1.
I wish to dedicate this talk to the memory of Patricia De Martelaere, author and philosopher (1957-2009).
“If you pay careful attention to your environment,” she wrote in her essay Over zoeken en vinden (On Seeking and Finding), “you will see that philosophy is in fact present everywhere”. And somewhat further, she added: “Shall we, then, define ‘art’ as an enigmatic way of not formulating questions that cannot be formulated, and of leaving them forever open in a fascinating form?”.
It is with these questions on proper perception, on the world and on art that I wish to begin. I am neither a philosopher nor an artist. A dramaturge is always a wavering being that, depending on the artistic process in which s/he intervenes, always has to keep filling him-/herself with other materials. This is, of course, only possible if you have your own materials, too. Today I have been asked to draw on these “own materials”: to tell a personal story, then. I wish to talk about the world that is our home today and how we perceive it, the metaphors we use in doing so, the images we search for to describe this world in the hope of understanding it a little bit better.
2.
We all construct sign systems in our lives, networks of reference
points: thoughts, visions, metaphors which each of us uses to help
read the world, society, history. As one grows older, one’s identity
and sign system increasingly tend to coincide. One’s personality is
largely defined by the metaphors one has acquired over a lifetime.
But the world is constantly changing and at a certain point, that individual
sign system no longer seems to correspond to what one sees
around oneself. One keeps on reading and reading; and one keeps
on translating and translating; but it becomes increasingly clear
that one is using the wrong dictionary.
“The cultural alienation of the aging man or woman is to be
interpreted as the difficulty of finding one’s way in an unknown
order of signs, under brand new signals,” Jean Améry wrote in his
perceptive 1968 book, On Aging: Revolt and Resignation. He would
commit suicide ten years later, the result of his profound dissatis-
faction with life as such and a losing battle with his own life, in
which he was unable to deal with the torture and wounds he suffered
during his internment in the Second World War. If one tries to accept
the sign system of a new reality, a different structuring of the
world, so Améry claimed, the price to pay will be the destruction of
that highly intimate and individual reading system that one has
built up over decades. One could thus describe the will to survive as
the permanent alertness to the decyphering of what is new in the
world, the headstrong effort needed to continue evaluating and discarding
what is old: to erase signs that are no longer of any use, and
replace them with others. Regardless of its necessity, it remains a
painful process, because one will have grown fond of those old
metaphors, and they will simply have become a part of oneself. To
rid oneself of them, one has to tear them out of one’s own flesh. And
there are some that, though one knows better, one will still wish to
hold on to, since, though awkward and of little use, they remain
beautiful and valuable.
But whoever wishes to live a conscious life, to live on, to survive,
can not avoid that painful process.
3.
In general, this process will not unfold smoothly, but proceeds by
shocks. The most significant turning points always seem to me to
be those at which social upheavals occur of such magnitude, that
the individual sign system is shocked into realising how unsuitable
it is. And as with important paradigm shifts in science, the “new system”
will be discovered, translated, experienced as a readable text
and transformed into a language by those who can see with new
eyes: in other words, especially by the younger generations or those
who, because of different life experiences, have not fully integrated
the old system. Put differently, still: by those who have not
interiorised the old system.
4.
I graduated and entered the world, as they say, in 1968. In Paris, students were
demonstrating with the labour movement. Factories were
on strike. Anti-capitalist demands were up for discussion. Russian
tanks entered the capital of what was then Czechoslovakia and
nipped the Prague Spring in the bud, smothering its longing for
more democracy. Liberation movements in South America were
fighting next to small farmers for land reform (Bolivia, Chile,
Nicaragua). In Vietnam, a small but dogged people challenged the
US military superpower, and won. In the US itself, the Civil Rights
Movement demanded civil rights for the black population. In the
early seventies, the death of Franco in Spain and the Carnation
Revolution in Portugal did away with two dictatorships in the south
of Europe. And this upheaval in Portugal immediately brought about
independence for the last remaining colonies in Africa (Angola and
Mozambique). In Greece, the colonels’ short-lived rule was brought
to an end, while in Chile, Allende’s Unidad Popular was crushed by
Pinochet’s military coup. Etc.
5.
There were victories and defeats, but the prevailing feeling was that
the world was moving on all fronts. It was a time – for me, for us – of
discoveries and enthusiasm. We believed in the possibility of changing
the world, and that, if we joined forces and stood together, we
could create a different world: more just; free of poverty, discrimination
and authoritarianism; and inwhich all people would be equal
and independent. No matter where one found oneself in society, it
was possible to contribute something, to become involved. Lawyers
fought class justice. Teachers stood up for anti-authoritarian education.
Feminist movements, soldiers’ unions, doctors serving the
people, gay rights advocates, environmental activists, solidarity
movements with what was then called the “Third World”, political
theatre, and so on: together we could make a difference. We made
and wrote plays of which the titles alone left no room for doubt as to
our ideas and expectations: “Leve het gewin, we stikken erin” (“Long
live profit, we’re chocking on it”) or “Hoe eerder hoe beter, zei de
arbeider, en hij dankte zijn baas af” (“The sooner the better, said the
worker, and he sacked his boss”). Society, the other, the oppressed,
no matter where around the world, were important; the world’s
common interest was more important than one’s own profit.
6.
If we define idealism as “acting on the basis of an unshakeable belief
in the possibility of a better life”, then we were the bearers of a
fervent idealism and great optimism. In its philosophical meaning,
idealism is a theory that holds first of all that reality is a product of
one’s consciousness, the ideas one has in one’s mind. But that was
not the theoretical foundation on which the movement of ’68 rested.
We drew support from the materialist philosophy of Marxism which
holds that the social being, the materiality of existence, in the final
analysis shapes man’s thoughts, emotions, mental processes. We
knew that people living in huts would inevitably think differently,
and see society differently, than people living in palaces. We were
aware that there were classes in society who had different needs and
concerns, and that this would inevitably lead to the emergence of
social struggles.
The achievements of the Enlightenment were not yet being questioned
at that time. We believed in the power of reason, in the power
of the word. We also believed in the power of progress, in hope, in
the possibility of improving the world. We were convinced that the
true nature of life in society was being hidden from view by an
ideological veil. We wanted to do what we could to remove that veil
from in front of others and ourselves, so that another perception of
the world could clear the way for another activity.
7.
And yet, despite our efforts and enthusiasm, the great revolution
did not occur; the world seemed a more difficult place to change than
we had anticipated. Our perception of the world started to sway, or
was it the world itself which was swaying?
In “Between Two Colmars”, an essay from his volume About Looking,
John Berger, the English author and art critic who resides in France,
describes two successive visits he made to the small French town of
Colmar (in Alsace) to see Grünewald’s famous Isenheim altarpiece:
first, in 1963, and then again ten years later, in 1973. In the space of
those ten years, the lives of many thousands of people would be
radically altered. In his essay, written in 1973, Berger observes that
for him, too, the years before 1968 were “a time of expectant hopes”
and that “hope” was “a marvellous focusing lens”. He attempts to
compare with great precision the impressions Grünewald’s altarpiece made
on him at those two different moments. “I do not want to
suggest that I saw more in 1973 than in 1963,” he writes. “I saw
differently. That is all. The ten years do not necessarily mark a
progress; in many ways they represent defeat.” The difference in his
consecutive observations lies in the difference in his frame of mind
at the time of observing: hopeful in 1963, doubtful in 1973. “Hope”,
he wrote, ”attracts, radiates as a point, to which one wants to be near,
from which one wants to measure. Doubt has no centre and is
ubiquitous.” I quote further: “It is a commonplace that the significance
of a work of art changes as it survives. Usually however, this
knowledge is used to distinguish between ‘them’ (in the past) and
‘us’ (now). There is a tendency to picture them and their reactions
to art as being embedded in history, and at the same time to credit
ourselves with an over-view, looking across from what we treat as
the summit of history. The surviving work of art then seems to confirm
our superior position. The aim of its survival was us. This is
illusion. There is no exemption from history. The first time I saw
Grünewald I was anxious to place it historically. In terms of
medieval religion, the plague, medicine, the Lazar house. Now I have
been forced to place myself historically. In the period of revolutionary
expectation, I saw a work of art which had survived as
evidence of the past’s despair; in a period which has to be endured,
I see the same work miraculously offering a narrow pass across
despair.”
8.
The feeling gradually emerged that history was hesitating, stagnating.
The more one anticipates an important change that will not
come, the more the image of that big change will be affected. Until
you yourself too, expectant, gradually become a different person.
Despair is perhaps too strong a word. Disillusionment is probably
better. But what is disillusionment if not the loss of illusions, the
loss of a dream image that one once thought answered reality?
Coming back down to earth can be unpleasant, but in itself it is a
positive experience.
9.
1989 was another one of those turning points when perception had
to be readjusted, a point at which processes that had been
happening for a long time suddenly came to the surface. These sorts
of turning points help structure and understand the slow shifting
of social realities. Events that, thanks to their formand force, open
our eyes, to the extent that we can no longer look away and the
underground work becomes perceptible. Like the image of the burning
Twin Towers in 2001, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked
just such a turning point in reality. The whole Eastern Bloc “crum-
bled” in no time. But the joy at freedom’s expanded territory also
provoked a bitter aftertaste. The euphoria with which the victory of
capitalism over communism was welcomed in the West left one
feeling uncomfortable. One was all too proud of one’s own
righteousness. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc not only meant the
victory of democracy as a political system over communist dictatorships,
but also the disappearance of planned economy in favour
of the free market. From that moment on, turbo-capitalism was
given free rein to spread itself around the world. We were told that
this definitive end to the Cold War also meant the end of ideologies.
But at the same time, one soon took great pains to create a new
enemy: that of the fundamentalist terrorist who represented Evil
itself and drew all Muslim states along in his wake.
10.
1989 was not only the year in which the Berlin Wall came down. In
that same year, a bloodbath took place in Tiananmen Square, in
Beijing; Khomeini died in Tehran; the US invaded Panama; and in
South Africa, the dismantling of the apartheid regime had begun.
Once again, it was necessary to read just the personal sign system
which one used to interpret the world – especially with regard to
Europe.
It has been twenty years already, but it seems as though since then,
things have been moving at breakneck speed. What has happened
since then, I believe, shall have required quite some readjustments
and is still raising many questions, and this, not only for older
people, but for all citizens of the world who, in 1989, were conscious
adults.
Not only did economic and political upheavals take place which led
to a new world order (and this process is still in full swing), but these
changes also coincided with an unparalleled technological revolution.
The digitisation of our daily practices, and especially innovations
in communication technology and the mass media, have
occurred so quickly that we are still trying to catch our breath.
Perhaps one can compare this shock to the impact the discovery of
the steam engine and electricity must have had on our ancestors.
The impact of these ongoing changes is such that our understanding
of space and time, and even our perception of the world, have
been turned upside down. Each international news item on the VRT
news (Flemish Radio and Television Network) is accompanied by a
picture of a small globe, which will spin around so that one can zoom
in on the place where an event is happening. What has taken shape
in our minds in recent years is neither more nor less than the
thought that we can, as it were, perceive and master that small globe
as a whole and as an image.
But perhaps that is nothing new, either. What an improbable shock
it must have been for our distant ancestors when they realised that
the earth was not flat, but round.
11.
I wish to explore some of the recent changes to get a better grasp of
how we perceive the world today, or how we could perceive it.
1) Economically, the forging of a new world order is in full swing. The
United States, Europe and Japan no longer stand alone on the
highest rung of the commercial ladder. The expansion of the G8 to
the G13, including the five emerging economies that are China,
India, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico, has been underway for some
time. Not 13, but 20 countries were invited to the recent summit in
London to discuss the global financial crisis. And in 2005, the combined
production of the five emerging economies was, for the first
time, more important than that of the so-called developed countries
(I borrow these figures from Rik Coolsaet’s insightful book De
geschiedenis van de wereld van morgen [The History of the World of
Tomorrow]). The wealthiest countries thus no longer control the
global economy. Europe, that has always seen itself, its economy, its
culture as the centre of the world, Europe as the cradle of modernity,
will have to face the fact that it can no longer claim its Eurocentric
position. A number of worldwide surveys also show that pessimism
is the dominant feeling in developed countries, whereas emerging
and developing countries hold a more optimistic view of things.
2) The unlikely speed with which we can communicate with the whole
world today and with which economic decisions and transactions
can be taken has led to an insane acceleration of our daily work
environment. To keep making ever more money, one always has to be
able to innovate, and companies must prove their flexibility to the
market. This has led to demanding from employees that they be
available for multi-tasking, specialisation, fragmentation. No
routine jobs anymore, no assembly-line work: this might seem like
more freedom, but there is a price to pay for making people
re-programmable like computers. And this price, as Richard Sennett
has shown, is the loss of one’s own professional history, the loss of
craftsmanship, of lasting relations developed in a work environment,
of emotional ties to work, of experience and confidence. The
price of short-term thinking.
3) Losing the opportunity to introduce a continuous narrative line in
your life through your work is certainly not the only change in our
experience of time. Modern communication technology enables us
to follow virtually everything that is happening in the world in real
time through sound and image: what impact does that have on us?
On our perceptions, our emotions, our thoughts? Are we up to a life
in “telepresence”? Improved living conditions and medical progress
mean that in a growing number of families, not three, but four
generations live together: what impact does that have on us? What
relation can a child have with a great-grandparent, or vice versa? Are
we up to simultaneity? Can we in fact do this: simultaneously drive
a car, make a phone call, consult a GPS car navigation system and
record the billboard messages that flash by? When elderly people
just want to stop living, what impact does that have on our understanding
of mortality and immortality? What impact does it have on
our understanding of the notions of suicide and euthanasia? Etc.
What impact does it have on us if, as Peter Sloterdijk put it, we have
to come to terms with the most important mental shift in Western
civilisation in the twentieth century; namely, the shift from the
primacy of the past to the primacy of the future. We draw up little
lists of important things that we want to take with us from that past;
we discuss the canon, cultural heritage, repertories, the final attainment
levels; we elect the most important Belgian or Fleming etc.
of all time. But none of this yields a real solution to the issue of how
to deal with the past. If you were taught in the seventies about the
importance of historical conscience as the means par excellence
with which to read the contemporary world, this is a development
that is very difficult to grasp.
4) In as early as 1992, French anthropologist Marc Augé describes in
his book Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la
surmodernité (Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity) the sense of the acceleration of time and thus also
of history, or better, of the process of “historisation”. History is close
on our heels, he claims: hardly has an event occurred, than it already
belongs to history. Our daily lives today consist of a succession of
events. Because only the “always-already-new” seems to sell, our
society is increasingly obsessed with a compulsive neurosis: not
only that of creating “always already new” products, but also of
creating “always already new” trends and events. The increase in
their numbers runs parallel to their decrease in value. The days
behind us are filling up with a growing heap of insignificant
man-made events, and this mountain, which we call history, is
hiding from our view that which lies behind it, further back in time.
This “overabundance of events” has saddled us with an “overabundance
of information”. We try, desperately and rapidly, to give meaning
to all these events. “This need to give a meaning to the present
(if not the past) is the price we pay for the overabundance of events
corresponding to a situation we could call ‘supermodern’ to express
its essential quality: excess.” Our attempts to grasp the present in
the hope of understanding life also affect our image of the future.
The future seems to coincide with the present; science fiction has
become reality; but the price we must pay is the loss of the idea of
progress from which we used to gather hope, and about which we
could cherish illusions. The future that was the source from which
optimism and idealism could emerge.
5) With the collapse of communism– and though those societies little
resembled the new world we had once dreamed of – a very important
idea was lost to the world, namely the idea that more than one
social model was possible, that there were other possibilities, no
matter how imperfect or lame. Should we then limit “utopia” to
giving a direction to our struggles? Or should we ban the very notion
of “utopia” since it seems that the longing for a better, for a perfect
world, in practice – and even in the drafting of it on paper – will
inevitably turn into a dangerous dystopia, an all-controlling dictatorship?
The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran defined utopia as
“the grotesque en rose”. “A monstrous fairyland” will replace the
image of the future, “a vision of irrevocable happiness, of a planned
paradise in which there is no room for chance and where the least
fancy comes across as heresy or provocation”. But Cioran added:
“You can repress everything in people except their need for an absolute”.
And he concluded: “No paradise is possible, except in the
innermost of our being and, as it were, in the I of the I; and even then
it is necessary, in order to find it there, to have observed all paradises,
the bygone and the potential, to have hated or loved them with
the awkwardness of fanaticism, and then to have explored them and
rejected them with the skill of disappointment”.
6) The holistic vision of the world that, in the seventies already, we
nourished in theory, namely, the sense that everything was interconnected,
today seems to have become a reality. A single system
spans the entireworld. Like time, space too seems to be compressed.
The internet, other real-time media, and tourism have made our
world smaller. We can, as it were, communicate with anyone around
the world as if they were our neighbours. The world is flowing into
our lives and our homes. When a tsunami hit a number of countries
around the Indian Ocean in late 2004 causing 300,000 victims, not
only was this event brought close to us through real-time footage,
but it also became clear how many Europeans spent their holidays
there, as if it were a destination in the south of France.
There is more, however. Spatial concepts such as centre and margin,
which were much in use in the eighties, now have a very different
meaning. In the seventies, going against the existing social order
at once meant that one was, in a sense, going to stand outside
society. One would join a commune, sit on a mountaintop in Nepal or
do some humanitarian work in some far-off place. But one would
integrate the class society as little as possible. Today one has the
feeling that “one can no longer stand outside society”. Everything
is in fact always immediately taken over: this has led to the contradictory
sensation of being “locked up”, though the world is open
before us.
Any point can now virtually be the centre of the earth; in any large
city one can find global phenomena pressed together. The world is
like a broken hologram: each fragment contains the whole. Places
are interchangeable. But it is precisely because everything is so
equal and similar that differentiation and individualisation are
again important.
The field of tension between the local and the global, the universal
and the territorial, is omnipresent. The centre and the margins,
inside and outside, have, as it were, traded places. The global is the
heart of the whole enterprise, regardless of where it is located: the
heart of the economy, of communication, of mobility. The local has
been pushed back outside, to the periphery, regardless of the place
it occupies on a plan or townmap. “In the world of supermodernity,”
Marc Augé writes, “people are always and never at home”. We have
all, in a sense, become displaced, nomads. Or, as the New Zealand
performance artist Kate McIntosh puts it (she lived in a number of
places around the world before settling in Brussels): “On each spot
you lose your history. On each spot you can rebuild yourself. This
gives you the possibility to alter yourself.”
Constantly rebuilding a life, breaking up and starting over again
someplace else: not everyone is up to this. A life in shards, fragments.
“Attempts at being”. There are no more grand or metanarratives,
but the need for narratives one can share with others has
probably never been so important. Stories by which to somehow
keep that fragmented life together. The more globalisation, the
greater the need for particularism, individuality.
7) Man’s alienation from his environment goes much further than that.
Flooded cities; forest fires that cannot be put out; ice caps that are
melting and crumbling in huge blocks into the sea; animals that are
dying out and others that are appearing in places where they were
never found or seen before; rising sea levels; devastating hurricanes;
the destruction of large tracts of forest; lakes and seas that are
drying up and making way for the desert; unstoppable rainfalls and
scorching droughts; masses of people on the move because their
land is no longer inhabitable; conflicts over energy sources, food,
water, etc. The excess that makes the world go around is destroying
the world. What impact will this have on us? It moves us, but much
too little. Because we are looking away. Because so far, we are still
out of range. Just one figure (taken from James Martin’s The
Meaning of the 21st Century, published in 2006): 4.5% of the world
population lives in the US, but they produce 23% of all greenhouse
gas emissions. Look at a world map, and you will see that the
wealthiest among us are the greatest polluters, while those who are
worse off live in those regions which now already bear the negative
impact of the devastation of the earth; they will also be the first
victims of future disasters. Etc.
12.
“Attempts at being”. Man is a slow-moving animal who risks losing
his way in the fast-paced super-modernworld. The problems he faces
are so overwhelming that on the one hand, he does not wish to see
them, while on the other hand, he is desperately looking for beacons,
support points, havens. He has a limited capacity for absorption,
which means he often can not manage the profusion of stimuli.
There are limits to his memory, whereby he cannot deal with a large
part of the information that is directed at him. He is increasingly
dependent on machines. His reliance on technology is increasing
before our eyes.
I am, perhaps, looking at all these facets of the globalisation issue
too much through the filter of that pessimism that is typical of
developed countries, that small percentage of privileged people who
enjoy a good life on this earth. Too much through the filter of these
timid hares that we are, who have so much that the thing most on
our minds is the fear of losing it all. Maybe people experience
globalisation differently elsewhere. Because the struggle to survive
pushes all the rest aside. Because there is no other way there.
Time to go back, now. Back to the initial questions.
There is no exemption of history, and there is no immunity against
the world. One’s own little story and the grand, global narrative
always meet at some point: the point where you stand, your
standpoint. Different for everyone, and for everyone the same. This
is where my longitude and latitude meet, at this point, at this
moment. In my rucksack I carry a memory and a whole chunk of life,
an artistic practice and some experience of the world. But the new
world requires a new positioning, a positioning whereby one cannot
put oneself at the centre of events, but neither on the outside, a
positioning whereby one always remains jointly approachable and
accountable.
Maybe a positioning as Judith Butler describes it in Precarious Life:
The Powers of Mourning and Violence: “The ability to narrate
ourselves not from the first person alone, but from, say, the position
of the third, or to receive an account delivered in the second, can
actually work to expand our understanding of the forms that global
power has taken.”
13.
Time to go back, now. Back to art.
The position of the omniscient author is probably definitely a thing
of the past: no one is able to have an overview of the whole world and
comment on it in any meaningful manner.
But how is the artist to find his way today in the multitude of
impressions, thoughts, sensations, feelings? How is one to tackle
that multitude? How is one to begin disentangling that knot? How is
one to see clearly and how is one to convey one’s questions to an
audience?
I wish to do a short exercise.
1) Slowing down by bringing the image to a standstill
Images are so massively omnipresent in our daily lives that we can
hardly see them consciously, but nevertheless, they touch us, affect
us, lead us in a certain direction. Given the speed at which images
reveal themselves to us and disappear again in a flash, to already
make way for new stimuli, more and more artists, or so it seems to
me at least, are focused on creating static or barely moving images
by means of photography, film, video, holograms and many other
technological applications, but also by means of older media, such
as theatre and dance/movement. One can interpret their need to do
so as a longing to bring time and movement to a standstill, to slow
down, so that it will once again be possible to reflect on that which
is seen. Against the overabundance of events, they are setting the
frozen, static image, in which they wish to collect the wealth of data
that each moment contains. It is never just an image; rather, it
involves showing a moment that contains numerous layers of
meaning. The image as archive, as memory. To capture the ongoing
moment makes it possible to show the simultaneity of various
metaphors. As in the Stills series or the representation I/II/III/IIII
by Kris Verdonck. The dangling women’s bodies in I/II/III/IIII reveal
in a flash both hovering angels and carcasses hanging from hooks.
The image can carry paradoxes. The process of creating an (almost)
static image out of a dynamic body or thing is in fact the opposite
process of what Futurists and Suprematists were trying to do at the
beginning of the twentieth century. In his so-called “prouns”, El
Lissitzky attempted to give two-dimensional images a threedimensional
perception by creating an apparent movement between
the surfaces. In his “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting”,
Umberto Boccioni wrote: “The gesture which we would reproduce on
canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism. It
shall simply be the dynamic sensation itself…. The construction of
pictures has hitherto been foolishly traditional. Painters have shown
us the objects and the people placed before us. We shall henceforward
put the spectator in the centre of the picture.” This different
approach between then and now is the result of the different reality
and its perception. The Futurists wanted to “capture” the new
dynamics of society which they cherished; but today these dynamics
are so painfully overwhelming that we would rather bring it to a
standstill. Moreover, we may now have reached a point of oversaturation
of moving images (television, film, etc.), whereas there
was no television at the time and film was still in its infancy.
2) Slowing down by intervening in time
Another way of slowing down is by stretching a single moment in
time, as in Ivana Müller’s Playing Ensemble Again and Again, in
which the moment of greetings after a performance is stretched in
slow motion to a one-hour performance. This, too, is in contrast to
the choices made by the Futurists, who were looking for a theatre of
speed and “brevity”. In their 1915 manifesto “The Futurist Synthetic
Theatre”, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli and Bruno
Corra wrote: “We are convinced that mechanically, by force of
brevity, we can achieve an entirely new theatre perfectly in tune with
our swift and laconic Futurist sensibility. Our acts can also be moments,
only a few seconds long. With this essential and synthetic
brevity the theatre can bear and even overcome competition from
the cinema.” And here too one can see the impact of technological
developments: creating a performance in slow motion only became
possible once, thanks to film, we were able to see slow motion, and
thus imitate it....
Overall, the recent interest in “performance” can be tied to the
longing for amore intense and conscious experience of the moment
as opposed to the hectic flow of everyday life. Standstill and silence,
but also stuttering, stumbling and almost falling: these are so many
moments at which a flow that propelled us forward is interrupted, in
which our thoughts, our senses can do their real work in peace and
quiet.
3) Creating a space in which the spectator is mobile
As an organ, the eye needs frontality. If the world is a theatre, then
the theatre is an eye. Experts have shown that the theatres built in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – in any case, after the
publication of Johannes Kepler’s Optica – reveal an architecture that
is comparable to the anatomy of an eye. Our bijou flats are like
eyeballs; from there spectators look through an imaginary lens at
the level of the “manteau” onto the stage that is the world. This
frontality has its limits. The ear is smarter; it can even catch what
happens behind us; sound is in fact like water, creeping everywhere,
filling the entire space, surrounding us, like an architecture or an
environment. Creating an environment – what one might call “a
space that is to be lived in for a short time by the audience” – is
another artistic means of reducing and, as far as possible, guiding
the abundance of stimuli to which we are normally exposed: it is
within this space that the spectator can attempt to organise and
summarise the information that he receives through his senses. He
himself will determine any movement within that space, as well as
the length of time he wishes to spend there. A further imposed
application of this method is resulting in the immersion technique,
a direct submersion, in which the spectator will sometimes entirely
lose control of the stimuli, but where the experience of the
synaesthetic whole will receive the whole emphasis.
Consolidating time, stretching the moment, enclosing space, etc.:
these are part of the artists’ task of brightening the world, of
emancipating themselves and their spectators. They are part of a
dramaturgy of perception which is still growing: the search for a
work method through which the spectator – who is both an
individual and a member of the audience – can consciously re-live
the here and now. Also, it is this enquiry into time and space that
has now brought the plastic arts and the theatre closer together.
14.
When time and space are handled simultaneously, there emerge a
trajectory, a chronology, a development, amovement and possibly a
story. The focus changes with the emergence of a story, since the
emergence of a story will trigger the longing to follow that story: the
attention will shift from the moment to the development, the shift
from one moment to the next. The value of amoment is then limited
to its function in the narrative chain. How can one reconcile the
moment and the development, what happens simultaneously and
what happens in succession? How can there be a story in a picture?
Through its layerdness? Its direction? Can there be a chronology in
the sense of “a time which elapses” without this resulting in a
narrative structure?
Today, communication seems to occur more often through images,
without having recourse to words. Language, that old and slow
symbolic medium, has seen its status affected in both social and
theatrical communication. William Forsythe has devoted a
performance to this topic, Heterotopia, in which language acquires
a spatial dimension. Language has become an image, a square
peopled with characters, a Tower of Babel that has been flattened,
made horizontal. And all these characters, including the audience,
are following the inscription (but simultaneously the injunction)
that Peter Handke wrote at the beginning of his wordless play Die
Stunde dawir nichts von einanderwußten (The Hour We Knew Nothing
of Each Other): “Do not betray what you have seen. Remain in
the picture.” All letters of the alphabet are literally on stage, but no
matterwhat the performers do, these letters refuse to formwords, to
createmeaning. And yet, there is a constant communication on the
stage: with bodies, actions, movements, sounds, images. In Romeo
Castellucci’s Purgatorio, “the reading of text” is turned into an
image; this also occurs in Hooman Sharifi’s God Exists, the Mother
Is Present, But They No Longer Care, in which, during the representation,
time is set aside for the audience to read the projected text.
In Castellucci’s play, the projected text includes descriptions of actions
that will occur on stage, or not. He is playing with time,
keeping us alert. The projected words make us pay attention.
What, in fact, is the relation between words and images?
What comes first: the image? Or the word? Was Wittgenstein right
in claiming that the word always precedes the image and that we
cannot recognise unnamed images? As regards the latter, recent
discoveries in neurology seem to confirm his claim. Our right
hemisphere knows/recognises the image of a spoon, while our left
hemisphere recognises the word “spoon”. For the perception of that
object in the world to be usable for us, both hemispheresmust work
together. Language and images have to come together for thought to
be possible.
Every day in my work as a dramaturge, I observe how the naming of
things leads to a readjustment of the perception of those things, and
vice versa. In order to talk about new realities, a new vocabulary has
to be developed. To name, to try to describe reality seems to me to
be the first task that we have to take on in the face of the confusing
reality that surrounds us. In order to decipher the world, to be able
to narrate theworld,wemust indeed believe that it can be described.
Maybe that offers one possibility, an initial boost. In order to
understand something, we must be able to imagine it. For understanding
to be possible,word, image, thought and imaginationmust
come together.
15.
It will be up to us to develop new hopes and a new optimism. To do
so we can draw strength from art – as Berger drew on Grünewald’s
altarpiece – and from artistic practices. In The Culture of New
Capitalism, Richard Sennett looks in detail at the decline and loss of
craftsmanship, which he defines as “doing something well for its
own sake”: “The more one understands how to do something well,
themore one cares about it…. Getting something right, even though
it may get you nothing, is the spirit of true craftsmanship.”
“Craftsmanship” as a formof “commitment”, then. Though theymay
be struggling, artists belong to society’s “privileged” people, for
whomthe choice of a career automatically entails, or should entail,
a commitment. Though we need to pause in the face of the arts’
social powerlessness, of the little that art is able to put in the balance,
we do at least have one trump card: the enormous energy that
emerges from people who enjoy doing their work.
Striving for integrity remains for me an important motif in our
practice. Doubt, too, including self-doubt. I would add: never take
things for granted. Keep exploring, keep asking questions. Hold on
to the slowness of our practices. Determine your own rhythm and
depth.... Take your time and take your freedom.
Something like: searching for clarity with passion.
16. Coda
And to conclude, two quotes on freedom:
The first is from Primo Levi, the Italian chemist, writer and
Auschwitz survivor:
“The noun ‘freedom’ notoriously has many meanings, but perhaps
themost accessible formof freedom, themost subjectively enjoyed
and themost useful to human society consists of being good at your
job and therefore taking pleasure in doing it.”
The other is from Simone Weil, the French philosopher and political
activist:
“True liberty is not defined by a relationship between desire and its
satisfaction, but by a relationship between thought and action.”
Brussels, 23 May 2009
Works which were cited or which served as sources of inspiration:
* Jean Améry, Über das Altern. Revolte und Resignation (1968)
* Marc Augé, Non-Lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (1992)Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
* Marc Augé, Pour une anthropologie de la mobilité (2009)
* Roland Barthes, La chambre claire (1980)
* John Berger, About looking (1980)
* Maaike Bleeker, ed., Anatomy Live: Performance and the Operating Theatre (2008)
* Judith Butler, Precarious Life.The Powers ofMourning and Violence (2004)
* Mary Ann Caws, ed.,Manifesto: a century of isms (2001)
* Emil Cioran, Geschiedenis en Utopie (1960)
* Rik Coolsaet, De Geschiedenis van deWereld vanMorgen (2008)
* Patricia DeMartelaere, Verrassingen. Essays (1997)
* Geoff Dyer, The OngoingMoment (2005)
* Peter Handke, Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wußten (1992)
* Primo Levi, TheWrench (La Chiave a Stella) (1978)
* JamesMartin, TheMeaning of the 21st Century (2006)
* Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character (1998)
* Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (2006)
* Peter Sloterdijk, Het kristalpaleis. Een filosofie van de globalisering. (2004)
* Susan Sontag, On photography (1973)
* Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2002)
* SimoneWeil, Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale