Читать книгу Performance / Media / Art / Culture - Jacki Apple - Страница 25

As Chinese Americans, David Henry Hwang and Ping Chong have both made the experience of “otherness,” of being aliens in American culture, a central theme in their work. For Chong the issue of perception is paramount. He consistently and consciously reverses the viewpoint so that we can see our own strangeness, while also identifying with someone who is different, be it a golem or a gorilla. Had he staged 1000 Airplanes we probably would have been puzzling over humans from the perspective of the visitors.

Angels of Swedenborg was inspired by the eighteenth-century Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg’s writings on heaven and hell via Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings. According to Swedenborg, angels and devils are not “a species apart but derived from the human race,” and we are not assigned but choose to inhabit one or the other’s domain.

For Swedenborg time and space were no obstacles. He visited other realms while his body remained in his study. Chong also allowed the audience to be in several places at once. Simultaneously, what happened in the corral that represented Heaven traversed several centuries in its reflection on our changing ideas about what constitutes “goodness.”

Chong reincarnated Swedenborg in the twentieth century as a modern man who suffers from existential angst. Alone in the empty void of eternity where all souls live, Swedenborg dramatically recited his credentials, his knowledge and accomplishments in the arts, humanities, and sciences, followed by the indicators of his present success — his IBM PC, Sony Walkman, VCR, Deutsche Gramophone recordings, etc. Alienation is now a common condition generally relieved by acquisition of material goods, preferably user-friendly.

He sat at his desk with his computer and telephone, grappled with unanswered questions about the nature of the Soul, Heaven, Hell, and the Universe, had revelatory visions, and a few visitations. An electronic word display randomly repeated Chevalier, Montrachet 1977, Batard, Puligny.¹ The sun rose over Heaven and turned into a Chinese painting of a beatific-faced baby.

Ping Chong, Angels of Swedenborg 1989. Photos: Joe Jeffcoat.

Projections of a text in an unfamiliar and unidentifiable alphabet, later replaced by pictographic signs of satellite dishes, airplanes, computers, and so on, appeared and disappeared. The world was overlaid with a grid as the names of countries were recited, and Swedenborg asked, “Where is the seat of the soul?”

Chong marked off the site of Heaven by putting a fence around it like a sheep pen, and covering the ground with white feathers. The Angels who inhabited it were identical female figures with white Noh-like facemasks and golden hair. Clothed in pigeon-gray nineteenth-century-style dresses with wings, they might have been schoolgirls, governesses, or a peculiar order of nuns. Heaven (or Hell if you prefer) was also occupied by male figures in white lab coats, with benign fish-like reptilian heads, like beings in a Surrealist painting. There was also a little brown furry creature, sort of a cross between a teddy bear, a chimpanzee, and a beaver, who scampered through kicking up feathers. In one sequence the precisely choreographed gestures of the winged angels had courtly grace as they pointed, questioned, bowed and prayed. Much later, two fought. The victor, cheered as a hero, became the commander. Donned in orange lifejackets, the rest moved in unison like the Red Guard.² The defiant individualistic angel, the one who didn’t “fit in,” had her wings clipped.

Which world is more “alien” — the one we imagine or the one we have created? Are they not one and the same? Chong leaves us to ponder such abstract questions. Though Angels of Swedenborg at first seemed a less complex, softer work than many of Chong’s other pieces, its elegant images contain subtle nuances of meaning that continue to resonate much, much later.