A Time-Based Installation/Multisensory Environment incorporating
dance-theater performance
by
Integrating time-based visual media and dance-movement theater, my interdisciplinary performance works create an environment in which the visual, textual, kinetic and aural elements are given equal weight, each capable of dominating or contradicting the others and stretching its traditional boundary.
Slide and
video projections define temporality, as well as manipulate perceptions of the
size and shape of the space. Ideas that are typically political are treated as
psychological phenomena ÐÐ ultimately, the audience's own creativity and
intelligence are trusted.
Shelter, an ongoing project, continues to
explore the symbolic and psychological significance of nuclear annihilation.
Parts of the project have been realized as a series of installations,
performances and site-specific events in the L.A. area since 1989, including
presentations in public plazas and on a downtown street.
"Like nuclear testing itself, its psychological effects
have gone underground." Ð Peter Schwenger, Letter Bomb, 1992
The "Nuclear Age" can no longer be contained in the past, but is now defined by the very absence of a decisive event, and marked by anxiety and denial. Today, images of The Bomb recur in the media, which has replaced myth as the predominant means to express and form the cultural subconsciousness. Beyond the iconographic mushroom cloud, apocalypse now exists somewhere between fantasy and reality, its appeal characterized by fascination and revulsion. As a mythical motif, it finds Judgment Day as its archetype ÐÐ nuclear annihilation "was, is and is coming." While end-of-the-world myths can be found worldwide, the Judeo-Christian variant supplies an explanation of the paradoxical appeal of nuclear annihilation: the Judgment is followed by the restoration of Paradise.
Before nuclear
weapons became a reality, the Paradise Envy found expression as the Dark
Continent of Tarzan or the
monster-infested island of King Kong; their pleasures were heightened by fear and temporary surrender of
control. The atomic bomb gave a new form to the catharsis required to reach
this paradise.
In the
aftermath of the Chernobyl incident, magazines carried classified ads for
mail-order potassium pills, supposedly effective in protecting thyroid glands
from radiation. The new emphasis on survival is an outcome of the shift in the
American evaluation of the self during the Vietnam War, which rendered the
traditional winner-loser dichotomy obsolete and led to a reinvention of the
American hero: the "survivor."
The term
"nuclear holocaust" is American in origin and usage, and indicative
of this survival fantasy. The term is not used by Europeans, who, needless to
say, remember the Nazi genocide all too well. Although the word
"holocaust" is from the Greek meaning "burning [kaustos] of the whole [holos]," it originally referred to a
burnt offering. Language, too, is both causal and symptomatic of belief. Does
the term originate in our memory of a selective destruction, whose victims were
singled out by one group's definition of the "other"? By implying
that there can be an unaffected bystander while "The Chosen" burn,
does the use of the word "holocaust" reaffirm the belief that
survival is possible? (The survivors in turn may call themselves The Chosen,
for they are the ones to enjoy liberation from the tedium of everyday reality,
and be "purified" in this fiery remedy.)
While the
more didactic treatment of the nuclear subject from the Cold War period evinced
an unacknowledged fantasy of survival, the "fantasy" media embraced
nuclear annihilation as a narrative convention: the requisite "clean break"
to initiate a world different from ours. The creators of Mad Max and The Terminator were among the audience for the '70s'
"underground" expressions of nuclear anxiety (science fiction, comic
books and "cult" movies created by those who were children or young
adults in 1945).
Liberation
from the tedium and restrictions of day-to-day reality is promised in these
post-nuke deserts or technopolises. Seeing the first explosion at the Los
Alamos experiment site, Dr. Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am
become death, the destroyer of worlds." He had recognized that man now
held the power once attributed to God. In the chaotic Fantasy Paradise thus
restored, the out-of-the-ordinary is possible, superheroes can emerge, or we
may ourselves become superheroes. The power of Judgment and destruction,
transferred at Los Alamos to state leaders and a handful of scientists, is then
democratically distributed to every man.
Jung
detected modern man's yearning for wholeness behind the flying saucer sightings
-- this need is signified by the mandala, which, coincidentally, also resembles
the symbol of atomic energy . The post-nuclear war "superheroes,"
having eliminated God and the State, would have attained this wholeness, not
unlike the omnipotent infant whose ego does not yet know to recognize and
separate itself from the threatening Other.
Shelter was inspired by a dream in a glass
enclosure built by a pregnant friend, who had intended it to be a protective,
"womblike" environment for the child she was expecting. In my
research for the project, I was struck by the frequency of female figures
characterizing and defining the paradise lores, e.g., Venusburg of the
TanhŠuser legend, and the Japanese legend of Urashima Taro in the Palace of the
Dragon Princess, from which he emerges as a 300-year-old man after what he
thought was three days of pleasure.
The glass
womb in Shelter --
the predominant and constant visual element ÐÐ is created by slide
"animation" projected on the surrounding walls of the
performance/gallery space. It is an illusory environment realized for the
duration of the piece only, integrating a dance-theater performance with a
time-based installation. The role of the slide animation extends beyond mere
representation of scenery, defining both the visual environment and the
temporality ÐÐ sequence, proportion, duration and rhythm ÐÐ of the piece.
Density and absence of images and light, combined with the movements of the performers,
cumulatively affect the perceived duration.
With a
single image of an ordinary window as the starting point, a series of slides is
produced through optical and photographic manipulation. These slides are
programmed at a rate of 500 slides per hour, or 8.33 slides per minute per
projection field. Projected to surround both the performers and the audience,
the gridlike pattern of the glass panes distorts and alters the size of the
space. The environment is animated in the original sense of the word,
"portraying" the "character" of the glass shelter. Within
these glass walls, there is no viewer-stage separation ÐÐ the viewer becomes a
part of this environment.
In phases I
- VII, analog dissolve-control
unit's capacity for delicate handling of transitions and superimpositions
results in an organic visual movement, and its use of audio tape for real-time
programming helped heighten the programmer's temporal awareness. The process'
inherent musicality is brought out, while the manipulation of the unit came to
resemble the playing of a musical instrument.
The sequence
of events is contiguous, the progression scrambled; some events approximate
flashbacks and loops, aiming not so much at non-linearity but at baroque
hyperlinearity ÐÐ to be perceived in parts but more fully understood as a
whole. Placement of "the blast" in time remains ambiguous; ground
zero becomes at once the point of origin and the point of finality. A recurring
film-lead countdown punctuates this visual-temporal continuum, referring back
to the piece's exploitation of conventions of cinema temporality, while
serving, on a more literal level, as a simple reminder of our mortality.
In Phase
IV-1/2 (The Los
Angeles Open Festival, 1990) the central motif was a series of tableaux vivants
from Da Vinci's Last Supper. Phase V (California Plaza, Los Angeles, June 1991) and Phase VI (Japanese-American Cultural Community
Center Plaza, October 1991) included eight-minute segments during which the
performers sat immobile.
Not a
"high-tech" project (characterizing my work as such has often struck
me as a Trade War stereotype), Shelter has made imaginative use of available media and
technology. Creative rule-breaking and low-budget have been the guiding
principles in the Shelter series.
1. A
photograph from the '50s by an unidentified photographer shows an advertising
sign for a "Utility Room [that] can be Used as Bomb Shelter." The second
line exemplifies substitution and projection: "Don't Let Pearl Harbor
Happen to You." go back
2. For
the next ten years, the Vietnam War became the dominant theme in world
affairs. Nuclear war and weapons were forgotten, much to everyone's
subconscious relief . . .The test-ban treaty had moved nuclear testing
underground. -- Dr. Helen Caldicott, Missile Envy
(1984) go back
3.
In Japan, one of the most graphic depictions
of the effects of the atomic bomb is found in Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa,
in the comic book format intended for young readers (made into a
feature-length animated film in 1984). In the story the young protagonist and
his mother witness the deaths of the rest of their family, trapped under a
fallen beam, in the fire created by the heat released in the explosion.
go
back
4.
Christopher Lasch, How To Survive a
Nuclear War (1981)
6. Dr. Helen
Caldicott, Missile Envy (1984) go back
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"The
terrifying reality of the nuclear conflict can only be the signified referent,
never the real referent (present or past) of a discourse or text." --
Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven
missiles, seven missives)." Diacritics 14 (1984)
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