Bruce Barber's performance work E was originally presented on three occasions: as part of his MFA thesis at the Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax in 1978, at the Living Arts Festival, Simon Fraser University Centre for the Arts, in Vancouver in 1979, and at the Sydney Biennial that same year. It was shown in 2010 at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, as part of the exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980.
I interviewed Bruce Barber about E on October 15, 2010, on the occasion of our co-chairing a panel at the Universities Art Association of Canada Annual Conference at the University of Guelph, Ontario.
Bruce Barber: E was actually my Master's of Fine Arts thesis exhibition. I installed the walls, the doors – the doors that, you know, open left and right. And they're sort of percussive instruments. At the second gallery, Gallery Two, Ellen Art Gallery, I had about ten performers, I think. In the back gallery were fourteen or fifteen Audience Arrangements. The audience was arranged for E as well. So they were part of a series that goes back to 1973-74. In fact I have been doing some contemporary Audience Arrangements for our MFA forum. We pair off two students per week and I give them an Audience Arrangement, which they put up on the screen and we arranged the chairs. The first couple – Ryan and Nicole – instituted a cash bar at the MFA forum, and so I arranged the audience in a wine glass formation, facing towards the screen. So anyway the work is broadly about hermeneutic endeavours.
Marc James Léger: Your essay, "Performance for Pleasure and Performance for Instruction" was published in a catalogue for Living Art Vancouver, where you showed the work in 1979, and was "concerned with the production and promotion of a socially engaged 'performance' via pleasurable and instructive modes of production" – so I imagine the three works – E, Revolve and Function – fall under that rubric of pedagogical work?
BB: Yes, performance as theatre is a vehicle for, to use an ugly word, conscientization. What I liked about Brecht is that you could see the apparatus, so there's no illusionistic distancing. What you were seeing was a real event – a reconstruction of a real event, mediated through gallery and institutional structures.
MJL: The instructional aspect of a work is very much at the level of the form of E – the form of the performance and its structuring aspect.
BB: Yeah. You could describe these as a series of interrelated, what I call, "actexts." I conflated the two words action and text. So it's about language and there are descriptives for the individuals who were engaged in performing these actext sequences. They're also cinematic. The door slamming is sort of like the gate of a camera, so that you see these individuals coming through quickly, slamming the doors, moving back, around and around, so that you have this sort of circular motion, which is recapitulated in Function and Revolve. Revolve has a door that is both open and closed at the same time.
MJL: Like on the cover of Reading Rooms.
BB: Yes. In my interview with Wystan Curnow [published in Reading Rooms] I believe I talk about the importance of doors in the films and theatre that had aroused my interest. In my first trips to New York I interviewed performance artists but I also took time to see performances by John Zorn and Richard Foreman – his Ontological-Hysteric Theater. That by the way was the first time I published something in Live magazine. John Howe, who I had met at a John Zorn performance, was one of the editors with Bonnie Marranca. Performing Arts Journal had a kind of sibling rivalry with Live. They didn't want the performance art and lower Broadway art spaces to contaminate the off-Broadway theatre discussions in PAJ. So you had performance theoreticians writing primarily for PAJ and the individuals engaged in postmodern performance and cross-over events writing for Live. Anyway, I was very taken with Richard Foreman's work and I read something where he said that no two people open a door the same way. So I tested this. I was teaching performance classes and I started observing how people open and close doors. Some people reveal a great deal about themselves when they open a door.
MJL: In Rochester you asked me to open a window. I don't know if you remember that. The first time we met, I went to your room to see on your computer your web site for Squat II and you asked me to open a window. I thought it was curious because I thought to myself why doesn't he open the window himself. (Laughs) So maybe you were watching me open the window, maybe not. (Laughs)
BB: Anyway, the door slamming sequence has a related work called Door Slam for Sony Walkman. I liked the kind of ambiguity – or really, it's order in ambiguity – and the polyphony of that act, as you are moving these male and female performers through and they're slamming the doors, left and right. Some are opening the door this way and slamming like that. Think of it, when people open doors and walk through and then close the door, they usually have their back to the outside space. But some people open with two hands and they never present their back to a potential attacker. It's often very gendered the way people will walk through a door.
MJL: Right. So they weren't choreographed in the door slamming sequence?
BB: No, they're left to their own modus operandi, although we did rehearse this work. It's part of why I enjoyed the project but also why I got out of doing this type of large-scale performance work. It was costing me too much money. Each time I did this it was something like a five thousand dollar production.
MJL: Did you pay the performers?
BB: No, I didn't pay the performers. The costs were for building the sets and paying people to help me put it together. The rehearsals for the first performance in Halifax took place on three or four days over two weeks. The rehearsals for the one in Vancouver took about one week. It could have taken a bit longer since we were thinking of getting a performance group together and doing other stuff. Some performers take to it like a duck to water. They're just natural.
MJL: They're obviously happy and having fun.
BB: Yeah. The tasks that I give to people who collaborate with me are pretty simple, but the people are complex. So they can do odd things.
MJL: Yes, well the simplicity of it makes you think many things.
BB: So what do you think when you see those people moving around like that?
MJL: Well, it's hard for me to think of the performance outside of what I know about your work from your writings. I know that you were a percussionist in the New Zealand Scratch Orchestra and I think that probably had some influence on the door slam sequence, but it does otherwise operate as a framing element in the performance because it's repeated at the end, and faster.
BB: And it's done in reverse, like it's rewinding itself.
MJL: It also signals avant-garde performance, with the colour choice of red, black and white in the costumes and the set.
BB: Yes, but that was the Vancouver performance. The one in Sydney was more raw. It was street clothes. I asked them to wear plain clothes. And the doors were not painted. Partly that was due to the exigencies of the exhibition – we had only a weekend. I got pretty good at it. The one in Sydney had the best, most beautiful-looking doors. I worked with students from the Sydney College of Art, some of whom, in particular the filmmaker Jane Campion, have become subsequently quite famous. I had the help of a mentor-teacher of mine Jim Allen who was at that time the head of the Sydney College of Art, and he asked around to see who wanted to work with a visiting artist from Canada. So I workshoped with the students. I had been a teaching assistant with Andy De Groat and Gary Reigenborn, who did the choreography for Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach. We did some of these what Wilson calls "hip plays" with Phillip Glass music, doing very repetitive minimal movements. That was another soft source for the work. I was moving out of the space of spectacular task-oriented performance associated with the work of Joan Jonas or the minimal performance of Vito Acconci and Dan Graham. One of my video pieces with railway tracks was influenced by Dan Graham's attention-based video pieces. I did this trip from the railway station where I worked in Auckland, packing box cars, to downtown Auckland. In the back of the guard's van was this little tray so that you could stand out and fix the camera on your own tripod and I videotaped the journey to White Station. The journey was about the length of a half-inch video tape. So I had this extreme perspectival view from the train, which was a kind of reversal of the usual image of railway lines as seen moving forward. There was a vertical tilt shot toward a wider-angle view of the rails. In the version I did in Halifax a dog was run over by the train.
MJL: What's the title of this piece?
BB: It's called Journey One or Journey Two: Exegesis for a Cinematic Cliche.
MJL: In "Statement Concerning 'E'," you mention that around 1974 you started using the word exegesis.
BB: Yeah. Exegetes were Jewish cabbalists who were into secret knowledge. So there is a kind of Judeo-Christian signifier there for your sort of exegete and there's also Hermes, the god of communication. So there's interpretation, understanding and comprehension. Those were the three key processes.
MJL: How do you see percussion sounds and doors opening and closing opening up a process of interpretation? They bring about a sort of breaking of the circle.
BB: Yeah. It's a performative theatrical trope, you know, when the curtain opens, the doors open, something's going to happen. It's something foundational to performance, which I mention in the interview with Curnow. The comedy of Terence, the ancient Roman playwright, had players coming in and out.
MJL: There's a certain amount of bravura at the same time as minimal reduction in that announcement, which is very intellectual.
BB: At the time I also TA'd for Darcy Lange who was a friend of Dan Graham's. He was a New Zealand sculptor who came from the same Alma Mater as me. He was doing video tapes. Do you know this magazine called Avalanche? It's a magazine that came out of New York and it was edited by Willoughby Sharp, who was a conceptual video artist-critic-writer and so on. Anyway, Willoughby met Darcy in London and liked some of the video tapes he was doing which were very minimal. He would set up a camera in an English public school and video tape the teacher. He would have loved the performance given today by John Stocking. He would have just set up a camera and that would have been it: beginning to end, pure unadulterated John Stocking. Weird wonderful stuff and a seriousness that was very evident. He would discuss a wide range of work and a philosophical position on the world.
MJL: Almost like an Arnold Toynbee "history of the world" according to John Stocking. John's History of the World.
BB: Trying to meld Marxist and Freudian theory like Deleuze and Guattari did. Artaud's theory of play comes in there somehow.
MJL: Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty" comes to mind in relation to E although in a mild way. There is a bit of struggle between the action and the text. You refer to the actexts as scores. There we have an instructional score that resonates with Fluxus terms and Black Mountain College. In the image of the soliloquy section we can see your notes resting on a lectern, the kind that people use to hold their music sheets. According to Derrida, Artaud didn't want a theater in which the text dominated the performance and so he was always trying to articulate the struggle between the authority of the text and the life of the performance. I'm wondering if that comes into play in some way in the almost pained performance in the second section – Comprehension. We move away from the almost ritualistic aspect of the door slamming sequence to comprehension. It's not really Artaud in the sense that it's not really the text standing over the performance; it doesn't have that kind of drama or antagonism towards language. The antagonism isn't towards language, it's within language in a sense, at the level of signification and meaning, and culture as it's embodied in language and vice versa.
BB: There's also a linking thematic that runs through some of the work in New Zealand, like the acupuncture traces. In this work it's happening behind the scenes. You only get a glimpse of it. Only half the audience would see it. Someone who appears to be naked is being projected on and someone is tracing on acupuncture.
MJL: Yeah, and this Chinese man – is he a stand-in for the audience on whom you're performing a kind of acupuncture?
BB: The person who did this in Halifax – the acupuncture trace, which is Actext 6 – was Theodore Wan, a photographer, who taught Jeff Wall how to use a 4x5 camera. He was a good friend of mine. We hung out together. He started a gallery in the East End of Vancouver. We used to see each other every week. He used to come over. He took me Dim Summing on Sundays. He died very young of cancer. He did performances of himself in medical scrubs, being prepared for surgery. All of his work is now in the Vancouver Art Gallery. Anyway, the whole work I see as a kind of allegory. I like works that encompass a lot of material, for example, I like Courbet's painting of his studio, which T.J. Clark wrote a whole book about. And Michael Fried could write a whole other book and refute everything T.J. Clark wrote about. That sort of thing excites me. I like a work that will register different meaning structures, that is allegorically complex.
MJL: Courbet's concept was that the people in his paintings are "real allegories." The people in his paintings are real people. People like Jane Campion and Jeannette Wall and Theodore Wan.
BB: Yeah. By the way Jane Campion is an amazing theatrical performer. She comes from a theatrical family. Her parents owned a theatre in New Zealand. So she grew up acting. Some of my Art & Language friends – Terry Smith and Ian Burn – took me out to this Italian restaurant after the Sydney performance and I could tell they were totally nonplussed. They thought: "This is kind of linguistic; it's about language, it's about politics, but it's pretty theatrical...!" Of course it's supposed to be very minimal, but with a few very theatrical people and beautiful-looking performers, it can be.
MJL: It think it's very perceptive of them, because the more you see the piece, the more theatrical it becomes. At first it's quite confusing and one has to work to piece things together. After a while though it becomes theatrical.
BB: The way it was made, apart from all of the reading and the previous knowledge, involved me being in a sound room with a four-track sound machine, reel to reel, and producing pre-recorded voices for this. If this was a visual, cinematic experience, it was parallel to the sound tape. The sound tape provides the instructional score that will then be followed, or punctuated by the performance.
MJL: Yes, to the point of an almost hysterical-ontological performance with the umbrella sequence. But before that you explain the umbrella scene. Before "Weatherman," in "'E' Comprehension" you mention the event that you witnessed: an old man walks out of a tavern...
BB: But I have a different voice.
MJL: Yes, you use a more working-class slang...
BB: Yeah. "Out of the tavern! One! Twoooo."
MJL: And then this more authorial voice comes in and contrasts with it. There is a gender slippage here too. In your notes for the work, you say that you witnessed an old man with an umbrella, yet we see a young woman performer.
BB: There, that's delicious isn't it? (Laughs)
MJL: And then you say that the voice is sexually ambiguous, but when I listen to the recording I hear your voice, and I don't hear the sexual ambiguity.
BB: Right. Yeah, so you work with what's at hand. In the first performance I think Jennifer Berlant – she's quite a well-known American artist now with lots of exhibitions – she was the umbrella. I like the idea of gender bending with that. So the audience hears: "I saw an old man, struggling in the wind with his umbrella, see?" And yet there's this beautiful woman, who is very seductive, with beautiful clothing and acting up for this director, this grand régisseur, doing this instructional performance rehearsal. So she's rehearsing for something that has happened in the real world that is being perceived. It's written down as a text and the text is being acted out, rehearsed and produced for viewing. E is not only for exegesis but is also an M on its side, but it's also the E from the ophthalmic charts. When you see an E, that's when you get the visuality of language, the visual texture of language.
MJL: The figurative.
BB: Yeah, the figurative, allegorical imaging potential of language.
MJL: I thought it might also stand for 'example' because at one point there are very insistent exclamations: "Give us an example!" And that's saying something of something. An encore.
BB: Saying something of something that's already been said.
MJL: Something that's already been said but yet we're not satisfied with what's been said. We have to say something more about it.
BB: Then it really draws in to the interpretive allegorical mode. These are all perlocutionary acts, in the Austinian sense, intermixed with some illocutionary acts and by that I mean that the illocutionary are more directive, descriptive, and less theatrical or commanding. I was reading all of this stuff at that time: Austin's Doing Things with Words along with Ricoeur's The Conflict of Interpretations. So I was interested in the permutations of language, partly through the assault on my consciousness by Art & Language. These guys were saying there's nothing outside the text – the Derridean putsch.
MJL: They're obsessed with the frame.
BB: Yeah, they're obsessed with the ontological. If you read some of those Art & Language texts, they're sort of like E.
MJL: I think your work is less pressured than something Art & Language would have devised.
BB: Yeah, it's more poetic, I guess. Anyway, the actexts – sometimes I use act and text separately and sometimes I conflate the two – and the notion of echoing, mimesis, punctuation, androgyny, sexual slippage, the teacher-subordinate, male-female, male-teacher...
MJL: Director-performer, author-critic...
BB: Yeah, the text as a kind of parasite, a text that's parasitical on the experience. It's not symbiotic, it's parasitic.
MJL: This is the Theatre of Cruelty question.
BB: Yeah. The second description is Ricoeur. Ricoeur is a kind of phenomenologist. At that time I had been introduced to Brentado and Heidegger. A friend who was a philosopher had read little bit of Hegel on art, "Building, Dwelling and Thinking," and I was reading Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind and Husserl. But it was Ricoeur that did it for me.
MJL: Is periscoping a term that you take from Ricoeur? You've associated it with Derrida but here it is in one of your drawings and one of the aspects of inclusion, which you contrast with avant-garde interpretation, which you say has more to do with reduction – microscoping and telescoping. Periscoping you refer to as inclusive, understanding as comprehension, meaning comprehensive.
BB: Is that brilliant? (Laughs)
MJL: Well, it may be brilliant but it's also mind-boggling. I may be over-interpreting but it's my task of periscoping to try to figure in what you were thinking.
BB: Only someone who is 25 would have the audacity to write stuff like this. (Laughs)
MJL: In the section where you introduce thin and thick description you have the allegory of the couple, who are united, separated, exist in isolation and reunite. At that point you introduce these ideas of Ricoeur's. Earlier you mention the "presuppositions and the exigencies" of reading. So thin and thick enter here in a dramatic way inasmuch as it's embodied in the performance.
BB: It's almost like a sexual coupling, isn't it? It's almost like coitus.
MJL: It's coitus but at the same time it's coitus interruptus. Thick you define as "the embracing of a number of different things under the umbrella of method." I don't know if this has anything to do with the umbrella in the previous section. So the method is split by thin and thick description, one that's reductive, one that's inclusive. And then you go through this almost Panofskian iconography where you are asking yourself all sorts of questions and you start rebuilding the event in your mind. What were you thinking? Where was psychology in this? Where was politics and economics?
BB: The need for understanding includes almost all of these of course.
MJL: At that point you're mimicking I think what the audience is experiencing. In this way E is a sort of reflexive meta-project because it performs what it's about. It's phenomenological in the way that Merleau-Ponty talks about something that can't be grasped conceptually.
BB: Being in the flesh of the world.
MJL: Yeah, and in that regard you're sort of holding the hand of the audience, walking them through the work, all the while it being fairly confusing.
BB: You know that Vito Acconci was on my defense committee and Gerald Ferguson, Garry Neill Kennedy, Eric Cameron – anyway, all heavyweight artists in their forties. I interviewed Acconci and others responsible for getting him in at NSCAD to do some summer teaching and he produced his Red Tapes at that time. There are some comparable moments in The Red Tapes where Acconci is being self-reflexive in his engagement with the audience.
MJL: The audience as a mediating participant.
BB: Yeah, and he's having a kind of interior dialogue with himself. When my PhD thesis was defended, there was a thunder and Wolfgang Schirmacher says: "Look even the gods are angry at you!" At my MFA defense, Gerry Ferguson went up to the doors and started slamming the doors to put a kind of edge to the discussion and Acconci knew that I had been interested in his work, especially Venice Belongs to Us, which is all about cultural imperialism. I love that work; it's one of his best pieces from that period, and The Red Tapes of course. He brought up Foreman's work and he asked if I was interested in Foreman's work and I said I was more interested in his ideas. I liked the way Foreman could get an audience to focus on the subtlest of actions, not through sound, but through ontological and phenomenological investment.
MJL: You have that in the theatre of the absurd also. Ionesco.
BB: Yeah, the silences in Surrealist theatre. Vladimir and Estragon.
MJL: The uncanny.
BB: Yeah, a kind of Freudian unheimlich moment so that the audience is sort of on edge. And the A-effect in Brecht, which he derives from Eastern kabuki theatre.
MJL: But it's become acculturated in Foreman.
BB: It's very studied.
MJL: It becomes cinema.
BB: Yeah, it's the same with Robert Wilson. It's very imagistic. It's interesting that they're all engaged in cinema now. Julian Schanbel's films have that kind of microcosmic attention to detail. Filmmakers like Hitchcock of course said it's all in the details. When you see a fat man eating an apple, you know it has meaning. It's an image of gluttony; it's about his weight. He's trying to domesticate overweight people. Anyway, it has a multiplicity of meanings. So I kind of liked that in Wilson and the kind of Yvonne Rainer, Judson Dance Theater strain. There was this minimal, process-oriented theatre that was being eclipsed by language. The dramatic spectacle that had been part of naturalistic theatre up until the 60s was challenged by The Living Theater and by other performance groups.
MJL: Let me ask you about this challenge to naturalistic theatre. What is the relationship between the critic, the exegete and the interruptor?
BB: Interruptor is kind of a pun: interruptor-interpreter. There's a kind of interpretation involved in the form of interruption. It's coitus interruptus.
MJL: The detail is interesting in this regard. Around this time there were two very well-knwon essays that were written: Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author" and Michel Foucault's "What Is an Author?" I think it's Barthes who quotes Beckett who says something like "What matter who is speaking?" There's a lot of revision of the event of the man with the umbrella that you lend to the work. It doesn't really matter that it's your personal experience and so your intentions aren't really being presented in this but rather the possibility of intention.
BB: It's also a mundane event that everyone has experienced, but of course with Freud and umbrellas it's all about coitus.
MJL: There are different directions that we could go towards in terms of what's there but there's also the critique of readings of Freud in say, A Thousand Plateaus, which has to do with a kind of schizoid experience, and infinite semiosis. Interpretation might make a kind of schizoid theatre, not a hysterical-ontological theatre.
BB: Yeah, a theatre of the ridiculous.
MJL: The ridiculousness of attempting to fix meaning. But in a way that's the role of the critic, which you attempt to engage in a meta-critical way. You sort of pre-empt the role of the critic by making the work about the discourse of interpretation. Barthes talks about the person who complements the function of the author. The two stand in relation to one another on a kind of sacred axis. The audience and the details of the artist's life are on the profane axis. The artist in a way has the function – the privilege – of not knowing what they're doing. If they did they wouldn't be in that structural place. There's an implicit Greimasian square used in that essay and the critic and the artist are aligned and reflect each other. One of the things that Foucault brings in is a process in which something like the old man event can be related to the function of the author. At the point at which an author becomes consecrated, the details of their existence get folded into the mystique of the function of the author and so the work and what stands outside the work start to function in relation to it – sort of like the way that so many aspects of our lives can today be associated with the name Sigmund Freud. So this brings me to ask why it is that in E you felt that you needed to include this personal experience? Why not another text that would have been more impersonal?
BB: Well, at the time I was thinking of events as confrontations with the real, where, for example, in the section on the need for psychology, there is a reference to a confrontation with a real schizophrenic who actually lived next door to me. My watch becomes at that moment not a time piece but a space piece.
MJL: Yeah, I read that scene in terms of orientation in time and space.
BB: Yeah, time and space. It becomes a Being and Time event. Even though I wasn't reading Badiou at the time that becomes a kind of evental moment that precipitates knowledge of phenomena that allows a moment of veracity in terms of your being in the world – even though interpreting that, using language, makes no sense whatsoever. But the recognition of that paradox of the incident, of confusing time with space, even though time is always space and space is always time... So the watch is doing something similar to being. It's measuring being, if you get my drift. (Laughs)
MJL: This is the part in the transcript where I put in "Laughs."
BB: The dialogue between a schizophrenic and one other. I think that at the time the voice on the tape says: "I think I was beginning to understand what was going on... there was a need for psychology."
MJL: What I'm getting at is the fact that in a way this is like your previous work Stocks and Bonds. It's you putting an aspect of yourself on the line, in your work. I'm wondering why the intrigue? You can see that more clearly in a piece like Stocks and Bonds. I don't see any reason why that shouldn't be part of this work since you're the author and a performer, but I see the intrigue functioning in tandem with this death of the author idea, a matter of fact.
BB: I think you may be right there. I wasn't thinking of that at the time, though. I was trying to make a work that had a certain complexity that was challenging to watch and pleasureful and instructive. To a certain extent I think I succeeded although the work was never until now the object of criticism. Actually it was written about in a book that included images of it and said "Baber's work is demandingly sociological and philosophical." This is the kind of review that gives a one liner as a way of rejecting the work.
MJL: Yeah, that's the sort of thing that a critic would have said at that time since there was still resistance to theory.
BB: Yes, so it wasn't all that clear to people what I was doing. But I wanted to make a work that was at least as richly challenging as some of the best works. Peter Greenaway has spoken to me about works that are world-encompassing. Duchamp's The Large Glass is a work like that. I'm not for a moment suggesting that this has the same complexity. On one level it may, depending on who is reading it, but I think of it certainly as being as challenging as some of the works of Foreman, and they were just as confounding and enigmatic. There's that letter E again – enigmatic.
MJL: There's a bit of concrete poetry there with the E – almost like Fritz Lang's M.
BB: Do you know that film? It's got a horrendous narrative. (Laughs) It's about a pedophile-child molester-killer.
MJL: Is there a connection between the work you did with Billy Apple, called Whitler's Soliloquies and the soliloquy in E?
BB: Yeah, that was a book project that was read aloud, so it needs two readers and Wystan Curnow read it with me. It was produced in two different contexts in Australia. Wystan is an English professor and a critic and who was a mentor of mine. He was a student of Morse Peckham, who wrote a book called Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology and Behavior in the Arts, where he used autism as a model for creative behaviour.
MJL: You define Whitler's Soliloquies as "a dialogue of swords to illustrate and review the contiguity between the words subtopia and subulate." Is that in some ways connected to your practice of periscoping?
BB: Again this is a 25 year-old mind at work that is trying to be all-encompassing and intelligent in his approach to art making. It's sort of related to Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Tell-Tale Heart." Dialogue of swords, en français, is a "dialogue de sourds." A conversation between deaf people and it's also a pun on "dialogue of sorts." Tell that to Grant Kester. (Laughs)
MJL: Kester's very critical of hermeneutics.
BB: Yes, well, hermeneutics is about the opacity of language, not transparency. It's about endless signification.
MJL: Yeas, it's almost hysterical in its obsession with what's behind the screen.
BB: Yes. You know historical materialists are kind of like vulgar marxists. They don't like that.
MJL: I don't know, they'll actually accept the efficiency of what's presented on the surface.
BB: Yeah, well, maybe. That's why the Grundrisse is about the value of work, of labour, and not simply the economy. My soliloquy in E, in which I read from Marx's Grundrisse was an introduction. When we did the performance in Vancouver we came up in an old nineteenth-century elevator. It was a great, theatrical entrance. Anyway, the night of the first performance, I pulled the cord that operates the lift and the cord broke, so we had to walk up instead. You could open the gates and slam the door down so it was a sort of vertical door closing. So that was another manifestation of door movement. And the competition between cinema and theatre was intense in the early twentieth century. That's when lift stages and revolve stages were introduced in the theatre so that swift scene changes could seem more cinematic. And that's still the case. Robert Lepage just did Wagner in New York with lift stages, sound stages and moving stuff. It's a total Lepage spectacle. He's not trying to change Wagner but competing with cinema, competing with the ultimate. Spectacle in the round trumps the illusionistic character of cinema – or it should, but it doesn't because it's less satisfying. It doesn't absorb your consciousness in the same way. So Whitler's Soliloquies was a dialogue between two people who had different political and aesthetic ideologies. We decided to take three words. Billy's shtick was abstraction. Here's a guy whose name was Barry Bates who graduated from the Royal College and who was doing performance who went to New York and changed his name to Billy Apple – because he was in the Big Apple. And he was married to a woman named Jackie Blum, who changed her name to Jackie Apple. She was with Martha Wilson, one of the founders of Franklyn Furnace. She invited me there to a couple of performances. I was representing the other side of it: "subulate." Subtopia is the subversive encroachment of the urban on the rural space. Subulate is a sharp object. So those were the two words we were working with. So my manner of working at the time was based on sketching, drawing, text, scrubbing out, adding things, notes from books like Ricoeur's. One revelation I had was that if you take out conjunctions and prepositions in the language you end up with a subversion of your epistemological history. Dialogue and debate disappear.
MJL: I have a bit of a fanciful question. You refer to Borges in your "Statement Concerning 'E'," who refers to a story by H.G. Wells about a time traveler who plants a flower that will only blossom years later. How would you say E has changed over the years? Has the text been interpreted because we said something about it?
BB: Of course Foucault refers to Borges in The Order of Things. The first chapter in which he's talking about Velasquez and the mirror that doesn't reflect is a very Borgesian moment. It's about a mirror that's in front of the subject, a kind of looking awry. Just like the way Lacan made a great deal about Holbein's The Ambassadors, an image of mortality. So it's not a fanciful question.
MJL: I have a question about class here somewhere. You refer to Clifford Geertz's idea that culture is composed of texts at the base, which connotes the marxist base and superstructure model. In Geertz it's an ensemble of texts, not modes and relations of production, so it's an anthropological model of social relations. This is ongoing in your work, I think, with your theory of giving, which is influenced by the work of Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, and works as a counter to the limits of Marxism. Anthropology is a way of getting away from the solipsism of the self or of authentic interpretation, but does this not also dichotomize nature and culture without dialectical mediation, avoiding the marxian analysis of the base? Ricoeur's work also seems to disable concrete analysis of social situations. Is there no way of thinking the universal without using the primary index of the reflexive "I." Is there no way to think of the universal without the problems associated with the agent/structure dichotomy? This seems to me to be the problem of ethnography which submerges the "I" in a particularistic context. Is the audience therefore not the author's mask – a way of reinscribing intention?
BB: I like the way you're playing with masks. Maybe these acupuncture juncture points are meridians. Base/superstructure binaries aren't that useful. Althusser pointed that out in For Marx. And Borges as a straight allegorist marveled at the Chinese encyclopedia. Joseph Needham produced over the course of twenty years this amazing set of encyclopedic books on Chinese science and civilization. Needham's depth research into Chinese civilization was a revelation to me. He tried to understand why China stopped with their science and he wondered why it stopped advancing. Anyway, Borges marvels at the number of terms that could be used for one entity, like dog. The dog that does this, the dog that does that, the white dog...
MJL: Including dinner.
BB: Yes, including dinner. (Laughs) So that's what interests me about Borges. So if a student comes up to me today and says they discovered Borges I say "keep reading," because he's fantastic. So, this mish mash stuff went into this extravagant work. I really enjoyed working with the three different groups. They were amazing. I think I could have been a film director or a theatre director. That's what I was starting to think – maybe I should go into a theatre or a film program. I was accepted to two different film programs but didn't go there. I had applied for a job in the theatre as a set designer after I graduated from a sculpture department in Elam and was interviewed but didn't get the job.
MJL: Well, had you become a filmmaker I'm sure you would have made good films, but we would have lost out on a very interesting visual artist and theorist.
BB: Thank you for saying that. And I would have lost out on your brilliant exegetical treatment.
Posted by: |