Sunday, September 30, 2012


[This image is from Sandys' artist website:http://www.edwinasandys.com/]
 
This Image which Is Not One: Edwina Sandys’ Christa (1975)

“So woman has not yet taken (a) place.”[1]

“The visual is essentially pornographic…”[2]

“There is an expression in French: sage comme une image, literally, ‘wise as an image.’ But the wisdom of the image, if it is indeed a kind of restraint, is also the tension of an impetus or impulse. It is first offered and given to be taken. The seduction of images, their eroticism, is nothing other than their availability for being taken, touched by the eyes, the hands, the belly, or by reason, and penetrated.”[3]

Since its first showing in 1975, Edwina Sandys’ bronze sculpture Christa has provoked polarized critique. Christa now resides permanently at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, but she has traveled extensively, with showings in London, Rome, Toronto, Washington, Kansas City, and at Yale and other universities. When she finally came to rest at St John the Divine, during Holy Week in 1984, The Very Reverend James Parks Morton, Dean of the Cathedral and organizer of the exhibit, recalled that, “All hell broke loose. The press was there, films were being made of Christa all day. The news hit Rome on Easter Day: ‘Episcopal Cathedral in New York has female Christ.’ That went over really swimmingly at the Vatican. I was fascinated by the amount of strong opinion for or against. Nothing was lukewarm.”[4] Dean Morton’s own strong positive opinion of Christa was that “Christa simply reminded viewers that women as well as men are called upon to share the suffering of Christ.” For those who embrace Christa, her example is a learning experience, a challenge to prejudice and oppression within the Church and the world. She performs what could be called a postmodern critique of devotional viewership, arguing for inclusivity as well as disrupting the patriarchal history of both Christology and soteriology by positing that the material contents of these theologies (male bodies, and the absence of female ones) reinforce their sexist histories. She represents a historical revisionist approach to Christology, especially—one that exposes the sexist roots of a church’s normative history that has been used to reinforce such gendered norms that work to exclude women from leadership.  

On the other hand, there are those critics who question Christa’s effectiveness. One criticism is that rather than disrupting the assumptions of devotional viewership within the Christian tradition, Christa may in fact serve to re-entrench herself within a history of religious art and secular viewership that simply privileges the male gaze. Margaret Miles, in the last chapter of her Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West, argues that a traditional image of Christ in the form of a female nude invites a traditional male gaze that would persist in seeing erotic provocation rather than suffering victim.[5] Similarly Carter Heyward warns against glorifying women's suffering or interpreting Christa merely as perpetual victim, though she may become "a symbol of our predicament, including our need for liberation."[6] Along with Miles, critic Jerry Myers asks, “Is it not…nearly impossible even in this historic context of redemptive suffering to expose the nude female body without inviting phallic prejudice?” Even these critics who sympathize with Christa’s politics are wary of this artistic method of reinterpretation of the traditional crucifixion figure.

Either side of this approach—whether Christa reminds of the human suffering of Christ that is lived in women as well as men, or whether Christa simply revisits the violence of the past again upon the bodies of women—misses something striking about this sculpture. The objection that exposing the female nude invites “phallic prejudice” is itself a violation, akin to any accusation that women (or any other non-normative gendered or even non-gendered body, for that manner), in their dress, walk, or any manner of being, somehow invite sexual violence (no difference whether that’s a cat-call or rape). On these grounds, it would be easy to dismiss Myers’ criticism as thoughtless, and the fact that he bases it on Margaret Miles’ own critique is far more telling of the depth to which such circuitous “blaming the victim” thought can reach. (And another thing to keep in mind is that I am picking up this conversation about Christa where it left off in 1990 or so, and a lot has changed in the rhetoric of women’s and gender studies in these past twenty years. I doubt that either Miles or Meyers would make this same kind of statement about Christa today.) However, their discomfort with Christa’s image also begs the question of the possibility of re-interpretation. Is it possible to wrest an image away from its own history and appropriate it for another use? On the other hand, the praise for Christa that she reminds people that women “are Christ too” is similarly problematic. Rhetorically, the sculpture asks the viewer to see women in Christ, and to see Christ in women. Women suffer, just as men suffer. The suggestion Dean Morton seems to be making is that suffering is a kind of equalizer, functioning syllogistically something like: women suffer; men suffer; therefore, women are equal to men. However, this is simply not the case. Shared suffering is not equal suffering. While both criticisms had their time and place, re-visiting Christa right now can help us re-think both spectatorship and specularity regarding both literal and abstract representations of the bodies of women and Others. What’s interesting about the above criticisms is that they take for granted that the main focus of the interaction between the sculpture and its audience is the viewership of the gazer--spectatorship. However, what Christa may invite today is a reversal of this model. She is an instance of a certain kind of display that performs its own specularity.

“Specularity” is a term used in the computer graphics world to talk about the size and quality of reflections in rendering the illusion of three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface. I would like to capture this word for another use. Here, I will use specularity to mean the process by which something becomes seen, becomes able to be seen, or allows itself to be seen. This notion of specularity presupposes a certain kind of agency on the part of the object seen or observed (acknowledging the paradox of the life of things). It allows that what we see is not necessarily what we know, and that the essence of or knowledge of things may elude us even when we think we’re seeing them straight. Briefly, “specularity” speaks to the performative agency of both subjects and objects.  To ask about Christa’s specularity means asking how she herself presents herself, and whether this is a performance to which anyone and everyone is invited. Christa uses quotation and mimesis—she is an imitation of Christ, and a reference to a historical Christ. But at the same time, she reflects back on an image that does not really exist: the female Christ.[7] In this way, the quotation is not really a quotation, and the imitation is an imitation of ---? Assuming this impossibility grounds the reasoning behind the denial of women to the priesthood in Roman Catholic Church according to apostolic succession (and to certain roles in other traditions as well), that women are simply unable to perform as priests because their female bodies do not allow them to literally inhabit this role. Paradoxically, even though women would have to really stretch the art of imitation, the Church allows only those bodies that can effect a “true imitation” to act as priests. So can a female Christ really speak the reality of the crucifixion to believers? The reality of the life of Christ? The reality of Christian belief and experience? Christa presents an image that exposes the mimetic quality of any image. She quotes a history of viewership and devotion, without offering anything solid. If anything, she is composed entirely of quotation. Mimesis is both her form and content. This is as true of the figure as “woman” as it is of it as “Christ.” Sandys herself recalls that the idea for the sculpture came to her in a flash; she used no model, she made no sketches. “I used my own hands and feet, and an imaginary face. I made it in clay. It took me three days to complete. It was largely a subconscious act on my part.”[8] Sandys gave a woman’s form to Christa, but she refers to no particular woman, just as the Christ of Christa refers to no particular Christ. Christa’s specularity is all mimesis, absent of referentiality.

In Unmaking Mimesis Ellen Diamond proposes that

A feminist mimesis, if there is such a thing, would take the relation to the real as productive, not referential, geared to change, not to reproducing the same.  It would explore the tendency to tyrannical modeling (subjective/ideological projections masquerading as universal truths), even in its own operations.  Finally, it would clarify the humanist sedimentation in the concept as a means of releasing the historical particularity and transgressive corporeality of the mimos, who, in mimesis, is always more and different than she seems.[9]  

Diamond’s reconfiguration of mimesis as productive of reality rather than referential charts a clear path out of what she calls the “hysteria” of realism, which presents “symptoms” to the audience to be read and diagnosed.[10] Rather than searching for the clues to the truth of representation, she remakes mimesis into the active relationship between performance and its social and political context. My purpose here is to ask, what if the reality that mimesis seeks to produce is the absence of a certain kind of thing, such as a woman, or the agency of the subaltern? What do we imitate when we want to represent the impossibility of the agency of a thing that has never had subjectivity? Can specularity be the agency of the thing that has no subjectivity? This is truly an aporia. There is no bridge between the non-existence of the subaltern and the agency of the subaltern, which is why Gayatri Spivak famously wrote, her words still ringing, “The subaltern cannot speak.”[11] This is a performative statement; it performs the failure of Bhaduri’s suicide to register as the sovereign speech act it was; the only thing that can then be said is that her act did not and could not speak. There is no way to say again what Bhaduri attempted, because her specularity was not read in any way that she could control. 

Similarly, there is no way to speak what Christa “says.” That Christ is woman, a woman, that women are in Christ, are Christ—these arguments can be discerned in the sculpture. Its mimetic function, as with Diamond’s feminist mimesis, produces what many would consider a better reality. And yet that is not the end of the story. In Christa’s case, the production of a new reality comes from an empty place. In imitating Christ, Christa exposes the lack of precedent for her. Christa is not a synthesis; in order for her to be a synthesis, and therefore productive of a new reality, there would have to have already been some other reality for her to re-make. But she’s referring back to the impossibility and the absence of the female Christ. If I remember from my grade-school multiplication tables, if one multiplies a positive (male Christ) with a negative (impossibility and absence of the Other, the female), the outcome is yet another negative (an impossible female Christ). This seems to be returning to the disturbing question that Myers and Miles posed when Christa first came on the scene: can such an image not help but invite phallic prejudice? Jill Dolan asks a similar question in Presence and Desire: “Can we really construct ‘new’ images, or can we only wrest new meanings from old ones?”[12] The issue here is whether any subject has the means of control of the interpretation of their own specularity, to control when, if, how, and what others see. To maintain this kind of control necessitates certain power and status, certainly. For many women the world over (or, as I believe, for all non-normative Others whether they are gendered female or not), the answer is no—no, you do not have control. You will be seen and you will be made of what the gazer wills. The only way to exert any control is to not offer an image, or to offer an image which is not one.

Dolan furthers her discussion of the control of visual meaning by quoting Jon Erickson: “You must transgress, that is trespass, across those boundaries separating what is yours from what is theirs. I make it mine, so the effectiveness that your meaning gives to it is devalued. This doubleness is at the core of both parody and travesty: the ridicule of authority.”[13] Christa, as mimetic of traditional Christian art and the crucifix, likewise plays between doubleness and parody, and is the essence of drag: to perform a gendered presence while denying an audience the satisfaction of assured definition, erotically and perhaps somewhat masochistically holding at bay any consummation of realist “truth.” She too trespasses into the territory of the other’s property and appropriates it for her own use. But in doing so she presents an image that has none of the hilarity of the drag king’s smirk. Drag to some degree synthesizes multiple realms of the real, especially the material realities of certain sexualities (it is also more complex than that, but I think that’s another paper), whereas Christa cannot be a synthesis because she is only drawing from one set: the thesis, the male. Female, in this case, is not anti-thesis (which would mean a force or a reality of comparable import to the thesis), but no thesis.

What perhaps makes Christa so disconcerting for her critics is that she is an image of nothing to see: mimos with nothing to mime, a realistic image that cannot be resolved in the logic of reference. If Christian iconic art reverences the referral back to the body of Christ, then Christa irreverently escapes all reference. She does not reverence reference! In looking at Christa, we look into the hole of woman’s signification of herself, which is “signifying nothing.” As with female genital experience described by Luce Irigary,

…[H]er sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see. A defect in this systematic of representation and desire. A ‘hole’ in its coptophilic lens. It is already evident in Greek statuary that this nothing-to-see has to be excluded, rejected, from such a scene of representation. Women’s genitals are simply absent, masked, sewn back up inside their ‘crack.’

This organ which has nothing to show for itself also lacks a form of its own. And if a woman takes pleasure precisely from this incompleteness of form which allows her organ to touch itself over and over again, indefinitely, by itself, that pleasure is denied by a civilization that privileges phallomorphism.[14]

But where Irigary sees the nothingness of women’s signification as an imposition from phallogocentric society, I wonder if not showing anything, if being nothing to see, is the kind of control over specularity that is its most powerful. On a material level, Christa is a bronze statue on a plexiglass cross. Viewers will interpret her as they will—feminine, masculine, liberating, blasphemous. But in exhibiting herself Christa makes abundantly clear what is missing, what is not there to be seen: a feminine image of the divine that is not only tolerated but seen as normal. There is simply no such thing in Christian society. Female saints (the Virgin Mary the paragon example) and their cults are always endorsed with a caveat: they are intercessors to God, but not God. The thing that Christa plays with in the game of realistic representation is an image of a female Christ. But there is no such thing. She effectively offers of an image of nothing. Her specularity is one of over-exposure to the point of blindness. Critics will continue to toil away at the politics of what she represents, but then the joke is on us. She offers no such thing, no representation.

                There is danger here, too, of the glorification of suicide and self-imposed silent suffering. By suggesting that specularity is out of our control lest we offer images that are not ones (an impossibility!), I am trying to speak to the fact that some subjectivities are not ones. Where one assumes subjectivity, objects may reside. Bhaduri’s suicide was an act of furious desperation, not a romantic gesture of despair. Going back to the “blaming the victim” example, perhaps it can be expressed like this: when an accusation is lobbied at any subaltern (If you don’t want to be homeless, why don’t you get a job? If you don’t want to be whistled at/insulted/discriminated against why do you walk like that, look like that, be like that?) it simultaneously objectifies the person while demanding that this person behave like a subject. That’s like locking me in a cell and telling me to be free, and degrades the very idea of freedom.

                The argument I’m trying to make is of course impossible. Taking it down to brass tacks, what I’m trying to do here is argue that when we look at something we are actually looking at nothing, which goes against all good reason and sense. Whether or not it’s possible, I feel this attempt is an important gesture to make. At the heart of it lies a thought very similar to Jean-Luc Nancy’s configuration of representation as absence:

[R]epresentation not only presents something that, either by rights or in point of fact, is simply absent: in truth, it presents what is absent from presence pure and simple, its being as such or even its sense or truth. It is on this point that confusions, paradoxes, and contradictions often come to be formed. In the absence that constitutes the fundamental characteristic or represented presence, the absence of the thing (thought as the original, the only valid and real presence) intersects with the absence that exists at the very level of the thing isolated within its immediacy; that is, it intersects with what I have already called absense, or sense inasmuch as it is precisely not a thing.[15]

Nancy highlights the gap, the aporia, between the absence of the thing represented and the thing that represents it. He’s speaking about the interplay between images and objects, or images and persons, or images and ideas. When representations exist at the same level of the original “thing isolated within its immediacy,” they blur the distinction between representation and reality. But still, Nancy is working within the economy of referentiality, whereas what Christa may help us think is a representation that escapes the system or the economy of the sign, that functions significantly without the intercession of a master signifier. We don’t see Christa; we only see everything she is not. This is the power behind her image, that she yanks the logic of representation and mimesis away from the viewer. Hers is an image that is not one.

 

 



[1] Luce Irigaray. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) 227.
[2]Frederick Jameson. Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992) 1. Italics original.
[3] Jean-Luc Nancy. The Ground of the Image. Trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) 10.
[4] Caroline Seebohm. Edwina Sandys: Art (online book, http://www.edwinasandys.com/filter/books#/Edwina-Sandys-Art) 15.
[5] Margaret Miles. Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon, 1989) 177, 179.
[6] Carter Heyward. Touching Our Strength: the Erotic as Power and the Love of God (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989).
[7] However, the image of the female crucified certainly has a long hagiographic history. In medieval art, Bosch’s triptych of St Julia the martyr being crucified places the female figure at the altar’s center in a scene that would have traditionally shown Christ. For an encompassing study of the female crucifix in religious art history, see Ilse E. Friesen, The Female Crucifix: Images of St. Wilgefortis Since the Middle Ages (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2001).
[8] Seebohm 15.
[9] Elin Diamond. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1997) xvi.
[10] Diamond 25-32.
[11] Gayatri Spivak.  A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
[12] Jill Dolan Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993) 180
[13] Dolan 183.
[14] Luce Irigaray. This Sex Which Is Not One, trans Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1985) 26.
[15] Nancy 36.

Thursday, August 16, 2012


A Proposition: Performative Transcendence
or
Transcendence: a virtual that behaves like a reality?

(a not too well structured think-through of some issues, written for the Performance and Religion Working Group with the International Federation of Theatre Researchers)

Transcendence, in a nutshell, describes that which exceeds everyday experience of both the world and the self (whether that be hidden realities of a metaphysical realm, or the sinking into and contemplative attention to the everyday), which is why the idea of transcendence, for most, points to the spiritual, the divine, or the otherworldly. In the study of theatre and performance, transcendence has been described as entering the realm of the “sacred” and “pure consciousness.” Since the 1960s and into the present day, modern theatre practitioners like Jerzy Grotowski[1] and Richard Schechner[2], following in the footsteps of avant-garde artists like Antonin Artaud[3] and Hugo Ball[4], and influenced by the anthropological research of Victor Turner[5], turn to ritual in order to create liminal states between everyday reality and a “higher plane.”  A contemporary curiosity about the transcendent infuses new work in theatre and performance studies, as evidenced by Ralph Yarrow’s landmark book Sacred Theatre[6], focus groups affiliated with various academic conferences dedicated to theatre, performance, spirituality, and religion, and journals such as Performance and Spirituality[7]. Such a burgeoning interest might seem at odds with contemporary academia, since in philosophy since Kant, transcendence has often been the object of skepticism. After Kant, transcendence became the childish past or “dark mirror” of philosophy, which now, having put aside its childish ways, seeks the bright instance of the present and of the particular “face to face.” This tradition is reflected in the intersection between phenomenology and performance studies today, which could be seen as a fusion of the modernist avant-garde fascination with the sacred and sacred experience, and the empiricist turn toward phenomenology that began with Kant. Performance studies scholar and phenomenologist Susan Kozel calls this a “revitalization” of phenomenology as a result of the convergence of theoretical, cultural and artistic forces that produce a new embodiment of older ideas, responding to a “need in dancers, artists, writers, cultural critics, and feminists to be able to describe concrete, lived human life, without forcing it through a methodological framework, or reducing it to a series of inner psychic experiences or conceptual abstractions.”[8] Kozel understands phenomenology as a call, or a return, to lived experience. Does transcendence still have a place in this present relationship between phenomenology and performance?

In order to answer this question, I turn to another set of questions: How is transcendence thought? Is transcendence something that exceeds performance, or is it part of what constitutes the experience (or the interpretation—which, I might argue in another place better suited to such a discussion, is simultaneous to experience) of performance? What Kant argued was that transcendence assumes a priori knowledge that can never be proven or confirmed. Transcendence is what allows Kant’s critical formulation of the so-called “transcendental argument”, wherein understanding or proof of a condition rests on an already-assumed prior reality or condition, such as the pre-existence of God before and as the condition for the existence of all else. Such a priori stances are claims of faith rather than statements of fact, and function as “virtual realities” that allow thinkers to understand and stabilize themselves within a given context (such as the context of belief or faith) rather than reveal timeless certainties and universals. Every belief, no matter how well-founded, is a kind of virtual space within which a system finds its context and within which it constructs meaning.  This is how Zizek reads Deleuze through Kant:  “the proper transcendental space is the virtual space of multiple singular potentialities, of ‘pure’ impersonal singular gestures, affects, and perceptions that are not yet the gestures-affects-perceptions OF a pre-existing, stable, and self-identical subject.”[9] A priori claims are synthetic knowledge of the world as it appears rather than it is “in itself.” Kant was a negative thinker through and through—what we do and can know does not necessarily describe what is, and what is may never be more than what we think we know. I want to extend this further and argue, at least for the moment, that we depend on that kind of virtual reality in order to understand even what the most advanced technologies would affirm as the undeniable and unchangeable real (and it is true that the further we progress from Newtonian physics, the less and less we find that we are certain about what and where we are). If transcendence is the ultimate virtual space, then thinking transcendence, or thinking with and through transcendence, is the root operation of every encounter with the world through perception, reflection, interpretation, and communication. Perhaps transcendence is the “performative” par excellence, the result of a “performative reduction” analogous to Husserl’s “phenomenological reduction.”

Etymologically, “transcendence” is to go across (from trans-, beyond) and above (from scandere, to climb), and as a performative it must be recognized as basically teleological; there is a before and after, a process and its result. Transcendence always transcends something—space, time, language, thought, experience, etc. It can’t exist for itself, but depends upon a certain need for fulfillment, retribution, salvation, fruition, completion, and the like, which is perhaps why it is such a catch-word for Western religion. But here we easily stumble into a logical conundrum when we try to think transcendence as a kind of ascent into “pure” or “meta” experience, because in order to reflect on the process of transcendence, one must engage in the process of reflection from a stance still entrenched in the sub-reality that is only a pre-cursor to the possible transcendence that the process of transcendence promises. So where does transcendence exist? If the truly transcendent is fully transcendent, then inhabitation of this realm is totally divorced from the prior experience. Perhaps the closest we can get to “true” or “full” transcendence is in its own thinking. Thinking transcendence, whether that is through the ecstasy of the mystic who understands herself to achieve union with the divine, or the scientist who stands in awe before the complex simplicities of a protein chain, is an imaginative and embodied process that creates new possibilities for experience.

What I propose is transcendence as a mode of thought that is also a performative. Transcendence is in its own thinking, and as it is thought it is done or achieved. With this sketch of transcendence, there can never be a question of transcending experience itself, but always the affirmation that transcendence is in the experience of its own thinking, but at the same time cannot be defined as that thought or event itself. Reflecting on the history of transcendence in philosophy, John Lachs comments that for thinkers after Kant, “instead of searching for a world beyond space-time finitude, we must content ourselves with trying to find something of intrinsic value in daily life. The stamp of the divine can no longer be some small but revealing signal to thought; it must be a value in which we can find true satisfaction, in which the striving self finds rest.”[10]  For such thinkers, no longer is transcendence about what is or what we can know, but the value and meaning revealed in our choices and relationships. What interests me is the possibility that transcendence, rather than axiology, ontology, or epistemology, is a performative. So, how is the valuation that Lachs identifies performed?  In the experience of union or communion, for example, which some might identify as a “transcendent” experience, how does a community decide its core values? What histories and relationships, what processes of frame and economies of signs help a community agree that one event or experience is transcendent, and another not? Lachs further writes, “Transcendence occurs in happy moments when we manage to shed the cares of the world to embrace it for the marvels it presents.” This statement belies the very argument that Lachs attempts to make. By arguing in passive language that “transcendence occurs”—as if ex nihilo—he reinforces transcendence as existing as its own thing. Transcendence is not a thing, but the operation of experience. By recognizing transcendence as a performative that occurs in and through its own process or experience but cannot be equated with that process or experience may give both philosophy and phenomenology another language with which to describe the shared human encounter with that which is beyond the self but still constitutes reality.

What exists beyond the self, while not knowable, can still be confirmed as real, such as the interiority of other selves. Virtual realities reverse this paradigm: what exists beyond the self is knowable (perceptible) but not necessarily “real.” Performatives are always virtual—the ultimate “as if”s, the most willing of suspensions of disbelief, the confluence of catharsis and denoument. Performatives are choices that behave like facts—virtuals that behave like realities. One of J.L. Austin’s examples, the christening of a ship wherein the “I christen thee…” is both the naming and the named[11], demonstrates that a performative is nothing other than a description that behaves like a recognition. We behave as if ships have names, and so they do. This hidden a priori assumption of the given—that ships have names—is the virtual reality in which the naming of the ship makes sense. In this regard, any kind of symbolic activity wherein meaning is made and circulated is a virtual reality. When we live in such symbolic transactions, we are performing transcendence. Transcendence is living in and through the symbolic enterprise and exchange that is perception and interpretation, and transcendence necessitates symbolic language and action because of this, such as the rites and rituals of religions as well as therapeutic practices, sciences, and the performing arts. To go beyond, to transcend the self, is as simple and as profound as transitioning from “I am” to “you are.” The intersubjective stance is as much a virtual reality, ripe for transcendence, as any apprehension of the divine.









[1]For  a representative work, see Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (1968) (Routledge, 2002).


[2] See Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).


[3] See Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double (Grove Press, 1958).


[4] Erdmute Wenzel White’s helpful biography with index of plays and poems is The Magic Bishop: Hugo Ball, Dada Poet (Camden House, 1998).


[5] See Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: the Human Seriousness of Play (PAJ Publications, 2001).


[6] Ralph Yarrow, ed. Sacred Theatre (Intellect, 2008).



[8] Susan Kozel, Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology (MIT Press, 2007) 5.


[9] Slavoj Zizek, “Organs without Bodies,”  http://www.lacan.com/zizisolation.html


[10] John Lachs, “Transcendence in Philosophy and Everyday Life,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 11.4 (1997)248.


[11] J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Oxford University Press, 1962) 5.

Friday, August 10, 2012

The Common and the Holy: What Icons Teach Us About "Performance"

I recently accepted an invitation to publish an article with an upcoming issue of Liturgy Journal. I've titled my piece "The Common and the Holy: What Icons Teach Us About Performance." It  draws from my experiential research in iconography painting as well as my recent visit to St Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Seattle, WA, where I witnessed the greeting of the miraculous myrrh-streaming Iveron Icon from Honolulu, HI (see the website devoted to this icon: http://www.orthodoxhawaii.org/icons.html). I will post information about the published journal when it comes out. Until then, here is a paragraph to give a taste of what my article entails:
"Ritual and liturgy, by using the material of the common and the everyday, stake a claim in the reality of the transcendent. The transcendent exceeds the everyday, while it simultaneously folds back into the everyday through the repeated traditions of worship. But at the same time, when liturgy focuses in on the unremarkable, such as the individual believer or the hundredth copy of the same icon, those objects or spaces blossom into the remarkable, the magical, or the religiously potent. That the Hawaiian Iveron icon is a copy of a copy is no mere accident—the miraculous status of a copy of a copy speaks theologically to the potential holiness of any object. Liturgical participation draws from this same paradox—every meal (the mundane) is a potential communion (relationship with the holy). The significance of the icon is that its mundane properties of wood, paint and gold, are made remarkable. Every ritual pays close attention to the potential potency of the particular. Ritual participation always is its own example, by virtue of its mundane particularity. By virtue of the multiplicity of difference that is daily life—each believer, each action, each flower, each icon—that which would seem to make us farther from each other, those particularities which makes us different, serve to bring us closer to one another. Through human performance, we experience the universal in each particular. To kiss the Iveron icon, Orthodox believers would confirm, is to actually kiss the holy."  

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Acting: "Experiencing" as Apophasis

Mary Shelley, by Richard Rothwell, 1840
When I was a 19-year-old undergraduate studying acting under Karen Lund, artistic director of Taproot Theatre in Seattle, Washington, I remember being concerned that I could not “make” myself cry onstage. I remember thinking that tears must be some kind of technical skill that some actors have and others do not, something perhaps biologically inheritable, like the ability to wiggle one’s ears or move at will only one eyebrow (two enviable facial contortions I have never been able to effect). We were reading Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting. From Hagen I took to heart the great utility of the object exercise: good acting is re-living what you really know, behaving with the same inward focus on stage that you would in your own apartment. But to take the leap between understanding the concept of the “magic if” and actually living and experiencing it on stage or in the rehearsal room was something that I don’t believe I have done until now. The thing that taught me the difference between understanding and experiencing was my own tears. They somehow flowed out at a few key moments when rehearsing a scene between Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley in Liz Lochead’s 1983 bio-drama Blood and Ice for a graduate acting course under Stanislavski expert Bella Merlin—and those tears both shocked and delighted me. What finally experiencing experiencing taught me, further, was that it was nothing I could force, not an expressive skill I could exhibit like raising of one eyebrow. It came about as the result of finely tuning myself to the harmonies and discords of a complicated relationship between two characters, and allowing myself to be battened about by the implications of the scene, and releasing my body from the constraints of intellectualization of the scene so that I could feel it fully as the Mary Shelley who is myself.
                The argument that I have been making throughout this dissertation is that performance is nothing, that it is not, and that the “pure performative” is the absence of performance. While J.L. Austin describes a pure performative as word and deed that fully corresponds (as in “I salute you!” which is in the saying itself the salute), I would like to understand pure performance as that which does not perform at all; pure performance is the essence of communication. In a sense, it is the “experiencing” of the actor that Stanislavski describes when he or she lives the utter spontaneity of response, alive with attention, actively listening to the scene partners and to the self. “Experiencing” is the creative state of the actor that Stanislavski hoped his System could foster. He related it to familiar states of mind like inspiration, creating, creative moods, or the “activation of the subconscious.’” “Experiencing” describes the sensation of existing fully in the immediate moment for the actor.[1] Stanislavsky called this “I am,” which is interesting when noting the legacy of that particular phrase in the Hebrew and Greek traditions (God says to Moses, “I am that I am”), and also considering Stanislavky’s interest in non-Western spiritualities. He also described “experiencing” as a state that is “rare” but “happy,” “when the actor is ‘seized’ by the role. At such a moment, the artist feels something akin to that of a yogi who has reached a higher state of consciousness; there is an ‘all-perceptive’ sharpening of the senses, and ‘intense awareness,’ and ‘oceanic joy,’ and ‘bliss.’”[2] Within “experiencing,” the actor is most fully himself, and most fully immersed in the scene. There is no need to access a kind of “transcendence,” or to posit that the actor has achieved anything other than the simple stripping away of convention and affect. She is present. Acting is a skill as well as an art when the actor becomes the “athlete of the heart” who can be present in the moment, as if the “as if” goes away and becomes “is.” Actors are the finest performers when this skill is alive within them—they make you believe that you are witnessing nothing more than life as it happens; that is, that they are not performing. What I believe to be possible is the ability, within the art of acting, to generate the creative conditions through which performance is truly pure—performance as nothing, performance as the absence of performance. Great acting allows us to understand performance as the absence of performance. This is what makes acting so much different from performance art. The actor creates the conditions for the stripping away of performance, and proceeds to do so. The performance artist, on the other hand, is already herself, whether or not the persona she performs is cultivated consciously. In performance art, the audience witnesses a self. With acting, the audience witnesses the conscious stripping away of a self to reveal self in relation. Performance art performs performance. An actor performs the absence of performance. That is the essential difference between performance art and acting. Another way to say this is that performance art creates experiences, while acting cultivates “experiencing.”
                The radical thing about acting is that it can achieve this “pure performative” through “experiencing” that is a result of active analysis—that is, the active and attentive relationship the actor enters with the text and scene partner(s).  Stanislavsky always maintained that “Actors play their roles, not themselves.”[3] The revolutionary thing about “experiencing” that I now understand after my experience with the eruption of emotion while working through a scene, is that although an actor plays a role, the experience of the role can only be through the actor living a moment in relationship with another actor and the conditions of the scene. Even though we can understand the performance through layers of representation and deflection of actor to role (i.e. through the semiotics of theatre), acting works when these layers compress into one comprehensive moment. At the pivotal moment when I finally understood “experiencing,” the deflected or intellectualized understanding of my character’s experience meshed with my own, and when it did, the tears flowed, as if I was experiencing what Mary Shelley was experiencing. I was only able to get to this place after analyzing the text with my scene partner, and working with him through several rounds of improvisations.
In this scene, Percy Shelley tries to convince Mary to go sailing with him in his new boat, and Mary balks at the idea for several reasons. The scene operates on a metaphorical level: Shelley not only asks Mary to sail with him, but to acquiesce to his chosen non-monogamous lifestyle while at the same time remaining his “brother-body-soul melting into sister-body-soul.” Having given birth five times and losing four of those children, either to sickness or miscarriage, Mary knows that to say yes is to sign her own death warrant, because another pregnancy would very well kill her. That Shelley would ask her to chance this rips her in two, because the passionate love that he offers her also wounds her deeply. He does not understand why she should refuse him—he only sees that they are “fused as one,” and as a result, fails to see Mary as anything different than the girl he met in a graveyard when she was only sixteen years old. When Mary tries to tell him that she is a “woman now,” her words fall on deaf ears. In order to convince Mary of his sincerity and his love, Shelley describes to Mary how he saved her life when she was bleeding out as a result of her last miscarriage. He ran to make an ice-bath for her, which stopped the flow of blood. It was when listening to Shelley’s monolog here that I myself was suddenly plunged into the bloody ice-bath of the experience of the scene. All of the sudden I understood the depth of Shelley’s love, his desperation and his conviction that Mary’s body is his body. To lose her would be to lose everything. But not to risk with her is also to lose everything. He needs her like he needs his own body, and Mary and I understood this all at once, and it reduced us to tears, because it is a terrible impasse and an irreconcilable paradox to be asked in love to give oneself wholly over to love when it means risking one’s own very life. The sacrifice must be made, but to be asked to make the sacrifice by the one for whom you would already willingly make a sacrifice—it’s unthinkable; it’s almost as if the asking cancels the meaning of the sacrifice out. It can only be a sacrifice if it is not asked for; otherwise it becomes an economic transaction. Mary would willingly die for Shelley, but to have Shelley ask her to die for him, and not to seem to understand that this is in fact what he is asking: here, tears are the only appropriate response, because I cry for what I can’t change, mourning for an irrevocable loss. I felt the loss of the kind of trusting relationship where the beloved doesn’t have to ask for the sacrifice.  The asking is already a loss and a destruction. When I cried, when Mary cried, it was because I was witnessing, in that moment, the death of something beautiful in the asking of the impossible question. And it really did die in that moment, and it was truly tragic.
I now understand “experiencing” to be that sudden flood of understanding that plunges the actor into the scene with such abandon that the actor cannot help but live it actually, at the same time remaining distinct from the character.  On a less emotionally involved level, I had several experiences during the active analysis process that resulted in similar flashes of understanding. No matter how many times I sat with the scene by myself, it was not until I was discussing and improvising the scene with my partner that I was able to see the text in a different light. It was almost like an epiphany—I felt touched with a divine hand that somehow guided my thoughts to a new enlightened state. It looks funny and strange to put such words down on a page, but if this dissertation argues anything, it is that we should carefully allow for close attention to the indescribable, and not be embarrassed by it, whatever our beliefs. There is no way to quantify or map out the exact movements that were made in order to arrive at a new and fuller understanding of a character, or to actually feel the emotional life of a character, but it happens, and every actor knows when it does and what to do to get herself there. “Experiencing resides in the tacit dimension; it can be known but not expressed.”[4] The transition from intellectual understanding of a part to the living and emotional experience of a part must be regarded with the same reverence that our society allows for the artistic genius of people like Van Gough or Beethoven. We would never demand to know exactly how Beethoven came up with his nine symphonies. That would be to reduce inspiration to pony tricks. This class has given me a new level of respect for acting, because I can now extrapolate, based on this small experience, what it might be like to sustain such concentration and attention throughout the entire run of a show or the entire filming of a movie. Great acting lives through the truth of human experience through a medium that is both not the self and also not not the self, in the way that Starry Night is not Van Gough himself, but could only have been painted by him, in that way the art and the artist live and breathe through one another.
This condition of being “not me and not not me” that describes Richard Schechner’s definition of performance underscores my appreciation of Sharon Carnicke’s nuanced explanation of Stanislavsky’s thoughts about “experiencing,” especially in relationship to the task of playing a real person. Although Stanislavsky said that the actor “does not act, but lives,” Carnicke is careful to qualify this Romantic-sounding fusion with a subtler understanding of the relationship between acting and living. Because the theatrical event, the work of playing itself, is the source of the actor’s genuine experience, we must understand that the way the actor “lives” onstage is the way that they “create” onstage, in the immediacy of the performance itself. Carnicke outlines two senses in which Stanislavsky uses “experiencing”: first, in the theoretical communication of personal experience, the actor and role fuse through sincere self-expression. Second, on a more practical basis, “acting generates its own experiential dimension in performance,” with the alternation between actor and character.[5] What I think is useful about playing real people is that it highlights the second way to think about “experiencing.” Since the role necessarily has a history outside the life of the actor and the text, and since there are resources out there to challenge the actor’s perception of the character, the character that is a real person makes the “fusion” of actor and role even more difficult to swallow, forcing the actor to find other ways to approach the character since information about the character can come from places other than the actor’s own experience and the text of the play. Since Blood and Ice takes place early on in Mary Shelley’s life, and ends with the drowning of Percy Shelley, my perception of the scene as Mary’s rejection and leave-taking of Shelley was challenged when I found out that she later spent a great deal of her writing career publishing and promoting her late husband’s work. Why would a woman intent on leaving her husband spend such energy immortalizing him? Perhaps he is the tantalizing prospect of immortality itself, which Victor Frankenstein grappled with in Frankenstein. If Mary can save Shelley from oblivion, maybe she can save herself.
“Experiencing” does not happen in a vacuum; rather, it is the spontaneous filling of the void the actor works to create within herself. The work is in the creation of the void; the filling of it is a gift, and it is nothing that can be grasped at or forced, and furthermore, it can only happen in the community of actor, partner, text, and scene. The work of the actor is to create the empty space the conditions and relationships of the scene will fill with significance and emotional understanding. I can still remember, on a visceral level, what it felt like to be standing in my costume, tightly girdled about the waist in a dark 19th century cotton house dress, my bare feet sensing the warmth from the bright cans absorbed by the flat black paint on the rehearsal block, gazing at the muscular frame of Jeremy, my scene partner, whose penetrating blue eyes, when he turned to look at me, suddenly embodied everything I’d ever known about love and loss. I felt like an empty water glass pushed suddenly under a gushing tap. I was the glass—I gave shape to the torrent coursing into and out of me, but I myself did not fill it. I had control, but I could also choose to give myself over to the grief welling up and bursting out, and so I did. What happened in that rehearsal, as a result, was real.
The conclusion that I draw from this experience is that while effective acting functions through the active stripping away of self, this emptiness is what allows the scene and relationships created to fill and inform that generative space. If pure performance is the absence of performance, it is because the pure performative is itself the emptiness that functions as a crossroad, or a junction, between condition and character. Performance is the condition that allows for the active relationship between two bodies desiring communication. It is not the relationship itself, but what allows the relationship to take on shape. Not the glass that shapes its contents, but the emptiness of the glass that allows for the pouring and the spilling.


[1] Sharon Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus (New York: Routledge, 2009) 129.
[2] Carnicke 130.
[3] Carnicke 141.
[4] Carnicke 130.
[5] Carnicke 144-145.