Spectacles
By Hugh Dichmont and Aaron Juneau
Bound to the ephemeral, in an ever-changing state of flux and mobility, ceaselessly experiential yet denying any directly effectual, participatory action. What we perceive is irrefutably exciting yet remains nothing more than something that we see, nothing above an experienced phenomenon, nothing beyond a spectacle.
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Of the few joys that had ever befallen Gordon Haddle’s stunted existence not one had, as yet, outlived the mayfly. It is true that he did nothing to prolong condemned existence of his happier moments -loving something obsessively one day, discarding it the next- and although they were short lived fascinations it could not be said that they were forgotten easily. Inhabiting his fluttering heartbeat as vividly and violently as an unrequited love, these passions became destabilized by their own furious momentum, like a train too big and fast for its tracks.
Gordon was not a collector, nor was he creative; his passing compulsions (periodic and desperate) took flight internally as lucid dreams that were chaotic and perverse. His most recent series of dreams took the form of foxhunts –heroic mêlées in which Gordon was both fox and hunter, whose fated strides would have him meet himself in a fit of blood and glory. The abject terror of the fight propelled Gordon’s dowdy heart into a pulsing beat, night after night.
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The transient nature of art today, its tendency towards the temporary and expendable is, unsurprisingly, deeply rooted in western modernity and contemporary art history. The provenance of such ideas can be traced to conceptualism of the late 1950’s and particularly to the coining of the term ‘Happenings’ by Allan Kaprow in 1959. Kaprow’s Happenings took the form of orchestrated events in which the viewer was physically implicated into the work. They were seen as a denouncement of the notion of the artist as commanding genius and as an attempt to transfer the position of artistic empowerment to that of the viewer or participant. Taking similar ideas as its impetus, the Fluxus movement of the early 1960’s delivered, to an increasingly sceptical audience, quirky, enigmatic performances seeped in the absurd and arbitrary. What underpinned such movements, putting aside the tenuous critique of capitalism to which Fluxus’ main man George Maciuna’s professed to adhere, is an indispensable connection to play.
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It was real bloody late, a Friday I think but that doesn’t matter. I sat in me favorite chair, reclined to the perfect angle. Not sure what exactly that angle is neither, but it’s probably around the 45 degree mark. Thing kinda finds itself there now anyway. There’s a click that hits the end of your finger, kinda like crackin a knuckle or clicking your jaw. I guess the old thing has become a part of my anatomy, just as much as any other damn part now anyhow, so its fitting that it feels like a joint popping. Anyways, so I’m just sitting there, just woke up from a real cracker, feeling more tired than when I drifted off and just lighting my last cigarette of my second pack of the day, when Martha storms in without so much as a knock.
“Sat in that stinkin fuckin chair again Gordy?” she yelled in her usual brash, indignant tone. “My god what a sorry sight you are.”
“Yeh well, what of it? There’s more happenin in here than any of those dumb shit-holes you hang out in.”
“Oh I’m sure there is Gord, like the pissin foxes of yours and those bleedin magic specs!”
“I never said they were magic! Sorry if I don’t feel like I need a barrel full of cheap wine to feel good.”
“Feel good! Oh sure, you feel good do you? That’s why you do nothing but moan huh? And that’s why you feel the need to live like this. In your little fuckin bubble! Yeh you feel good alright Gordon, as good as I do pissed-out-me-ed at least.”
“It ain’t the gettin pissed that I object to Mar, it’s the cuttin corners. There’s no easy route to progression and success you know. There’s rules to comply to, there’s structures in place that you’ve got to adhere to and there’s boundaries to cross. Walls to climb and stuff. Well… If you’re searchin out there that is. Although I’d be reluctant to say that you were searchin at all Mar. Ha, searchin in the trousers of all those scummy bloody men maybe. Aye, or searchin at the bottom of a bottle of fuckin vino de la crappo!”
“And what would you have me do Gordon? Sit on my ass all day and sleep? No ta Dad. You can keep your crazy fantasies to yourself. I wanna play, to have a bit of fun is what I want.”
“Aye, and you’ll have fun en-all Mar, but I’ve said it once and I’ll keep sayin it. You’ll never be as free out there as you will in your own head. There’s no substitute for your imagination my love and out there there’ll always be some bastard controllin ya. Its what they call subjugation Martha.”
“Fuckin subja-what? Well whatever it is, it’ll do for me.”
And then she was gone.
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Play should be considered inseparable from artistic practice. In its broadest sense, it is synonymous with both evolutionary and cultural advances and is firmly nestled in the heart of the innovative and revelatory. For knowledge and discovery are often founded on experimentation and chance, two notions that refuse to be disassociated from plays ideological make-up. This placement must not be deemed to disregard plays purely visceral, naturalistic qualities, as it could never fully shake the inherent childlike implications that it unavoidably connotes. Perhaps an image of a child maniacally jumping around in a carefree manner, arms flailing, proudly grinning with milk white teeth, could act as a fitting analogy for plays binary attributes of the whimsical and the anarchic when placed in the context of art. Play is a point at which these otherwise dysfunctional polarities can coalesce in the fertile pools of the liberated imagination.
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Down the cement stairwell she stared at the doorman. Often short men, hairy and stocky, would turn up at Gordon’s flat looking for her. They would bind her wrists. She obeyed. Gordon, often sat in the adjacent room, heard in their voices the hollow jeers of conquest, their disregard for Martha as urgent and violent as their own self-hate. Desperate rhythms.
Gordon put the glasses on. At first nothing. Gripping the chair’s sagging face he lifted himself to his feet. His march stammering beneath him, ankle-deep in a tangled meadow of debris, Gordon traced the perimeter of the room, arriving sluggishly at the kitchen, dull with the early evening’s half-light. He sat. Through the wall the incessant thudding.
A break in the clouds let bright stems of light stream in through the window blinds, marking abstract shapes on the kitchen floor. A cool autumn’s breeze tickled Gordon’s skin; the blades of long-grass bickering energetically amongst themselves. The glasses had produced scenes before but none so vivid as now. Across the way was Martha, talking heatedly to her identical twin in the water’s reflective sheen, punctuating her persistent banter with over-arm lobs of rotten crab apples. From where he was sat Gordon couldn’t discern the expression on her face.
Without much hope of reaching the door, Gordon made his way across the room. Leaning against cupboards and appliances he staggered into the hallway, towards her bedroom, adjusting the crooked stance of the glasses with his arthritic right hand. The loud laughter and dull thumps had since become enigmatic whispers, carefully muted. He prodded the door open. Four leaden-footed men stood hunched above Martha; naked and grey, their anxious faces, her lifeless body.
She was squinting up at the sun, the light warm on her skin, allowing brittle smudges of colour to seep in through her eyelashes. As she wriggled sleepily on the grass Gordon noticed threads of pubic hair poking out the side of her shorts.
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What is play but distraction; Closing one’s eyes to imagine a sunny beach in the midst of bitter winter? In A Very Easy Death Simone de Beauvoir’s dying mother, whilst on eternity’s threshold, finds pleasure in the simple things; crosswords, reading, polite conversation with visiting acquaintances. With her gentile life as a happy, vivacious woman steadily receding into the past-tense, these pastimes anchored her to normality, routine and a time when she was ‘herself’. They are faith in action, and more than anything else, acts of rebellion against fate.
When all hope of recuperation is lost Madame de Beauvoir abandons the frivolities that had previously characterized her life. Having always lived life turned towards the outside world she suddenly became in-tune with her inner monologue for the first time. She abandoned the “ready-made phrases and the conventional gestures (that) had masked her real feelings”, becoming honest about her opinions in a way that unsettled those that knew her as a “retiring woman, so rarely named.” In declining to play anymore she became herself.
And so to art. Gallery openings, littered with literati, critics, booze and buzz, represent art world utopia; terribly self-conscious affairs in which assuming definite roles becomes as integral to the event as the art itself. From afar conversations can seem like one inane monologue after another, full of awkward pauses and self indulgent anecdotes. Personalities form categories, pieces of clothing; costumes. With vaguely Shakespearean connotations the gallery becomes the stage on which each of us portrays a distorted version of ourselves. But what if the art event itself refuses to play as expected? A scary thought springs to mind; the selves we hide may unexpectedly surface, revealing our inelegant characteristics, our desperate truths.