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.
