Art in General Production Notes

Category: New Commissions

August 2, 2011

Andrew Hultkrans on “Sleeper Cells” at Art in General …

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WHEN SUN TZU WROTE The Art of War in the sixth century BC, he probably wasn’t thinking of artists, let alone Toby Heys and Lisi Raskin, the two artists who delivered presentations on the weaponization of culture on Tuesday night at Art in General. He was, however, advising his readers to exhaust every strategy short of physical combat to defeat their enemies, and that, Heys and Raskin showed, is the aspect of war for which art and culture have been conscripted to play a part, particularly since the dawn of communications technology and electronic media. Sponsored by Triple Canopy, this (literally) small talk felt like a slightly rambling but often engaging tour through the audiovisual scrapbooks of two mildly paranoid obsessives. Being a mildly paranoid obsessive myself—one who, like these artists, is fascinated by music, deception, intelligence work, and the cold war—this was fine by me. I did find myself occasionally wondering what others were getting out of it.

After a brief introduction by Triple Canopy deputy editor Molly Kleiman, Heys, a British sound artist, began his talk. He announced that he was going to play twelve sound clips from a laptop, each an example of audio designed to deceive, dispirit, or terrorize. Though he promised something from the 1930s to start, the familiar descending bass slide of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” came on instead. An early instance of sonic deception? No, a glitch. (Oddly, for two artists so focused on technology, this was a recurring theme throughout the evening.) Cueing up the intended clip, Heys said that the innocuous Guy Lombardo–style big-band tune was by Ben Selvin & His Orchestra. Selvin, a hyperprolific bandleader and producer, holds the Guinness Book world record for most recorded sides in music history. He was also, more to Heys’s point, an early program director for the nascent Muzak corporation in the ’30s. Muzak is generally thought of as annoying but harmless elevator music, but, as Heys noted, it has been deployed strategically since its inception on factory workers (as Taylorist “audio anesthesia” that would mask the grimness of their surroundings and make them work harder) and on shoppers (to lull them into a consumerist trance).

Next, Heys played a clip of the Ghost Army, a WWII cadre of artists (including Ellsworth Kelly), set designers, sound engineers, and the like, who were enlisted to mimic or exaggerate US forces in the field, fooling the Nazis with live mixes of sound-effect records of armored vehicles, munitions, explosions, etc. These multi-turntable mixmasters were the “original battle DJs,” Heys quipped. He followed this with the eerie, psychedelic “wandering soul” tapes from the Vietnam War. Over an Acid Test collage of severely Echoplexed musique concrète, a mournful female voice told her countrymen in Vietnamese that she was trapped in limbo between life and death because she had died far from her home village. A CIA psy-ops project inspired by Vietnamese folk superstition, the “wandering soul” tapes played a part in Denis Johnson’s novel Tree of Smoke and have a distinctly Apocalypse Now vibe. With several clips of music, including “These Boots” and the Barney theme, used to force those under siege to surrender (Koresh in Waco, Noriega in Panama) or to elicit confessions from detainees (Guantanamo Bay), Heys theorized that the key element of such “touchless torture” is repetition, the rate of which has been increasing in music culture ever since the invention of the radio. (The sampled loops of golden-age rap might have bolstered this point, though he didn’t mention it. Adorno had something to say about this as well.)

Raskin began her PowerPoint presentation with a slide of the Greenbrier fallout shelter in West Virginia, a massive, real-life Strangelovian facility that was intended to house Congress in the event of a nuclear holocaust. Known for installations inspired by cold-war military and intelligence culture, Raskin (like Heys), seemed to be sharing the source material for her work. She ran a long, hilariously retrofuturist AT&T ad from the early ’80s about their spanking new fiber optic network, the promise of which seemed to be that it would make routine interoffice communications look as whiz-bang as an episode of The A-Team. She spoke about ARPANET, the cold-war Defense Department network, connected by fiber optics, which slowly mutated into today’s Internet. Over a still of Michael Caine sitting in front of an early computer bank, from Billion Dollar Brain (1967), Raskin free-associated about Honeywell, a long-standing conglomerate that, like General Electric, makes everything from mundane household products (thermostats) to military supercomputers to napalm. To emphasize the horrors of the last, she played an infamous news clip of burned Vietnamese children fleeing a misdirected napalm attack.

During the Q&A, both artists spoke about the repurposing of culture for warlike ends and how some artists and their appropriated works can slowly be returned to the cultural realm without blemish. Raskin noted that Hugo Boss once designed uniforms for the Nazi brownshirts and that Donald Rumsfeld’s “logic” (“known unknowns,” etc.) sounded like Deleuze. Heys asserted that modern communication technology abnegates personal responsibility and provides cover for malign or negligent corporations. The connotations of commodities are effaced by time, they agreed, and hence it’s hard for anyone or anything to remain “outside” this process. Strangely, two middle-aged women in the audience challenged the artists on their perceived pacifism, one saying the use of cultural material as weaponry can sometimes be justified because war itself is necessary; the other maintaining that a pacifist stance “opens one up to risk.” Well, yeah. So does being born. I knew the Mama Grizzlies were out there in the heartland; I didn’t expect them to be near Canal Street in a small gallery with a bunch of liberal-academic cultural elites. Maybe they were part of a psy-op… or perhaps they’d just been temporarily repurposed.

Original post here:  http://artforum.com/diary/id=28679

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June 18, 2011

New Commissions Artist Steve Goodman (AUDiNT) interviewed on NPR.

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On June 14th, the day after their panel discussion, The Martial Arts of Sonic Hauntology, at Eyebeam, and right before debuting their New Commissions project Dead Record Office at Art in General, NPR’s All Things Considered caught up with AUDiNT‘s Steve Goodman to talk about the exhibition, sonic warfare, and the politics of frequency. Listen to the story or read our repost below.

AUDiNT on All Things Considered

Bad Vibrations: Investigation Sound As Terror

By Sami Yenigun

I first heard of Steve Goodman as the head of Hyperdub, a London-based record label that has released work by avant-garde electronic artists like Burial, Joker and The Bug. But Goodman isn’t your average label executive. He’s a scholar, a lecturer at the University of East London and a musician who goes by the name Kode9. His new album, Black Sun, features rumbling bass lines under lyrics about a toxic world where a radioactive event has laid the land to waste. Goodman is also a DJ, and the time he has spent in the clubs of London during the last decade helped spark the global dance genre known as dubstep. But Goodman’s interest in sound extends beyond the dance floor.

“From being a DJ and playing on various good and bad sound systems, I’m very aware of the fact that sound — and music — doesn’t always create enjoyment and pleasure,” Goodman says. “Actually, sound has a very special power of creating irritation and bad vibes.”

As a scholar, Goodman studies the potential for music and sound to repel or harm listeners. On Friday, as part of a collective called AUDiNT (short for Audio Intelligence), Goodman will open an exhibition at Art In General in New York City called the Dead Record Office, which looks at various military uses of sound.

I met Goodman in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where he told me that he thinks of his work as a musician and his work as a scholar as being separate from one another but admits that elements from one inform the other. In 2009, MIT Press published his book Sonic Warfare.

“We look at everything, in the book, from the military using acoustic weaponry to the way sound is used in branding and advertising, to the way intense sound is used by various music cultures around the world to build collectivity,” Goodman explains.

His work with AUDiNT looks at the way sound has been used to aid destruction. The group takes the detailed historical research of his scholarly work and dresses it as art. The Dead Record Office exhibition offers a peek into the group’s work.

“What we’re doing is tracing or mapping these three phases of the history of acoustic weaponry,” Goodman says. “Firstly, starting with the Second World War, there was a division of the U.S. Army that was referred to as the Ghost Army. Part of what they were involved in was sonic deception, putting loud speakers in the battlefield to create a false impression. So we trace this from the Second World War to the U.S. Army in Vietnam, a division of psychological operations called Wandering Soul. This involved helicopter-mounted loudspeakers playing simulated Buddhist chants, fabricated sounds of the dead ancestors of the Viet Cong fighters speaking to them from the afterlife to try and persuade them to surrender.”

The third phase is less psychological, looking at a sound’s potential to be a more conventional weapon.

“What’s starting to emerge now,” Goodman says, “is the use of these ultrasound driven directional audio speakers.” These speakers can actually rupture eardrums from a distance.

Despite such advances in sonic technology, the old psychological tactics are still being used. Toby Heys, a fellow researcher at AUDiNT, says the U.S. military’s use of sound with prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has been well-documented.

“A lot of the detainees who were interviewed after their detainment have spoken about sonic torture as being the worst,” Heys says. “Rather than the sexual humiliation, rather than the beatings, the worst thing that they went through was the sonic torture.”

Nina Kraus, a neurobiologist at Northwestern University who studies the human auditory system, explains how sound triggers responses like fear in the human brain.

“We know that our auditory system has direct connections to our limbic system, which modulates emotions such as fear that will strengthen these neural circuits,” Kraus says. She adds that those connections are unique to each individual, so no two people will hear a sound in exactly the same way. “You know, because of the experience that a person has had throughout their lives using sound, now when any sound occurs — and in this case emotionally salient sounds — then the nervous system will respond in a way that will particularly enhance the information bearing elements of the sound.”

For a child raised in an urban environment, the sound of an ice cream truck might trigger a desire for sweets, while those who have never been around a vendor on wheels may find the looping melodies an annoyance. Heys says that the U.S. troops have employed an exaggerated version of this idea in Afghanistan.

“Before they embark in conflict they cleanse the area, but it’s like this cultural cleansing,” Heys says. “They’re playing heavy metal music, they’re playing rap music, they’re playing country music.”

Depending on your cultural experiences, the booming bass lines of Kode9′s music may sound either threatening or inviting. But as Goodman says, that’s exactly what interests him about sound.

“There’s a political dimension to sound and music that people often ignore that I call in the first book the politics of frequency,” he explains. “The way certain frequencies change the way you feel the way they resonate with different parts of your body, tapping into physiological and psychological dimensions of your experience. I’m looking to open up that other dimension, to get people thinking about music and sonic culture.”

People often celebrate the healing power of music; it can distract us and put us at ease. But Goodman’s work demonstrates that music can be something more than just a pleasantry, and that it’s worth trying to understand the full scope of its power, even if it hurts.

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June 1, 2011

Chinese Take Out on NY1

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NY1′s celebration of Asian American Heritage Week continues in Chinatown, where several Chinese restaurants and contemporary artists are creating a unique cultural exchange in a project that is up through July. NY1′s Arts reporter Stephanie Simon filed the following report. Watch the video footage here


Of course, there’s plenty of great takeout in Chinatown, but artist Jason Bailor Losh is adding a whole new flavor with his art project “Chinese Take Out.” He asked Chinatown restaurants to give him objects from their establishments, in exchange for new works of art.

The objects that were “taken out” are now on view at the Art In General gallery on Walker Street.

“You’ll see a lot of objects that are fairly cliche and represent things that you’d probably see in a Chinese restaurant all the time, and you may ask yourself, ‘Why are we showing them in the gallery space?’ It’s because they’re culturally revelent and they have a significance to the locations and they mean something to those locations,” says Losh. “It could be about feng shui, it could be about bringing prosperity to their businesses, and as an average viewer and attendee of these restaurants, we just walk by. We see things and we don’t pay attention to it.”

At Old Shanghai Deluxe restaurant, co-owner Yu Lin Zhu gave a traditional Chinese landscape for a contemporary photograph of a tree by a house by artist Lucas Blalock.

“I think a cultural exchange between Chinese traditional art and Western modern art has a lot of significance for our costumers and also for myself,” says Zhu through an interpreter. “I am myself also a lover of photography.”

The photograph, which places a flat, white outline around the tree, is especially welcome in Old Shanghai Deluxe.

“This piece uses this technique that comes from the film era in photography, where if you want to remove an object from its surroundings, say lipstick in a lipstick ad, you would need to sort of paint around it with a white-out material, and then it would allow you to be able to print it just sort of separate from its background,” says Blalock. “But this idea can be transferred or sent from one context to another without much change.”

When Losh was picking restaurants for the projects, he wasn’t just interested in decor, but was also interested in good food. Even thought the project is called “Chinese Take Out,” it actually encourages people to eat in and take in their surroundings.

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June 1, 2011

Kelly Crow writes about Chinese Take Out in today’s Wall Street Journal.

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In Chinatown, Trading Heirlooms for Fine Art

A new exhibit has turned Chinatown into an artistic scavenger hunt. For its latest show, “Chinese Take Out,” the nonprofit group Art in General has embedded pieces by such contemporary artists as Martin Basher and Lucas Blalock inside seven Chinese restaurants across the neighborhood. At the same time, the group is displaying some of those eateries’ decorative objects—from Buddha figurines to a jade dragon boat—in its white-box gallery on Walker Street nearby.


At Excellent Pork Chop House on Doyers Street, artist Vincent Como has installed a trio of minimalist wooden cubes inside a wall-mounted light box lined with Buddha figurines and kitsch dolls. The swap aims to allow art lovers, armed with maps, to burrow deeper into a neighborhood that is culturally rich yet seemingly insular, said artist Jason Bailer Losh, who conceived the project four years ago. Mr. Losh said he asked each of the participating Chinatown restaurateurs to lend him an object that symbolized their cultural identity or offered a glimpse into the lives they’re leading in New York. He asked the same of his 10 participating artists, and the results are revealing.

Chen Wei, who owns Old Shanghai Deluxe on Mott Street, handed over a bucolic landscape depicting mountains beside a seaside port bobbing with dragon boats. In its place now hangs Mr. Blalock’s color photograph of a suburban yard in California. The photographer is planning to move to that state shortly. 88 Palace, an East Broadway dining hall, gave over a toaster-sized porcelain figure of Buddha as well as one of its light-box landscapes of Hong Kong. In exchange, artist Ted Riederer, whose work has been exhibited at MoMA P.S.1, gathered a group of Chinatown musicians and recorded a group performance that now plays on a Victrola near the restaurant’s entry. New Zealand-born Mr. Basher, who has exhibited in galleries like New York’s Exit Art, tackled 88 Palace’s light box by creating a transparency-style image that splices together photographs of everyday images like a sunset, a cocktail glass and a luxury watch.

One of the most poignant pieces pops up at Excellent Pork Chop House on Doyers Street, where artist Vincent Como has installed a trio of minimalist wooden cubes on a shelf lined with Buddha figurines and kitsch dolls. Mr. Losh said the cubes symbolize how “out of place” Mr. Como felt growing up in rural Pennsylvania. Mr. Losh added that it took some time to convince some of the restaurant owners to display the edgier pieces, but he added that most of the participants were curious to see how the pairings matched up between owner and artist. A Brooklyn resident who has studied in Beijing, Mr. Losh is known for creating art that explores his own cultural heritage. In his native Iowa, he once took a series of photographs of houses that his carpenter father had built over 50 years, many located in small towns that have since been largely abandoned or fallen into decay. Three years ago in Long Island City’s Socrates Sculpture Park, he slathered gold paint on a Pontiac Trans Am, his boyhood car crush, and placed it atop a towering pedestal, like a sports trophy.

Eddie Chen, a senior advisor at the Lin Sing Association, a local community center, said Mr. Losh’s work also resonates in Chinatown, where people similarly grapple with notions of identity and home. After meeting the artist a few months ago, Mr. Chen said he even encouraged several restaurant owners to join in. “In this community, people don’t often work with outsiders, but we can all learn a thing or two about art.”

The “Chinatown Take Out” project is up through July 2.

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com and read the original article at the Wall Street Journal here

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May 2, 2011

Artforum Critics Picks: Emily Roysdon

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Emily Roysdon. Positions. Installation view, Art in General, 2011.

For “Positions,” her debut solo exhibition in New York, writer, artist, and curator Emily Roysdon brings together three independently commissioned projects produced over the last six months. Multifaceted and intermingled, the works activate what Art in General deems a “dialectic consideration of language, choreography, and political representation.” Viewers are immediately let in on the discourse via three Constructivist-esque posters (designed with Studio SM) delineating the conceptual and iconographic DNA of each project.

The cumulative core is Roysdon’s investigation into how people move politically, socially, and aesthetically. Engaging deeply in collaboration, she is developing a vocabulary of human gestures that serve as building blocks toward her philosophy of imaginative political representation that visualizes a new order of resistance and improvisation. These gestures are depicted in the gallery via images silk-screened on square panels (If I Don’t Move Can You Hear Me?, 2010) and affixed to the walls and floor directly (Positions, 2011). In the latter, screenprints of artist Celeste Dupuy-Spencer––her body frozen and multiplied in a lexicon of poses––are presented in a sort of tablature that reads like Muybridgean inversions; movement is hypothesized rather than broken down.

At center is Sense and Sense, 2010, a video diptych and photographic installation produced with performance artist MPA in Sergels Torg––Stockholm’s iconic public square and designated site for planned protests. Shot from fixed points above the plaza, camera 1 captures MPA laboriously inching on her side along the ground in an intensely controlled adagio-pantomime of walking at full gait. Camera 2 pulls back to reveal the scale of the square she’s barely traversing, as well as the (un)choreographed movements of passersby, quickly cutting paths across the frame. Viewed in the afterimage of the recent Egyptian revolution––staged and won from Tahrir Square––Roysdon’s insistent imagining (and imaging) of the impossible seems all the more tenable, and imperative, in the arena of aesthetic and social critique.

— Corrine Fitzpatrick

Read the review on Artforum here

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April 2, 2011

Art in General presents a guest lecture with Maria Lind

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In conjunction with Emily Roysdon’s exhibition, Positions, Art in General is pleased to present a discussion with renowned curator and writer, Maria Lind.

Sunday, April 10, 2pm

6th Floor Galleries, Art in General

Lind, who currently serves as the Director of Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm, has worked closely with Emily Roysdon over the past several years, most recently including her work in the exhibition, Abstract Possible, which is currently on view at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City.

On the occasion of Roysdon’s exhibition at Art in General, Maria Lind will speak on the subject of movement and its relationship to resistance in contemporary art practice. This talk will be followed by a Q & A with the artist.

Maria Lind is currently the Director of Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm. She was the director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, from 2008 to 2010. She was formerly Director of Iaspis in Stockholm (2005 to 2007) and Director of Kunstverein München (2002-2004). From 1997 to 2001, Lind was curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where she was responsible for Moderna Museet Projekt. She was also co-curator of Manifesta 2 in 1998.  Lind has contributed widely to magazines, publications, and numerous exhibition catalogues, and her book of critical writing, Selected Maria Lind Writing, was recently published by Sternberg Press. She was the 2009 recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.

Emily Roysdon is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Roysdon completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001 and an Interdisciplinary MFA at UCLA in 2006. In 2008 she was a resident at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS). Her work has been shown at the 2010 Whitney Biennial,;Greater NY at PS1; Manifesta 8; Bucharest Biennale 4;  Participant, Inc. (NY); Generali Foundation (Vienna); New Museum (NY); and the Power Plant (Toronto). Recent solo shows include Konsthall C in Stockholm and a Matrix commission from the Berkeley Art Museum. Her videos have been screened widely, most recently at the Berlinale and the Images Festival (Toronto). Her writings have been published in numerous books and magazines, including the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Zehar, C Magazine, and Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory. Roysdon is a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award (2010) and a contributing member with the band MEN. She recently developed the concept “ecstatic resistance” to talk about the impossible and imaginary in politics. The concept debuted with simultaneous shows at Grand Arts in Kansas City, and X Initiative in New York in 2010.

For More Information on the exhibition Positions, please visit: http://www.artingeneral.org/exhibitions/506

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April 1, 2011

Emily Roysdon’s Positions and Ioana Nemes’ Times Colliding Open at Art in General

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Nicolas Linnert wrote a great blog post about our recent exhibition opening, so nice in fact, that we reposted it below.

Art in General hosted an opening reception for its two latest shows by artists Emily Roysdon and Ioana Nemes last Friday. The galleries were stuffed with people chatting and checking out the newly showcased work. Emily Roysdon’s collection, Positions, explores notions of movement, language, and representation in tandem with rationalist entities like the grid. The artist used photo and video installations and also leaned minimalist panels along the gallery walls that had silkscreened images both on the plane’s surface and on its shadow. While Roysdon’s work occupied the larger gallery space, I was enchanted by Ioana Nemes’s archival examination of chronology and self-recording, entitled Times Colliding. The artist gave tangible form to recorded personal evaluations, and centered the gallery around a sculpted planar intersection of varying accounts, the most visible one stating “In sorrow all the facial muscles relax.” Both shows run until May 7. This post was originally posted on March 28th, 2011, by Nicolas Linnert at Wild Magazine.

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March 3, 2011

Rehearsal for Something-Part 1

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By Bosko Blagojevic and Stephen Squibb, International Pastimes
Part 1 of 2.

Ohad Meromi, Performance still from Rehearsal Sculpture, 2011

Performance still from Rehearsal Sculpture, 2011

Often, when in rehearsal, it is hard to notice the changes or the improvements taking place. Repetition is the staple; the imperceptible smoothing of the edges. From the outside it is easier to see the details emerge. First one walks, then runs, then dances. One cannot be concerned with standing if one is to dance. Rehearsal is the practice of this progress. When we speak of being professional we are speaking of the unthinking deployment of structures, codes, and patterns. Professional work is located in details that appear as possibilities for transformation. These are invisible to amateurs. Rehearsal is the condition of possibility of freedom within structure, in this sense. By letting the lines, movement, and intonations become rote, rehearsal opens space between them, and it is here that the exhilarating freedom that is action onstage takes place.  When we say of the theater, or music, or sport that it is ‘live,’ we are speaking of the shared experience of sculpted possibility.

What does it mean for Ohad Meromi’s exhibition at Art in General to be a rehearsal sculpture, a sculpture in rehearsal? Over the course of the past few weeks, Meromi has  used the exhibition space at Art in General to place the bodies of his guests—friends and strangers—into motion. Repetitive and task-oriented, these motions are often times animated by the easy directorial flare affected by the artist. One is invited with infinite and resonantly un-American entreaty to hold this, pass that, walk there, or turn here. Relatively unchallenging of cognitive estimations or abilities, the tasks often times require little more than that much more demanding and precious commodity of time. But isn’t this what is expected today when visiting the black box theater or the white cube exhibition? To spend some time with a constellation of works or motions, to move through the present in tandem with such things. It is at this point of congruence that we may find a helpful divergence in the notion of the professional.

In the professional’s unthinking deployment of technique, a kind of low-order idleness of the mind is manifest. Like the hum of a sophisticated but mechanical machine, it interiorizes the space of its surroundings —one can speak comfortably in such aural static, confident that one’s words will be flooded in the sonic noise and never reach whatever unintended listeners may lurk in surrounding shadows. But if the professional of an earlier generation distinguished themselves with dry-cleaned garments and an affectless devotion to grooming regimens and hygiene rituals, the contemporary professional exhibits such deliberation through its impulsive counterpunch: the distracted reach for the Blackberry, the vigil over the electronic inbox, the protracted SMS conversation. In apprehending such reach, we lose something of our touch.

Part 2 can be found here.

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March 3, 2011

Brendan Fernandes and Kalia Brooks

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A recording of the February 8, 2011 public program in which Brendan Fernandes spoke to Kalia Brooks about his New Commission project, From Hiz Hands, in the Storefront Project Space of Art in General. The two discuss themes of authenticity, exchange, and African diaspora. Fernandes explains the ideas that inform his work and the processes that he uses to create previous and upcoming work, including a video work in the Guggenheim exhibition Found in Translation.

Recorded and Edited by Hethre Contant. Originally broadcast on WNSR on February 17, 2011.

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March 3, 2011

Rehearsal For Something-Part 2

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By Bosko Blagojevic and Stephen Squibb, International Pastimes.
Part 2 of 2, part 1 can be found here.

Ohad Meromi, Performance still from Rehearsal Sculpture, 2011

Ohad Meromi, Performance still from Rehearsal Sculpture, 2011

There are no spectators in Ohad Meromi’s Rehearsal Sculpture, not while he’s there anyway. Everyone is a participant. And in the movement activated by the artist’s words, whether actions proscribed or improvised, these non-spectators are amateurized. Made to feel the clumsiness of our bodies — a consequence of our hands passing empty cigarette boxes or our artless skipping along a floor-drawing snaking through the space — a very different kind of idleness begins to manifest. It is of a profoundly secular nature.

Still there is the issue of being in rehearsal, of the insensibility of progress. The mind, craving action, sets itself loose while the body is fixed in such and such space and at such and such time. Watching children rehearse one can see the immense freedom and energy that is unleashed by the imposition of basic structure. Words, having been decided in advance, tumble forth at volumes and at pitches unheard of otherwise. Feet and hands, directed from elsewhere, tremble and shake with unique intensity. It is as though the physical essence of speech and movement are recovered precisely at the moment when the freedom of their choosing has been removed. Perhaps guided is a better word.

Language plays games onstage. When we speak of learning lines, we are not talking about learning to speak, of learning the physical capacity for speech. Yet we are infants before the text, still, not yet allowed to appear as people in the world of our writing. This infancy is best understood as being between experience and language. We become human by speaking and being spoken by language, the humanity of the performer set off by their mastery of one particular combination of words and movements. Humanity appears in performance precisely to the extent that it lacks the capacities and freedoms we consider to be it essence. There is an absolute opposition between our apprehension of humanity and our experience of it. Humanity is rehearsed, or its does not appear to exist.

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