4
December Thinking about the disembowelment: visual contexts. Yesterday,
the Common room was the familiar brick of space, chairs casually clustered
on the carpet, dashes of neon brightly glowing, all surfaces and things
in their places. But tonight! at least a third of the ceiling tiles
have been pulled down and removed from the room; now the raw concrete
underflooring, miles of conduits, the whole sensuous electro-mechanical
mess ordinarily hidden behind the skin of false ceiling is exposed.
From the struts of the false ceiling now depend a wild tangle of wires,
tubes, strings, threads —thrusting toward the floor, swinging in lavish
arcs, writhing through space, twisting through innumerable spirals random
convolutions toward the ceiling again. Sweeping through space: dull
black and silver tubes and wires, some wrapped in cellophane, some spewing
sprays of glittering filaments, some smeared with vaseline. Some of
the lines descend to the floor and disappear into heaps of wiring. plastic,
videotape and rubber. The lights shine down into the violent commotion,
but the rest of the room is dark and quiet, except for the human movements
in the silver light radiating from two video monitors, except for the
occasional twitching of a figure, fully wrapped in surgical tape and
thread, tied to a chair situated in a pile of plastic and videotape,
except for the weird croaks coming from a squad of speakers hidden behind
couches, under things.
On the video-screen the artists, whose faces and hands have been completely
wrapped, stumble in a suburban backyard, find objects and use each as
a ritual key, find the dance locked in each dark thing and perform it
in the darkness of his mind, in the sunlit backyard, in the eye of the
camera. We notice that certain objects on the screen are in the room,
and distinctions become blurred. From the television screen the ritual
dance extends into the altered space; we move among the hanging, swaying
things now as dancers, manouvering our way among the now animate objects,
following the steps of the complex ritual of which we are now celebrants.
The white underbelly of bourgeois, technical rationality has been ripped
open by the commandos and the dark guts of irrational intelligence have
been spilled on the broadloom. Yet the observers here tonight do not
witness the crime as it was committed. By the time the doors were opened,
the stillness in the room was interrupted only by the occasional sound
of a vaseline-smeared length of wire losing its grip, on the struts
and slithering into a heap on the floor, the croaking, a few voices
—all of which belong to the present of the piece. Tonight we have been
called not to all execution, but to a wake in the bowels of the victim,
to a ceremony in the body of the rational and real —we have been called
into the bowels of our old enemy to dance randomness, to dance disorder,
to dance perversity, to dance like crazy children on daddy’s corpse
until we all are happy.
The celebration swirls around the wrapped figure, who occasionally,
emits a mumble or a shout from beneath its bandages. Sometimes it answers
questions of those who bend over it, inspecting if for signs of life.
From time to time, it counsels, advises, admonishes; earlier I observed
it hearing a confession from a young man with a troubled face. Like
the speaking stones of mythology, it answers stimuli enigmatically,
sporadically, if at all; it is the still point in the centre of the
piece, the mysterious form which, like the stones of myth, is the turning
point, the single element that transforms the total hieroglyph into
its opposite. At this precise point the time of the piece suddenly
goes around a corner from the hoc tempus of destruction and
drunken revelry into the illud tempus of creation, the exuberant
creativity that is the other side of this work. The entire event turns
on this mysterious wrapped figure: the dead body of the Lord Osiris
who, being dead, lives forever as the perpetually decaying loam from
which springs wisdom, oracles, new life and promise. The mummy speaks;
the word it speaks contains portents and memories; the word it speaks
is the peculiarly ambiguous nature of this piece. The mummy is the transforming
rock, the whole work is the body of the mummy, the killed and living
Osiris in whose body we who have come to look now dance the changes.
6
December Sitting in the, Common. Room a couple of days distance
from the opening night, noting how things are different The wrapped
figure, the video monitors, the sounds have be, taken away; only the
hanging pieces are here, yet filling a third the room.
I am struck today with the incredible fecundity of the piece:
the environment no longer seems a hell of destruction, a cave festooned
with the intestines of the killed god. Rather, it looks like a tropic
rainforest at high noon, sultry and shadowy, illuminated only by fine
mist of light, the tortured, descending, soaring shapes are now fantastic
lianas and roots thrusting into warm earth. The former violence, the
horror-show images remain for memory, but the newer meaning of the piece
is burgeoning life.
Yet even as a new complexity emerges, the whole hieroglyph an structure
recedes. Secretaries and students now sit and drink coffee on the comfortable
couches arranged beyond the perimeter of the jungle. Like colonists
firmly in control, they either ignore or refer contemptuously to the
forest nearby, they can do both because they know that before long the
enforcers will clear away the undergrowth to make way for more couches
and tables, before long the threatening context of confusion and random
exhilaration will be replaced by grid patterns, and the world will be
tidy again.
Susan Sontag reminds us that the tropiques are not tristes
as Levi-Strauss says, they are in agony.
11
December Tonight, the closing performance; the wrap-up of the piece.
Semi-darkness again; in the jungle the animals are coming back. The
few people who stayed after the college meeting and buffet are sitting
in the dark; they are quiet, but the piece is full of faces and sounds.
It begins with cries and the sounds of falling, moving things. It begins
with amplified voices, speaking, shouting words and syllables. It begins
with a voice intoning the sacred Trickster myth of the Winnebago Indians:
Then a new thought came into Trickster’s mind. and he remembered
the second reason Earthmaker had put him down here. I think I’ve made
enough trouble for a while he thought. He chuckled to himself as he
thought: 'The people will never be the same. I have broken so many
rules and made so many serious things look silly, it will take people
a long time to sort everything out. Now I must bring some order into
the world I have disrupted.' So he smoothed rant the rapids in the
rivers, hung man’s balls on straight, and generally tidied things
up, so that the people would he happy. Then the Trickster left this
earth forever —but not before making sure that there would always
be somebody to carry on his work of disruption, somebody into whose
laughing face each generation of serious people could throw this insult
and tribute. ‘Hey! that must be Trickster!’
