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"To learn truly what each thing is, is a
matter of uncertainty."
( Democritus 500 BCE)
Democritus, the laughing philosopher, suggested that the
soul is a form of fire which animates the human body and
that pleasure along with self control was the goal of life.
His statement that we know nothing truly about anything, but
that for each of us, opinion is an influx conveyed by the
influx of idols from without is at the heart of the evening
of performances by Winnipeg artist Grant Guy.
The dual performances of Photogenic and Lost
are the mature and penetrating works of this veteran
performance artist. Guy's work has always questioned the
performance - theater hybrid, but if the viewer is willing
to accept the traditional definition of performance art as
visual art that borrows from the area of theater, without
narrative or plot but rather a central concept or core that
is explored through the performance, there is no doubt that
this is performance art at its most elegant and engaging.
In performance art the artist's own body or self is a
part of the work. Guy is the master puppeteer replacing
traditional actors with puppets which are, in the case of
Photogenic, rectangular photographs. His puppets
claim a historical connection with the Modernist artist Paul
Klee, who created reductive, whimsical and spontaneous
puppets for his son. Guy's photo-puppets avoid the actor's
sense of authority and the problems of compromise and
collaboration of the artistic vision. The objects possess
the final authority.
The evening begins with a seamlessly edited video
montage. The video script is a logical extension of Guy's
Cowboy Tapes, which were about the American and
Canadian psychosis with regard to heroes and mythmaking. It
is a fifteen minute preface, providing context. At first the
voices are a cacophony of monologues. Eventually the frenzy
pares down to singular voices, accompanied by images of fire
and fireworks. "I am not the victim", "John Dillinger", and
the phrase "good looking" fight for supremacy with dictums
like "The very first rule...you must be photogenic" and the
tongue-in-cheek "Honey - got a match?". After an alarm clock
goes off, the artist rises from behind a 2 1/2' x 2 1/2' x 2
1/2' cube and raises the curtain on the cube. The
confessional is ready, ritual candles are lit, and
Photogenic begins.
Dressed in neutral mechanic's coveralls, Guy places a
white face mask over his face and begins to manipulate black
and white photographs within the cube. The audience
encounters images from the True Detective genre.
There is a photographic image of a corpse. It is John
Dillinger's body in the morgue. For the artist, Dillinger is
the ultimate; a type of Errol Flynn character who possessed
a sense of theatricality - and while it's true that he
killed a lot of people, he was polite in his robberies. But
corpses eventually turn to dust, and many in the audience
will not recognize the stark, reductive images of a bygone
era.
A criminal is someone who has violated the law, but an
outlaw is someone who is outside the law. According to the
writer Tom Robbins, while the criminal may be photogenic,
the outlaw is always photogenic. Mythologizing the social
bandits of the turn of the century so that they become
outlaws requires several precise steps. Rules must be
followed if a criminal is to be elevated to 'photogenic'
status. First, the outlaw never commits a crime for mere
greed.
Today's criminals appear to be avaricious. Or is it that
time puts a patina on the past? Secondly, the outlaw is
never a victim. Other necessary criteria are that outlaws
must believe in their own superiority, and that the world
owes them a living. Frank "The Jelly" Nash, Bonnie and
Clyde, "Machine Gun" Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd and John
Dillinger are all fuzzy images from Guy's mythologized past.
Time and distance roll history into myth and some of those
names have been enveloped in a "Robin Hood" halo, if memory
serves.
Numerous photo-puppets of these dark black and white
images are examined by the white faced figure, then are cut
and burned. Two are not destroyed. Machine Gun Kelly
mythologically bombs because he is a coward - he is
mercifully spared. Pretty Boy Floyd is strung up in a manner
worthy of an ascension into sainthood because he loved his
wife and child passionately and spread his wealth around.
The photo of Baby Face Nelson gets removed. Bonnie and
Clyde, the lovebirds, receive a blessing of confetti before
being destroyed. What is this fire? Is it cleansing or
consuming? A rite of passage or the agony of eternal Hell?
Destroying the puppets allows the mythology to break down.
But for many in the audience who are far removed from the
turn of the century mythology of outlaws, the murkiness of
the images raises more questions about history and memory.
If Photogenic is a secular examination of the drive
to create myths, then the second performance, Lost,
is its sacred counterpart.
Lost is influenced by - but not based on - "The
Lost Ones", by Samuel Beckett. Beckett's novel takes place
in a cylinder and explores human weakness, frustration and
helplessness through the coupling of tyrant and victim. Guy
pushes Beckett's belief in the inadequacy of language for
meaningful expression through to a haunting conclusion by
the absence of language. There is only the hollow sound of a
drip echoing through what might be imagined as a cold, dank
dungeon - a counterpoint to the crackling flames that
consume the puppets of Lost.
In the performance Lost the white-faced mask takes
on a more sinister edge. While the personalities and
identities of the photos command attention and the
inclination to mythologize in Photogenic, the generic nature
of the paper dolls demands that the puppeteer become the
focal point in Lost. While the puppeteer in
Photogenic is interventionist, the puppeteer in
Lost is an intervening deity. In an otherwise
expressionless white mask there are two generic eye holes, a
prim, generic white nose, and taut lips, pulled back, ever
so slightly, into what could be interpreted as a sneer.
Historically, the White Face references the white faced
clown. The White Face is the Nasty Clown and in the silence
of the space, the sound of labored breathing behind Guy's
mask compounds the vulgar melodrama.
The Deity holds up a candle, offers it to the audience
and then places it at the side of the cube. The curtain is
raised and a paper ladder is dropped into the space. White
Face lovingly caresses the cube and then lights the ladder
on fire. Paper dolls with heart shaped holes, hearts on
sleeves, and holes in their heads attempt to climb ladders
and get burned in their attempt to ascend. The image of five
traditional paper dolls with a fuse that connects all of
their hearts together is one of the more thought-provoking
narratives. As the first doll is set on fire, a fuse snaps
through each heart of the connected paper dolls in a
contagion of consummation and death, evoking thoughts of
plagues and shared dogmas that consume those connected by
love or tissue. The fire efficiently consumes each of the
figures in this Dante's Inferno.
Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise,
accompanied by the spirit of Virgil, was an allegory of the
progress of the individual soul towards God and possessed a
mystic vision of the Absolute. Part Two of The Divine
Comedy, Purgtorio, or purgatory, is about purification.
The higher on the mountain the spirit climbed, the less
grievous was the sin of which it must be purged. Like the
mountain, the ladder appears to be the only way out of
purgatory. In a fitting reminder of Sartre's No Exit
, the ladder is always lit on fire by White Face and
there is no escape.
But who is this clown, this White Face Nasty ? Jean-Paul
Sartre spoke of the God-shaped hole in the human
consciousness. He insisted that even if God existed it was
necessary to reject him since the idea of God negates our
freedom, stunts our creativity and stifles our sense of
wonder. This tyrannical deity allows us to see the danger of
creating God in our own image, confining God to a purely
human category, an anthropomorphic, traditionally male God
who is Lawgiver and Ruler - a God of Revenge who will damn
for eternity those who do not keep his commandments. "May
the wrath and displeasure of the Lord burn against this man
henceforth, load him with all the curses written in the book
of the law and raze out his name from under the sky" was the
curse uttered against Spinoza by the churches of Europe.
In the final tableau, the back curtain of the cube rises
to reveal a mirror. White Face sets the last puppet on fire.
Their faces reflected, the audience become participants in
this mythology. The final soul looks into the abyss of the
Personally Created God and sees his own terrified
reflection. The final curtain drops as the inferno of paper
figures continues to burn, evoking images of corpses in
death camps. This is what happens when God is mythologized.
Lost is concluded with the absent or merciless God of
Auchwitz.
In the Gospel of Christian Atheism, Thomas J. Altizer
spoke of the necessary freedom to kill the god of the
tyrannical deity. This empty space permits the silence that
is necessary before God can become meaningful again and
gives credence to the idea that a passionate and committed
atheism could be more religious than a weary or inadequate
theism. In Grant Guy's Lost, only one figure
survives, providing a clue as to how we seek God above a
discredited and inadequate theism which has lost its
symbolic force. The doll that was saved gave up, entering
the human experience of nothingness. Although in Sartre's
Existential philosophy humans never give up but actively
engage in the business of living despite confronting the
emptiness of their illusions, in the journey of the dark
night of the soul there the experience of a mystical God.
Like the empty chair of the Buddha, mystics saw God as the
nothingness from which we came and will return.
The Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar believed that
instead of seeking God in logic and language, we should look
to art for a God found by our senses. Guy once said to me
that as long as he was in an authoritative position he could
not come to terms with his own stupidity. That sense of
inadequacy that he is so acutely aware of is at the heart of
the figure who gives up. Approached by the imagination,
faith is rekindled as a kind of art form to express a
reality that goes beyond concept. Silence is a tangible
material to fill the space with necessary Nothingness.
When I interviewed Grant prior to his performances, he
recounted a story to me that is the essence of his approach
to artmaking. He related the story of a brilliant academic
by the name of Sheldon Glashow who had just given out
examination papers to his students. As his students worked
on the exam questions, he drew their attention to one of the
questions and interjected, "By the way - I haven't found the
solution to question number five myself so if you find the
answer please let me know." Grant Guy's performances will
provide you with questions, but not answers. If you find an
answer, please let him know.
Sharon Alward is a multimedia artist whose performances and videos have been received in museums and site specific locations throughout the world. Sharon is a professor of drawing and open media at the University of Manitoba School of Art.
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