Flotsam of the future
Concert, installation, machine: Verdensteatret works with found stories and Powerbooks to create
what they describe as a "rusty shadow" theatre. Synthetic expression becomes organic, organic becomes syntetic.
And because the Oslo-based collective sees art created in the moment it vanishes, their multi-layerd games
of reerence works with the idea of disappearance as appearance.
A text by Jon Refsdal Moe.
An
old university instructor pulled a packet of tobacco from his pocket after
having spent all morning explaining the basic concepts of Aristotelian metaphysics
to a group of freshmen. "In all physical material dwells a potential
form," he told the students while his fingers swiftly rolled a cigarette.
"And according to Aristotle" – he paused at this point to
lick the cigarette paper – "form is realized in matter. But what
about this cigarette, then? How can its form be maintained if it is not to
disappear as matter?" He lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply twice.
"When its form is realized, it ceases to exist. In the end it becomes
ash again." The instructor smiled and closed the door behind him.
This
anecdote is not only about an old professor challenging the philosophical
system in which he had taught his entire life. It also touches on the work
of Verdensteatret. Just as with the instructor's cigarette, it is pointless
to talk about a fundamental form, an idea that is to be realized as well as
possible by means of artistic material. And just as with the instructor's
cigarette, Verdensteatret's art is born the moment it disappears.
Instead
of with an idea, Verdensteatret begins in the ashes; it collects fragments
from contexts that may have been meaningful once upon a time: scraps found
along the wayside, noises they have heard, a story someone read to them, a
dream someone once had. They call it flotsam: things that were floating by
and that perhaps had some purpose once. The work of Verdensteatret transforms
this flotsam into aesthetic material: it is rotated, turned, and carefully
reassembled. It is not the sculptures constructed, nor the pictures projected,
nor the mechanisms with which they operate: the art of Verdensteatret is the
shadows that fall on the back wall, the joke told in a foreign language that
one does not understand, the sound produced by hammering on a piano. The art
of Verdensteatret is everything that is born and perishes at the same moment.
The
Oslo-based Verdensteatret was founded in 1986. Following experiments with
visual performance, environmental theater and text theater, the group has
evolved to incorporate more intermedia means of expression in recent years.
Today the group consists of video artists, computer animators, sound engineers,
musicians, actors, and a painter, among other professions. They develop their
works in a "flat structure" or, as they say themselves, "by
everyone interfering in everything." The outstanding feature of their
work is the fact that it comprises many different forms of expression and,
at the same time, a good portion of happenings. Video productions are processed
with curved mirrors, and human voices are digitized; synthetic expressions
become organic, while organic expressions are transformed into synthetic ones.
Every picture, every individual dramatic element is combined with the others
in so many different ways that we cannot see where one ends and the other
begins. This begins an expansive game of references and opens up a space of
associations in which a host of new opinions can emerge and disappear.
Like
the group itself, the name too is Norwegian. In English it means something
like "World Theater" or "Theater of the World." But don't
let that remind you of hackneyed metaphors of the world as a stage –
although, it may be precisely that. Nor of the old cinema auditoria from the
early days of film, when people came together to experience the fascination
of pictures and the technical wonders shown therein. These auditoria were
called Circus World Theater. Verdensteatret takes us to such places, filling
them with their own dreams of the future: with samplers, Powerbooks, and video
projectors – instruments that fascinate us today but which will soon
fill rubbish bins. By combining them into a "rusty shadow" theater,
Verdensteatret shows us, quite plainly, that our own conceptions of the future
are also about to disappear, but, nonetheless, they do want to continue relating
them to us.
You
may not be able to recognize that the work of Verdensteatret is theater. The
group prefers to compare their works with machines and three-dimensional musical
compositions. The best comparison is perhaps with installation artists such
as Christian Boltanski, who works in the same way with shadows, stories, and
disappearance; or with an older hero of installation art: the Hungarian Nicholas
Schffer, who planned monuments and futuristic cities and constructed light
ballets and electromechanical sculptures in the 50s and 60s. "The task
of the artist is not to produce an opinion but rather to create a production,"
Nicholas Schffer once wrote. That may sound narrow-minded but it makes a
big difference.
Verdensteatret
never presents a finished opinion but prefers to show the production of an
opinion instead. The viewer is never presented with a finished expression,
but rather sees how an expression is created. And because time, space, and
the viewer are incorporated into the production, an element of coincidence
always plays a role. But just as in Schffer's light ballets, John Cage's
happenings or Alexander Calder's mobile sculptures, coincidence is always
subject to a profound stringency: the rusty mechanics of the machine.
Verdensteatret
adopted the idea that art should be created at one moment and disappear the
next from the practices of avant-garde theater. But the idea of the perfect
moment that was defined by earlier generations of the avant-garde may fall
by the wayside. Instead, disappearance is made a part of appearance. Verdensteatret's
expression is always blurring itself – hence, all the historical references
in their works. And that is why their work becomes a defiant homage to artistic
production as such: a production that leaves behind no excess of products,
that creates no stable values, but instead pays tribute to the moment to which
you cannot really pay tribute.
The
productions put on at the steirischer herbst, "Concert for Greenland"
and "The Storytelling Orchestra (Fortellerorkesteret)," are variations
on the same theme and yet two separate universes. One is a performance and
concert, in which the makers play on the machines as operators and musicians.
The other is an installation, in which the machines start to live their own
lives and produce new stories. Both works are machines. The material was collected
on a trip to Greenland – that giant sparsely populated island on the
edge of Europe that remains, to this day, a victim of Scandinavian colonial
history. Most recently with the global charge of hunting seals and whales,
the traditional food source for Greenlanders. As an Arctic subcontinent it
lies up there, casting a shadow over us, a country with more poverty and alcohol
dependence than you would assume in view of the seemingly idyllic total population.
Most of us are familiar with Greenland mainly because of the native Inuits
one sees at the main railway station in Copenhagen, when we travel to Berlin
on the night train. On the news, we see that the inland ice is in the process
of melting – but Verdensteatret experienced something quite different
there.
You
may not be able to recognize that Verdensteatret is theater. Over the years,
the group has moved in many different directions. But in one respect, they
have remained glued to the theater by explicitly orienting themselves according
to the European, particularly to the German theater tradition of Brecht, Walter
Benjamin, and Heiner Mller as natural points of reference. Mller in particular
is often found in the works of Verdensteatret, with the "World Theater"
also treating these writings as pieces of flotsam. Not as a literary template,
but rather as an open landscape to be traversed.
When
the old university instructor closed the door behind him, he left a lot of
confused students behind. I was one of them. Twelve years down the line, I
came across these lines in a book. I think that he must have been reading
them while he was grinning broadly and finishing his cigarette.
"From
what source things arise, to that they return of necessity when they are destroyed;
for they suffer punishment and make reparation to one another for their injustice
according to the order of time." (Anaximander)
Jon Refsdal-Moe 2006
Jon Refsdal-Moe is a research fellow at the faculty of Theater
Science of Oslo University. Based in Oslo, he also works as a theater and
visual arts critic.
This article may not be reused without the permission of the author.
To get in touch with him, see: < http://jonrmoe.blogspot.com>
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