Читать книгу Performance / Media / Art / Culture - Jacki Apple - Страница 27
ОглавлениеHow deep is time? How far down into the life of matter do we have to go before we understand what time is?
We head out into space. We brave space, line up the launch window and blast off, we swing around the planet in a song. But time binds us to aging flesh.
Don DeLillo, Underworld 1997
Every so often art delivers on the promise to transport us beyond the mind-numbing media assault and banalities of twenty-first-century daily life. Like a wide awake walk in nature, great art can lead us to contemplate the larger mysteries of life, one of which is the nature of time. Two recent theatrical performances have addressed this question in very different ways, both of which open us to a simultaneous perception of the macro and the micro.
South African artist William Kentridge and his collaborators virtuosic multimedia opera Refuse The Hour takes us on a revelatory but appropriately elliptical journey through history, science, and art in its exploration of the mechanisms and meaning of time from the Greek myth of Perseus to Einstein’s revolutionary discoveries and their modernist visual representations.
On the opposite pole New York filmmaker Charles Atlas and choreographer/dancers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener’s futuristic dreamlike non-narrative visual masterpiece Tesseract enfolds us in a metamorphic time-space landscape traversed by dancers, their projected spirit bodies, and abstract geometric forms.
Refuse the Hour
Refuse the Hour takes place inside the constructed world of William Kentridge from the projected environs of his studio to the theatrical set inhabited by his eccentric time-measuring mechanisms, dancers, and musicians. It is the manifestation of the artist’s creative process as he investigates the measurement and manipulation of time, the problem of human perception, and the question of control — mere chance or fate.
At the center of all the action is Kentridge himself, a visual artist of remarkable range, diversity, and intellect, and an equally skilled and charismatic performer. He is the mastermind inventor and storyteller who delivers a series of historical anecdotes and philosophical musings laced with mythological, scientific, and poetic references. Dressed in black pants and white shirt, white-haired and soft-spoken, his voice and manner brought to mind Anthony Hopkins as Robert Ford in Westworld. He is just as mesmerizing and the questions he raises are equally compelling.
William Kentridge, Refuse the Hour 2017. Photo: John Hodgkiss.
It begins with the problem of Perseus who, despite an epic journey through great dangers and obstacles that by all logic should have altered his course, ends up fulfilling the prophesy of killing his father anyway, not by intent but by accident. Could he have escaped his fate? Alter the course of time that led to an otherwise unlikely conclusion? Can any of us? Are we bound by destiny or merely coincidence in an unpredictable universe? It reminds me of the possible parallel paths in the film Run Lola Run in which the circumstances generating the ten seconds differential of when Lola arrives at the curb determines whether or not she will be struck by a car. Is that an accident, mere luck, or some mysterious order in the algorithms of time? Do we all inhabit multiple timelines in which we live in one, and die in the other? In her novel Life After Life Kate Atkinson replays this scenario over and over. But Kentridge plays out the dilemma of Einstein’s theories of spacetime by demonstrating how our perceptions of time shape our experience as the clock ticks.
In past time on film Kentridge paces his studio, his mind a kaleidoscope of thoughts, ideas, questions, calculations, all colliding into each other and spinning around. He changes the speed of his walking as he marks, counts, and measures. On stage every thought is put in the context of history, simultaneously activated verbally, sonically, visually, and kinetically. Kentridge’s discourse explores the problem of speed and measurement, light versus sound, mechanized synchronization versus the human body in motion, an expanding universe versus entropy and black holes. Then there is the matter of the invention of photography and its ability to “stop” time, Muybridge’s studies of bodies in motion, cinema in which time can move forward and backward, and riffs on clocks and trains and Greenwich time. He even cites Einstein’s twin astronaut paradox.1
