Goran Sergej Pristaš Exploded Gaze First edition published by Multimedijalni institut © 2018 by Goran Sergej Pristaš Multimedijalni institut ISBN 978-953-7372-46-0 — this book is a joint publication with the performance collective BADco., in collaboration with Drugo more A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the National and University Library in Zagreb under 001017853. — Skhole is a program-segment within the flagship Dopolavoro (Rijeka 2020 – European Capital of Culture) Zagreb, December 2018 Goran Sergej Pristaš Exploded Gaze Translated by Žarko Cvejić With an Afterword by Bojana Kunst Contents Acknowledgments — 9 1. Encounters “How do you work?” — 13 Of Animals and Artists — 16 Producing production — 22 Work, Non-work, Artwork — 32 The Institutions of Viewing — 37 interstice: Parenthesis on Responsibility — 46 2. The Exploded View Chrono-logics of Theatre — 51 Post-Hoc — 57 Literarisation — 69 Displacement — 74 Regime of Interests — 78 Operation — 84 Interruption of Myth — 88 Reconstruction — 91 interstice: On Translation — 96 3. “He is in the Orchestra Seats. He’s the Wise Man.” Cinematic Modes of Viewing — 103 Concerning the Image of the World — 107 Situation, Event — 112 A Paradox within a Paradox — 118 Indifference — 128 The Law of Energies and Interest — 138 Scene, Image, Plan — 146 Similitude — 163 Hieroglyph — 168 Objectification — 177 Up to Brecht and Cinema — 182 interstice: Breath — 189 4. Notes on Viewing Composites — 197 Ideal People — 209 Double Exposition/Exposure — 213 The Melting of Perspective — 220 Scheme — 224 The View from Matter — 235 interstice: A Few Looks... — 251 A Few Turns — 255 5. Appendix The Exploded View of Poetics — 269 afterword: Poetics of production — 283 Notes — 295 Works Cited — 303 Acknowledgments This volume of artistic notes emerged from a whole series of encounters and turns, involving both the people and artworks that are discussed in it. A number of people played an important part in its making, while numerous opportunities allowed me to record my insights whilst observing the world through their refraction in the theatre. Much of it was already defined in the early days of writing my master’s thesis on Denis Diderot’s thought under the supervision of Prof. Vjeran Zuppa at the Study of Literature programme, and years went by until those ideas were articulated and crystallised in collaboration with my invaluable partners: Pravdan Devlahović, Ivana Sajko, Tomislav Medak, Ana Kreitmeyer, Zrinka Užbinec, and Ivana Ivković. Much of what I write about in this book was named, imagined, or performed by them, in our shared adventure known as BADco. My sincere thanks to all of them. But, above all, neither this book nor any of my dramaturgies could have been made without my fascination with the artistic power of Nikolina Pristaš, whose last name at the time of writing the book’s first lines was Bujas. Her unique artistry made necessary all that is in here and there is nothing in the book that is not, one way or another, manifested in her body, thought, gaze, or performance. Along the way, I was supported by my dear friends Bojana Cvejić, Janez Janša, Aldo Milohnić, Ana Vujanović, Bojana Kunst, Karin Harrasser, Hannah Hurtzig, Ric Allsopp, Anders Paulin, and Isabel de Naverán. My thanks to all of them for their inspiration, criticism, and support! 9 Parts of the book were written during a residence at AZALA Space for Creation in Spain at the invitation of Idoia Zabaleta. Parts of the text have been published in journals including Performance Research, Maska, TkH, and Frakcija, as well as in books published by ArtEZ Press Arnhem, Azkuna Zentora Bilbao, BIT Teatergarasjen, Concordia University Montreal, Institut del Teatre Barcelona, les presses du réel Dijon, Multimedijalni Institut Zagreb, Skogen Goteborg, UNIARTS Helsinki, and BADco. Zagreb – my thanks to all of them! I would also like to thank all of my former and current students, with whom I had an opportunity to sharpen these reflections, which, I hope, stimulated their desire for the theatre. Finally, my thanks to Petar Milat, the adventurer who ultimately gave impetus to this book and turned it into the object you’re holding in your hands, and special thanks to my translator Žarko Cvejić and proof-reader and friend Stephen Zepke for their comments and a job well-done. Without all of you, all of this would still be a crude matter. 10 1. Encounters “How do you work?” “It’s simple. I get up in the morning and start working.” (Cage 1974, 130) This simple answer given by John Cage in an interview for Croatian theatre journal Prolog implies something complex: artists’ working time is all the time. But it also suggests that the artist works even when he’s not labouring. Interpreted from the perspective of visual artist Mladen Stilinović’s notorious manifesto “Praise to Laziness”, the states of “indifference, staring at nothing, non-activity, impotence, sheer stupidity, a time of pain, futile concentration”, all these “virtues of laziness” are important factors in making art (2013, 335). During the late 1980s, when socialist systems were beginning to collapse, Stilinović found it problematic that artists still pursued production rather than purposeless work. Unlike Western artists, Stilinović argued, “Artists from the East were lazy and poor because the entire system of insignificant factors did not exist. Therefore they had time enough to concentrate on art and laziness. Even when they did produce art, they knew it was in vain, it was nothing.” (2013, 335) 13 Simply browsing through interviews with freelance artists from the last twenty years shows that the most common answer to questions concerning the modality of artistic work is “I’m working on several projects.” Bojana Kunst claims that the “project”, or its “projective temporality is the main mode of production in today’s art and culture in general. It is also influencing how cultural or artistic value is articulated nowadays, and how, for example, contemporary art and culture are articulating their right to be supported, financed and presented in public.” (Kunst 2011, 16) This constantly projective temporality focusses on the production of the new “new”, but this “new” never becomes “now”, a part of the present. It’s either in progress or it’s operating in the future anterior. The decisive and articulating marker of projective temporality is the deadline, which divides the time of production as the time before the deadline, from the time of the completion of project. But the time of completion begins just before the deadline and stretches into a time of undead work, depending on the deadliness of the mortal limit. The time of completion is extended by a pseudo-performative interpretation by a performance studies scholar, or by some final reworking of the artwork done by the artist herself. Cosmetic or surgical corrections adjust the zombie-face of the endless, deadless or undead project in realms of publishing, documentation or archiving. The paradox of the project is that it exists as long as it is incomplete, but its endless completion is its mode of execution. The project takes the form of proto-work, and has a mythical time-frame defined by “undeadness” because it gains an “uncanny vitality” through too much 14 pressure. In Eric Santner’s words “too much” pressure “produces internal alienness that has a particular sort of vitality and yet belongs to no form of life” (Santner 2001, 36). This vitality, the project’s “throwness amidst enigmatic messages” (2001, 36-7) is what constitutes its mythical structure, what transforms the dead project into a promise of artwork. Or rather, the project as a constitutive act of the future and the ideological structure of its temporality inaugurate the drama of legitimating an artistic work in public. Detached from any results, dislocated in the abstract domain of meeting time plans and financial constructions, the artist’s work is transformed into labour out of necessity. This kind of labour connects artistic existence with cultural production, but the key to its valorisation does not reside in a work of art whose lifetime might exceed the process of production.01 Instead, valorisation stems from the direct connection between the artist’s labour and its consumption, which takes place in the market itself. The project does not take place in a public sphere, in an agora where individual artists, institutions, and spectators might come together. Rather, the project is a process that acquires its “exhibition value” (Benjamin 2008, 25) within an institution, regardless of its level of structuring, whose main social task is ultimately exhibition and exchange, that is, the market. 15 Of Animals and Artists “My project is a rendezvous I give myself on the other side of time, and my freedom is the fear of not finding myself there, and of not even wanting to find myself there any longer.” — Jean Paul Sartre (1966, 73) But in order to speak from the position of an artist about encountering or finding others, or a community, at the end of your own project’s time, a project that primarily concerns the production of forms of life rather than a process of self-formation, it is necessary to assume that your fantastic idea always has its ideal form at the beginning of the process. For, as Marx argues in Capital, “what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.” (2007, 198) Social distribution, however, has often placed the artist on the temporal side of the project, which Marx attributed to animals, and indeed analogies with animals 16 are not uncommon in narratives idealising work.