, absent, invisibilities, subjects, objects, projects, voids, worlds, people, places, concepts, the dead, the dying, spirits, gods, atoms…all twisted beyond , meaning, understanding, knowledge, comprehension, but connected in a thread the shape of a mobius strip.

And thus, this is the 1st semester Honour’s Research Project “le petit mort” Progress Report thus far.

nothing, something, everything, anything

I have had a revelation of Artaud
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2006-10-26T05:51:00.000-07:00

“le petit mort” – “The Little Death” (translated into English from the French)

By questioning “How does the notion of performance presence make present pasts, memories, traces and how’s this signify absences to others?”, the project asserts performance as a death.

And why not ?

Make the stakes high. Or else turn on the television or …

Although metaphorical, a live performer literally is dying before the audience’s eyes (also figuratively during a “bad” performance) through the passage of time and in this presence of being-there, present, a mirror reflection before the eyes of the audience in their own mortality might be experienced.

French artist Antonin Artaud and the events of New York City’s Twin World Trade Centre Towers terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001 became an originary point of departure.

A solo performance and materials for exposition traversed theories and practices (Sorsen Kiekergaard, Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucalt, Gilles Deleuze with Felix Guattari, Elizabeth Grosz, Julie Kristeva, Helen Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Charles Bataille via Rosalind Krauss and Yves Alain Bois, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Slavoj Zizek, Peggy Phelan, Bert O.States, Henry M Sayre, Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Butoh, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Maria Abramovic, Heiner Muller, Wooster Group, Romeo Castelluci, Goat Island and Forced Entertainment) attempting to present performance and post-human-9/11 images as problematic relations, highlighting a repressive fear of death in contemporary culture.

Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s concept of the compulsion to repeat a traumatic event which has been experienced as though absent and an aesthetics of violence in the fetishized pleasure of destruction and repetition identified in German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche‘s essays on the role of art in early Greek culture underpinned the performance material developed by re-tracing (exhumed) past memories to be inhabited by the performing body in movement, words, emotional and physical experience with the psyche.

Notions of infantility, pre- Wittgensteinian language games were incorporated with extended voice explorations, Butohesque philosophies, breath work, Artaud’s concepts of the body in crisis, Theatre of the Seraphim, Affective Emotional Athleticism and hieroglyphics with text from the bible, English poet Ted Hughes’ “Crow”, Artaud’s and personal writings connected the factually-real-self-performing body as a singular subjectivity with imaginal-multiplicitous-fictional mythological relations in a mirrored reflection of the individual and the social as a being-becoming anamorphic mobius strip.

Video footage mediatised the live process with images of “9/11”, cinema, Renaissance art with the intention to not explicitly juxtapose but merely imply a presence through its very absence and thus blur that which is authentic in artifice.
Whilst challenging the complicity connected to a sense of identity in site-specific or simulated repetitions within a socio-cultural context it proposes performance as a strategically vital, absolutely relevant and necessary mode of being-becoming knowledge, understanding and meaning as a critical insightful experience and commentary on the assumptions and contradictions of a post-human-9/11 age.

By a dialogical exchange of auto-ethnographic material engaged with theoretical discourses and practices, a personal sociological analysis attempted to document in words and images a process acknowledging performance’s sacred and necessary power in its origins of ancient history, ritual and brevity of life due to its ephemeral nature reflecting the futile quest for immortality in time that is frozen in words and images.

It celebrates performance’s willingness to explore not only acts of giving (gifts of love) and life’s existence but mortality in death. In establishing the freedom and necessity of not only the sensual but spiritually sacred experience of live performing bodies as a contrast to the seductive and pervasive qualities of the images that permeate the landscape of a post-human-9/11-late-capitalist cultural age.

This is performance as an inescapable, impossible mythological subjectivity. A masculinity in abject madness searching for a radically feminized jouissance in the Real of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s terms.