POSTCARDS FROM OUTER SPACE
1. Live Art/Dead Art
In 1950, in a small house in Coventry, in the British Midlands town of my birth (Shakespeare country), my paternal grandmother climbs on a stool in her kitchen, and placing a home made noose carefully around her neck, she quietly hangs herself. My gradfather, in 1950, is still in India, with the British Army, after 20 years there. It is three years after Independence. There are so many deaths in those troubled times, but few of British civilians. And news travels slowly enough from England for the full event of my grandmother's suicide to seem unreal to my grandfather, who whispered still of it and wept when I met him for the first time in 1970. In 1950 the postcard from a friend which brings the news to Coventry of my grandfather's child born to his Indian housekeeper had reached my grandmother equally slowly. The ink is faded now - but already it was faded then. It came from outer space, and it remained there in my parents' attic until I found it, but in a more real sense it was lodged in outer space by my parents, in a place never verbally enetered again by my father. My father has never spoken in the past tense, in my lifetime, and at 76 now I know he never will, since a properly British emotional reticence is his everyday currency. But this drama of British colonial history and its deaths and silences are inscribed in my heart, and were inscribed there as an unspeakable silence, from long before I found the postcard and learnt of the death. My father's daughter that I am, this is the first time I have spoken in public of this burden of the colonial heritage, where the almost helpless sins of the grandfathers are visited upon the children. My father's daughter that I am, I am reticent, and reasonable - but sometimes I wonder why I am so polite.
My first postcard,addressed to you here by the grandchild of the colonial order, comes from an Old World which tries helplessly, now, to exorcise its ghosts through something called multicultural and intercultural theatre funding. In London in the Royal national Theatre, I watch Tara Arts, a "British Asian" theatre company, subsidised as such, perform politely flirtatious versions of European classical dramas with parts rewritten in Hindi or Urdu, and with song and dance from Northern indian traditions. As I watch I wonder why, since Jatinder Verma and I share so many deaths, his art, like mine, is so reasonable, why his art is never live, never cuts, never stings, never draws blood, never speaks bitterness, never accuses, never weeps, never rages, is never agnry. I wonder why we never meet, over theatre, except in a polite agreement not to speak of our dead, and - and this is what matters - why I can never tell him that his theatre isn't really good enough, and that it doesn't need to be good enough, because we subsidise it so that it becomes another victim of history. When I interview Jatinder, after the show, his says into my microphone that in his heart, at least, he is white. Politely I change the subject, and we discuss the Natyasastra, the ancient Sanskrit treatise on performance, and we note, politely, that unlike Aristotle's Poetics, Bharata's Natyasastra does not like crisis, paroxysm, blood-letting, and tragic death. It prefers romance and resolution.
2. Live Art, Dead Art The second postcard has no stamp, no printed address, and it seems to pop up from nowehere. At the top it says "Wish you were here", and then underneath is written "fear of the Internet". I feel at home with fear so I've stuck the card on my fridge door. I know too well, after all, the fear of theory which shows in the faces of some of my colleagues when I begin to speak. There is such British reticence over theory, almost as though the long tradition of non-conformism combined with Bertrand Russell's philosophy of plain speech plainly spoken precluded words over three syllables from polite public discourse. On occasion I see my listeners turn blind and stop their ears, so that they are unable to see the gesture I make as I stretch out my hand to make a point, unable to feel my hand on their arm.
I feel at home with fear of the Internet. After all, I have lived for a long time with the fear of practice which shows in the faces of some of my thoughtful colleagues when I show them some performance work, and I can already hear their anxious questions: "Yes, but what are they trying to say?", and then, "what about the discourse of the mise en scene?". But I like the Internet. I like to doodle in the air, and the speed of it, and the things that fly into my field of vision from names which are no longer proper names - by which I mean no longer names attached to property. Why would anybody be afraid of the internet ? So much easier without the problems of bodies attached; so much easier when I can't see those faces; so much easier to model the multidimensional in virtual rather than real spaces. So much easier to press the delete key, or to wash the kitchen floor, rather than answer a provocative question - such as - and this is from lpierre@mcs.com and dated Fri.5 April 1996, Subject: What are we talking about? "Which kind of performance is liveart's subject matter? Are we talking about avant-garde, are we talking about life? Are we simply chatting? Are we performing? ciao"
There was an answer, but I didn't get it for a few days, because I'd unplugged the modem. It went like this: from bradbrace@netcom.com dated Fri.26 April 1996 Subject: Shoes that moved.
The text of the message was:
MERCHANT NO.00965 erected a mechanical shoe display by which shoes on an endless belt move slowly across a stage in the show windon, the shoes being held on by clamps."
The next one was this: From bradbrace@netcom.com Dated Tues.4 June 1996 Subject: Made People Want to Buy
message: MERCHANT NO. 980 held a ÔRemodeling Sale', during which he displayed merchandise in his windows along with all the various artisans' tools used in the work, and wood shavings were scattered about. Then later on that same day there was another message from the same source, Subject: Signal noise newcastle/Sure to Bring Business which read:
MERCHANT NO. 1043 wanted to create and popularize a slogan and so used the letters TAF mysteriously in his windows, about his store and in his ads for a month, arousing much curiosity when he announced that they stood for "Tell A friend".
Then on 5th June of the same year I got this, from chrischeek, address chris@slang.demon.co.uk Subject: no patent on this idea.
The message reads:
Can Brad Brace be said to make a positive contribution to the list with this trash?
Then from bbrace@netcom.com dated 6th June 1996 Subject: no patent on this idea again
it reads:NO. 912 sold toy scooters at half price to women buying aluminium goods on a certain friday and Saturday. and the next day: MERCHANT NO. 919: when he read that a man's lkife in a railroad accident was saved by the strength of his shirt, he hunted up the man in the hospital, and then bought a lot of shirts of the same make, dressed a window with the torn shirt and the new ones and held a successful sale. Then on 25th June 1996 from bbrace@netcom.com Subject: de-realization the message read (and it still reads like this, which as you can see is the beauty of the medium)
CALL FOR NO PAPERS What is happening in the field of artistic creation is spreading to everyday life. Breaks in meaning, if only in the way we express our thoughts, cannot emerge,they are cut off by the modelization [sic] of interpretation which precedes them. This terrorism is founded on an infinite illusion, wherein all the different possible meanings of creation are the reflection of institutionalized speech.
There were no answers to that, reasonably enough, so 4 days later he wrote: and this is once again bbrace@netcom.com Subject: insular: regional
When smaller cultural institutions complain of being overshadowed by larger ones, their requested remedy is invariably greater finances and infrastructure to bolster the existing, evermore exclusive and incestuous institutional-realm. This prescription becomes deliberately and hopelessly addictive; the only effective remedy is the detah of the institution.
I pulled the plug on it after that. I admit that keeping the hardware next to my bed, where others keep a packet of cigarettes for that shared post-coital moment, might have been irritating to my sexual partner. But the hardware is more responsive than most sexual partners, over time, and I have gone back and reread all that stuff on Pavlov's experiments. I think, if we're speaking performance, I like the delay factor best. I can wander off in one of those pauses which keep you sitting in the theatre in the dark, wandering when it will all end, and how quickly you can get to the bar for a drink. But seriously, I am pleased to say that the internet, contrary to some rumours concerning the decline in the sperm-count of men in post-industrialized societies, I am pleased to say that the internet increases my yearning to hear your voice, the rustle of your language, to tastte the sweat on your skin, breathe the smell of your hair against my mouth.
3. Live Art, Dead Art
This one comes from two British live art/performance companies who had to share two sides of the card for reasons of lack of funding. The address is on the third side of the card, which is rather hard to read but the Royal Mail is still a wonderful institution despite the government's failure to privatise it. On one side there's an advertisement for a piece called Speak Bitterness, by the performance company Forced Entertainment. The performers stand or sit behind a long table set front on to the audience at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, london. This is on the 12th December 1995, but I remember it as though it were yesterday. The three men and four women are dressed inb severely tailored suits in grey and black, and the show consists in their confessing, for an hour and a half, to litttle crimes, monstrous crimes, little and larger abuses, errors omissions, to hurting their friend's feelings in 1973, all of which - because this is performance, the performers might or might not have committed. The piece is curiously compelling. In the press, later that week, Robert Hewison, who has always been interested in Forced Entertainment's work, but felt that its audience potential was limited, wrote: now they are good enough to do Chekhov.
On the other side Desperate Optimists, another small performance company based in London, but coming from Dublin, advertised their piece called Dedicated, commissioned by the Showroom, a gallery in the East of London. In Dedicated at the Battersea Arts Centre on April 4th this year, a long table faces the audience. It is strewn with little mechanical objects, incluing an old-style telephone with a dial. Next to the table is a fax machine. To one end of it is a live DJ complete with longplay discs and turntable, amplifiers and so on. At the other end sits a computer artist, with her machine hooked up to a man camera which she wears strapped to her forehead. The three performers perform what would be their everyday actions if they were a terrorist group in 1971. The telephone rings a lot but they speak in Gaellic which not many of us in London understand, for one reason or another. Because it might be 1971, but might also be 1996, the performers also have a fax machine at their disposal, so the demands they make to various named 1996 top people are typed on an old machine, but then faxed before our very eyes. At various moment in the procedure the man camera operator shoots a performer's actions and this shot which appears on the large computer screen is digitized and can be manipulated at will by her. Sometimes a little bit of someone's face, blown up and digitized, is printed out and accompanies the faxed message. Hard copies are sealed in brown envelopes, and sent through the post.
These postcards from outer space, together, make up a desultory overlayed image of life in the performance scenes of contemporary London, personalized because the viewer, here, is myself, which in terms of constituted subjectivities represents one life span through a series of dramas specific to a particular place and time and a highly ambivalent way of seeing, presenting and representing. I wish it came with pictures, for those of you here are happily scopophiliac, but you will have had to make do with the curious tableau that Erick and I present for you, and those images or snapshots you may have idly imagined at one moment or another. I like the certainty that I cannot know how that play of images may have worked for any one of you, and I am equally pleased to confess to you here tonight that I have never done this before, especially not in Mexico City.
I have decided not to leave the three postcards in my attic, in that curious gesture with which one used, a little while ago, to signal the possible importance of a singular past. I have decided against the memorabilia of the speechless, against that emotional reticence with which I, but also the performance groups of whom I have spoken here tonight, are marked. That marking seems to be ineradicable - hence perhaps the choice of the company names "forced Entertainment" and "Desperate Optimists" - but I wonder? In a text called Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, the writer advises the artist to visit an unknown town with a friend, and to show that friend around the unknown town - as though she knew it already. In this way, moving between the known, the forgotten and the little surprises of the unforeseen, she can begin to learn to invent something. Thank you for being my unknown twon, and my thanks to Erick Merino and Mario Lozano Alamilla for being my trusted friends.