‘Art does not exist. It declares itself’ (Harold Rosenberg)
1. Disfigure Study -the name of Meg Stuart's début work in 1991 -was a programmatic title, not least because 'disfigured' bodily attitudes and movements were presented repeatedly in the show of the same name, (1) The term 'disfigure' fitted wonderfully well the image of an arm creeping over a back with a crawling hand, of a pair of dangling feet suddenly nuzzled by a mouth (the opening scene), or of two bodies toiling with great difficulty across the podium floor. This initial impulse to disfigure the human body and change it into an uneasy subject/object continues to smoulder in Stuart's more recent work as a sort of prevailing theme that just will not be extinguished.
The word 'study' was also programmatic. In graphic art and sculpture it is customary to (learn how to) make studies of the human body. Disfigure Study referred to this tradition. The performance displayed movements and poses that you only observed with a distant, even somewhat cold or analytical, look at the human body. It is the gaze of a cartoonist, painter or sculptor who is drawn to a hardly perceptible fold of skin, who becomes fascinated by an unplanned movement and who lets a series of minimal gestures coalesce into one single 'cool image'. This aspect has also persisted in Stuart's work, which is always about the eloquence of the material 'out-of-body', It is rare to find moments in which the movements or gestures displayed obtain a psychological meaning or inner depth - it is as if we are dealing with an aesthetic behaviourism. Everything is "the exterior', to the extent that it is solely the act of observation that counts and not the possible symbolic value of what is seen, heard or tasted as well.
Of course, this is not the whole story. Stuart's performances also affirm the lessons of physiognomy, but applied to the whole human body. They presuppose a gaze that is seeking a possible face in the smallest movement, even in the most intimate gesture, a literal, superficial 'power of intonation' that is more profound than each and any psychological meaning. Gestures, poses, attitudes, limbs... modelled and viewed as faces: these are the first principles behind all portraiture. Yet Stuart virtually never allows us to see a flattering portrait. In her work, she sets her sights too clearly on contorted movements, perpendicular poses and fragmented attitudes to permit this. It is not that her art celebrates the dismembered body, the imploded body that satisfies the perverted lust of the fetishist. The look that buttresses her work has everything to do with close scrutiny - with visual microscopy. This studious vision sees what we scarcely ever see when we observe others: little jerks, shuffling feet, an unusual handstand, a twisting body. This optical unconsciousness was first highlighted through photography, according to a famous thesis by Walter Benjamin. Meg Stuart makes art of this, just as did Rodin, Kokoschka or Bacon, for example; it is no coincidence that all of these were plastic artists.
2. Is she, perhaps, creating modern dance as well? Stuart's work is usually programmed and reviewed under this heading. But just what is modern dance? An oxymoron - that is what Stuart's work immediately teaches us. It is a paradoxical combination of dance and non-dance, because that is how the work does indeed appear: as a quest for both the individuality of the 'dancing' as well as for an 'exterior' that breaks this possible identity, thwarts it or otherwise puts it on the line. 'Dancing' in Stuart's work is sometimes synonymous with concurrence or unison, the simultaneous performance of movements. (2) But much more often the idea in her performances appears to point to the physical impulse, impossible to portray, that drives and motivates all movement towards the invisible 'interior' or proverbial motor of perceptible gestures, poses, jerks, gesticulations... This explains her interest in improvisation as evidenced by the Crash Landing project, which between 1996 and 1999 brought together dancers, musicians and plastic artists at diverse locations in Leuven, Vienna, Paris, Lisbon and Moscow. It also explains her particular technique of working, in which 'tasks' interchange with examinations of movement.
In Stuart's performances, the importance of the invisible impulse to move can be clearly read from the significant quality of the movements displayed. These are not performed, but appear to be born momentarily. Movement is made - as if the performers are giving substance to 'dancing' on the spot, hic et nunc. The emphasis is invariably on the doing or 'performing', the making of a movement, the act of the performance that requires an extremely specific form of concentration. It often gives the movement a cinematographic character and more than once makes you carry on staring in fascination, as if you might yet be able to catch the inner drive 'behind' or In' the displayed gestures or attitudes.
Stuart understands 'dance' in terms of a need for movement that, nonetheless, is always tamed and disciplined. This is why it must be defied and provoked. Creating new situations time and again - it does indeed come across as 'situationist' - in which the urge to move has to find a new way out or direction of escape and manifests itself in a manner that until then has been unfamiliar: the work of Meg Stuart is averse to organised movements, physical routines, aesthetic codes. Dancers and spectators need to learn - experience - that a myriad of movement opportunities follows from the impulse to move. Dancing can be performed with all your limbs and muscles and not only with the body forms canonised by professional ballet - movements with your nose or little finger are just as good as those achieved through well-trained arm and leg muscles. In Stuart's work the whole body is a medium of movement and non-movement: the dancer's body disappears, even or even implodes into the 'dancing body'. This often comes across to the spectator as a rediscovery of the polymorphically perverse body of the young child that does not yet have any rigid organisation or coordination.
To be modern, 'dancing' - the urge to move - requires an 'exterior' against which it can orient itself and that simultaneously focuses it because it is an obstacle that blocks an easy or obvious movement. This 'exterior' takes on very diverse forms in Stuart's ten-year old work. There are the everyday movements with which trained dancers often find particular difficulty. Or the performers are either obliged to perform before the anonymous eye of a video camera, which registers the movements from an unusual angle with unpredictable framing and effectiveness, or else perform 'outside', which is simply a performance area without the standard auditorium so that the drive to move no longer has a familiar setting, a house or a home. In Stuart's work, 'to be modern' is indeed synonymous with the investigation of limits, of resistance - of 'material' in which 'dance' breaks down and becomes 'dancing'. It is an attitude that is commonly accepted within the world of the modern plastic arts but that in dance circles still comes across as exceptional.
3. A Meg Stuart show invariably requires attentive observation and studious watching. The spectator has to see repeated what it was that the creator first envisaged: an exaggerated or, conversely, a banal detail that does not disclose any hidden or underlying message but which fascinates and interpolates in its sheer materiality (of being 'as it is and not otherwise being'). Remarking on, retaining and enabling the reproduction of the singular materiality - and thus also the uniqueness of poses, gestures or movements: this is perhaps what characterises the work of Meg Stuart. The key to her work is a gaze that does not want to understand or interpret the human body but which loses itself in the ever-shifting enigma of the observable exterior of private movements, coincidental gestures and contingent configurations. 'Ce que nous avons de plus profond, c'est notre peau': this passing remark made by Paul Valéry would not be out of place as a motto for her work.
The studious gaze is of an intimate kind. Unlike the romantic or erotic gaze, it discloses a physicality that appears neither attractive nor ugly but that simply is, like a generally unseen 'idiotic form of being' that patiently awaits visual attention. We are continually surrounded by physical enigmas but fail to notice them without art. The result is 'uncanny' or unheimlich art - and 'the uncanny is only uncanny because it is already too secretly familiar to us, which is the reason why it is repressed' (Freud). Unheimlich art displays the out-of-the-ordinary in everyday things, the unusual in the familiar - not behind, under or alongside it. A contracting body, a girl pulling crazy faces in front of a video camera, people shouting in a corridor...: this is indeed quite ordinary but in Stuart's work it becomes out-of-the-ordinary, if only because one watches attentively with an astonished gaze that is prepared to see at last what was always there to be seen throughout the duration of the performance.
The ordinary in Stuart's shows is out-of-the-ordinary particularly because it is given a face that is simultaneously - this is often literally the case - anonymous. There are never 'characters', never even the suggestion that the poses displayed or attitudes enacted are connected with the character or individuality of the performer. Showing intimacy that is usually unseen, incorporating gestures or movements that are made when no one is watching - No One Is Watching is in fact the name of one of her performances - yet without 'personalising' it: it is in the paradoxical amalgamation of intimacy and anonymity, of 'face' and 'flesh', that Stuart's work finds its secret focus. That anonymity can be translated and captured literally in words since what one gets to see or hear in Stuart's performances time and again is not a female or male body but the body; not anecdote but a general everydayness the everyday. It is for precisely that reason that one recognises what is shown, yet as an ordinary unseen subject with the most extraordinary power of expression - with 'a face' that it never possesses in everyday life.
Everyday gestures that become non-everyday due to their staging immediately incite the familiar 'what' question. 'What is being said here?', 'What does this mean?', 'What is the implicit message?', 'What do I do with this?'. These are the types of question that assail the spectator in Stuart's performances. The only valid answer is found in the performance itself - in the fact that you are seeing something that is continually overlooked: the strangeness of so many commonplace movements, the remarkable quality of the human 'exterior', of the body and physicality In short, you see what you do not see when you am seeing - you look at the blind spots of your observation. Yet, it is only natural to react with self-examination and ask yourself whether when actually watching during the performance you were not in fact also watching inaccurately...
4. A lot of compositional ingenuity is required to exhibit mundane subjects in such a way that they come across not as banal but, conversely, as 'worthy of viewing'. The danger continually threatens of either a surfeit of 'blackness' (as if the basic element could be profound or ritualistic) or else a paucity of 'vitality' (as if the commonplace did not already overflow with it). Stuart avoids these pitfalls through having an exceptional feeling for the internal duration or temporality of movements, attitudes and poses. She gives them the time to be moulded into images - into condensed moments, into live stills in which movement is still made but where the movement is simultaneously transformed into a static image of itself.
Take, for example, No One Is Watching, a performance that referred throughout to the convention of the fourth wall including even in its title. Behave as if no one is watching and, 'thus', - the crux of the performance was vested in that one small word - stage very intimate situations or bodily movements: No One Is Watching placed the spectator emphatically in the position of the visually omnipotent voyeur. The voyeur sometimes saw a very banal intimacy (nose picking, scratching where it itches...), then alternatively the type of activity seen in private rituals or physical idiosyncrasies for which the human species would appear to have a patent (for example, only we experience a pleasure - usually referred to as childish - in playing with water or mud). You were soon made to feel uneasy about all this. You could not maintain for yourself the fiction of the fourth wall. The performance took the axiom of the performers behaving as if no one was sitting in the auditorium so literally that what was presented did not come across as a simulation. However, crucial for the visual impact of No One Is Watching was its strange imagery, continuously splitting the three-dimensional podium space, time and again, into a flat projection screen. Bodily movements or poses came to a standstill in this merely optical presentation space, becoming immaterial and 'photographic'.
In Stuart's work, the paradoxical dialectic between movement and stasis is often based on a slight delay, sometimes in an imperceptible or, conversely, brisk acceleration, and, thirdly, based on unexpected juxtapositions of movement. Every single time it results in a seizure of the movement' in apparent immobility, as if the movement is involved in self-admiration and wishes to freeze into an image - first into a statue or carved sculpture, next into a photograph or a video still, Stuart's art - her dance that is always non-dance - repeatedly aims for that strange visual effect in which a movement, or series of movements, is split and slides into a third reality between actual and seen movement. In that strange reality, movement obtains a face that casts a momentary glance over its shoulder. This is also unheimlichkeit or the uncanny: to experience as the viewer that the movements observed - a writhing arm, a walking body ... - look back at you.
It has a great deal to do with timing but, of course, also has to do with the podium situation. The redefinition of podium space into imagery space, of physical movements into physical images, is also a question of lighting, sound and music... Therefore, Stuart's work is also permeated to its depths by the realisation that the theatrical dispositive - the audiovisual relationship between podium and auditorium, performers and public - has a multimedia structure. It confirms repeatedly that light, movements, podium space, music, etc. define the 'representation' jointly: their mutual interaction establishes how the enactment manifests reality, or becomes an image or representation.
5. Attentive viewing, close observation, 'having an eye for detail', and especially having an eye for the blind spots of your own observational capacity - how does one achieve that? From the beginning, Meg Stuart found an ally in the now digitised camera's eye. Unlike human perception it does not experience reality: it registers it, coolly and neutrally, and it stores it, without continually remembering and forgetting. The camera's eye thus creates a visual register that differs completely from the human gaze, in which looking is also always overlooking. By looking (repeatedly) at video footage of movement material made during rehearsals, Stuart, from her first performances onwards, has armoured herself against this kind of failure to observe properly. Her work departs from the premise that it is the image of human perception that has to be held suspect and not the technically manufactured image. This axiom has increasingly entered into her performances as well. More than once they reveal their conditional possibilities and openly depict the difference between human perception and technical registration - between the experienced and documented world.
Splayed Mind Out (1997), the performance in which she worked together with video artist Gary Hill, contained the memorable scene where performer Christelle Filled drew on her back with felt-tip pen. Simultaneously in other words live', this movement was shown in close-up on stage on a video screen. The same treatment twice, but two completely different types of Imagery'; the same body twice, and yet not the same body either. For example, on the projected video close-up you could see in fine detail the graininess of the scribbled skin on the performer's back. As a spectator this was not something that was possible to observe in a direct manner. Without the eye of the camera, one merely saw smooth skin, not a parchment-like writing surface or living sheet of paper. The camera's eye acts as a prosthesis, as the producer of a visual closeness and intimacy that eludes the human gaze. In her work, Stuart critically deploys this simple 'truth' against the ideology of the liveness: the belief that the real-time movements and physical co-presentation of performers and public in stage art always implies an advantage.
Unlike much technological or media art, however, Stuart does not place her bets on the supposed superiority of 'the digital', nor on the possibility of a transhuman body. The new techno-positivism or -optimism is completely absent from her work. Stuart confines herself to showing or staging the difference between human perception and technically orchestrated recording. Moreover, her work is suffused to the tiniest detail with the knowledge that embodied sensuality constitutes a barrier for us that cannot be breached. In the end, it is a human eye that views the digitised image of the body…
6. Recording equipment, with closed-circuit cameras heading the list, is gradually surrounding us. For some time, we have no longer trusted the evidential value or accuracy of our own senses, never mind our memories: what we see and, even more so, what we consider important, we record with photographic or video equipment. Meg Stuart also explores this current phenomenon, derived from the technical or digital, in her contemporary dance. In the Highway 101 series of performances, the quest for a radical actualised art form often culminated for the spectator in continual observation back and forth, a split perception; on one side, the live observed bodies and movements of the performers, on the other - on a large video screen or, conversely, on small monitors - the recording of those same bodies and movements. The live images were sometimes mixed with images previously recorded, which provided visual confusion and created situations that reanimated the worn-out concept of 'surrealism'.
The Highway 101 project demonstrated continuously the difference between the human and digitised memory The former is quite unable to do what the latter can: to reproduce the recorded past effortlessly and, notably, with perfection - which actually comes down to recalculation involving the reassigning of bits and bytes in a computer. However, that is why a digital recording device can never experience the world in a sensory fashion or observe it from an 'unconscious', self-structuring network of previous experiences. Recording is precisely that: observing without memories, seeing (the video camera) or hearing (the microphone) in an everlasting 'now' time that knows no past or future.
It began with photography and has presently culminated in the digitised image of the body that can be manipulated at will. In this synthetic image, each screened body dissolves into silly pixels, into ones and zeros in the hardware behind the screen. Images in the form of meaningless data, images as neutral information: the breakthrough of the digital as a new supermedium what is there now that cannot be digitised? - undermines the hermeneutical paradigm, the axiom that 'everything is text', that the world and body are bearers of meaning and require reading with care, layered deciphering or ingenious deconstruction - in short, interpretation. The body as a cultural, social… text' and, therefore, capable of being deconstructed - this is not the point of Meg Stuart's shows. In fact, her work avoids depth, psychology, semantics or semiotics. It has recorded the digital revolution and made an ally of the digital video camera but has done no more than that: it does not allow itself to be imposed on or dazzled by the possibilities of 'the digital'.
In the digital information era, empty fascination has won out over interpretation, Every successful digital stream of images or sound generates an immediate connection with the human capacity for observation - and this structural link suffices, 'Reading', comprehension or interpretation is superfluous as is also criticism or deconstruction, Stuart's work relates to this conclusion most equivocally. It underwrites the primacy of exterior and surface, of the simultaneously uncanny and fascinating materiality of body and physicality, as well as of bodily imagery. However, it also recharges it with a magical power. Movements, attitudes, poses, etc change continuously in her performances into laces' that interpolate, address, cause one to consider. Salvation of the body's aura in the digital era' - this would not be an entirely unfair description of Stuart's work, A guiding footnote must add that this involves a post-metaphysical rescue operation, one that takes place beyond the distinction between being (body) and appearance (bodily image), authentic and inauthentic.
7. What is there remaining of the concept of the performing arts in this work? Perhaps this: cautiously investigating and articulating the audiovisual 'mediations' between one or more performers and a public in a situation of physical co-presentation, The many restatements of the movements or poses enacted live through video images in the Highway 101 series aptly symbolised this more general input in Stuart's performances. The visible transmitted images point implicitly to the existence of usually non-observed 'mediations' in the relationship between performers' and spectators' space, even if this has not been modelled on the traditional stage versus auditorium layout. Stuart wants at once to make explicit these 'meditations' experienced directly in the live relationship and to break through them and simply to re-evaluate them. To make explicit - by taking the convention of the fourth wall literally to the letter as in No One is Watching. To break through - by demolishing regardless the distance between performers and public as in some parts of the Highway 101 project. To re-evaluate - by creating both 'photographic' as well as 'cinematographic' avenues of escape in the movement or, particularly as in Highway 101 again, by playing ingeniously on the specific spatial opportunities of the building used (3).
The audiovisual relationship - we reduce it all too often to the purely optical - between performer(s) and spectator(s) determines the proverbial hard core of all stage art and, in more general terms, of the theatrical dispositive, Stuart does not want to display this 'truth' immediately through self- or metareflexive performances about performances. Rather, it is a question for her of the mediating character of the relationship between stage and auditorium, the fact that - just as with a language, for example - it permits many combinations of forms and, consequently, can be actively manipulated before it becomes open to redefinition and 'remediation'. Stuart makes contemporary dance, not theatre - although, in her performances, she always tinkers with the theatrical dispositive as well. It is also for that reason that her work is so difficult to classify to the extent that many restrict themselves to the neutral term 'performance'.
The fourth wall is the mediating essence of all theatrical art in the modern tradition, Stuart takes it literally, or redefines it as a two-dimensional screen, or demolishes it, or points to its existence ironically by - as in the final scene of the Highway 101 production in Vienna having the spectators watch and listen to a performer from behind a window. Or else she redefines the primary visual metaphor of the fourth wall in a wall of sound, an impenetrable acoustic cocoon that, paradoxically enough, created an even bigger partition. The house, the long penultimate scene from the Highway 101 stop in Vienna on electronic noise by Pita (it was recaptured in Zurich), marked a current high point in Stuart's investigation of the audiovisual relationship between performers and public in terms of a medium that can be re-evaluated.
8. Perhaps the theatrical dispositive constitutes the secret escape route for all modern art - pace Michael Fried's famous anathematising of minimalism. Every modern work of art in the broadest possible sense of the word is in fact always also an artefact that was made with human observation in mind an 'object' that emphatically offers itself to be observed as a subject. This is why it is perhaps not the material work as such that is decisive for modern art, nor even the 'imagined' (or non-imagined since it is unimaginable), but instead the relationship to be inaugurated repeatedly between work and spectator, we presentation and public. Seen this way, modern art represents that specific relationship in which 'being able to relate to something' is the drive in a game with the capacity of human perception that is constantly being redefined. If this is in any way correct, the work of Meg Stuart & Damaged Goods contains a relevance far surpassing the limits of contemporary dance, now stretched into 'performance'.
In modern works of art, the relationship with the expected but unknown spectator takes the form of a question. The relationship is a possibility, not a fact and absolutely not a rhetorical construct: modern art fails or shifts in the direction of commercial culture when it all too visibly wants to convince, all too immediately wishes to address the public it desires. In that sense, modern art is 'an anxious subject' (Harold Rosenberg): it exists only in a relationship freely entered into that perhaps will never come to fruition. Betting on the risk of both success as well as failure is also a characteristic of the Meg Stuart & Damaged Goods performances. They require attention, studious observation, a capacity to perceive that allows the self to be 'irritated' - but never are they obtrusive, blaring or overwhelming. They beckon us, they invite us - but in line with the modus of a hospitality that is becoming ever more rare in modern art and contemporary dance.
Our senses are occupied, even colonised, by the culture, and leisure industry; our capacity for perception and observation has become impoverished and enriched simultaneously - it has simply been re-evaluated - by our constant relationship with the TV screen or, more recently, with the computer screen. In her work, Stuart also refers constantly to this new phenomenon, which is of capital interest to (the experience of) art. Her performances do not reject the present media culture but refer to it or else even include it by means of direct quotes, The pointers or borrowings are also always processed: it is material, a raw substance that has to be 'artfully applied' - since whatever else art might be, it demands a relationship different to that of the media or sensation-based culture. This sense of being different is that of 'uncertainty': a modern work of art does not know whether it will also be recognised as such or not.
In the Viennese edition of Highway 101 there was a scene in which the public bumped against a human wall, Simone Aughterlony, Heine R. Avdal, Varinia Canto Vila, Ugo Dehaes, Davis Freeman, Eric Grondia Yukiko Shinozaki and Meg Stuart created one line of human bodies at the start of a tunnel-like corridor. How near should you approach the performers? How close physically dare you to go? How should you relate to them? The scene was a practically perfect symbol of the relational question that, essentially each modern work of art is. This was only made even more clear once the performers slowly began to step backwards, simultaneously making beckoning hand and face movements, indicating: 'Follow me' - and when those who dared among the spectators did just that, the performers suddenly moved a few paces forwards…
The tunnel scene ended with a projection on the rear wall of video footage containing a group of people standing still, made during one of the Viennese demonstrations in the spring of 2000 against Jörg Haider. The video image of the compact mass of people slowly came to life - it took a while before you realised that not only the images of the people but also the image itself had changed. Slowly, very slowly, the group of people being filmed shifted to the bottom of the frame. Simultaneously, the image became continually more abstract until finally, all that could be seen was merely a meaningless whole of countless coloured spots. This is what happens with images of the body, even in human perception: they appear and they disappear; they live and they die, just like organic bodies of flesh and blood; and above all else, they become just like 'real bodies', remembered one moment, forgotten the next.
Being remembered, not simply being seen or heard, recorded or commented upon: this is the ultimate drive behind the relationship simed at every modern work of art. This is why art needs our body and the body art of Meg Stuart as well.
1
This text is based to a high degree on notes and ideas by Walter Benjamin (experience, aura,..), Roland Barthes (studium versus punctum, materiality…), Thierry De Duve ('the work of art as a face'), Friedrich Kittler (the digital versus the hermeneutical) and Niklas Luhmann (art as a relationship of perception), Bibliographical references have been omitted since this is an essay - an attempt - in the strict sense of the word. For the sake of clarity: the insights borrowed have been cut or expanded on depending on the subject under discussion.
2
The expression 'dancing' is used here in the sense of the French word 'dansant'.
3
Regarding this see also Jeroen Peeters' contribution in this edition that does further justice to the extraordinary stratification of the Highway 101 project.