Deborah True Matias Viegener, Dave Burns & Austin Young Peter Bond Ayssar Arida Johnny Golding
Rosa Ainley Philippa Beale Helen Kerwan & Jane Madsen Eileen Simpson Sarah Ross
Attitude
Rendering the Town and Country Dialectic Through Performativity.[Jetzteit]---time now-------------- -right here, right now
The present and the self is the performance artists’ stock in trade. I will proceed with this notion. I will work the dialectic of town and country using the model of performativity and the ideas of the self, the present and the past and future. In doing this I present a performative reading of some of the works by Walter Benjamin. It is his attitude that I most admire. Performatives according to J. L. Austin (1) transmit , a promise, which can either be true or false, to the receiver. I use receiver as a word broadly to include an audience through to a television set with multiple channels. This is important because in operating on the lines of performatives a new revealing emerges. Alan Read (2) describes theatre as a forum. Performatives, when operating in a theatrical sense can potentially be used to reify and ratify. This is its ideology and is a very ancient concept.
This model can at least generate ways in which concepts and arguments can be understood. Furthermore the idea of performatives can be applied to a branch of philosophy that discusses time and place together as spatial. This is possible and compatible to performatives via the mutual ground of proxemics and kinesics and I attempt that here. This is why the attitude of Walter Benjamin to experience life as a recorder, collector and collator of fragmentary images becomes important; for Walter Benjamin was concerned with the relationship with his self and the present, the true historical moment and a critical account of the future through a belief that history with its obsession with progress leads to what he called a messianic cessation. This is a cynical argument but true nevertheless. I argue that theatricalisation; here used in a figurative sense and not in a metaphoric sense, used correctly places a constructive energy upon the present.
Benjamin celebrated a plethora of ideas including getting positively lost or travelling down a one-way street, the fragment, the passage, the arcade, glass in architecture and the act of the flâneur. A curious mixture that I will celebrate here in the form of a moment or moments in time. They are also memories of time, or memories of moments in time that make a mark on me as opposed to no other. Town and country as a performative; which by nature works according to the concept of proximities and kinesics or things moving in time and space, sets up a new and playful dialectic. This is made easier in an age of digital connection.
Benjamin did not have the experience of information technology, apart from his filing cabinets, and this change in the notion of the present is conducive to Benjaminian thought. He did however predict an ever increasing and intensifying engagement with the dialectics of inside and outside. This in turn can be equated with another duality of public and private. In this present moment we are obsessed with glass in the form of building and in the form of the lens. The in-between, that is neither inside or outside is an increasing concern and a fascinating way to interpret the theory of material history that Benjamin delivered. In a classical sense town and country are, like outside and inside, prime dualities, they are either one thing or the other. In a post modern sense they are no longer mere dualities; a whole other sense is developed. It is within this sense that I refer to liminality or the existence of the in-between and by discussing past, present and future, of which the latter is a big speculative question, a performative and the task in hand. The town and the country are in-between states.
Liminality makes what is happening in this time and space a playing field of discovery. If the prime duality, such as the Wigs and the Tories, is an historical reflection; a version of a parity that is not redundant, then the in-between becomes not only a matter for introspection but also a matter of physicality and of space and time.Glass is liquid.
Town and country merge to be replaced by another kind of space, be it virtual, cyber or physical. One thing that is certain however is that they are corporeal. Our time is unique and there is no reason to think that the notion of town and country will not be relegated to the introspection of post-modernism and late capitalism along with countless other metanarratives such as the academy and the book. Town and country do not exist except as mythological speeches or performatives or metanarratives.
Town Mouse, Town Fox, Country Fox, Country Mouse.
The mouse and the fox need to be respected wherever they are in space and time.Fredric Jameson identifies [an]… entire contemporary social system [that] has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live the perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in some way or other to preserve. (3)
I write performatively, I don’t care if my performance is bad. Performance is not damaged by either good or bad performance. Performance lives for the moment; it too is based upon corporeal space. Our obsession with performance mirrors our obsession with the now—I want it now—to take away---instant this and instant that. The corporeal space of performance is unique in its double-barrelled perspective of both the performer and the audience. Together they make performatives or generate performativity through the double-barrelled action of performance. One barrel contains the performer and the other audience. It is however triple barrelled because the audience operate as an exchange, not only with the performer but with each other as well. Like the audience I am using the performer as a figurative and not a metaphoric device. This piece is about audience response only when its party makes it a text.
The performative of town and country is schitzhophrenic and paranoiac, it starts with a binary opposition and ends with a pastiche, which Jameson argues, in the essay Postmodernism and Consumer Culture, is one of the most distinctive forms of the postmodern as condition. Town and country are becoming one in a dangerous moment when centres can be anywhere that we can lay our cables and pipes or set up our satellite.
* * *
Walter Benjamin claimed that the present moment will be subject to a traumatic loss and perhaps because of this, history is obsessed with progression but actually the true history is that of the moment in time lost. Benjamin called this the lost aura. Repeat is never repeat, the performative model ensures this. Benjamin also said that the present will be a combination of both lost and remembered historical moments; of the future, he said, would be redemption, not reconciliation but ultimately, to reiterate, what he called a messianic cessation.
Here I draw parallels with the ability of performance, or theatre for that matter, to focus on dead moments in time, a quality that Roland Barthes compared to the physical photograph and what the French allude to when describing the orgasm. I am inspired by a particular reading of Lacan that outside of schizophrenia being a disease, of which he fully acknowledged, it is very much a mechanism for life. Jameson applied this to the postmodern as a condition. However in letting schizophrenia free fall we must remember, like modern day channel hopping, fragments are part of a constituted whole; we need to know what this whole might be and the more fragments one assembles in real time the better. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama Benjamin compares the fragment to the components of an Ancient Roman mosaic of which the true whole is lost in time. Performance is concerned with the present, little deaths in time that constitute that moment, which in turn is indexed to a decision, observation or treaty. This is why in Ancient Greek society performance was formulated into a theatre, not unlike our present operating theatre of theatre of war. Theatricalised performance yields unity of consensus through the waxing of the problematic. Theatricalised performance exists in the spatial dimension of time that is a fusion of past, present and a speculative conceit of the unobtainable future or the unknown. In the fragments I am about to express I will attempt to assemble moments that would otherwise be lost in the corporeality of the self.
Antonin Artaud maintained that theatre should contain everything in war, madness crime and love.* * *
The Hound and Horse
My Hound likes running, it’s very tempting to want to see how he would twist and turn in symphony with the hare on a hunt. But on the other hand I am more familiar with my meat sanitised and in polystyrene trays wrapped in cling film. My shire horses come in glistening ceramic under tiny leather straps. My hound will not be allowed to hunt the hare by law; its history is reflected in this change.
Collection of the writer
words and images (Orna-mental) This is a city shire horse, not one of the ones that the multi national company Whitbread’s use as a nostalgic comforter and marketing device but one used by hobbyists to complete the picture of a small replica horse and cart. It is like the one that Constable, the great rural landscape artist depicted. It is like the one that is depicted in The Haywain with a peasant standing by. We must not forget that Constable was despised for his picture of toil and graft.
One thing that the town and the country have in common is toil and graft, the origin of our word toilet. In the centre of Leicester City is an American style shopping mall, including basement food court, called The Shires. The countryside pollutes the city in the same way that the city pollutes the countryside. The countryside is not a romantic tool; it is the working of the land. Progressive history tells us about the combine harvester, literature however tells us about making love in a cornfield. Can you still make love in a cornfield without being shot? My city dog shits in the park and I need to pick it up or I may be accused of anti-social behaviour or I may get a £1000 fine.
* * *
Obsessions with a Shire Horse (2004)
Going shopping in the shires today
A spanking concrete edifice
Spanking new, slapping concrete morphic shires
In the latest ceramic glazes
Don’t care if it crazesGlazed over street to amaze.
The pain of glass
Inside out we marvel at our nature to conquer nature
But we don’t
Along comes an aeroplane
Bound for
Disturbance
Of the urbanLeather, soil and fur
Presentation in lasting ceramic
Takes the duster and detergents
To new and dizzy heights of Subservience.
Oh how Constable does it for me
Makes me feel
Comfortable
Mental piece, over
Or on the table
Or in the StableredruM,Murder of a horse
My student poses a question:
How long will it B B4 WE see a live killing ….a human being dead…..the scene of a perfect murder, the audience would not believe they were seeing a killing, SUCH IS THE CULTURE OF FAKING IT.Wish list:
a) Town = Astro turf
Country = Post office or other type of convenience store
b) Country = Fresh air
Town = Post office or other type of convenience storeThe Art of Blood and Sports
It’s interesting to note at this point that the hunt is not a competitive sport; it is about a rite, a ritual. Ritual is subject to change only through the necessity of profound development.
They say it’s the blue blood that hunts with dogs for sport. I thought that blood was always red. We have a love hate relationship with blood. I want to celebrate blood.
The performance artist Mark McGowen ate a fox to protest against our pre-occupation with fox hunting or not. Hundreds of people die unnecessarily, it’s these problems that we should be addressing, he claims and I agree. He eats the fox roasted with potatoes and brussel sprouts.
I am writing in London, the metropolis, the spectacle, the phantasmagoria.
I once had a friend from Northern Ireland, protestant, not catholic. Londonderry, not Belfast. His soul was in England and it was futile to take that away, on the contrary fertile for him. His perspective was unique; he was attracted to the big city, the secular city. The city is merely a different cultural imaginary. The emotions surface in the city, the emotions surface in the country, we should take care to acknowledge the theatre of both. The summer Fete in France hosts naked dancing boys and so do the night clubs of the city.Town and Country Blood
Franko B will give us his own blood in the form of the real. His recent piece at The South London Gallery was radiating. It was an image that for me represented life in danger of fading, near the edge. He calmly sat up, sat for a while with his feet dangling over the edge (of the table). With the aid of his trusted and qualified assistants walked out of sight for a short sleep. Careful, controlled, dignified. This life was not still; it was pumping with love for his public that came to see the magnificent Tableaux Vivant of the city in what was once the village of Camberwell. In using the phrase tableaux I want to include the audience, the history, the geography, the social dimensions, the sense of event, the venue, the architecture. The blood of the hunt is an aggressive and angry release; Franko’s blood featured acts produce a gentle and persuasive reminder of ourselves. We may find it useful to see Franco’s action as tribute, as floral, as a horn of plenty delivered on a shining white table interrupted with pure, unadulterated pulsating blood.
* * *
The combine harvester is financed by the city.
* * *
Sex in the city
Sex in the country* * *
Franco let his own blood run for a while in a carefully staged performance, just long enough for us to comprehend the image, long enough for us to accept the consequences of him continuing for too long.
Afterwards the sheet lay on the table that shone from the light box beneath it. Its table’s slender angled iron legs reminded me of stiletto-healed shoes. My projection was of earth and light supporting life. The four metal stiletto’s conducted the light to the earth and thus completing the image as regulatory control. Franko left us with the table covered with delicate cloth of vivid fresh blood. The image compelled us to stay; the blood sodden cloth was in danger of sticking to the toughened safety glass warmed by the heat of the lights In their light box. We were ushered out.* * *
Self
To be absolutely truthful there is someone where I am with a Rod Stewart hair cut—funny how you know what I mean by this example of a mythical speech. How do I square this? Roots to die for. Where will I find this in the annals of history? This is material history, or proletariat history and it weaves a different kind of cultural imaginary. We can bracket Rod and call it the glam rock era, post John Peel; here he is again, still kicking in 2004. And 2005 rolls on----Peace and Love in 2005 is the message on my 2004 Christmas card as I contemplate my happy holiday … as I contemplate my happy winter solstice.Walter Benjamin said:
Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. (4)Henrick Ibsen said:
Never in any circumstances shall I belong to a party that has majority on it’s side… ….The minority is always right; that is to say, the minority is leading the way towards some point at which the majority has not arrived. (5)Walter Benjamin said:.. History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but filled by the presence of the now [Jetzteit] ….. (6)
Location, locomotion, locution
Please Drive Carefully Through our Village
In an area known as murder mile, on a bridge across a canal in London’s East End is this statement. This is not postmodern irony. Of course it is a village, Haggerston village, why shouldn’t it be? Local government is distrusted by national government. The village is in denial by remote control. It is our obsession with the idea and ideology of the lens that presents one type of glassy vision, ultimately one idea. The lens, which starts as a circular physic is changed into a frame. Foucault warned us of the panoptican as means to central control yet we still ignorantly re-visit it through our obsession with surveillance.It is not a Race
Signage is a form of control in itself. Both of the above signs are by the street artist Banksy; messages like the two signalled here are his response, the artist’s response in responsibility. Rarely are they removed. Banksy knows about site and location. It is not a race is, like the previous example written on another bridge, this time in the very busy corridor to the East End at Shoreditch.I am at the start of my journey; usually I am on the 55 bus, up and down Old Street. Upper deck is best; birds eye views and more adventurous types. Old Street is not a one-way street but even if it were I would still carry on. I lose myself. It is one of the main arteries of London and so it has many distributaries and tributaries.
Another Banksy street work is based on a still from the film Pulp Fiction. Performers John Travolta and Samuel Jackson appear as a black and white stencilled rendition holding bananas, in yellow, as guns. It has been in a very prominent place for at least ten years and has been refurbished and maintained, such is the preciousness of the work. It can be found near the Old Street roundabout, the east flank above a parade of shops that includes a costume jewellery emporium and 2 kebab shops next to each other
Soon, as railway bridges in London are refurbished they will be subject to surveillance cameras. This method of control is another example of a gradual move to make the streets private, not public. Most Banksy paintings remain, they some how survive the graffiti remover. He tailors the work to the site. For example in the City of London there are smaller and more discrete works. Any other tactic would not be tolerated. His images may use subversive practice but they entertain, they are carefully proximate in an ever increasingly tightened domain.
* * *
There’s no rush, were all heading to the same destination
This statement was heard in a country market town by a pie seller. (2005)
* * *
Graffiti art is the material of history. Some of the earliest examples survive at the former Chatham naval dockyards. Workers, of which there were thousands, expressed themselves, their sentiments and feelings by scribing on the walls. This is literature of the highest order. It’s us, the individual who lives the present moment. History is dead, the future counts, Let the Dead Bury the Dead was one of Karl Marx’s finest repeat declarations. (7)
The street is becoming no longer public; the purification of the last bastion of free will is being violated by bigger and bigger advertisements. As I write, one such hoarding in Hoxton, London near the Old Street roundabout is huge, but it is not the biggest. The biggest is probably in Aldgate, London. The Hoxton advertisement covers the curved front elevation of a former bank building of which the lower floors are currently home to the pioneering Foundry Bar. This hoarding yields more revenue than do the tenants that were housed in the building, it is also easier to maintain no doubt. One big central corporate cheque.Rembrandt pioneered corporeality in terms of art and cultural critique. Not only did he make self-portraits at intervals throughout his life he depicted corporate bodies of another type. This was the corporation, the institution; paintings such as the Anatomy Lesson draw our attention to the collective. As is well known Rembrandt brought us recognition of the space of the corporeal, and that we are merely bodies in time. Along Old Street I find the graffiti on the old Magistrates court cleansed which offers a clean palette for more identities to be stated. I am here EINE declares. This street artist is clear about his message: EINE, his name. Loss is replaced by the gain of subversion, my mark, you will value it in the street; you will take note of who I am, a real person, as no-one else gives a toss. Incidentally his work, his name is also carefully placed, it impacts, scale and placement, proportion, typography and colour add a strange formality. It is a one-word item, a brand that echoes branding that the corporeal body must have.
My history based on Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism, It too is the one of the flâneur, the stroller. My vision is unique, individual and lost. My history changes, it is not written in stone, if it were it would chip and erode. I use paint, it can be painted over, I use digital and electronic medium. You will need special machines to access my data. You may not have that machine. Future archaeologists will need to re-invent my machine to decode my history.
Its 6.15pm and its time for my dose of the countryside, The Archers. Here I can hear about what goes on in the country. Do country dwellers get a dose of the city through Eastenders at 7pm?
The street is gradually becoming longer, apparently if you imagine an area from London to Lisbon then that’s how much rainforest is being destroyed in South America every year. Usually starting with the road, then from the road flanks of developments erode more of the forest, that’s how it starts. Roads and streets have a lot to answer for. I thought we were supposed to be lone workers, getting what we want from our home machine? Longer streets are easier to survey.
Soon you will need a ticket to enter the street, contemporary corporeality creates bigger and bigger liminal spaces, they are being grabbed. The sizes of atria these days cushion this effect. This new rendition of liminal space is a hybrid between the public and private. Bloated and overgrown foyers, nature under glass, floral tributes, tropical temperate plants in carefully controlled climatic zones. This still has a touch of the renaissance mannerist, heralding mans superiority over nature. No dogs allowed. You have been fired, leave the building by 12 o’clock midday today, your desk drawer contents will be forwarded to you by courier. A security guard will escort you out of the building.
Before the moment you pass the threshold of a public house a security guard sporting the latest ear nose and throat electronics looks you up and down, your bag is searched. Wrong kind of trainers, wrong type of underwear, boots and underwear only? Private members club, wrong smell? Its rubber nite 2 nite.
If I go, as I sometimes do to the Nelsons head pub in Burnham village then I immediately think of Old Street. Nelson travelling down the M11 , Cambridge way, by coach no doubt. Through the watercress beds of Hackney, its moist marshes were perfect for this, watercress the great digestive. The reason why Burnam village reminds me of Old Street is that two pubs, one on each side of Old Street, east of the roundabout, called Nelson this and Nelson that mark his passage, to the admiralty no doubt. Except that one of them is now called The Aquarium!!! Named after the great marsh fishes of Hackney???…….pity. The main point is that if you want to eat in the country you need to book a week in advance and they do not allow dogs, except in the part that is draughty, scraping chair sounds and a picture of the local gamekeepers and their guns, dogs and dead pheasants above the mentalpiece..
In Old street you can quickly pop into FCKF (Fried Chicken, Kebab and Fish).
Another combine harvester is purchased by the Archers, no work in the village. The English seaside town cannot buy its own fish. The coffee in Quito is lousy, they export the best beans. And there appears to be more than one gay in the village. I have since learnt that the reason that there were two Nelson pubs as Old Street Nelson Gateways because the landlord of the one set up the other for his son. This is an example of how to make performative connections, however the Aquarium remains a trifle enigmatic [ but I can equate this to the dionysic Hoxton, London village night life].* * *
How long will it be before Oxford street becomes a corridor covered in glass?
It will become another liminal space like the Nicholas Grimshaw spectacle of the Eurostar terminal platforms. No dogs, mobile phones to be switched off, no evil, no smoking.--- Rubber shoes only--- No hoods!!!! No baseball caps. Graffiti artists will be paint balled to death preferably. This all began with the lorry drivers’ spy in the cab.Self
The Fox & the Box (2004)
The Renaissance began in Italy
And spread swiftly
And we manner thee
To conquer the Animaly
But that’s when it all went wrong
For the Greeks of ancient
Made a society
Where the animal became piety
As the inspiration for understanding
Apollo the wolf God
Lyceum
The Company of WolvesI can just imagine
The most beautiful
Spectrum
From blind bat
To sloth
Who only comes down to the ground to shit
To classification
Of the senses
And emotionThese were the Greeks ancient
Not ones to dwell on their
Problems, what problems
You see
But the solving of them.
The Fox is sly
Slyness is the Fox
That is its boxI once
Saw a Fox
In the middle of
The 5.30 pm
Rush hour
On Old Street
It dived into
Saint Luke’s Church* * *
A Robin
A Robin
Once followed me as I circumnavigated
Bunhill fields
Off the City Road, London
(South)… every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (8)
Performativity is concerned with the moment to be disseminated. Performance was designed to instigate a theatre, it does, but arena and event; here, again, used figuratively must make it controlled. I can only speculate upon town and country, I can offer no solutions but I can look at the problem through my own unique perspective just like anyone else can. It is not a dualistic argument but one that concerns spatial philosophy. Antonin Artaud insisted that theatre must be at the centre of its audience. This is why the works of Banksy compel and why the spectators of the performances of Franko B take on the role of witnesses. The centre is not the city nor is it the country; the centre is an empowerment. This empowerment is born out of people who are its subject. Therefore people create their own centres and Jameson predicted that these centres can be anywhere, for example we no longer need be proximate to the river for degrees of sanitation, transport and water consumption. We get our fairy tales from Disney and our water from Evian. Where is our centre? Is it the home, the university, Aol Time Warner, Orange, Nike, the Athenaeum club on Pall Mall or Sheila down the hairdressers?
Benjamin practised a philosophy that based itself upon the fragment as part of a lost whole. A circle or a sphere is a whole, and pivotally the subject of the Ancient Greek playing area. Each fragment in its own right is also some sort of whole. If the circle or sphere is not humanistic, but lets say machine driven then it becomes a virtual control. Hitler tried virtual control, to name only one example from modern history. Information technology gives us the opportunity to create, through performativity, a virtual theatre. It is important to emphasise and reiterate that the centre is the audience not the performer if we use the Artaudian model, which I believe, we should. This is why graffiti, although I will call it street art is paramount, particularly, and my best example here, Banksy because his work resonates with memorable permanence in my rushed and temporal city life.
A theatrical situation such as that created by Banksy will involve the audience as centre. And one can imagine here the point in which art itself turned against the traditions of the theatrical idiom when Michael Freid’s Art and Objecthood became hugely influential. This is another example of how the past needs to factor into the present. For the denial of the real, people and fabrications, caused a rift that Michael Fried identified as dangerous to exclusivity. He was correct in many respects; he acknowledged the requirements of Duchamp’s observations about commodiousness. Freid did however project a cynical argument that has stuck until only now -- right here---right now----because performative critique has begun through and despite an habitual use of performance as a very generalised descriptor; high performance companies and high performance cars and so forth, can we begin to introspect and find out, once again about the epistemology of performance and theatre.
The town and country debate needs to be in a state of theatre for we are about to step into Jameson’s predictions that centres will not be about people or audiences but about organisations that in effect are monitories and outside the jurisdiction of the people as a whole. And it would take Christ to turn these tables. The liminal spaces outside of these centres: and I might add here that the Greek proximate for theatre event was as beautifully cited as Europe’s Medieval cathedrals, are dissipated, fragmented and are being grabbed to such an extent that soon their will, like the ozone layer, be none left. I do not wish to end with a rendition of a romantic image of a theatre, for that has been persisted for too long. I will end by highlighting the space of corporeality and of liminal space. According to Rembrandt this can either embody the collective or it can embody the individual. .Given that anthropology tells us that we are entirely tribal and that we want brothers and sisters to survive then a logical conclusion as well as an affirmative critique of these two prime dualities deduced from the historical Rembrandt, is that the collective prevails. It then becomes an issue of the nature of this collective. I ultimately argue for a collective in the form of performative critique in the purist form thus outlined. If we do not have this then the hallowed ground, or liminal space between dualities and centres that Benjamin alluded to using the effects of glass and steel to make shopping arcades. Knowledge, in the age of information technology needs to act as the historical equivalent of what the Ancient Romans called the conduit.
Horse and huntsman rider, ceramic figurine sitting on a windowsill.
Photograph by the writer from the collection of the writer.
Footnotes
1 How to do Things With Words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955; Oxford, New York. Oxford University Press, 1962 and 1972.
---Austin writes mainly about speech acts but he is apt to point out that speech acts are only part of performative actions. Austin’s emphasis on words and speech illuminate and provide examples and models for the potential of other actions; such as the action of the body and of wearing clothes for example, in order to qualify the usefulness of performative critique.2 Alan Read, The Theatre and Everyday life, An Ethics of Performance; London, Routledge. 1993.
3 Jameson: Postmodernisn and Consumer Society; 1984. In Postmodern Culture, Hal Foster (ed.); London, Pluto Press 1985. p125
4 Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History XIV in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zorn, London, Pimlico Press, 1999. p253
5 This quotation written in 1882 appears in Ibsen’s stage play An Enemy of the People. I include it because by definition the minority is ultimately the individual. Ibsen wrote in this play, about how an individual is lost amongst and overpowered by a corrupt community. A collective, such as an audience has the potential to disarm this process. Ibsen wrote honestly and directly about his time in great detail, mainly about the individual and their relation to society as a whole. The level of the naturalists’ enquiry of this period forms an historical distance that can further endorse arguments for performatives and the anti-progressive slant to Benjaminian approaches to historical analysis.
6 Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History XIV in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zorn, London, Pimlico Press, 1999. p252-253
7 Mark Neocleous gives an excellent account of Marx’s use of this expression in an article that applies Benjaminium theory. It is called Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, Marxism and the Politics of Redemption and appears in Radical Philosophy 128, November/December 2004.
8 Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History V in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zorn, London, Pimlico Press 1999. p247
Peter Bond
Artist and Writer, multidisciplinary practice. Recent work includes a performance piece that deals with text as an object that becomes a subject the moment it is released in front of an audience. This work attempts to acknowledge audiences as a major, if not prime, concern of performance. The work also tackles the problematic of performance as a ubiquitous word/idea and uses anthropological models to offer an explanation of its unique language/capabilities and quality as an art form. The work was launched at the Ecology Pavilion in Bow, London last year and subsequently played at Nottingham Trent University and The Cochrane Theatre, London.
A prime theoretical concern aside from this lies within the problematic of performance and theatre or theatre and fine art practice. In 2003 a book called Locating Performance, Performance Related Text (Peter Bond ISBN - 0-9543802-O-7) was produced that discusses all aspects of performance, its relation to theatre, to fine art practice, but, above all, its quality of economy. In all Locating Performance is an eclectic mix of musings on and meanings of performance.
Before concentrating on performance and live art research and teaching at Central Saint Martins he worked as a painter, both exhibiting his own paintings and operating in the mega orbit of commercial painting for theatre, film and television.
The latter represented a turning point in his career when he just could not bear the idea of so much of his work remaining as ephemera that would exist only in the memory of the other! This however was a departure that he has recently returned to in performance art pieces.
The result is to radically analyse performance and theatre as a formal discipline both as artform in live time and in documentation. At present a new project called - Aftermath, The Artists Breath and Other Uses For the Ethereal - will look at performance as a permanent image of an effect alongside other issues such as documentation of performance, its relationship to new media, performance as moving image and its commodified values. He still continues to paint and use photography as well as performance for video to engage in current debates and continue to explore message and meaning as well as commentary through all kinds of creative media.
