'The Set-up' was a catalogue essay of sorts for an exhibition that didn't know whether it was a group show or three solo shows - all of which were terrific - by Justene Williams, Meiro Koizumi and Damiano Bertoli. I suppose it would have been a group show if I'd had more money and space, but then again it simply could have been five solo shows. It was first published in Column 8 (2011, pp. 61-6). The title was swiped from here:
Stage one
Stage two
Theatre has retained the word ‘proscenium’ from the Greco-Roman era to describe specific structures that replicate the predominant spectator/performer relationship of that time. A proscenium theatre is one in which the audience faces the stage directly, generally — though not exclusively — viewing the action through a framework known as a proscenium arch, the window that implies the presence of a ‘fourth wall’. In Latin, however, it simply means ‘in front of the scenery’, denoting the stage as such. Modern French has translated the term literally, rendering it as avant-scène, but shifts its emphasis to refer specifically to the apron, the part of the stage that places the performers in front of the proscenium arch, in front of the curtain, dangerously in the littoral space between performer and audience, leaving one or both dangerously exposed. Julian Beck situated his Living Theatre directly in this space. We see it parodied to a certain extreme in the notorious 'Be Black, Baby' sequence from Brian De Palma’s Hi, Mom!, where the stage is defined purely in temporal terms, a bourgeois audience allowing itself to be brutalised in the most appalling fashion by an experimental theatre troupe, then applauding them at the completion of the performance (‘Great show, great theatre’ … ‘I’m tickled I came’ … ‘Clive Barnes was right!’). There is no such humorous let-off in Hideo Nakata’s Ring: the piercing of the fourth wall of the television screen comes with the traumatic realisation that as performers, we have foregone the agency of our spectatorship. At least De Palma allowed us room for disinterested critical judgment, no matter how much he lampooned it; the most terrifying aspect of the electromagnetic avenging kaidan Sadako is that she precludes any such possibility.
Stage three
Chieko! Toshio Anazawa’s Ki-43-IIIa fighter took off from Chiran airfield on the morning 12 April 1945, carrying 250 kg of explosives. It plummeted into an American destroyer off Okinawa shortly after. ‘Chieko’, read a letter that his lover received four days later, ‘I want to see you … I want to talk to you … honestly’. Chieko! A photograph of a group of schoolgirls waving goodbye to Anazawa was circulated as propaganda before Japan’s war came to a horrific halt that August. Chieko! His letter formed the basis of a wildly popular but deeply ambiguous manga by Koji Seo, whose publication in 2007 coincided with a problematic revival of the figure of the kamikaze as part of the founding mythology of post-war Japan. Chieko! In 2010, artist Meiro Koizumi, having sought to deconstruct the ongoing romance of this figure over a series of videos and performances, adopted the form of Anazawa’s ghost as he made the final steps of a sixty-five-year stagger home, traversing some of Tokyo’s most iconic locations, not to Ikebukuro station where the pilot last saw his love, but to Yasukuni shrine, where his soul had been interred along with that of 2,466,000 other war dead, among them fourteen Class A war criminals. Chieko! In Ginza, passers-by stopped to ask if the hideous figure was alright as he lurched forward, stumbling, clutching the side of his face as if to keep his jaw from swinging off. Chieko! In Shibuya they ignored him, even when his agonised gait left him stranded in the middle of Hachiko Crossing as the lights turned green. Chieko! Koizumi later recounts how the pedestrians knew exactly what he was doing, how they did not judge. Chieko! His disappearance beneath Yasukuni’s imposing stone torii was documented from afar by a static camera shot along with the distorted recording of his voice and those of the shrine officials and right wing thugs forced to deal with him. Chieko! Fade to black.
Stage four
When performance, presented to one public in one public space, is documented and presented to another public in another public space, where is the art? According to one line of argument in recent theory, what is encountered in galleries these days is often not so much art as documentation — the art has already taken place, and has taken place elsewhere. But what of performance that is performed in order to be documented and presented in a gallery? Or when there is no primary register as such, when performance, documentation and presentation cannot be isolated as priorities within an artist’s methodology? In documentation, a first public can themselves be documented, their interaction with the performer drawing them into the work. In a perverse and terrifying inversion of Sadako’s traumatic annulment of the fourth wall, the line between spectator and performer is dissolved to find the first public on the other side of the screen. Trapped in a looped sequence of temporalities, they are subject to the gaze of the second public. All they can assert is their chronological precedence as a public, an outdated, unfashionable claim to originality, perhaps, but entirely keeping with the touristic logic of the vernissage, where one allows oneself — no, forces oneself — to be seen to see, to be seen to be the first to see. We know where our publics are, then, but where is that art? There is only a sequence: set-up, performance, set-up, performance. Can installation perform? In the sense that it is performative, yes. It is a rhetorical gesture, a temporary structure that takes on meaning only within the less temporary structure in which it is presented, which is to say the gallery space, the site it points away from but according to which it is always defined. Set-up, performance, set-up, performance. The doubling here is specular, queering the membrane between spectator and performer on both sides of the screen.
Stage five
To stage: Desire caught by the tale was a play written by Pablo Picasso during an idle moment in occupied Paris, eliciting Gertrude Stein’s famous advice that the painter stick to his day job. Indeed, it was staged by its author precisely once, three years after its completion, as a private reading in the apartment of Louis and Michel Leiris, with a rather extraordinary cast that included the Batailles, the de Beauvoir-Sartres, Georges Braque, Albert Camus, Jacques Lacan, Henri Michaux and Raymond Queneau, complete with a two-metre swastika swiped from the entry to the Louvre by none other than Samuel Beckett. The work is so self-consciously absurdist, so purposefully difficult, in a theatrical sense, that is has seen few revivals (although its proponents have been notable, among them Dylan Thomas, Lynda Benglis and Julian Beck himself). No staging has been so celebrated as the work’s first full-scale production by the radical raconteur Jean-Jacques Lebel in 1967, whose own cast may have been lesser-known than Picasso’s but no less intriguing, featuring nouvelle vague actor/director László Szabó and Warhol fixtures Taylor Meade and Ultra Violet (Meade would later direct the Benglis production). It is, in short, an art-historical oddity, capable of attracting luminaries from across disciplines but remaining utterly anonymous.
Stage six
To restage: Continuous Moment: Anxiety Villa draws on the Picasso and Lebel versions of Desire caught by the tail and collapses them into the aesthetico-political universe we know as Damiano Bertoli. Bertoli has created an installation out of a play and previous stagings of the play in their own theres and thens, restaging it and them for his here and now, restaged in the Bertolian universe of Superstudio collage aesthetics — Cartesian grids; disjunctures of perspective, light, colour and texture; dialectics of figure and ground, of presentation and representation, of yearnings for pre-representational presence; tails by which to catch desire; pretty girls — collage being at once more violent and reflexive than montage, its severed edges and brutal tonal shifts announcing itself as collage, never anything less, which is to say, never anything like the seamlessness of the image, that slick negotiator of spectacular social relations. To stage, to restage: staging as spatiotemporal performance (there can be no stage without other stages). To stage, weirdly transcendent in the agency this gesture asserts over space and time, at least insofar as a given space and time is defined as the stage on which to stage. In this ahistorical act of historical retrieval, the artist might slow what once was moving down to complete inertia. But this inertia is the bearer of a terrible momentum just waiting to be released, shivering between collapse and explosion, a romantic, wholly problematic absurd sucked into a black hole only to be spewed back somewhere else in space and time.
Stage seven
All of history all at once! Here is our ghost—speak to it, Horatio! ‘Chieko!’ is all it can muster in response. But then history never appears as just one ghost. Just as there is more than one communism, our spectres are always multiple (by how much do the dead outnumber the living?). Should we be so bold as to articulate our relationship to history along the lines of the proscenium structure, and even bolder as to complicate that relationship by introducing the screen, many screens, it would look something like Justene Williams’ Hot Air Hillbilly Weekend Workshop, a barrage of screens unravelling time not in sequence but in simultaneity. In Williams’ work, the performance never was. Any notion of originality, of the smooth and regular passage of time is carved up, looped mouth to tail and strung together sideways, like a ball of string presented in section, ruffled a bit for effect. Elaborate costumes, props and sets are created, activated, recorded and destroyed, all except a ragtag bunch of chairs, rigged to infantilise their sitters with torches shining up though holes cut for ablutions — to perch on one while watching the bank of monitors aggressively looping snippets of Williams’ non-performance is to participate in the crazy spectacle as some kind of demented pre-schooler. The room is a haphazard grid of fluorescent yellow punctuated with blue and pink, like a drunken antipodean flirtation with the ghost of Piet Mondrian, while a masked accordionist provides the jaunty soundtrack to a host of weird tasks undertaken by a stout Judge Judy character, a chaotic female authority figure who bosses her way around a set that she seems to have risen out of, the first sign of egocentric life to emerge from the primordial swamp of twentieth-century avant-gardism, genomic Picassos and Lebels no doubt lying somewhere within (but oh, for a history of twentieth-century art containing only women!).
Stage eight
Even the authority of the first public as historical precedent has been annihilated. We experience the gesture all at once. The only difference between audiences is not time, but the gesture’s framework. Are we in the reflexive space of the gallery, or are we so many passengers on a train? When a young man awakes to find himself in theatre’s dreaming on a beautiful afternoon, we see him for the first time whether we are on the train or in the gallery. The same as if instead we were seated near young woman, attempting to comfort him, from another train going in another direction at another time. The privilege of being a gallery viewer is being able to see the two together in imaginary conversation, joined across time and space by apposed projections. This is not a historical authority as much as it is the joy of confluence, of being present to witness the second set-up performing. The players here are not star-crossed lovers like Toshio and Chieko, nor are they sexually assertive archetypes like Picasso and Judge Judy; their tension is that uneasy one between masculine and feminine modes of emotional collapse, or rather, between modes of emotional collapse that might be gendered masculine or feminine, tragic in the sense of the former, hysterical when it comes to the latter. What sex is your nervous breakdown? Hamlet or Ophelia? This is Koizumi’s Theatre Dreams Again of a Beautiful Afternoon, which, as it happens, is only half a remake of an earlier version of the same work, the recurring dream of theatre, with qualifications. One might be tempted to read the work as the coming to consciousness of a character within a vignette — not an actor, a character — that he is nothing more than a fiction, and that this might find its parallels within contemporary life. Surely it is not for nothing that he is a commuter on a train? But the majority of the character’s breakdown occurs off-camera, which is to say off-stage. When he collapses to the ground, he is out of view, he is behind the proscenium arch. He has left the avant-scène, leaving us with nothing but his first public, an audience facing an audience, being seen to see.
Stage nine
Set-up, performance, set-up, performance: to stage, to stage, to re-stage. A mise-en-abyme of mise-en-scène, art becoming documentation becoming art, all of it shuddering inexorably toward some paradoxically receding denouement, like the two sides of a single train speeding in opposite directions. The train never reaches its destination, history appears all at once, and two stages are collapsed to constitute a third stage. Performance here depends not on its immediacy but on its mediation. In a sense, there can only be representation, whether it occurs in the street, on a train, in an apartment, a theatre, a gallery or a chaotic cardboard video set. Is pre-representational purity ever possible? Can mediation not find its own immediacy? To be immediate necessarily implies occurring without mediation, but there is no requirement that mediation itself cannot occur without mediation. Nor does it preclude performance itself from being mediated performatively. In another sense, immediacy means to happen at once, and in this sense there is no temporal difference between the melodrama that unfolds on the train and the melodrama that unfolds on the screen. Indeed, the reduction of a performance to a plurality of instances occurring at once is arguably more immediate than its ‘pure’ unmediated duration. In performance, time is shared between performers and spectators. But there are, effectively, two times to which installation has access: that of its performers and that of its spectators. What is most provocative about this is that the performative stage can never be reduced to pure temporality. The organisation of space assumes a real centrality. This perhaps is the strongest contribution of such work to the symbolic field, in a general sense. Set-up, peformance, set-up, performance; in the avant-scène, before the proscenium, in the staging of every action, the uncertain ground shared by performers and spectactors, by their agencies, which in themselves are at once in conflict and in common, the organisation of space is paramount. Such is the lot of art at this moment in history, telling us what capitalism already knows.
Stage ten
Chieko! Fade to black.
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