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TIME, TRAVESTY AND THE THEATRE OF MISREPRESENTATION An a propos of Lilli Hartmanns's art and life In the periphery and in the in-betweens of our ordered, recognizable perceptions there is an array of half-thoughts, homeless feelings, impersonal nostalgias and muted challenges. Our lives are somehow structured by habits, regulated by the rewards and punishments of our ever-didactical surroundings. And all this constitutes a certain ordered world, a nomos . If this is true, then these cracks and outskirts, these hidden playgrounds, unidentified odours, these chance meetings and unintended interferences, are the anomalies . Superfluous, disturbing, sometimes violent and sometimes hardly noticeable. Art is not an end to which these anomalies serve as a means. Life, experience, is not a material. Art is a means to exposure to these anomalies. Art is a means for life and experience to materialize. Weirdness is good, bur weirdness is not enough. Weirdness is an indication, it nudges you. But the matter is how to make it nudge you hard, out of position, so that you will have to start moving, if only to get back. Or to make you move somewhere else entirely. There are those who claim death is lurking back there in the nooks and behind the shifting surface. But the Faustian prince of darkness, Mephistopheles, is the innocent-looking poodle that sneaks in through a faulty line, and that really brings about a new kind of lively spectacle. He mocks all serious representation, and plays some most serious jokes. Likewise, death is not the denial of life, but an agent of urgency, a nudger, a weirdmaker. What does it mean to be not yet dead? Certainly to be alive, and certainly more than that. Death is a blind spot. To see what is there you'd have to look slightly askew. Permanence is more deathlike than change. The moment is the mirror, the camera is the killer, the gaze regenerates. And life comes out oddly commonplace and the commonplace very odd. Up against Hamlets dialectical “To be or not to be”, there is Ophelia's delirious “we know what we are, but not what we may become” Hamlets mock-insanity is a refuge to divert the mocking insanity of the events. His chance murder of Polonius is a travesty of the fatal decisiveness that is yet to come, but yet is what sets the wheels in motion. Travesty: the art of diverting or attracting events by means of a representation that is out-of-place. Action by misrepresentation. Travesty may seem to be playing around with serious things, to make a mockery of something that ought to be respected. But this is not the whole story. It is a matter of dressing things up in such an awkward fashion that the show is not to be believed. A travesty might be seen as an attempt that is intended to fail, a triumphant failure. Like flapping your home-made wings on a hill. So – cataloguing and staging different ways of committing suicide might yield a taste of death plus a comic relief. But yet again there is more to the story. The state of being not yet dead is made visible. It's like a bottle melodramatically marked POISON with big scary letters plus an exaggerated skull-and-bones – hidden on your inner pocket. Kept there as a private joke, all the more merry because of the real poison inside. Playing with things might be a serious matter, especially if being serious about things is playing too, only unknowingly. Playing with genres, identities, movie commonplaces, styles, need not be a light-hearted highlighting of clichés. It can also be the most intimate way of entering the fictions, in putting oneself at risk as playing. Playing oneself playing the actor that's playing the role sounds like a roundabout way to reality, but it might just be the short circuit that makes art meet life in the most unpredictable fashion. Playing out a fantasy might be many things, from voodoo to psychodrama. The one is played out by the alleged master of the event, the other, perhaps, by the victim. The one is played out before the situation, the other after. But events don't happen only once, and every repetition is a modification, a modulation, another distorted image of the invisible. Fantasies are not a personal matter. They might not determine what we are or what happens, but they might effectively decide what we are not, what doesn't happen - and yet is there. The mute actor on the drawing is said to impersonate the horizon. Another acts the part of a glove. These failed attempts, so doomed to fail, manifests a weird truth. Misrepresentation might be closer to the mark than representation. Representation is no deeper than the ground of comparison, and might just be doubling an illusion. What shows itself as what it is not gathers all of the invisible behind it. And when the picture-text describes something that is arguably not there, the absence gets eerily present. Playing out a fantasy might just be what we're doing all the time, in our wishful actions and interactions. There might even always be a tacit and mutual understanding of a distance to the roles and prescribed actions, and maybe that's just what keeps the social machine smoothly running. But what happens when roles are prescribed in the most explicit theatrical fashion, and yet acted upon, even by the director-actress? Another short circuit. Real life Stanislavski method-acting. Too many people seem to be acting and doing things just to tell the story, but what happens when you make your autobiography an explicit motivating factor? What happens when the research is done on behalf of a novel about yourself? When you really start doing things in order to write them? Art becomes as a means of experience. Can you produce jealousy by writing fake love-letters to yourself? Can you produce love by staging fake jealousy? And when you produce anomalous situations between fiction and reality, where are they to be inscribed? On the skin, like a tattoo? Or in the flesh like a sweet or disquieting shock to the nervous system? Or maybe they are to be weaved into another fiction parading as reality, in another real event masquerading as fiction. Certainly it's not a matter of aesteticising life, in the sense of making life picturesque, (though that can be fun too). Rather it's a matter of shuffling the cards, even cheating a little in the game, mixing the genres and disordering the senses. The arrow of time penetrates the framed picture, and the picture is what it does. Experimentation is a lure to see what could be moving in and out of us, under and about us. The fish steers the boat. See where it's headed to - or cut the line and try a different lure. Events are like vampires, only inverted. Invisible to our eyes they can only be seen in the mirror of representation, in the theatre of misrepresentation. And they might even infuse blood instead of extracting it. To die they must give us life.
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time, travesty and the theatre of misrepresentation (an a propos of Lilli Hartmann's art and life a text by Anders Dunker)
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