Ecstatic resistance, jingle bells
So to Kansas City. That’s Kansas City, Missouri, not Kansas City, Kansas. There’s a difference in the skyline (it’s bigger) and the alcohol laws (you can buy it on a Sunday), but it loses out on thrift stores, so cross the state line for them. Stay at the Hyatt Regency for Ernie on reception, KC’s only revolving skybar, wallpaper that looks like its just about to start to begin to peel and the cagefighting tournament in the ballroom and the cagefighters in the sauna (who swipe the sweat from their flesh with credit cards). Don’t walk the streets after 7pm (not that there’s ever anyone on the streets at any time, but still you might get shot). Do line dance with lesbians at Tootsie’s. And eat, eat, eat… oh, and there’s an art show too…
The kitchen at Grand Arts is as much an engine room as the impressive workshop where they produce artists’ projects, its fuel on a par with any in the exhibition spaces. I mean, It was always a great invitation. To go and make a performance as part of an exhibition conceived by the American artist Emily Roysdon – as much the gathering together of a group of people and the extension of a set of ideas that she has been exploring in theory and practice through and as her own work as it was anything like a standard curatorial proposition.
Which is to say as much the relaxation of unlimited breakfast, lunch, dinner and/or room service as the anxiety of making the private public. Ecstatic resistance. The exhibition as a radical queer expression, with the questions, the problems, the risky communication of any project making this kind of trouble, the dissolution of a binary code or the massaging-away of the infliction of a social blueprint into the energy of an oscillation… (toasted muffin/fresh pineapple chunk/muffin/chunk/muffin… etc.). I think that’s what it was/is…
I was enjoying my second breakfast in the gallery the morning after the show opened, sat on a staircase next to a wall orgiastically covered in photographs by A.L. Steiner. Here are friends, lovers, sometimes semi-strangers in various states of expression, undress, abandon – absolutely, incontrovertibly whole, somehow, wonderfully, defiantly present without always knowing it, solid against these fleeting moments. Real sexy and full. Full of love/I love them.
A school party arrives for a guided tour and the gallery assistant begins with Steiner’s wall. It is, she says, an artwork against normative values. I like this person but as she describes the work she seems trapped in and by this word – normative, the norm – and repeats it in every sentence like the involuntary blink of a person caught in the headlights of a car on an empty road at a proverbial midnight. And I sat there, within earshot but out of sight and thought about just how potent and hideously loaded such a description could be understood to be, and how to make sense of my instinctive reaction to it.
It seems to imply that the subjects of these images are absolutely, incontrovertibly from somewhere other than where those viewers were from – socially, psychically, perhaps geographically. That they are at a distance from each other, in other lives, on different planets. Actually what was going on was the construction of these viewers, not these subjects, as coming from somewhere else, by what they were being told about where they are viewing from. That they, the viewers, were being told in this explanation of the work that they were utterly outside of what these images were depicting – an awful, normative otherness inflicted upon these (and by implication all) viewers as the receivers of news which the images carry.
Nothing could be further from the truth of Steiner’s images presented in this way (and I use that word ‘truth’ consciously, with every problem it invokes and everything that it suggests about something to believe in). To me they are the rich and valued evidence of the life that we are in and its unadulterated mess, for which read ‘joy’. They are not news of somewhere else, they establish pictorially a situation which we are already in, in and of life – life as opposed to the constructed, adulterated, tortured and manipulated, obliterating representations that otherwise occupy the everyday constituency of, let’s say, the mediasphere from which they’d like to imagine we are indivisible. It is there, not here where I see the other to be jabbed at with a pointed finger. We are not it.
Which was much the same point that I came to at the end of the Rameau’s Baroque opera Platée, which Jimmy Robert and I happened to stumble upon and actually get tickets to see as we wandered past the Galeries Lafayette to the Opera Garnier, while we were in Paris together a couple of weeks later to perform our work Marriage à la Mode et Cor Anglais, for the last time in a while.
This opera – a play-within-a-play devised to ‘correct the faults of humans’ – like this opera house is excessive perhaps beyond Versailles, dripping in ornament and dazzling to such an extent that there you (we) could only ever feel like jawdropped daytrippers in dirty jeans. Apart from the fact that everyone in the auditorium was figured on stage by the chorus who were dressed and positioned to represent us, The Audience, figuring and encoding our act of watching as they respond to and comment upon the play-within-the-play.
Composed for the marriage of the French Dauphin to the Spanish Infanta and scandalously premiered in 1745 in short Platée tells the story of a trick played by the gods on Plataea, the ugly queen of frogs, a ridiculous water-nymph performed by a man. They tell her that Jupiter wants to marry her. She is ebullient with unabashed, naïve delight. The gods play out the preparations for her marriage in the form of grotesque burlesque vignettes with much hysterical-awful dancing and she can barely contain herself with excitement.
Finally Mercury conspires to rumble Jupiter’s plans by alerting his wife Juno who catches up with him, by design and to his relief just before he says “I do.” Juno tears the veil from Plataea’s head and bursts out laughing at her ugliness, seeing the marriage was obviously an elaborate joke at Plataea’s expense, a creature such as Jupiter was only ever going to torture and never marry. Jupiter and Juno run off together laughing at the game. Utterly humiliated and destroyed, in abject misery Plataea is simply left alone and in this production disappeared in a silent, shocking flash into a black hole through a trap door in the floor of the stage. And this is played like a pantomime.
For nearly three hours we’ve watched a game (of love) in the name of raucous, riotous entertainment and bravura spectacle. There’s a lot to say about this, but for now I’m affected by the device of this production that figures the chorus as the audience. Because how I think it functions is to suggest a radical inversion of affiliation.
That for the whole way through the opera we think we are affiliated with the gods, we share their jokes, their knowing position, wit and intelligence. But by the end the sustained celebration that we’ve been complicit in is revealed as nothing other than sustained sadism. We have been watching ourselves, watching the opera. It’s entertainment becomes the nasty infliction of a hetero-determined spiteful institution that affects (here, tortures) all of us in different ways and forms, for different reasons as we inflict it upon others for our own amusement.
It is the horrible game of marriage and everything that its associated expectations imply that I will not play (cannot/am not playing?). At the same time as realising I have been watching myself I recognise that actually I really have been watching myself. There I am, in no royal court but in the brilliant, beautiful, rancid swamp of frogs, jabbing with a pointed finger that I hope I can laugh at too, centred and happy, disappearing into whatever black holes there are to fall down. And I do not think I am the only one.
Ian White is an artist and Adjunct Film Curator for the Whitechapel Gallery, London, as well as working on independent projects. He is the Facilitator of the LUX Associate Artists Programme and a writer. He curated ‘Tense Present’, a guided tour of artists’ film and video in the Luxonline collection.
