Chez Booz

I’m in Colorado Springs presenting Etiquette alongside Silvia’s piece Wondermart and my collaboration with Sam and Joji, GuruGuru. The space the organisers here (Caitlin Green and Drew Martorella) have sourced for the latter is fairly breathtaking. We usually aim for something modern, antiseptic – something a little unnerving which might feed into the dehumanized, focus-group world the piece plays off, but here it’s something special. The group of five enters the building – one of only three tall office blocks in the whole town – and goes to the 11th floor in an elevator playing panic-inducing footage from The Weather Channel. They exit into a brightly lit lobby area with fake plants and a sign on the wall indicating these are the offices of a very large (and controversial) US Military Intelligence contractor.

Next to their sign is one for GuruGuru, so instead of going into their offices they go the other way and open a door into a gigantic and entirely empty space offering a floor-to-ceiling panorama of the nearby Colorado Rockies. Cheyenne mountain, one of the closest, contains the famous NORAD compound, a nuclear bomb-proof Bat Cave which has been the central command of all North American defense (including Canada) since its construction in 1958.

This is the view of the mountain from the window of our space. Click for big.

This enormous empty office-space is one of several gathering spots for the group en-route to the smaller room where the action actually takes place. Inspired as it is by Adam Curtis’s incredible documentary ‘The Century of the Self’, I can’t help but feel GuruGuru has really found it’s place here, enjoying a view onto NORAD, sharing the floor with intelligence contractors, FBI bureaus two floors above and something called GIPSA or JYPSA a few below (I think they’re also federal agents, but the friendly security guard who took us onto the roof said the doors don’t open on the 8th floor, they have their own security, he doesn’t know what it stands for and hasn’t asked…) Coming up in the elevator I also can’t help noticing some of the characters standing there, so still, avoiding eye contact with anyone and pretending not to listen to the Weather Channel: this one is focussed, muscular, close-shaven, his huge neck ringed with heavily starched collar, the line of it continuing straight into the sides of his shaven head, a horizontal indent between eye and ear betraying long hours involving close-fitting eyewear of some kind. I can’t stop thinking about system failure, the ‘bungles’ of GuruGuru overlapping with the near apocalypse-triggering mistakes that took place within that mountain, twice, 30 / 31 years ago.

No this is not part of the play

Someone in Canada contacted us with an unusual question regarding Etiquette (Rotozaza) >

“From reading what the play is about it appears as though the audience interacts during the play. I am looking to propose to my future wife and was hoping we can work that into the play. It would make for a memorable moment for all involved. Kindly, could you please help me in making this happen?”

We replied explaining he should maybe try and fit it in towards the end… we didn’t know what more we could say really. Anyhow he wrote back the other day:

“Good day Great People, Thank you very much, it was a great success!!! First and foremost P said YES. She was taken by surprise and loved the proposal. Thanks to the Etiquette team; the play is very unique and entertaining concept. This is how the proposal went; at certain times during the act I was adding my own lines talking about P. It was hilarious she thought it was part of the play. E.g. I would start lines off with her name and finish with I love you P…. During the time when I was meant to drip water on her palm I wrote on the note pad #Will You Marry Me# folded that, wrote on the outside open at the end…and placed in her palm. She thought it was part of the play. At the end of the play with my headset on, I asked to open it and she read it. She thought it was part of the play and was like are you serious. I took my headset off and went over to her side of the table went down on one new pulled the ring out and told “No this is not part of the play. Will you Marry Me?”…. she said YES YES YES.”

Through another’s eyes

An addict in the area described in the last post approached me offering to draw my portrait. I told him i only had 2 dollars and he said fine no problem, smashing what remained of his green pencil (overused, chewed) into the page and immediately crushing the lead to bits. ‘Awww you got a pen man, i need a pen…’ – I told him he could have it. His portrait, which I think is quite amazing for how it manages to look like both of us, was finished in no longer than 25 seconds. I don’t know if he’d have spent any longer on it if i’d given him $200 given the state he was in, but I only wish I could have sat down and had a conversation about what he’s doing, how people react etc. He managed to tell me he was happy for people to go away with their portraits. When I asked him what the folder full of dirty pages was, he said, well they’re the ones they didn’t want.

I was thinking of an experiment with Greg and Gemma as the Other People, where we charged £1 for a portrait done in 1 minute. Go here, scroll down to ‘Portraits in Puerto Banus: €1.00, One Minute’.

The Only Sea Foods

One of the biggest surprises for me here in Olympic-hosting Vancouver has been the incredible number of homeless drug users. The area around Chinatown along the 20 Bus route, specifically the street called East / West Hastings, is a strange place to be in 2010. It’s not just people on the verge of collapse; buildings and businesses too. ‘The Only Seafoods’ stands despondent, its window-sills scattered with dusty sea-shells and plastic replica fish, doors plastered with Closure Orders and the note below.

It’s the Push Festival, and for the opening a new version of Jerome Bel’s The Show Must Go On, with local Canadian performers, was staged at the brand new and badly-named “SFU Woodward’s Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre”  -surely the best first show you could hope to open a theatre with, the empty stage taking its time to transform from Darkness ‘Tonight… tonight’ to light (“the sun shines in”) to peopled (‘Come Together’). The theatre is part of a new development on the above West Hastings Street, and walking through the covered / shopping area, I was amazed to see one of the bravest and most fascinating works of public art I’ve ever seen. The large scale photo installation by Stan Douglas – on laminate glass lit from both sides – is a reconstruction of a riot on pretty much the exact same spot. The title: Abbott and Cordova, 7th August 1971. The subject matter reminded me of Deller’s Battle of Orgreave re-enactment, but above all left me wondering if there would ever be a situation in UK like this: of a development on this scale (multi-millions) in a troubled area allowing for the inclusion of an explicit reference to something at the heart of the problems it seeks to redress. So much easier to forget with the usual heavy dose of ‘glassitecture’, glossy brochure, shopping malls and huge banners with 20-something couples unpacking / reclining on their brand new floorboards, smiling at each other, fingers in mouths. More here on the brave decisions and, above all, history behind this amazing work. Click on images below for bigger versions.

The day before yesterday

here – needs full screen / hd on – quebec city 14 jan 2010

a 2 minute pause

Map Dream

This is a non-video response to Map Dream.

I’m in a hotel room with my parents and younger brother. My elderly dad and I are sat up in bed. Mum’s shouting from the bathroom, ‘what are we going to get him?’ – I think we’re going to a birthday dinner – and Dad shouts back, ‘I’ve got a great idea, let’s give him that book by Walter Benjamin’. At the time of this dream, maybe 5 years ago, I didn’t know anything about Benjamin, but now i like the idea that he was talking about a book as big as the Arcades Project (although I doubt he ever read it). Anyway, I ask him ‘why’ or something, and he’s about to reply when he notices an enormous map of the world printed on the duvet covering him there in bed. It pains me but I must admit I can’t remember why his interest increased – it would be easy for me to make up reasons, or try to connect it with the Benjamin thing – but what’s certain is that his fascination led to him slowly uncovering his legs as he pulled the map/duvet up to his eyes for scrutiny. I remember my brother and I agreeing that it was wonderful to see him so interested in the world, but that he should really try and stay warm all the same.

a i R

My first end of year reports from primary school would often describe me as impatient, and I remember well thinking to myself, how observant they are. One tantrum was to do with a teacher not giving me a straight answer (in my opinion) to a question, how do you spell R? She kept saying ‘you don’t spell it, that’s all it is, R’ and it drove me nuts, after all you can hear it suggesting ARRR or something.

I’ve since found out that in other countries they DO spell letters. If you were to spell R in French, to someone who spoke English, it would be Air. All this was brought back to me today in Madrid when I saw the two photos below, next to each other, in this incredible show about the Pamplona Encounters, 1972.

Coming up for air

With Heinrich von Kleist’s idea in mind regarding ‘the production of thought while speaking’, this is somewhat thinking aloud (though i’m writing, quietly). It’s an attempt to unpick the experience of reading ‘The Absence of Mark Manders’, a book with images of his work alongside some text mostly written by Manders himself. I’m continuing to think about various aspects to the reading experience, so this can also be seen to tie in with this recent post.

I loved the room with Manders’ work in the recent Hayward Gallery show ‘Walking in my Mind’. It was the only room I liked at all really. The evening before I was in the street talking on the phone. When I hung up, I saw a small fox with a mouse in its mouth looking at me, only a couple of metres away. I rode off on my bike, and it followed me, trotting alongside. That night I dreamed I befriended a baby fox – we spoke quite a bit. The next day I walked into that room and saw this on the floor.

And so I bought his book. In it, I read of this sculpture >

Fox / Mouse / Belt
Actually, this work originated from a series of three separate words. The word ‘fox’ consists of a jumping fox that I froze in the middle of a leap. I caught it at a moment in time. I then used my belt to tie a mouse to the fox’s stomach into which the mouse would normally disappear. With a simple gesture, I took this ‘unit’, which took place in mid-air, and set it down on the ground, whereby the sculpture sank even deeper into motionlessness. Consequently, the moment seems to occur in a continuous present or outside of time. The stylization creates an unbelievable standstill without a ‘before’ or ‘after’.
During this period, I was also fascinated by the fact that living creatures can disappear into other creatures as food, sometimes even when they’re still alive. At the same time, I wanted to create a sculpture in which a human act could be clearly distinguished. I ended up painting the sculpture to look like it was made of wet clay. For this reason, it exhibits an extreme, vulnerable nakedness, and it seems as if you could just press your fingers into it at any time. This is the only future moment that the sculpture seems to capture.

Somewhere in the book he says what you often hear from artists, something like people are free to interpret from the work what they will, etc. But the joy of the book is how the text leads. It usually goes like this. You turn the page and,

1. you see a picture of the object and begin to imagine yourself next to it physically,
2. you give it some thought of your own,
3. you try to anticipate what he might write about it,
4. you read his text
5. you look at the object again.

He talks a lot about seeing his art as a ‘research into thinking rather than an investigation of perception.’ He also talks about the time it takes for thought to happen, that ‘thinking needs time’. Maybe the time it takes to read the texts is exactly the time required to think about each piece, plus a few seconds before and after, following sections 1-5 above!

I definately like the idea of an accompanying text actually structuring the thinking time. It’s a bit perverse, because from one angle it’s like allowing the wall-texts in a gallery to exert sole influence on how you interpret the art on display. But if you accept the work as an extension of this text – that it’s actually an expanded reading experience – a different perspective opens up for which a sculptural object is no longer king of the situation. Instead, it becomes an accompaniment to the thoughts which flow on, under a kind of intertia, following the reading of the text.

This reminds me of something I once read, and keep trying to find again (I usually find out it was Peter Handke who said these things – for some reason I became fascinated with his work when i was younger), about the moment when a reader needs to ‘rise for air’… when a passage is simply too replete with thought, beauty or associations, and we need to put the book down for a moment and look up. It’s a very special act, or moment. It seems to mark the point at which the human frame can’t internalise any more, where the thoughts have to escape, where we somehow acknowledge the world and our presence in it, wherever that may be, even while remaining under the book’s spell.

For me, each of these texts generates something like this moment. The mix of assertion, guesswork, metaphor and association is humble but powerful in its invitation to imagine the forces within, surrounding and preceeding the object. And it’s within that moment of ‘coming up for air’ that we see the sculpture for the second time. This moment serves also as a kind of yardstick for the power of the text, in that it creates a ‘before and after’ scenario – it was only a few seconds ago that we were on stages 1-3, looking at it for the first time, alone with our own thoughts and reactions.

Wednesday Box

Riddled with truth

Thanks to those who have added things, so far, to the comments in the last entry. It’s really interesting- I’ll be following it up shortly (although feel free to add to it long into the future). For now, variously -

1. Richard Gregory from Quarantine replied to my thoughts about documentary theatre with some beautiful words which certainly help with my confusion about the word ‘authentic’. It looks like I’ll at last get to see their work – ‘Make Believe‘ at the Arnolfini on Dec 3rd / 4th.

I’ve never really thought of our work with Quarantine as belonging to any kind of documentary theatre genre or tradition, as much as it most definitely doesn’t belong with the verbatim theatre trend here in Britain.  From limited experience of Rimini Protokoll’s work (Sabenation/CallCutta/Cargo Sofia/the Marx piece) I see some connections but also some significant differences.  Yes – we choose to work with what our performers tell us are or remember as factual records of real events but we don’t set out to present this material as any kind of factual record or report of their lives.  Rather we use this found stuff as source material and, with them as (usually) performers of their own stories, fabricate (and I choose the word carefully) something that moves back and forth along a line of veracity during the performance.  This what interests me I think – exploring and exploding the notion that we can ever be certain of a performer’s or our own recounting of experience.  As I’ve said many times before, what each member of the audience experiences is their own take on what that night’s performance offers of what we frame of what we edit of what a performer chooses to tell us about what they remember about something that might have happened. I’m thrilled by the fact that that utterly inauthentic, sometimes downright dishonest thing can be riddled with truth.

2. I spent half an hour or so the other night rapt, listening / watching Susan Sontag talking to a couple of girls from Barcelona: generous, enquiring, even fragile somehow in the way she’s thinking aloud and questioning herself.

3. Ten years ago I was in Napoli with friends, for the new year 2000. I love the city, and i’m excited to be working there next year making an Italian GuruGuru for Napoli Teatro Festival 2010. I couldn’t resist dropping myself into one of the streets in the amazing Centro Historico. Found myself here – (hit the full screen button, top right) – incredible how everywhere you look, just on that one spot, there’s something happening. The man’s face lit up by the TV, the guy warning the motorcyclist (a child?), the woman peering out from the doorway, the sheets stretched across the alley. Looking again, I realise now that I was sat with a coffee in the little outdoors bit to the right just beyond those sheets a few months ago in July; I’d come from a gig in Puglia and had a couple of hours before flying to Berlin (one of the strangest transitions i’d ever experienced). Next to me there was a group of brick-chinned men, one of them with a volcanic, pock-marked face and huge sunglasses. He had just bought a new Ducatti and the others were trying it out, one by one, accelerating helmetless with terrifying roars into these tiny streets, only to reappear grinning 5 minutes later back at the cafe.

4. Very nice post here by Matt Trueman made me think of another here by Tim.

What you see

Some questions about different mind’s eyes while reading. Please,

1. read the text below and then (only then) go to number 2, which follows.

*

2. Please answer these questions (if you’re in a rush, just answer some). Write them down, best in a seperate text document on your computer. Go by what you remember from reading, don’t return to the text (you won’t find any answers there)

What time of day is it?

Where/ when is this? What kind of town, city?

What kind of car is driven by the man who goes blind?

Describe the blind man in simple terms – age, face, voice, clothing, etc.

Describe the setting in simple terms – light, temperature/ season, dry/wet, size of road, size & kind of buildings, distance of road from buildings, etc.

3. Copy / paste your answers into the comments section below.

4. Compare with the other comments.

Thanks!

(ps. i won’t use anything you write directly, but this will help a lot with a project i’m starting, about reading. More on that soon)

Text is opening page from the amazing / devastating Blindness by Jose Saramago