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Category: art

Pina Bausch: Poet of Performance (1940 – 2009)

Published July 1, 2009 by cgerrish

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The difference I suppose is one of presence—of the energy field that envelopes the performers and the audience for the duration of the performance. It must be felt directly, it can’t be translated into video or text and transported for decoding and consumption at a remote endpoint. My first experience of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal was the piece called ‘Palermo Palermo’ at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I’d read about her work extensively, but this was my first taste.

Pina Bausch passed away yesterday, she was 68 years old. Bausch had just completed a new work, and was preparing for upcoming performances. She was one of the few artists who was required viewing in my book. If you could see a performance, there was no alternative, you must go. Now we must try to do the impossible; conjure a semblance of what it was like to be in the presence of a performance.

‘Palermo Palermo’ began with the stage completely obscured by a floor-to-ceiling wall of cinder blocks. As the lights in the auditorium dimmed, the audience was confronted with this wall. Slowly one detected movement, something was happening to the wall. It was falling backward onto the stage, and it struck with an incredible crash. The air was filled with dust, the stage was covered with broken cinder blocks, the music started up and dancers appeared—running madly across the field of broken stone.

My last encounter with Bausch’s ensemble was in Berkeley, at Zellerbach Hall. I happened to be sitting in the first row, and during a particular sequence in the performance, Dominique Mercy was asking people in the audience to make a snoring sound. This was my one contribution to Bausch’s body of work— a loud snore from the first row.

Cafe Muller

The Rite of Spring

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Il lamento dell’imperatrice

Pina Bausch settled in, and lived her life, on the boundary between dance and theater. Her interest was not in how people move, but rather in what moves people. Her pieces were without beginning or end, constructed from the real-time lives and emotions of the dancers performing the piece. Standing at the edge, or perhaps a bit beyond it, there are no hard and fast rules about what can and cannot be included in a performance. It’s a rare artist who can consistently create passionate, engaging works from that position over a long career.

Lee Yanor’s short film on Pina Bausch captures the movement of the choreographer’s hands. Her works often had a mythic scale to them, but they began, perhaps, with her hands thinking through the movements that moved her dancers through the dance.

Pina Bausch, may “…flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

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A Radiant Node, A Cluster…

Published June 18, 2009 by cgerrish

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Ezra Pound discussing the work of Wyndham Lewis: “The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.�

Imagining forms of static and dynamic representation, or perhaps a network whose nodes are vortices.

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Preserving Ambiguity

Published March 20, 2009 by cgerrish

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“Design is preserving ambiguity.” This fragment recently surfaced and won’t leave my current playlist. It was a thought expressed by Larry Leifer in a talk called “Dancing with Ambiguity, Design Thinking in Practice and Theory. ” Today it finally collided with a blog post on StopDesign.com. Douglas Bowman is leaving Google, where he was employed as a visual designer. He summed up his reason thusly: “I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.”

Our human interactions with the Network swim in a sea of data. Each stroke of a key or click of a mouse leaves a trace somewhere. The business of analyzing these traces to plot the trajectory of our activity streams powers the internet economy. And while past performance is no guarantee of future results, it’s apparently close enough.

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This begs the question that was asked of Mr. Bowman. If design and ambiguity are intimately intertwined, can ambiguity be preserved through the sword of data? In this particular skirmish, the answer appears to be no.

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Ambiguity is the enemy of economics in the Network’s current equation. The ratio of clarity to ambiguity must always be advancing in favor of clarity. Value is equated with unimpeded visibility, its end goal a kind of panopticon. What then of poor ‘ambiguity?’ — linked in this context to the opposite of value. In the grips of such an economy, why should ambiguity be preserved?

If design has value, then ambiguity must have value. What, then, is the nature of the value of ambiguity? A thing that is ambiguous may have more than one meaning, and may have many meanings. Proponents of logic would have us push ambiguity in the direction of nonsense.

But we can also move in the direction of the dream and poetical thinking. The design object is overdetermined, overflowing with meaning. It connects with the emotions of each individual and the diverse set of circumstances that are linked to those emotions. Imagine a graph linking the design object to the emotions of each person and then the circumstances that provided the ground for those emotions.

Clarity produces value in a restricted economy, in a controlled vocabulary. Ambiguity produces value in a general economy, in a language open to play. Just as with clarity, not all ambiguity is created equally. The poet’s pen, the designer’s pencil, the painter’s brush make the clear mark that overflows with meaning.

Of course these thoughts have been batted back and forth over the tennis net for years upon years. Ambiguity continually undervalued, the underdog, beaten at every turn, it continues to limp along. Although, never fully disposed of, for to get to where you’ve never been, there is no clear road. To see what you’ve never seen requires a different kind of vision.

From T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets:

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

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Writing Under Erasure: The Art of William Kentridge

Published March 14, 2009 by cgerrish

William Kentridge

The fluidity of William Kentridge is astonishing. My mouth hangs open in awe. It’s difficult to even find the words to describe what he does. I’ve just returned from the members preview of his major exhibition at SFMOMA called William Kentridge | Five Themes.

As Kenneth Baker of the SF Chronicle says, “Even people only causually involved with contemporary art tend to bookmark memories by their first encounter with the work of William Kentridge.” Mine was about 4 or 5 years ago at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I happened upon a small exhibition of charcoal drawings and one of Kentridge’s “drawings for projection.” These hand-drawn films are composed through a process of making a set of charcoal drawings corresponding to the main scenes of the film. A drawing is created, one frame is shot, then a portion of the drawing is erased and redrawn. Another frame is shot. And so on. The palette of the narrative becomes a palimpsest.

The film was called “History of the Main Complaint” and was made after the establishment in South Africa of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The narrative plays out through a ‘medical’ investigation into the body of Soho Eckstein, the white property-developing business magnate– and it eventually works its way around to point the way toward the emergence of conscience and the possibility of reconciliation. This is not agit-prop theater, its politics are filled with poetry, ambiguity and some sharp edges.

Kentridge’s process of drawing a film is a fundamental artistic act, a gesture in four dimensions. Thousands of individual drawings are created and destroyed in the process of making the projectible drawing. Marks are made, erased, new marks are made and erased– and the camera catches each state of the drawing. These fleeting moments of being exist only on film, the individual states of the drawing flash into being and are at the same time, both irretrievably lost and leave ineffaceable traces.

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The SFMOMA show includes a performance of Kentridge’s design for Mozart’s The Magic Flute through projections on a very large toy theater. The YouTube videos have embedding disabled, so you’ll need to click the links to view them.

While working on Magic Flute, Kentridge concieved another piece called “Black Box.” It’s a stunning piece of work. Stop whatever you’re doing, go to SFMOMA and watch this work from beginning to end. It’s another mechanical theater piece consisting of animated film, kinetic objects, drawings and a mechanical actors/puppets. It is a powerful piece of political theater, a Trauerarbeit machine. (These videos don’t do it justice)

Kentridge discusses the role that memory and mourning play in his work:

There was a term someone introduced to me that I’ve kept in my head for Black Box, it’s the word Trauerarbeit – the work of mourning. Freud writes about that in 1917 in Mourning and Melancholy.

Freud talks about how memory compares to reality and what it takes to arrive at an objective view once the lost object is actually gone. It’s a process of detachment and de-vesting.

A Trauerarbeit machine on stage could turn, and things would come out of it.

Kentridge works without a detailed plan, here he discsuses the moments before the real-time flow of his work begins:

“Walking, thinking, stalking the image. Many of the hours spent in the studio are hours of walking, pacing back and forth across the space gathering the energy, the clarity to make the first mark. It is not so much a period of planning as a time of allowing the ideas surrounding the project to percolate. A space for many different possible trajectories of an image, where sequences can suggest themselves, to be tested as internal projections. …It is as if before the work can begin (the visible finished work of the drawing, film, or sculpture), a different, invisible work must be done. A kind of minimalist theater work involving an empty space, a protagonist (the artist walking, or pacing, or stuck immobile) and an antagonist (the paper on the wall).”

A contradiction must be captured, Kentridge must make a clear mark that preserves the ambiguity of his original impulse. It’s writing under erasure. Time, memory, history, humanity and reconciliation inhabit his work.

It happened at some point. While I’ve been following Kentridge for a number of years, I missed the moment when he emerged as the artist for this generation. If you’re not conversant with his work. Seek him out, his work touches all the notes in the central narratives of our time. And indeed, time itself.

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