Date: Fri, 20 Jan 95 03:39:25 -0500
From: malgosia askanas <egg-AT-martigny.ai.mit.edu>
Subject: Negri -- inchoateness as spectacle


Since nobody is coming to my rescue, and instead you're all enjoing the
spectacle of my mental contortions in trying to characterize "representation", 
let me try to h*lp myself by introducing another data point.  Chris Burden
once (once!) did a performance called "Deadman", in which he got into 
a canvas bag and lay down on a well-trafficked highway in LA.  He managed
to survive and was ultimately removed by the police, who arrested him 
for creating a false emergency.  

Now this is a non-representational spectacle.  It is a spectacle of nothing
but a canvas-wrapped man lying in the middle of a busy thoroughfare.  
The police intervention is here a marginal detail; the piece would have
been the same if Burden had simply gotten up and left after a while, 
although there would have been the aesthetic unpleasantness of having 
to choose a particular time for doing so.  Interestingly enough, the fact 
that he survived is also a marginal detail; the piece would have been 
exactly the same if he had gotten run over.  

Now when I say that the piece would have been the same, I am interpreting
it.  Yet I claim that it is non-representational.  What does it mean to
interpret a non-representational work?

It is fascinating how easy it is to disturb the non-representational
character of the piece.  For example, imagine that Burden, instead of
being in a bag, had been naked.  To me, the piece would then want to be 
interpreted as speaking about the vulnerability of the human body 
among machines.  The nakedness tilts the scales, it takes over. 
Or if he had put himself in the middle of a a corporate lobby and got
removed by the police -- it would have been a piece about corporate decorum
and the ties between corporations and the state.  

But is not the original piece, in many ways, _about_ things other than itself?  Is it not, for example, about the nature of art?  Somehow, though, this 
"aboutness" is different from the way in which the naked version is
"about" bodies and machines, or in which nonviolent protest is "about"
the brutality of the state.  It is a resonance optionally generated 
from inside the piece and respectful of the piece's immanence -- rather 
than an external framework usurping and emptying out the piece for 
its own purposes.  

It is interesting to speak here about "immanence", when all I am doing
is _reporting_ on the piece, offering a representation of it in words. 
The fact that this piece, so physical, can seemingly be fully apprehended 
through its description, is no less than shocking.  But this may be 
another topic altogether.  


- malgosia 



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