Watching Lars von Trier's film The Five Obstructions (2003) last night and laughing out loud at the third Obstruction. For the film Von Trier makes an agreement with sixties film maker Jørgen Leth that the latter will remake his rather stylish/minimalist/conceptual work The Perfect Human / Det perfekte menneske (1967) five times; each version in adherence to a different set of instructions, rules or prohibitions determined by Von Trier. One rule for the First Obstruction is that Leth must use edits of no more than 12 frames, another that he must provide answers to all of the rhetorical/poetic questions posed by the voiceover used in the original version. Rules for the second obstruction include a demand that Leth go to 'an terrible place on Earth, a terrible situation' and make a version of his film there, *without* showing anything of the reality he encounters.

It's this last rule that gets Leth into trouble with Von Trier and which prompts him (already playing up as a kind of whimsical tyrant) to punish Leth. His first inclination is to tell Leth to go straight back to Bombay and simply make the film again, only this time to do so *strictly* in accordance with the rules. This seems appropriate, or predictable in Von Trier's general mode of humorous sadism, but then he chances on much a better punishment; decreeing simply that Leth must re-make the movie again, but this time with complete artistic freedom, without obstructions. 

Leth's very much the star of the movie. His slightly bumbling good humour, calm and stoicism in approaching the tasks is pretty remarkable. Perhaps the most touching thing though, is watching how, in making each of the Obstructions Leth always gets inspired. Even as he works through the most miserable and tedious constrictions you always see him starting to get excited, seeing chinks of light in the darkness – always sensing the possibility that somehow, despite everything, he might just find have found a really good solution, or make a really good film.

The New York Times has a nice long piece on Ant Hampton and Rotozaza here. It’s great to see the work getting attention. Can’t remember but NYT may require a log-in  to read stuff, in which case I’m sorry – at least you only have to do it once.

The troupe had already been practicing an unusual brand of cerebral theater, building darkly psychological dramas about surveillance, communication and modern love that use a mix of actors and unrehearsed guest performers who are told what to do and say by an Orwellian voice offstage. This chilling aesthetic is based on a certain uneasy ambiguity among viewers over whether a guest performer knows the script or is just following instructions.

But if the line between audience and performer seems blurred, Rotozaza’s new drama, “Etiquette,” which they created with Paul Bennun, erases it entirely.

*

This afternoon at the Star Wars exhibition with S.

Weird to be somewhere so very like a museum for something that doesn’t even exist,  which never existed. The artefacts are all there though, in their dim-lit cabinets, with all their labels and explanations in three European languages, so you more or less have to accept it.

But perhaps what’s even more strange than the exaggerated/mock reality the films are afforded here, is to somehow imagine the opposite. To think that on a certain day in the early 1980’s someone called George Lucas sat down and hand-wrote a ten page outline for a film that had not yet been made and called it Star Wars. And that subsequently he and certain other people sat down to imagine the characters, locations and objects of its world – making drawings and plans of what they might look like, going through versions until they were happy with these plans. I say this is strange because it can seem from the current moment, that these things must have always been known. It’s so familiar, so much part of the background these last twenty odd years, even though I’m not remotely a fan of the films. To think that it all had to be invented, even to imagine that it might have turned out otherwise, to see it as something other than a cultural given, is minor-league unsettling, like one of those first incidents that plague characters near the start of Philip K. Dick novels, before they really start to go crazy.

Transport ticketing system goes all Buddhist on me:

She says: 

_{06/08/2007 14:16}
wish i could take an aerial picture of my brain
_{06/08/2007 14:16}
cos all my thoughts are very well organized that way
_{06/08/2007 14:16}
its when they try to get on the paper the problems begin

Like all its neighbours the street is jammed incoherence in the form of restaurants and bars, part-Spanish, part-Turkish, part-Mexican grill, a lot of Italian, some Zorba the Greek, some Dim Sum, some Indonesian, some non-descript and some Indian. Your eyes take a beating first-off from the jumble of signs (some neon, some not) and the overlapping maze of job-lot discount plush and patio furnitures that are breaking ranks all over the street plus its hard not to wonder why the décor/colour-schemes of these places look like they got chosen by the managers cousin or by his brothers second-wife or like they were simply determined by some bloke who sold them the remnant 12 litres of paint left over from some other place he’d painted elsewhere. Anyhow. It’s not a spectacular area in any way – to call it run-down would give it a glamour that it doesn’t have. Its more a kind of roughly approximated but somehow defective acceptability that seeps, grows and cancers everywhere just like the narrow pavement with its topping of sporadic food remains and broken wine glass. No big deal.
 
A young guy, skinny, looks like he might be Spanish, sporting Superman t-shirt and with him a girl in white shirt and jeans – could be his younger sister or maybe girlfriend, impossible to say. They come hurrying determinedly through the crowds of people that are looking for somewhere to eat, or who maybe have just eaten already and want to find somewhere they can go to forget about it, which probably won't take long. They come past the dazed or stoned Australians and the drunk English and the grim Germans, and the family packs of Americans – all kids with braces walking single file and yelling ahead to their dad – and the occasional groups of Dutch-guys-in-suits-and-ties types (impossible to read). In her hand she (the girl with the Spanish guy in his Superman t-shirt) is carrying a muffin or a cake of some kind, wrapped in cellophane, and as they come through the crowd past the table where we are sitting, they break their stride, just for a very short moment, in which she holds the cake flat in her hand and he photographs it, with the small digital camera that he has, and once the picture is taken they are gone – vanished in the endless flow of pedestrians and incomplete and incomprehensible narratives that make up the night.

*

S's nightmare, he said, seemed like an episode of something, because first it was happening and it was horrible and then it stopped, and he thought it was over, and then it all just started up again.

My friend K. wrote about starting rehearsal work on a bunch of text material she's using in a new project, with words from different writers (me included). First work in the studio has simply been reading the texts aloud. I really like what she says below about this part of the process, and her articulation of the relationship between text and performer, very smart.

Of course as soon as I'm trying this – the main questions come up….One thing is – why have a body in space telling these stories? Why  not leave them to be read – published, or on the net. This has got me  into the area of 'what are these stories doing to me/you as I tell  them?' – something about what happens to a body when it is taken over  by the images it is reading. It's reminding me of stigmata – a story  that takes over a body, or maybe a body that takes over a story,  anyway, that the thing leaks into the body of the teller, and the  listener too. That helps a bit necessitate the telling of them.

Following up the Warhol’s Screen Tests post from Wednesday my friend and colleague John Rowley mailed, reporting that the series of video portraits he’s been working on for the last year or so – inspired in part by the Warhol work – will be screened in Cardiff as part of Chapter’s Experimentica Festival. The pieces sound great – I hope I get to see some of them.

John’s been performing with Forced Entertainment a lot during the last five years or so (in performances such as First Night, The Travels, Bloody Mess etc) but he’s also got a stream of solo projects on the go including this new piece comprising around 25 of these hour-long portraits. For each portrait the subject is filmed in a full-length body-shot and standing, for long confrontations with John’s un-manned video camera. While Warhol’s Screen Tests ran 3 minutes (the length of regular film stock) the length of John’s portraits is based on the one hour duration of a standard MiniDv tape.

The same Warhol post also drew a reaction from Ant Hampton of Rotozaza whose recent work around ‘live portraiture’ also sits in some kind of tangent proximity to the Warhol Screen Tests. You can read about the research workshop project Ant was part of concerning live portraiture here.

Jonathan Jones had a nice piece here in The Guardian yesterday about Andy Warhol, specifically touching on the tendency towards a posthumous ‘humanising’ of Warhol, a process not unlike that William Burroughs’ went through in the lead up to and aftermath of his own death. Seems that the weird/queer outsiders have to be assimilated posthumously, brought back to the family fold.

As Jones points out though:

“Try as you might to make Warhol a happy, well-rounded individual, exhibit his art for kids, paper a vast gallery with cow wallpaper, recreate his installation of helium-filled silver pillows – it’s all fun, it’s fine – none of it justifies seeing Warhol as a modern master. He only really becomes that when he indulges his obviously unhealthy obsession with violent death…”

Continuing this Jones gives a vivid account of the part of the show currently at the National Galleries in Edinburgh that’s focused on Warhol’s Death & Disaster images. I remember seeing some big Warhol retrospective at the Hayward, in the early 90’s I think and being very blown away by these images in particular.

Years back Jones wrote another piece on Warhol, this time about the Screen Tests. It’s very useful.

The screen tests are amazing and for me they remain a constant point of reference in thinking about contemporary performance. The link is close to the surface perhaps in something like Jerome Bel’s the show must go on, or in some scenes from Raimund Hoghe’s work or even in my own video (and occasional live performance) Down Time. But Screen Tests‘ relevance runs deeper than any direct echo of their core strategies, in which a silent/still figure is watched/witnessed and must negotiate their presence in front of an unmanned static camera. What’s really strong and prescient about the Screen Tests is how neatly  Warhol uses a rule to draw a a frame around a piece of time. Everything that happens in that time is the work. Time ticks. And inside it – in their live, inadequate and inspired attempts to be there, to deal with the task and the situation in which they find themselves – human beings make something happen. Warhol’s articulation of this in Screen Tests is pretty hard to beat and its certainly an inspiration.