“Much is being made of the decision to include what the artist calls ‘reperformances’ in Abramović’s retrospective. To me, this debate is largely beside the point: If you believe in the sacred authenticity of the original, then by definition no redo could threaten it; if you think performance is always already meditated, then live bodies are as much a form of representation as any other. More interesting than whether reenactments are art-historically correct is what they are asked to do– whether they close down or open up the potentiality of performance.”
Lambert-Beatty, Carrie. “Against Performance Art.” ARTFORUM May 2010; 209.
touches (13)
duration (13 seconds)
number of opponents (6)
Cage III – Free Show. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Cosgrove Watt, P. A. Heaven, Everard Maynell, Pam Heath; partial animation; 35mm.; 65 minutes; black and white; sound. The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs.
“”
…
Q: Do you regard yourself as a Catholic novelist?
A: Since I am a Catholic and a novelist, it would seem to follow that I am a Catholic novelist.
Q: What kind of Catholic are you?
A: Bad.
Q: No, I mean are you liberal or conservative?
A: I no longer know what those words mean.
Q: Are you a dogmatic Catholic or an open-minded Catholic?
A: I don’t know what that means, either. Do you mean, do I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?
Q: Yes.
A: Yes.
Q. How is such a belief possible in this day and age?
A: What else is there?
Q: What do you mean, what else is there? There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materialism, Buddhism, Muhammadism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy.
A: That’s what I mean.
Q: To say nothing of Judaism and Protestantism.
A: Well, I would include them along with the Catholic Church in the whole peculiar Jewish-Christian thing.
Q: I don’t understand. Would you exclude, for example, scientific humanism as a rational and honorable alternative?
A: Yes.
Q: Why?
A: It’s not good enough.
Q: Why not?
A: This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “Scientific Humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e. God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and wouldn’t let go until God identified himself and blessed him.
Q: Grabbed aholt?
A: Louisiana expression.
“”
The new society offers few roots in the sense of truly enduring relationships. But it does offer more varied life niches, more freedom to move in and out of these niches, and more opportunity to create one’s own niche, than all earlier societies put together. It also offers the supreme exhilaration of riding change, cresting it, changing and growing with it– a process infinitely more exciting than riding the surf, wrestling steers, playing “knock hubcaps” on an eight-lane speedway, or the pursuit of pharmaceutical kicks. It presents the individual with a contest that requires self-mastery and high intelligence. For the individual who comes armed with these, and who makes the necessary effort to understand the fast-emerging super-industrial social structures, for the person who finds the “right” life pace, the “right” sequence of subcults to join and life style models to emulate, the triumph is exquisite.
Undeniably, these grand words do not apply to the majority of men. Most people of the past and present remain imprisoned in life niches they have neither made nor have much hope, under present conditions, of ever escaping. For most human beings, the options remain excruciatingly few.
This imprisonment must–and will– be broken. Yet it will not be broken by tirades against technology. It will not be broken by calls for a return to passivity, mysticism and irrationality. It will not be broken by “feeling” or “intuiting” our way into the future while derogating empirical study, analysis, and rational effort. Rather than lashing out, Luddite-fashion, against the machine, those who genuinely wish to break the prison-hold of the past and present would do well to hasten the controlled-selective-arrival of tomorrow’s technologies. To accomplish this, however, intuition and “mystical insights” are hardly enough. It will take exact scientific knowledge, expertly applied to the crucial, most sensitive points of social control.
But of course!-the feeling-out here at night, free, with the motor running and the adrenaline flowing, cruising in the neon glories of the new American night-it was very Heaven to be the first wave of the most extraordinary kids in the history of the world- only 15, 16, 17 years old, dressed in the haute couture of pink Oxford shirts, sharp pants, snaky half-inch belts, fast shoes- with all this Straight-6 and V-8 power underneath and all this neon glamour overhead, which somehow tied in with the technological superheroics of the jet, TV, atomic subs, ultrasonics- Postwar American suburbs-glorious world! and the hell with the intellectual bad-mouthers of America’s tailfin civilization… They couldn’t know what it was like or else they had it cultivated out of them-the feeling-to be very Superkids! the world’s first generation of the little devils- feeling immune, beyond calamity. One’s parents remembered the sloughing common order, War & Depression- but Superkids knew only the emotional surge of the great payoff, when nothing was a common any longer- The Life! A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very neon Renaissance-And the myths that actually touched you at that time-not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses, and Aeneas-but Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman, The Human Torch, The Sub-Mariner, Captain America, Plastic Man, The Flash-but of course! On Perry Lane, what did they think it was-quaint?-when he talked about the comic-book Superheroes as the honest American myths? It was a fantasy world already, this elector-pastel world of Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis in the suburbs. There they go, in the family car, a white Pontiac Bonneville sedan-the family car!-a huge crazy god-awful-powerful fantasy creature to begin with, 327 horsepower, shaped like twenty-seven nights of lubricious luxury brougham seduction-you’re already there, in Fantasyland, so why not move off your smug-harbor quilty-bed dead center and cut loose-go ahead and say it-Shazam!-juice it up to what it’s already aching to be: 327,000 horsepower, a whole superhighway long and soaring, screaming on toward… Edge City, and ultimate fantasies, current and future… Billy Batson and Shazam! and turned into Captain Marvel. Jay Garrick inhaled an experimental gas in the research lab…
