Disarmed by Unexpected Encounters
As we count the days back to the possible point of exposure and forwards to the remaining time of isolation, as the everyday loses all spontaneity of unexpected encounters in the endless repetition of routine, engagement with others seems to be the only means of capturing the present, of challenging our own single-perspective notions in the face of a multitude of often uncomfortable polemics.
In a similar way, we’ve frequently been caught in the performance machine of spectatorship in the theater, seeking indices and our own routes into the performance, into the environment it establishes, seeking an aperture, an opening leading to a being-here. The theater we yearn for is not an “alternative” to the “real” world but is a “real place, where real people go to work, and where their work takes the form of ‘conversation.'”[1] There is no single perfect vantage point, but rather a series of possible entries into the event. Narrative continuity is extremely unstable in these circumstances, with dramaturgy constructed by chance encounters with others, by failed gestures that remain in traces, by the unplanned. We design a space of friction, a happening, a multitude of conversations.
After our performances, the public joins us: touching the props, examining the abandoned costumes, testing the floor, and looking back over their shoulders towards the now-empty seats. The performance is over, and an excavation of sorts begins. The gaze turns its object, the theatrical event, inside out, looking at its seams: the duct-taped cables, the backs of screens, the lost sock, the stage lit up by working lights, devoid of shadow play.
Like the people in Brecht’s Street Scene, we are stuck on a street corner, struck by our responsibility for the event. As the dust settles, as the sweat is wiped away, we find ourselves in an encounter with memory and the traces of the event: among the material and cerebral detritus, among the fascinating ruins. What is left on stage takes the shape of a strange post-festum instruction manual or informational guide. This exploded view of traces and ephemera functions as an extension of the performance itself and is more reminiscent of a situation in the making than one that has just passed.
BADco. is a collaborative performance collective based in Zagreb, Croatia. Since 2013, we’ve initiated a series of 24-hour events,[2] inviting others to join us in temporarily inhabiting spaces—ecologically problematic urban zones, former industrial buildings, abandoned construction sites of cultural venues. A day would start with setting up tents, a generator, cables and mics, parking bikes and letting dogs run around, coffee—but also a segment of choreography, a reading, a workshop, an interview. And it would continue with conversations, concerts, objects, dance.
Even if we planned a schedule or a narrative arc, performing in such a setting inevitably leads to text spoken or choreography danced coming into proximity, into correspondence with what others brought to our expanded conversation, leaving us disarmed by unexpected encounters, creating a space of friction, a space—to quote Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula—”where a work of art and the spectator come together to produce a crisis, as well as mutual recognition.”[3]
[1] Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love (University of Michigan Press, 2013), 124.
[2] More on the project at: http://badco.hr/en/work/1/all#!nature-needs-to-be-constructed
[3] Florian Malzacher, Not Just a Mirror. Looking for the Political Theatre of Today: Performing Urgency 1 (Alexander Verlag Berlin, 2015).
The word magazine comes from the Arabic makhzan, meaning storehouse: a place for materials to be placed and held, temporarily or permanently.[1] A magazine is a container, a vessel, a holding site–always with an implied temporal function. A magazine houses various kinds of materials or many specimens of the same type. A storehouse serves as a source: it is a repository and a supplier.
Like a building, a published magazine organizes deposits and extractions. In a cycle each serial edition replaces the previous one, supplanting it, yet advancing because of what came before. “To publish a magazine is to enter into a heightened relationship with the present moment,” writes Gwen Allen in her history of artist publications; magazines reflect their moment while also defining and shaping it.[2] Having captured the “contemporary” in serial, they also store these moments durably: in print, in archives, in annals, in volumes. Magazines imagine futures but in that future they also document the present as histories. They are ephemeral and disposable, but also archives, back lists, long tails.
For artists—literary, visual, performance—magazines have proven to be necessary, even essential, spaces since modernism. The pages of art magazines offer places for play, for experiment, for the formation of identities, stances, looks, ideas– foreshadowing key historical developments in the avant-garde and, indeed, making them possible by letting artists express on paper what they could not (yet) realize in other forms: think of Dada (1917-21), Cabaret Voltaire (1916), La Revolution Surrealiste (1924-29), the many magazines of Fluxus, and more recently Triple Canopy, e-flux, Raqs Media Collective, Sarai Reader 9. Artist magazines precipitate an altered future.
Goethe, the ur-dramaturg, said a magazine is like a series of rooms, a crossing of thresholds. Explaining the name of his Propylaen (one of the first artist magazines, 1798-1800), Goethe called it “the step, the door, the entrance, the antechamber, the space between the inner and the outer, the sacred and the profane; this is the place we choose as the meeting-ground for exchanges with our friends.”[3]
In the spirit of Goethe’s threshold gathering of friends, I propose a living magazine—The Storehouse—as a serial time-based event. (Storehouse #1, #2, etc.) Each edition lasts for a long weekend, taking place in one building holding a mix of forms. The public wanders through a collection of rooms, each with a different performance, exhibit, reading, meeting, game, discussion. Their experience is not fixed. They wander without moorings, the way a curious reader meanders through the pages of a magazine, not knowing what they’re searching for. Each edition convenes authors, sculptors, theatermakers, and explores an urgent question of the day—what defines illiberalism? How does color define perception? What is anonymity in 2020?
In one room, three philosophers engage in spirited debate and invite visitors to join them at the table. In the next, a photographer’s display. Then a hall inhabited by dancers in motion. An immersive theatrical installation. And so on. The order of encounters is determined by the visitor’s curiosity. The participating artists and writers get to see what the others have contributed to the overall investigation. Everyone is surprised by the collisions, disarmed by unexpected encounters.
Could a sustained platform of this kind serve as a model for the current tidal wave of nonobjective art experiences, grounding cultural communities in a shared sense of critical values and inquiry—missing since the 1980s? Could the dimensions of a live immersive “publication” encourage public-facing artists, leaving a trail for those who come after? Momentary heat from the convening gets captured in print or web publication. Would a built-to-dissolve edifice serve as a (much-needed) invitation to play, with low stakes as part of a community of other writers and makers?
What if this live discovery platform encouraged shared thinking-through of political crises and aesthetic impulses? Could we affirm the importance of collective creativity by coming together in regular cycles? What if this was a space for spontaneity, not careerism? How could the loose experience of discovering contents in “magazine” form yield a new component of liveness: live readings, shared spectatorship, collective response?
In his essay “On the Grammar of the Space,” Boris Groys writes: “Today’s art space can be regarded as beautiful only if it is rhetorically persuasive.” In the Storehouse, inquiry happens on your feet and the art space holds bountiful supplies. The collectivity is beautiful; it persuades.
[1] See Gwen Allen, “Magazines in and as Art” in Documents of Contemporary Art: The Magazine, edited by Gwen Allen. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2016. 12-13.
[2] Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 2011. 1.
[3] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Introduction to the Propyläen” (1798), quoted in Allen, Artists’ Magazines, 3.