Preface, between Twilight and the Accident
One of the various ways to describe the aesthetic artistic experience, particularly in the aesthetic discourse that culminated in the early 19th century, is its perception as a twilight zone; a mental realm where two consciousnesses meet and blend: The representation consciousness and awareness of the context that frames the event (“this is a performance”), and the submission to the sense of realness of the imaginary (the depicted world of images).1 In contrast with the separation between the imaginary produced in art and the real associated with life, over the past few decades performance has devoted itself to searching for the common ground between them. Without discounting the trend or the revolution of performance as an all-encompassing social-cultural notion, and with an additional formulation of the space shared by life and art conjured by performance art, I wish to apply a “regressive” strategy – one that revisits the ontological distinction between imaginary and real in order to dissolve the categories into one another.
Creation is not only the reordering of acts and images, but an order that requires ontological distinction between different types of worlds or realities, including cases in which this distinction is refuted or rejected. Even when viewed through the prism of performance, any state and structure can be aesthetically arranged, even when everything is just as real as it is imaginary, and the classifications of “real” and “imaginary” are categories of perception and constructs, in certain respects the distinction between them remains vital. The artistic act summons – usually with great and deliberate intensity – an active ontological hierarchization, which entails a synergistic friction between different types and experiences of reality. This hierarchization allows us to measure subjective and social existence in relation to classifications of reality; the dynamic encounter between classifications activates and invokes the conditions of visibility and perception. Despite its binary foundation (real-imaginary) this is not about entrenchment in distinct categories, but rather about allowing and upholding relative positioning in the world: The real is positioned in relation – and not in opposition – to the imaginary.
The longstanding romantic description of the artwork as the twilight zone or an intermediate state of sorts is a philosophical foundation anchored in the ontological distinction, which is still essential and pertinent. And so, I will begin with short milestones in this diverse discourse.2 The focus of this discourse is on the need to overcome an awareness of the real in order to surrender wholly to the imaginary. However, I wish to propose here that the significant dimension of the encounter between categories stems from the potential of their collision. The heightened encounter between “really” and “like” (semblance) is an event that pierces and slices through the ontological attribution of space, time, and action. The twilight that stretches between dawn and sunrise and between sunset and night is compressed in it into a moment of a gesture or spark;3 flashing in the gloom of half-light, related to dimming and decay.
For that I will address what I will call an “ontological accident” (based on the use of the term “accident” in cultural, political, and aesthetic discourses): an accident that takes place between the real and the imaginary. The radicalization of the concept stems, inter alia, from the amplification of the encounter between different ontologies as well as from the distinct tendency of the artistic ontological accident to become embroiled with life crises. The ontological accident generates spark and vitality, and at the same time embodies devastation or crack, fitting of the positioning between orders and states; it is identified with a critical situation and the potential or materialization of a threat, calamity, state of emergency, fatality, and loss.
While contemporary cultural awareness of the ontological accident is becoming increasingly more extreme, its practices are not necessarily new. In fact, to some degree they are familiar from any performance art that sets out to diminish the gaps of marking (non-acting, non-matrix performance, etc.). The accident is patently present in theatrical extreme states, which we can call “semiotic excess” or “iconic excess.” For instance, the actual slabs of meat that André Antoine incorporated in the scenography of Fernand Icre’s play The Butchers, in Théâtre Libre in 1888 – the avant-garde epitome of naturalistic representation, but one that draws attention to itself and undermines the focus on the represented world. Or the disturbing use of composer and pianist André Tchaikowsky’s real skull, which he donated to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) after his death in 1982, and indeed was used in Hamlet, in the famous scene (act five, scene 1) as Yorick’s skull held by Hamlet.4
After addressing the twilight of the aesthetic experience and linking it to the accident, I will focus mainly on three disparate cases: first, the generic ancient Greek story of Polus, the tragic actor; then a contemporary local manifestation – House 113 by Einat Weizman and Aziz al-Touri; and in conclusion the street spectacle Questionable Performance at Bat Yam Festival. Reexamining the dimension of the real in performance, which Richard Schechner defined as Actual in the late 1970s,5 we can attribute these forms of realization to the wider category that Carol Martin dubbed “Theatre of the Real.”6 Her book centers on practices and styles that offer a recreation of social, political, and historical reality, and not necessarily on expressions in which the real in all its extremeness is present in some way, like the cases I will review.
The instances I will present demonstrate variations of the accident of the real and the imaginary in the aesthetic twilight. “Twilight” appears in them as the foundation for the compression of the intermediate state into the spark or “half-light.” The radical spark holds the threat of degeneration over the aesthetic illusory experience. Its possible end is even more present when the artistic radically imbues the real (and vice versa). The real is duplicated through the unreal (and vice versa), and with that it both takes up space and offsets or immerses. The qualification, reversal, and duplication are fitting of the panel “Like Really!” at Performance 0:6 Conference: Twilight (October 2017) at the School of Visual Theatre in Jerusalem, where the first version of this text came to be.7
A Waking Dream, to Which We Voluntarily Surrender Ourselves
The “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment,” is a fragment of an idea that is often taken out of context, written by British poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and espoused by artists and theatre artists as a mantra of an illusory aesthetic experience. The famous insight that appears in Coleridge’s essay Biographia Literaria (1817) emerged in his conversations with his neighbor, the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and takes on the question: “What is needed in order to generate the empathy (or in the original “sympathy”) of readers or viewers towards fictional characters, particularly unreal or super-natural characters?” Coleridge’s answer does not offer a detailed means of representation that can formulate a convincing semblance or realness of characters, but rather a mechanism called “poetic faith”: faith that defers or pauses the knowledge that these are merely shadows or figments of the imagination.8 The real outlined by the aesthetic discourse has many faces. In this instance, it addresses the experience that has to be suspended, which stands in contrast to the fictional image and against the improbable – what is not likely to be a part of reality as we know it.
Had the neighborly conversation taken place not in the early 19th century, but after the second half of the 20th century, we could say with some probability that the precondition for disbelief and its suspension would have been associated with the very classification of something as art. For instance, in George Dickie’s institutional theory, artistic is what gains recognition as such by the agents representing the art world (artists, curators, committees, and critics).9 Viewed from this angle, the real is the ontological coefficient of an institutional reality that establishes a cultural state – the framing apparatus within which the represented image is perceived. Even without the formulation of an institutional position, the disbelief in figments of the imagination involves an awareness of the artistic. The suspension of disbelief is not a direct response to the immateriality of images (including fantastic images), but rather taking a stance towards the framework of representation and jumping over the fence that demarcates the event as artistic.
Suspending the viewers or actors’ disbelief may sound like a delusional surrender to fiction; a full and polarized deferment of the real world. However, early 19th century philosophy describes the aesthetic experience as the twilight between forms of existence and epistemic (or mental) pause between belief and disbelief. Coleridge himself refers in 1804 to the liminal aesthetic experience as half-faith as well as negative-belief, and describes the mechanism that allows the “suspension of the act of comparison” between the real and the imaginary as wavering between wakefulness and dreaming.10 Poet and philosopher Friedrich Schlegel also claimed in 1808 that:
This idea of illusion has occasioned great errors in the theory of art. By this term there has often been understood the unwittingly erroneous belief that the represented action is reality. In that case the terrors of Tragedy would be a true torture to us, they would be like an Alpine load on the fancy. No, the theatrical as well as every other poetical illusion, is a waking dream, to which we voluntarily surrender ourselves. To produce it, the poet and actors must powerfully agitate the mind, and the probabilities of calculation do not in the least contribute towards it. This demand of literal deception, pushed to the extreme, would make all poetic form impossible; for we know well that the mythological and historical persons did not speak our language, that impassioned grief does not express itself in verse, etc.11
The expression “waking dream” does point to Schlegel’s affiliation with German Romanticism, however this is not a state where one has no control, like sleep dreaming. The aesthetic dream is imbued with the mentality of the Enlightenment that preceded the Romantic sentiment – the experience is characterized by a cognizant acceptance of the artistic situation and the exertion of will by the person, who rationally rejects the mystical existence of supernatural creatures, and yet suspends his disbelief. In another description, Coleridge contrasts the delusion that replaces the imaginary with the real, with the illusion that is an intermediate state,12 a sober twilight area.
Over a century later, in 1912, we find Edward Bullough’s proposal to approach the aesthetic experience through the multifaceted concept of distance. In a Modernist iteration of waking dreams and informed by Freud’s understanding of the psyche as a structure, he presents the aesthetic experience as a state of gradation between the sense of real and its reversal (a feeling he calls “antinomy”). This mechanism describes the psyche’s aesthetic positioning on the line that stretches between hyper-distance (“over-distance”) and hyper-proximity (“under-distance”). Rooted in Kant’s familiar notion that the aesthetic is expressed in the removal of utilitarian purpose, such intermediate positioning demands us to remove practical needs. The aesthetic mental state is particularly tangible in the face of danger, which Bullough demonstrates through the ability to eliminate the threat embodied in the fog at sea and experience its beauty.13 And so, the aesthetic gains a psycho-mechanic Modernist structure that links the real to functionality appropriate of the Industrial Age, is still linked with danger and nebulousness befitting of Romanticism, and is rooted in the Enlightenment that is aimed at the mind’s rule over will.
The twilight area of the aesthetic experience is not the opposite of a balanced and sober position, since in these and other approaches the intermediate space created between the categories of the real and the imaginary receives the stamp of appropriateness, normativity and sanity (like a “center party” of the aesthetic experience). The variegated aesthetic experience, which does not reach the radical edges of the experience, is considered the sane, defused equilibrium. Desire, discernment, and awareness persist in it as half-awake gatekeepers. This does not mean that the performative occurrence is necessarily normal. As Brecht noted in the mid-20th century, a show can elicit a hypnotic experience, which allows a frightened bourgeois audience to believe dream characters in order to take part (while remaining seated, knowing full well that this is “only theatre”) in summits to which they would not have access in their own “normal life.”14 Following this logic, even when the aesthetic experience summons horrific, forbidden, and exhilarating situations, it is still subjected to the averaging of the “normal,” and there we have a recipe for political lethargy.
In these approaches, the real remains an elusive construct. The real is not only the authentic set against the imagined in spirit, the imaginary or fictional realized in the medium, or the reverie, but is the familiar reasonable reality, whatever can be used, whatever may threaten, the normative social or the institutional organization. As such, the real remains the element that one has to suspend and somehow merge temporarily with the imaginary. There are no practices of artistic or political alienation and there is no crisis, including the Second World War, which eradicated the dominant cultural power of the perception of the aesthetic as a place of twilight. Quite the contrary, the overwhelming comfort associated with it is a motivation better understood in states of increased threat and social breakdown. “A waking dream, to which we voluntarily surrender ourselves,” in the words of Schlegel, is still an apt description of the willing surrender to the act of artistic representation. This surrender is evident in escapist television series binge watching, no less than in the consumption of realistic representation culture, striving to fill profitable or loss-making theatres.
This discourse of the perception of the aesthetic experience as a place of twilight concerns ways of merging the real with the imaginary, under the assumption that they are conflicting or contradictory. I wish to suggest that the distinction between these perceptual and cognitive categories is not only the understanding of the aesthetic experience as a fusion or amalgamation of the real and the imaginary, but is also created as an ontological accident between them. The twilight area in which we are invited to suspend disbelief (in any fiction, not just the fantastic creatures and superheroes populating Marvel and DC universes) summons – more than ever – an accidental encounter.
Ontological Accident
We could draw a broad distinction between two trends in the ontological accident (which are in fact intertwined): one is a confrontational amplification of the real, which emerges in or maintains the action and the image themselves, to the point of collision and intensified friction – via event and action, (reality show) subject and (ready-made) object taken from life or which are in fact life, through site-specific spatial presence, irreversible body modification, exertion of force through dance action, and more. The second trend is the “crash” of the real and the imaginary into one another; a collision whose opposing and complementary characteristic channels are saturating the virtual and simulative and relegating the need for a distinction between the real and the unreal or between the artistic and aesthetic to the quotidian, functional, or practical.
Experimental theatre of the 1960s and 1970s, the extensive shift from creating visual objects to carrying out actions, the growing recognition of Performance Art as an aesthetic (interdisciplinary and definition defying) category, and the establishment of performance studies in the early 1980s as a multidisciplinary academic discipline and diverse scholarship, legitimized the performative aesthetic of the real – on the one hand, recognizing a presence that is not a playful embodiment of a fictional character, but rather an artistic or everyday action; and on the other hand, the application of role playing and masks on any type of enactment.15
The extreme collision and relegation of the distinction between the real and the imaginary are the elements in the same kaleidoscope, through which the conditions of the perception of reality are split and refracted. As Slavoj Žižek defined it, the fundamental Postmodern paradox of the “passion for the Real” is in the union of its extreme manifestations: the terrorist violence and radicalization and the total theatricality of the real join to form a violent spectacle. The horror turned semblance, which has always been a spectacle, in an exact inversion, makes “a violent return to the passion for the Real” – real that will overcome appearance.16 The very thing that has to remind us that we exist (preferably also why), with alertness and under duress, is intertwined in the world as a paradoxical accident – the one that in one test drive both cancels the real and aspires for its radical manifestation.
A part of this is the morphing of this discourse into slogans or clichés of Postmodern performative awareness, even if the latter rejects definitions and classifications as part of its non-essential nature. The discourse has taken root, words were worn thin, but the simulacra celebration of neoliberal society of the spectacle continues (– a hackneyed phrase whose sense of realness is long gone); and with it endures the increased engagement in the desire of the real as (an aspect of) the unattainable. We, artists and participants, are left in the twilight of the aesthetic experience, expressed in the lack of distinction between what is a part of the experience and what exists “out there” in the world, occasionally “hit in the face” with what turns out to be a collision. At times, the journeys in the desert of the real traverse the discourse about it through the celebration of the simulacra in Las Vegas architectures. Overnight, on October 2nd 2017, in an indiscriminate shooting from the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay hotel, they became the crash scene of the accident and a real carnage. As of 2018, we are still preoccupied with the addition of “fake” as a prefix to real life news – possibly due to elimination of the distance between campy simulation of a president at that time and who can actually push the button that will generate the ultimate explosion.
The accelerated technological advancement, bolstered by mass consumer culture, generates what Paul Virilio defined as the aesthetics of physical space’s disappearance. As he notes, what we have experienced as real space collapses at an accelerating speed into virtual time, telecommunication, and telepresence that assimilate in “Big Optics.” What he calls “accidentology” refers to the end of Modernist thought through the realization The Event embodied in it as potential – “the Integral Accident.”17 By the end of the 2nd decade of the 21st century, even an enormous unprecedented crisis is, in the meantime, a beta version, a prototype, or an artistic precedent.
An interesting example of the aspect that complements the total virtualization, which removes the need for distinction between the real and the imaginary, is Stephen Wright’s theory. At the heart of this theory we find the category of “Usership,” which offers new foundations to what could be “contemporary art’s ostensibly democratic ethos,” among others through 1:1 scale practices that, in Wright’s words, “certainly don’t look like art…enacting a function already fulfilled by something else.” These have a “double ontology” that does not feed off of framing as art, but of the coefficient of self-comprehension as art. The coefficient of art can apply to anything and have a political-aesthetic impact both on the reductive role “merely art” and on the conditions of visibility and acting in the world.18 We may be alarmed by what could be read as another version of the end of art. The end of culture intimated in the concept of the accident does not do much to improve matters. But these concepts offer a much needed, at times constructive and optimistic, expression to the existential demand to position oneself in relation to ontological constructs and be embroiled in their dualities.
When the coefficient of art applies, and in most cases it is indeed established and present, the imaginary is subjected to the awareness of the event’s framing and derived from the representation that takes place in it. A predetermined institutional order is an effective coefficient of friction between real and imaginary. However, the clear inclination is to surrender to the institutional order, without the need to invoke a quasi-violent conceptualization of collision and crash. Even when the circumstances of invitation and artistic framing are transparent, or no longer required, there is not necessarily a need for violent looking collision that suggests a crisis. Here, let us linger in relative comfort in a shared space and organic connection between life and art, made possible in the performance. And yet the transparency or relegation of artistic framing can summon a deceptive ontological accident, more so than a present artistic framing.
When Public Movement (founded by Dana Yahalomi and Omer Krieger and currently led by Yahalomi) performed Accident for the first time on Ben Zion Boulevard, in December 29th, 2006, as two black cars hit two performers, this was carried out without a present artistic framing. Accordingly, the accident – purportedly a literal car accident – elicited extreme reactions on the street, and later from performers who refused to enact it again on the same date.19 The accident scene was indeed staged and duplicated (like really, an accident, where an accident is an “accident” and involves two cars), but also removed itself from the organized and exposed power of art. In the process, it took upon itself (as art) to perform a metonymic action-pattern of organized power; and mostly of systemic or state power, whose rituals and formal façades ensure controlled and safe aestheticization, which also applies to the crisis and disaster and often holds the potential for their eruption.20
This example can demonstrate that playing with the constructs of the real and the imaginary converts the relativity that defines them – their definition or negation in relation to one another – into an effective public gesture. The cases I will present unfold a few diverse possibilities for intensified public encounters between the real and the imaginary. These cases lend themselves to the examination and problematization of the potential embodied in the gesture of ontological accident: is it indeed a public force? In what way, if at all, can it be viewed as a political gesture, which expresses a contrarian position and is aimed at change?
Public Movement, Accident, 29.12.2006 (Video: Nir Evron, Nadav Lapid)
Really Painful: Polus’s Urn
The aesthetic twilight zone has been a crash test scene since the dawn of art. Just as Bullough and others turned to the escalation of dangers to explain what is needed to produce distance, the ontological accident summons extreme conditions, whose inherent inclination (and not axiom) is, as mentioned, to join forces with a life crisis. One of the unsettling experiments is the 2nd century CE story by Aulus Gellius about the superb 4th century BCE Greek tragedy actor Polus, who has lost his beloved son. At the end of the mourning period, he returns to the stage in the role Electra, who carries the urn with her brother’s remains, as she laments him.21 The aesthetic account or myth, which Gellius presents in Attic Nights in Latin centuries later, concludes with the words (translated by John Rolfe):
Accordingly Polus, clad in the mourning garb of Electra, took from the tomb the ashes and urn of his son, embraced them as if they were those of Orestes, and filled the whole place, not with the appearance and imitation of sorrow, but with genuine grief and unfeigned lamentation. Therefore, while it seemed that a play was being acted, it was in fact real grief that was enacted.22
A terrible accident befell Polus – his son had died. And later, in the aesthetic sphere of the theatre, an ontological accident transpires, bringing together and duplicating different logics of realness – a real urn and a “real” urn are linked with double gestures of carrying the urn [gestare urnam] and grieving. The dual ontology does not speak of the suspension of disbelief in Electra’s mythical unrealness, nor of the suspension of the son’s real death, but on being in the twilight of their dual presence. That and also of being in double duplication, since the one who is dead and gone (Polus’s son) is made present via the real urn, while the one who is present (Orestes) is imagined via the urn as dead. We can still describe it as a twilight area, but this is not a waking dream or an ambiguous comfort zone, but rather a dense area of conflict between critical events.
A (parenthetical) morbid comparison: As opposed to Polus’s immediate processing of grief, André Tchaikowsky’s real skull, which he bequeathed to the RSC (after his death of cancer in 1982, at the age of 46), sat in the theatre storeroom for twenty-six years (although it was used occasionally in rehearsals, and a replica of the skull was even made in 1986). Only in 2008, in a production of Hamlet directed by Gregory Doran at Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, and in 2009 in Doran’s film, the composer’s will was finally followed and David Tennant held the skull to his face in the graveyard scene, him as Hamlet and it as what is left of the fool, Yorick. This is nothing like losing a child, but there is a link between the fraternal emotion and cradling of the urn and the insight of Tennant, whose use of the skull saved him from the cliché pitfalls of the scene. His intention can be understood as an opportunity to harness the realness of the prop not only for an authentic acting presence, but also for the dissonant lingering in the two dimensions.
The duplication is thematical, no less than it is ontological, since in Hamlet the skull offers a moment of memento mori (a reminder of death involving a memento – a tangible object that triggers a memory). The moment of memento mori, in which fictional Hamlet holds the skull as a mirror, manifests the correspondence between the ultimate truth of death and the crushing realization of the insignificance of life, an understanding that also stems from Yorick’s role as the court jester. Another point is the secrecy. Polus finds himself in a clandestine situation of his own doing, and similarly, the performative use of Tchaikowsky’s real skull was also kept secret. When the media caught word of this, the RSC spokesperson announced that the use of the skull will be immediately ceased, since it distracts the audience. However, the announcement itself was a distraction, and the skull was in fact still used when the production moved to the West End, and even in the television adaptation for the BBC.23
David Tennant with Yorick's/Tchaikowsky's skull in the film Hamlet, 2009
Let us turn our focus back to Polus. For Gellius, Polus experiences real pain [non simulacris] that overshadows the imaginary lamentation, but the case is more complicated. In contemporaneous gender cross-dressing, the male actor is clad with a dress and a mask of the female character Electra. In Sophocles’s version, Electra accidently mourns her brother, who is in fact not dead at all, after he handed her a false urn when they did not recognize one another.24 And so, Polus’s pain does not stand only as an authentic emotion against any and all fictional world, but also against the chain of performative and narrative simulations and deceptions. The pain does not only stand against, but also activates the imaginary mourning. To take this a step further, the real death of the son does not only maintain its presence, but also crashes into the virtuality of the live performance.
Gellius underscores Polus’s secret choice, which on first examination seems like a private, perhaps therapeutic sublimation of grief. As an actor, he applies a direct and effective personal manipulation first and foremost to himself (a phenomenological as-if of presence and touch, not only of similarity and likeness). However, the private and theatrical act of mourning has an intrinsic public quality. If the gaze of the audience is blind, the viewer’s immersion in Electra’s mourning is influenced by the merger of the lamentation sign in real grief, which pierces the fictional enclave or creates a punctum in it.25
That is to say, the ontological accident turns, albeit indirectly, into a public effect where the actor’s intimate feelings in the orchestra are expropriated and expand to the entire Amphitheatre. The tangible conditions for the manifestation of mourning are redistributed, and with them, the hidden distribution of the responsibility to remember. A social division of the burden is made possible, at least for Polus. This is also true of Tchaikowsky’s ready-made skull (the audience may be affected by its impact on the actor, even if they are not aware of its identity), since the de-human ethical burden involving the transformation of a human relic into a theatre prop is exacerbated in a public setting, despite the subterfuge and secrecy, and as such is shared with the audience. From the humane point of view, the spectators are made a part in a will and validate the memory with their gaze.
In the terms of Jacques Rancière, sharing the private story in the public sphere of the polis is the intersection of the aesthetic and the political. Rancière emphasizes: “there is no 'real world' that functions as the outside of art,” but rather, divisions and intersections that redefine the conditions of visibility and experience.26 To use his terms, the double ontology (invoked in the story of the urn in the theatre, one of the institutions of the polis) is duplication through polemics. “It is a practice that shakes up the distribution of places and competences, and which thereby works to blur the borders defining its own activity.”27 The story of Polus shakes up what is defined as real to present it as a construct that is also fictionalization. Thanks to the ontological accident that cracks an urn with an urn, there can arise a political polemic doubt concerning the distribution of what can or cannot be seen, said, and done.
Ethics of Reversals: House 113
The intersection of the aesthetic and the political becomes explicit when the reframing of the real through artistic event uncovers social problematics and forms of repression and inequality, addresses the trust crises between sovereignty and citizenship, and associates itself with counter position and change. An interesting example is House 113: A Lesson in Political Construction by Einat Weizman and Aziz al-Touri. Debuted in Tmuna Theatre as part of A-Genre Festival in April 2017, it reframed the demolition and construction that take place in the Bedouin village of Al-Araqeeb – one of the unrecognized villages in the Negev (about 10 km of Beersheba), whose residential and agricultural presence in the site goes all the way back to the Ottoman period and after 1948. The long legal battle surrounding the fate of Al-Araqeeb was decided in the Israeli Supreme Court, which stated that the village was established on lands belonging to the state and so the Bedouin residents must evict the area, to be forested by Keren Kayemet LeIsrael – Jewish National Fund. Since its comprehensive demolition in 2010 by the Israel Land Administration (accompanied by police force), the buildings of the village are rebuilt and demolished habitually.
The performance, advertised as House 112, changed its name at the last minute in the wake of another demolition (and since then dozens of demolitions took place). It consisted of a quick construction (approx. 15 minutes), before a frontal audience, of a transient structure made of wood beams covered by a sheet of plastic. The construction was skillfully carried out by some of the tribe and family children, since al-Touri himself was forbidden by administrative order to take part in the construction of a house. He observed the action, offering directions every once in a while, and finally spoke to the audience – a monologue about the state of the community, the inadequate solutions it was offered, and his positions – on the backdrop of a projection on the plastic sheet that covers the structure, documenting a D9 bulldozer flattening a house (or the house) in the village.
The house built in the theatre takes shape in a functional act of reenacting a house, expropriated from its location and repositioned, deterritorialized from the village and reterritorialized in the theatre. The boys and al-Touri are the residents of the village and construction did indeed take place. However, the house underwent a minor performative politicization (which stands in the face of major policy) that rendered it public.28 The performative framing is a practice of fictionization, which reformulates the visibility conditions of the construction of the house, while transforming it into a symbol and withdrawing its practical function.
While the dual ontology does serve a targeted political and pedagogic position (“A Lesson in Political Construction”), it inevitably also entails ethical clashes, which I believe are mostly part of the performance’s effectiveness. I will underscore this as two facets: on the one hand, performance is based on trust relations and collaboration. The action generated empathy in the specific audience and more than that – probably raised awareness of the problem of unrecognized Bedouin villages and resulting human anguish, thus creating the potential for additional visibility and even engagement and action. The struggle, manifested in the village with recurring construction, is symbolically associated with an artistic performance, which by its very nature will be realized through repetitions and patterns, even when it amplifies the singularity of the live act. The space of the performance has become a de facto public sphere of criticism, when al-Touri turned to the audience, allowed them to become an engaged agent of knowledge, and pleaded his case with them; the audience asked and responded and the entire situation served as a public sphere of critical exposure. The construction garnered applause, rewarding the accurate effort put into the construction and expressing the audience’s satisfaction with its completion.
On the other hand, the realness of Al-Araqeeb, and with it the performance’s satisfaction economy, are converted in the show into a complex shadow image: The constructive act offers repair, but it is also the realization of the destruction in reverse. The creative collaboration constitutes a utopian conversion of alienation and unequal power relations, which may pose the (all too predictable) claim that such collaboration is yet another layer of power relation, owing to cultural appropriation. The recurring construction in the village, needed both for survival and for keeping the struggle going, was transformed into a performance that could be read as a spectacle – children steal the show in it and the power of the D9 Bulldozer becomes a flickering projection. Moreover, the encounter between the real and the fictionalization not only confronts the audience with responsibility, camaraderie, and accountability, but also replicates the lack of accountability and the passive stance on the sideline. From this angle, the effect of constructing a stage house (a real-imaginary house) is the mental distance perpetuated in the geography of separation between stage and auditorium and between performers and observers. The story of relinquishment is displaced to the audience’s powerless or passive gaze.
In a variation on the twilight zone of the aesthetic experience, this version of the ontological accident traps the creators and the audience in ethics of reversals and clashing and flickering values. The show I watched was also attended by MK Juma Azbarga (Member of the Knesset for Balad and the Joint List), who was invited to speak at the end of the action. The gathering of the artists, children, and politician for a group smartphone photo was perhaps another small step towards the “pixelization” of the real (like the possible collision of real grief into the fictional world of Electra); or perhaps another accessible channel to the pain that lies beyond the frame.
Einat Weizman, Aziz al-Touri, House 113: A Lesson in Political Construction, Tmuna Theatre, A-Genre Festival, 2017 (photo: Daphna Ben-Shaul)
Cool, a Man Falling: Questionable Performance (Meets Don DeLillo)
First, at some distance, a man is seen threatening to commit suicide and falling from the roof of a six-story building on Derech Ben Gurion corner of Max Nordau Street. The young person who told me about this reported a critical event with some naivety. He passed there briefly as part of the senses-opening walking tour Walk (by May Zarhy and Galit Criden) which took place in pairs, with one guide, and in complete silence, at the 2017 Bat Yam International Festival of Street Theater and Art. During the walk he saw people gathering under a building, a Channel 10 news correspondent, policemen trying to assist and positioning a mattress, and an actual jump.
In light of the explanatory conjecture I proposed, he re-processed the event and linked it to a moment of wavering between the real and the imaginary. We decided to wait for the next jump off the roof, the Questionable Performance (my translation to Mofa Be-Siman She’ela) by Kepa Group, created by Sergei Klimkin (movie and television stuntman) and Tanya Plazner (theatre director, circus artist, and musician). Its plot was encapsulated in the festival’s program with reflexive framing and self-humor: Sergei, a long-time movie stuntman, has been rejected by Bat Yam Festival for three years (in another version two years). “This time he won’t back down! Even if it means risking his life in order to participate in the Festival…”
We stood with the crowd that gathered behind the metal fence, across from where the previous jump took place. Up close, it was hard to mistake the spectacular nature of the event, which included a trailer and an air of getting ready; a would be suicide threatener in white stylized clothes ran to the roof in the bright spotlight; a circle of light moved and flickered on the building, homing in on the central actions; a production woman cried for help with a megaphone and a t-shirt that said “production”; a news reporter in a red dress ran to the roof after the suicide threatener; and security guards demonstrated slapstick incompetence – the ladder they brought was too short, one tried to climb holding a groove in the wall while in the circle of light, the other almost fell off the roof himself.
The many viewers looked up. The performance was iterated in the Festival twice a night, and in the audience there were children and adults who told each other what is about to happen. A man standing next to us was visibly agitated, offering advice and struggling to accept that this was “just a show.” Firefighters dragged a huge tarpaulin mattress used in stunts and emergency scenes, and started inflating it until it gained some volume. The reporter on the roof shouted her announcement at the bustling crowd – this is “one of your” performers, he is doing a “political statement,” because he was not hired for the Festival.
With the reporter’s microphone in his face and a photographer with a neon vest dangling a foot off the roof and taking pictures, Sergei made a statement to the audience, raising his hands as in a religious sermon and concluded: “I don’t need your production, the audience is here!” He directed a question to the crowd below: “Do you want me to jump?” which was met with the immediate growl “Yes!” He jumped all the way to the soft, secure mattress, accompanied first by a collective scream and then by laughter and applause. Everyone gathered to take a bow. He then handed out a prospect of a mobile extreme sports park run by Kepa Extreme to the people who were standing by the fence. The attention quickly turned to the pyrotechnics and fireworks over the promenade across that street, which ended the dance and aerial show Galileo by the French group Deus Ex Machina.
Questionable Performance is an enjoyable and popular street theatre, site-specific in its generic sense, which can also take place in another building and in another festival. Its dual ontology is aided by the reflexive overlap between the Festival and the plot of the event: The performance denies its legitimate affiliation to the Festival, but its declared counter-position and the spontaneous leap are self-negating. This is not the real urn of death, this is not a political reconstruction of a thorny reality, but rather actuality that crashes into virtuality, while the online images of media representation form an integral part of the act. This is a conscious representation of the scandal as entertainment aftershock of the great disaster spectacles and subsequent discourse, especially after 9/11.
When parents look for the best angle from which their toddler can view an act of suicide (which from a child's point of view may look like the real deal), it may be utterly redundant to ascribe to the show an admonishment against ethical numbness or to attribute a related intention to it. Nevertheless, it weaves a web of ontological and ethical contradictions. The spectacle flirts with the real, drawing on vitality and deceptive moments. Precisely because the captured gaze and the anticipation for the leap have been converted, and no longer relate to the possibility of a real disaster, there is an explicit anesthetization of values. Falling on the tarpaulin mattress is really cool, and it is still a brush with the pleasure and horror that imbue a gladiator show, and the effect of looking at a disaster from the sideline. At the end of the day, a fall is a fall. A human body accelerates downward in the inevitable geometry of impact.
Kepa Group, Questionable Performance, Bat Yam International Festival of Street Theatre and Art, 2017 (photo: Daphna Ben-Shaul)
The bare simulacrum conjured in the street performance needs the shadow of the real accident, while it continues and quotes a rich cinematic tradition of disaster and rescue scenes in action films, and offers entertainment, stunts, and extreme amusements. The real fall is not only a primal fear, a horrendous event, and the raw material for the threat that gives the spectacle its effectiveness, but is in the background after having been culturally assimilated. This assimilation may resurface with an unsettling public image, like the one from 9/11 falls. As described in the film 9/11: The Falling Man (directed by Henry Singer in 2006), the phenomenon of the people who fell from the Twin Towers, due to the blast or by choice, was practically absent from the media in the years following the stunned encounter with the photograph of a man falling from the northern tower before its collapse. The most famous image is one of several, taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew at 09:41.29 In contrast to the proliferation of images and films of the crash and the collapse of the towers, the phenomenon has become a sort of taboo for a while (which also drew on religious prohibition of suicide), until it was discussed and seen, among others, in the sequence of manipulated photographs at the end of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, in which a falling man is reversed and becomes a flying man;30 as well as in Don DeLillo’s 2007 novel Falling Man,31 alluding to the photograph of the falling man taken by Drew.
The preference to avoid dealing with the photographs of the fall and to suspend the belief in a saturated and unsettling moment, converted through photography into a Still Act (a still action of a physical movement, stasis) is understandable.32 The silent moment brings together the imaginary and the real in an unbearable way. It invokes the poignant dissonance and correlation between the aesthetic impetus to suspend the body accelerating towards the ground and the passage of time, and turning our gaze to the inevitable end.33 In other words, the suspended moment in the photograph does not leave the viewer in a twilight of comfort, but rather sets in motion the suspension of the negation of suspension itself. After all, in the end there’s a fall.
Freezing the movement in the photograph realizes Walter Benjamin's distinction in A Short History of Photography, which takes into account the dissolution of the aura and increasing reproduction, but also the shock effect of the photograph: “The camera becomes smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture transitory and secret pictures which are able to shock the associative mechanism of the observer to a standstill.”34 Moreover, the Falling Man photograph reveals the moment that connects the uncontrollable drop in space and what in some cases was evidently a choice. In the film 9/11: The Falling Man the act is read as heroic – one last gesture of freedom. It is impossible to get into the mind of those who fell, only to project: Whomever made this choice wrote or rewrote, at the very last minute, the looming ending of their life, bestowing a poetic reasoning upon its narrative. Even without a photograph, established the aesthetic dimension of the end of their life.
In Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, between the narrative collage of characters associated with 9/11, there is a performance artist known as “the falling man,” who suspends himself without permission from different buildings around the city:
He’s appeared several times in the last week, unannounced, in various parts of the city, suspended from one or another structure, always upside down, wearing a suit, a tie and dress shoes. He brought is back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump. (…) Traffic was barely moving now. There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body’s last fleet breath and what it held. (…) There was the awful openness of it, something we'd not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all.35
The literary-fictional urban spectacle of the falling man takes place a few days after the disaster and is associated in the novel with its presence. The performative jumps of DeLillo’s character are not a reenactment of the fall, as much as they are a representation of the in-between moment that was frozen in the photograph. The entire disaster is channeled into a singular performance, which removes the actual event from context, but remains a gesture that repeats it through an actual jump. The fall is secured, while insufferably bringing to the fore the repression of the image. The resulting image connects the performative exposure of a frozen moment, and the fact that with the photograph the anonymous falling man – the one who really fell – has been turned into a display of flat beauty.
In Don DeLillo’s novel, the horrifying reality of what had happened erupts into the present and continues to signal the collapse of order – the event is unpredictable (the performance artist rejects a formal invitation by the Guggenheim), the artist provokes the control mechanisms (the falling man is repeatedly arrested), and puts himself at risk (the falling man is injured). The artist places his action in the hands of the audience – suspended above angry and discordant reactions, he does not provide any explanation, does not confirm or denies the connection to the famous photograph, does not make documentation arrangements (and the images of his action are accidental street photos). Only a few days separating it from the collapse of the World Trade Towers (The Accident, as to 2001), the public camaraderie and the dispute that the action provokes are part of the realness of the reenactment. Although the gesture repeats a still moment in the photograph, the performance artist apparently also had a plan for one last jump without a safety net, which he did not get a chance to carry out.
*
The various cases cited here delineate a certain evolution of the ontological accident. This is a methodical scale of the existing and real (urn), functional and reconstructed (house), and spectacular yet performed (fall): It starts with the actual urn that holds real death, continues with a functional action that reconstructs the construction of a house in the shadow of a harsh reality, and ends with a performance of a fall that maintains its relation to real falls, which in certain respects have become spectacles. In Polus, the life crisis and ontological accident join to form a private experience, whose public aspect in the polis is created circuitously. The public take off on the construction of the private house – House 113 and so forth – is aimed at collective and explicit political accountability for the extensive demolition, implying an effective ethics of reversals; whereas in the street spectacle, the real fall dissolves into the spectacle in demonstrated publicness, yet still implies a social value.
Even if the real does not gain an unequivocal sense in the aesthetic experience, it is not what can be subjected to suspension, but rather a constant dimension; a dimension made present through the elimination of the boundaries between execution and performance or through an unsettling collision. “Accident” is a daunting concept, and yet to me it seems a sober one. It means to accept that the aesthetic dimension is a dialectical force, which aspires towards the conflation of constructs of the real and the imaginary, but is still an area that feeds off of the aesthetic-political distinction of the orders formed in it. The accident is not necessarily a mending or revolutionary force in the direct sense, but it is a positive force: in the “accidental” encounter and fleeting flickers that flash in it there lies the potential of existing and acting in areas of heightened lucidity.
October, 2018
1 For the use of the term “imaginary”, which can be replaced by “fictional”, see: Menachem Brinker, “Aesthetic Illusion,” Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism 36:2 (Winter 1977), pp. 191-196.
2 Since this is a short outline of a discursive tendency, I will refrain from tangent discussions, like the issue of identification and empathy, which has been discussed at great length, along with the attempt to fathom the nature of (real or semi-real) feelings directed as representations; and like the fascinating delusional phenomena (which I explored in different contexts), manifested in the complete replacement of the imaginary with a real experience.
3 On the notion of gesture see “Gesture,” Maarav23 (2018), edited by Avital Barak with Udi Edelman (chief editor) (accessed: 18/9/2018).
4 I thank Yair Lipshitz for the information.
5 Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, New York and London: Routledge, 1988 [1977].
6 Carol Martin, Theatre of the Real, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
7 Some of the works performed at the conference can be understood through the notion of “ontological accident”. See presentations in Maakaf, Journal for Dance, Performance and Visual Theatre, “Twilight” (2018).
8 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983, pp. 5-6.
9 See George Dickie, Art and Aesthetics: An Institutional Analysis, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.
10 Coleridge in Raysor Thomas Middleton (ed.), Shakespearean Criticism, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1960, pp. 178-181.
11 August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, London: Henri G. Bohn, 1846, p. 246.
12 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures Upon Shakespeare and Other Dramatists, in Shedd, W. G. T. (ed.), The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4, New York, Harper and brothers, 1884, p. 73.
13 See Edward Bullough, “Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology 5 (1963 [1912]), pp. 87-118.
14 Bertold Brecht, “A Short Organum for the Theatre,” John Willet (ed. and trans.), Brecht on Theatre, New York: Hill and Wang, p. 188.
15 See Daphna Ben-Shaul, “Role-Playing,” Mafte'akh – Lexical Review of Political Thought 8 (2014), Minerva Humanities Center, Tel Aviv University, pp. 153-178 [in Hebrew] (accessed: 18/8/2018).
16 Žižek follows Alain Badiou’s emphasis on la passion du réel, reacting to Lacan’s unattainable order of the Real. See: Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Essays, London and New York: Verso, 2002, pp. 9-10.
17 See Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. by Philip Beitchman, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007; Sylvère Lotringer and Paul Virilio, The Accident of Art, trans. by Michael Taormina, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2005.
18 Stephen Wright, Toward a Lexicon of Usership, edited by Nick Aitkens. Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2013, pp. 3-5; Museum of Arte Útil (accessed: 13/9/2018); Omer Krieger, “Introduction: Stephen Wright’s Theory,” trans. by Margalit Rodgers, Maarav 16 (2016) (accessed: 18/9/2019).
19 I thank Yair Vardi (who served as a driver in Accident) for his point of view and our conversation.
20 See Daphna Ben-Shaul, “Critically Civic: Public Movement's Performative Activism,” Performance Studies in Motion: International Perspectives and Practices in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Atay Citron, Sharon Aronson-Lehavi and David Zerbiv, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014, pp. 118-130.
21 On the discourse surrounding Polus see Leofranc Holford-Strevens, “Polus and His Urn: A Case Study in the Theory of Acting, c. 300 B.C.-c. A.D. 2000,” International Journal of Classical tradition 11:4 ( December 2005), pp. 499-523.
22 Aulus Gellius, “Attic Nights,” The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, with an English Translation (John C. Rolfe, ed.), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927, Book VI, section 6, pp. 34-36 .
23 See “André Tchaikowsky – Miscellaneous” (accessed: 18/9/2018).
24 For the urn episode see Sophocles, Electra in Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra, trans. by H.D.F. Kitto, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962 (lines 1098-1375).
25 On the punctum as a component or an emphasis that will break or punctuate the sovereignty of the stadium see Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, pp. 25-27.
26 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran, London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010, p. 148.
27 Ibid., p. 149.
28 On performative politicization of home and domestic sites see Daphna Ben-Shaul, “A Home Unfound: The Political Modeling of the Domestic Performance,” Theatre Journal 69:2 (2017), pp. 235-257; Diego Rotman, “On the architecture of the ephemeral: The Eternal Sukkah of the Jahalin tribe,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 16:3 (2017), pp. 498-514.
29 The photo was published in the New York Times already on September 12, 2001.
30 Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Boston, Mass.: Mariner Books, 2005.
31 Don DeLillo, Falling Man, New York: Scribner, 2007.
32 Discussed in André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement, New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 15-16.
33 This dialectics is well familiar from Yves Klein’s photomontage known as “Leap into the Void” (first included in his project Théȃtre du Vide, 1960). The image is based on live performance – Klein really (and securely) jumped.
34 Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” Screen 13:1.1 (1972 [1931]), p. 25.
35 Don DeLillo, p. 33.
36 It is possible that DeLillo was inspired by the tightrope walker Philip Petit who in 1974 went (in an unauthorized action) on a wire stretched between the Twin Towers. When he was arrested and asked why he did so, he replied: “When I see a beautiful place to put my wire, I cannot resist” (accessed: 18/9/2018).