Ventriloquism, Performance, and Contemporary Art (Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies) [1 ed.] 9781032290454, 9781032304762, 9781003303978, 1032290455

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Pulling Strings
1 Voice, Vivification, and Subjectivity
2 Over My Dead Body
3 Putting Words in Your Mouth and Images in Your Eyes
4 Dislocated Voices
Part II: Dummies
5 García’s Juegos
6 Dialectic Silence
7 Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Dummies
Part III: Speech Acts
8 I Remember
9 Embolalia
10 Re-siting Marx
Part IV: Echoes
11 In A Manner of Speaking
12 Lithic Record
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Ventriloquism, Performance, and Contemporary Art

Ventriloquism, Performance, and Contemporary Art volume calls attention to the unexpected prevalence of ventriloqual motifs and strategies within contemporary art. Engaging with issues of voice, embodiment, power, and projection, the case ­studies assembled in this volume span a range of media from painting, sculpture, and photography to installation, performance, architecture, and video. Importantly, they both examine and enact ventriloqual practices, and do so as a means of interrogating and performatively bearing out contemporary conceptions of authorship, subjectivity, and performance. Put otherwise, the chapters in this book oscillate seamlessly between art history, theory, and criticism through both analytical and performative means. Across twelve essays on ventriloquism in contemporary art, the authors, who are curators, historians, and artists, shine light on this outdated practice, repositioning it as a ­conspicuous and meaningful trend within a range of artistic practices today. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, media studies, performance, museum/curatorial studies, and theater. Jennie Hirsh is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the ­Maryland Institute College of Art. Isabelle Loring Wallace is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Georgia.

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into visual culture and art practice, theory, and research. Art-Based Research in the Context of a Global Pandemic Edited by Usva Seregina and Astrid Van den Bossche Cultural Approaches to Disgust and the Visceral Edited by Max Ryynänen, Heidi S. Kosonen, and Susanne C. Ylönen Art Agency and the Continued Assault on Authorship Simon Blond Artistic Cartography and Design Explorations Towards the Pluriverse Edited by Satu Miettinen, Enni Mikkonen, Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos, and Melanie Sarantou Ventriloquism, Performance, and Contemporary Art Edited by Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Advances-in-Art-and-Visual-Studies/book-series/RAVS

Ventriloquism, Performance, and Contemporary Art

Edited by Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace

Designed cover image: Allora & Calzadilla (in collaboration with Ted Chiang), The Great Silence, 2014. 3-channel HD video, 16 minutes 22 seconds. Installation view, Sharjah Biennial 13, 2017. Courtesy of kurimanzutto, Mexico City and the artist. Photo: Shanavas Jamaluddin. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-29045-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-30476-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-30397-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003303978 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction Voiceovers

vii xi xv 1

J E N N I E H I R S H A N D I S A B E L L E L O R I N G WA L L AC E

PART I

Pulling Strings

23

1 Voice, Vivification, and Subjectivity Jasper Johns’ Ventriloquist

25

I S A B E L L E L O R I N G WA L L AC E

2 Over My Dead Body Puppets, Performance, and Paralysis in Cardiff and Miller’s The Marionette Maker

42

JEN NIE HIRSH

3 Putting Words in Your Mouth and Images in Your Eyes

59

C O U RT N E Y M C C L E L L A N

4 Dislocated Voices Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades K AT E O ’ C O N N O R

72

vi Contents PART II

Dummies 89 5 García’s Juegos Puppets, Immunity, Torture

91

J UA N C A R L O S G U E R R E RO - H E R N Á N D E Z

6 Dialectic Silence Schizophonia in Juan Muñoz’s Ventriloquist Dummy

110

CINTIA GUTIÉRREZ REYES

7 Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Dummies

130

K AT I E G E H A

PART III

Speech Acts

147

8 I Remember On Modern Living

149

NOR A W EN DL

9 Embolalia Anna Deavere Smith Throwing Her Voice

173

JA N E BLOCK ER

10 Re-siting Marx Okwui Enwezor, Ventriloquism, and the Das Kapital Oratorio

188

K ER R HOUSTON

PART IV

Echoes

203

11 In a Manner of Speaking

205

C AT H E R I N E C L OV E R

12 LITHIC RECORD

225

N I C H O L A S B . J AC O B S E N A N D N I N A E L D E R

Bibliography 255 Index 267

Figures

0.1 Photo of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy from NBC Radio, 1947 2 0.2 Jordan Wolfson, (Female figure), 2014. Mixed media. Overall: 90 ½ × 72 × 29 inches. (229.9 × 182.9 × 73.7 cm) 9 0.3 Jordan Wolfson, Colored sculpture, 2016. Mixed media. Dimensions variable with installation 11 0.4 Boaz Arad, Hebrew Lesson, 2000. Still from 12-second video 13 0.5 Candice Breitz. Stills from Love Story, 2016. Featuring Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin. 7-Channel Installation: 7 Hard Drives. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Outset Germany (Berlin) and the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg 15 0.6 Candice Breitz, Stills from Love Story, 2016. Top: Shabeena Francis Saveri, Sarah Ezzat Mardini, Mamy Maloba Langa/Bottom: José María João, Farah Abdi Mohamed, Luis Ernesto Nava Molero. 7-Channel Installation: 7 Hard Drives. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Outset Germany (Berlin) and the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg 16 0.7 Allora & Calzadilla (in collaboration with Ted Chiang), The Great Silence, 2014. 3-Channel HD video, 16 minutes 22 seconds. Installation view, Sharjah Biennial 13, 2017. Jamaluddin. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation 18 1.1 Jasper Johns, Ventriloquist, 1983, 75 × 50 in. (190.5 × 127 cm), encaustic on canvas. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 26 1.2 Jasper Johns, Voice, 1964–1967, 96 × 69 ½ in. (243.8 × 176.5 cm), oil on canvas with wood, string, wire, and metal spoon and fork (two panels), The Menil Collection, Houston 28 1.3 Jasper Johns, Voice 2, 1967–1971, oil and collage on canvas (three panels), 72 × 50 in. (182.9 × 127 cm) each panel, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung ­Basel, ­Kunstmuseum 31 1.4 Barry Moser, Moby Dick or Sperm Whale, from Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or the Whale (San Francisco, 1979), p. 357. Wood engraving, 10 ³∕8 × 6 ½ in. (26.4 × 17.3 cm) 34 1.5 Jasper Johns, In the Studio, 1982, collage and encaustic on canvas with objects. 72 × 48 in (182.9 × 121.9 cm). Collection of the artist 36 2.1 Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller, The Cabinet of Curiousness, 2010 44

viii Figures 2.2 Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller, The Marionette Maker installed at Palacio de Cristal del Retiro, 2014 2.3 Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller, The Marionette Maker, 2014. Detail 2.4 Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller, The Marionette Maker, 2014. Detail 2.5 Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz ’d’éclairage … (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas…), 1946–1966. 7 feet 11 ½ in × 70 in × 49 in (242.6 × 177.8 × 124.5 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the Cassandra Foundation, 1969, 1969-41-1 2.6 Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Night Walk for Edinburgh (screen grab), 2019 3.1 Installation view, Amalia Pica, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, 2013 3.2 Installation view, Amalia Pica, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, 2013 3.3 Antoine Catala, Trophies, 2012. Latex, aluminum/wood frame, pump, tube 57 × 39 × 4 in. (144.78 × 99.06 × 10.16 cm) 3.4 Ann Hamilton, Face to Face 2. Pigment print. Edition of 3 with 2 artist’s proofs. Published in 2001 by Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. Image size: 3.5 × 10 in, paper size: 22 × 18 in 3.5 Courtney McClellan, Teleprompters, 2018. Faux molding, vinyl, vinyl ­netting, picture frames, velvet, grommet, clip, slide. 8 × 7 × 24 in 3.6 Courtney McClellan, Teleprompter, 2018. Vinyl, microphone stand, clipboard. 60 × 24 × 24 in 4.1 Wael Shawky, Cabaret Crusades I: The Horror Show File, 2010, HD video, color, sound, English subtitles, 31 minutes 49 seconds. Detail of Italian puppets from Turin’s Museo della Marionetta 4.2 Wael Shawky, Cabaret Crusades II: The Path to Cairo, 2012. HD video, color, sound, English subtitles. Dimensions variable. 60 minutes. Detail of the marionette playing Usama ibn Munqidh 4.3 Wael Shawky, Cabaret Crusades III: The Secrets of Karbalaa, 2015. HD Film, color, sound, English subtitles. 2 hours. Detail of marionettes dressed as Muslim pilgrims circle the Kaaba in Haram and discuss the fate of Hussein 4.4 Wael Shawky, Cabaret Crusades I: The Horror Show File, 2010. HD video, color, sound, English subtitles, 31 minutes 49 seconds. Detail of the child Seljuq Sultan in Mosul warning his people of the Franks who had resorted to cannibalism 4.5 Wael Shawky, Cabaret Crusades I: The Horror Show File, 2010. HD video, color, sound, English subtitles, 31 minutes 49 seconds. © Wael Shawky; Courtesy Lisson Gallery. Detail of the decapitated heads of Thoros and the Queen of Edessa 5.1 María Consuelo García, [left] Juego No.2 and [right] Juego No.1, 1978–1979, at 28 Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales, November 1980. The caption reads: “For the first time in the history of the Salon, the public comments that the best work was awarded the

45 46 47

51 53 61 62 65 66 69 70 73 75

79

83

84

Figures  ix first prize. Set of the María C. García’s winning work.” El Tiempo (newspaper) n.d. Clip from García’s personal archive 5.2 María Consuelo García, Juego No.2, 1979, at 28 Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales, November 1980 5.3 María Consuelo García, Juego No.1, 1978–1979, at 28 Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales, November 1980. El Tiempo (newspaper) n.d. Clip from García’s personal archive 6.1 Juan Muñoz, Wasteland, 1986 6.2 Juan Muñoz, Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior, 2000 6.3 Charlie McCarthy 7.1 Tadeusz Kantor, Schulbank aus: Die tote Klasse (school bench from “The Dead Class”), 1975. Installation view 7.2 Tadeusz Kantor’s props-in-action for The Dead Class, 1975 7.3 Tadeusz Kantor, The Sea Concert, 1967. Performance featuring Edward Krasiński at the Baltic Sea 7.4 Installation view of the Jewish Museum’s 2009 permanent collection exhibition Theaters of Memory: Art and Holocaust showing Kantor’s dummy piece in relation to Anselm Kiefer, Die Himmelspaläste (The Heavenly Palaces), 2004 and Christian Boltanski Monument (Odessa), 1989–2003 7.5 Tadeusz Kantor, Children at Their Desk from The Dead Class, 1975 in installation at Centro Pecci, Prato, Italy, 2016 7.6 Installation of Tadeusz Kantor, Children at Their Desk from The Dead Class, 1975 with Marlene Dumas, Female, 1992–1993 at Centro Pecci, Prato, Italy, 2016 8.1 Gerard & Kelly, Modern Living, 2017. Performance view: Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, presented by the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Pictured: Julia Eichten 8.2 Bill Hedrich, photograph of Farnsworth House, 1951 (Mies van der Rohe, Plano, Illinois, 1951), Farnsworth Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL 8.3 Gerard & Kelly, Modern Living, 2017. Performance view: Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, presented by the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Pictured: Julia Eichten and Zack Winokur 8.4 Nora Wendl, I Listened (58:15–58:40), 2017. Digital print on glass, 28.8 in. × 21.6 in. 8.5 Photograph of unknown woman in the Farnsworth House, undated, back stamped “Gorman Child Photography,” Farnsworth Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL 8.6 Nora Wendl, Unknown woman, Farnsworth House, 2013. Chromogenic print, 24 in. × 36 in. 9.1 Anna Deavere Smith as Carmel Cato, Fires in the Mirror, George C. Wolfe, director, PBS, 1993, 97 minutes 9.2 Anna Deavere Smith as Michael Miller, Fires in the Mirror, George C. Wolfe, director, PBS, 1993, 97 minutes 10.1 Isaac Julien, Das Kapital Oratorio, 2015. Installation shot of performance at La Biennale di Venezia

92 94 97 111 112 115 131 131 134

140 142 143 150 151 157 164 165 166 174 178 189

x Figures 10.2 Isaac Julien, Das Kapital Oratorio, 2015. Installation shot of performance at La Biennale di Venezia 192 10.3 Zoe Beloff, Still from A Model Family in a Model Home, 2015 193 11.1 Catherine Clover, In a Manner of Speaking (2018) as part of My ­Monster: The Human Animal Hybrid curated by Evelyn Tsitas RMIT Gallery, ­Melbourne, Australia. Stereo field recording, vinyl lettering, participatory performance. Courtesy of the artist 207 11.2 Catherine Clover, In a Manner of Speaking (2018) as part of My Monster: The Human Animal Hybrid curated by Evelyn Tsitas RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, Australia. Stereo field recording, vinyl lettering, participatory performance. Courtesy of the artist 210 11.3 Catherine Clover, Speaking in Tongues (2019) as part of Assembling Animal Communication curated by Kevin Chua for Animal/Language Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, US. Stereo audio recording (a reading of Bat by Tessa Laird to the local fruit bats) and digital prints on paper. Courtesy of the artist 212 11.4 Catherine Clover, OH! AH AH PREE TRRA TRRA (2019) as part of Music and Other Living Creatures series for Café Oto, London, UK. Sound walk and participatory performance in Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park. Photo credit Helen Frosi. Courtesy of the 217 artist and Helen Frosi 11.5 Catherine Clover, The Ambassadors (2019) as part of Immerse 2019 ­curated by Kim de Kretser, Ferntree Gully Public Library, Melbourne, Australia. Vinyl lettering on the library windows, performance. Photo credit Samara Clifford. Courtesy of the artist 221 and Samara Clifford 12.1 nicolas b. jacobsen and Nina Elder, Lithic Record, 2020, detail 226 12.2 nicolas b. jacobsen and Nina Elder, Lithic Record, 2020, detail 229 12.3 nicolas b. jacobsen and Nina Elder, Lithic Record, 2020, detail 230 12.4 nicolas b. jacobsen and Nina Elder, Lithic Record, 2020, detail 241 12.5 nicolas b. jacobsen and Nina Elder, Lithic Record, 2020, detail 242 12.6 nicolas b. jacobsen and Nina Elder, Lithic Record, 2020, detail 253 12.7 nicolas b. jacobsen and Nina Elder, Lithic Record, 2020, detail 254

Contributors

Jane Blocker is Professor of Art History at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of four books of contemporary art history that engage performance, gender and sexuality, and critical race studies: Becoming Past: History in Contemporary Art; Seeing Witness: Visuality and the Ethics of Testimony; What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance; and Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile. She has published articles in many interdisciplinary journals including The Drama Review, Performance Research, Grey Room, Art Journal, Camera Obscura, Cultural Studies, and Performing Arts Journal and contributed essays to numerous anthologies. Catherine Clover’s  multidisciplinary practice addresses communication through voice, language, and the interplay between hearing/listening and seeing/reading. Using field recording, digital imaging, and the spoken/written word, she explores an expanded approach to language within and across species through a framework of everyday experience. With listening as a key focus and the complexity of the urban as a shared sonic space, the artworks prompt transmission and reception through the fluidity, instability, and mobility of voicing and languaging. The artworks are social in nature and frequently involve collaboration and participation with other artists and with audiences. They take several forms including texts/ scores, sound, installations, sound walks, performance, readings, and external public artworks. Brought up in London, UK, she arrived in Melbourne, Australia, as a visiting artist through Gertrude Contemporary in the 1990s. Her work has been exhibited and performed regularly both within Australia and internationally since the 1990s. She teaches in Melbourne at Swinburne University (M.A. Writing) and RMIT University (M.A. Public Art) and holds a practice-led Ph.D. (Fine Art) through RMIT University. www.ciclover.com Nina Elder  is an artist and researcher who creates projects that reveal humanity’s dependence on and interruption of the natural world. With a focus on changing cultures and ecologies, Nina advocates for collaboration, fostering relationships between institutions, artists, scientists, and diverse communities. Her work takes many forms, including drawings, performative lectures, pedagogy and critical writing, long-term community-based projects, and public art. Recent solo exhibitions of N ­ ina’s work have been organized by SITE Santa Fe, Indianapolis Contemporary, and university museums across the U.S. Her work has been featured in Art in America, VICE magazine, and on PBS; her writing has been published

xii Contributors in American Scientist and Edge Effects. Nina’s research has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Rauschenberg Foundation, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. Nina is an affiliate artist of the National Performance Network. She has recently held research positions at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, the Anchorage Museum, and the Art and Ecology Program at the University of New Mexico. Nina migrates between rural places in New Mexico and Alaska. Dr. Katie Geha is the Director of the Galleries at the Lamar Dodd School of Art where she oversees the installation of exhibitions at the Dodd Galleries and the Athenaeum, a downtown contemporary art space established in 2021. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin. She has organized many exhibitions, most recently solo shows with Lisa Tan, Trevor Paglen, and Rosemary Mayer. She is currently working on an essay on the artist Roger Brown, the history of his various residencies, and the curtains that appear throughout his homes and in his paintings. Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández  has a Ph.D. in Art History, an M.A. in Philosophy, and an MSc in Electrical Engineering. He researches global contemporary art and culture, particularly video, experimental and expanded cinema, photography, collective memory, decoloniality, and gender. He has published articles and book chapters in journals such as TDR/The Drama Review, Photographies, Cinergie— Il Cinema e le altre Arti, and chapters in edited volumes, such as Pop Cinema (Edinburgh University Press) and Fallen Monuments, Contested Memorials, and Dislodged Pasts (Routledge). Of his two forthcoming books, both in Spanish, one addresses six women artists exploring video art in the 1980s in Colombia, while the other discusses the feminist work of the Koré Dance Teather. https://juancarlosguerrerohernandez.academia.edu Jennie Hirsh is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She has held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton and Columbia Universities as well as pre-doctoral fellowships from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the U.S. Fulbright commission, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Wolfsonian FIU. Her publications include Contemporary Art and Classical Myth (Ashgate/Routledge, 2011/2016), co-edited with Isabelle Loring Wallace, as well as essays on artists and filmmakers including Giorgio de Chirico, Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini, Soledad Salamé, Yinka Shonibare, and Regina Silveira. Her monographic study of the painting and writing of Giorgio de Chirico is forthcoming. Kerr Houston  is an art historian and critic whose scholarship has largely focused on the Italian Renaissance, embodied viewership, and the history of art criticism. He has taught at MICA since 2002 and is the author of An Introduction to Art ­Criticism (Pearson, 2012), The Place of the Viewer (Brill, 2019), and more than two dozen articles and essays, which have appeared in publications such as Art Journal, Gesta, NKA, and Source: Notes in the History of Art. He lives in Baltimore. nicholas b. jacobsen is a seventh-generation Utah-Mormon, trans-nonbinary settler raised in the traditional homelands of the Nuwu. As a creative historian, cultural critic, and visual artist, their work addresses their personal and ancestral

Contributors  xiii connections to the U.S. and Mormon settler-colonial-imperialist project via performance, video, installation, writing, digital collage, pottery, and found-­ ­ object sculpture. Through this, they work to dis-assimilate from the myths of supremacy and innocence central to Mormon and U.S. cultures. jacobsen completed a M.F.A ­degree in Art & Ecology at the University of New Mexico and a B.F.A in Ceramics from Southern Utah University. They’ve won numerous awards and have been published, podcasted, exhibited, and collected throughout the U.S. You can see more of their work at nicholasbjacobsen.com and @Unsettling_­Mormonism on Instagram. Courtney McClellan is an artist and writer from Greensboro, N.C. She earned her B.A. in Studio Art and Journalism and Mass Communications from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008, and in 2013, she earned her M.F.A from  Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 2013–2014, she served as the Fountainhead Fellow in the Sculpture and Extended Media Department at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Sculpture ­Fellow at the University of Georgia. She was a 2017–2018 SMFA at Tufts Traveling Fellow, and she has been an artist in residence at the McDowell, Yaddo, the Hambidge Center, and Wassaic Projects. McClellan’s work has been shown at ­Sculpture Center in Long Island City, NY; Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, VA; and the ­Atlanta Contemporary in Atlanta, GA. Her work has been written about in Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Burnaway. She is a contributor at Art Papers. In 2019, McClellan was named the ­Roman J. Witt Residency at the University of Michigan and a Working Artist Project Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Recently, she was named the 2021 Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. She lives in Atlanta, GA. Kate O’Connor completed her Ph.D. in Art History at The University of Queensland, Australia. Her research focused on motifs of puppetry as a device for critiquing relationships of power within specific marginalized histories. Kate currently teaches Master’s, Honours, and undergraduate programs at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University and works within the collection at The University of Queensland Art Museum. Cintia Gutiérrez Reyes is an artist and researcher at the Ministry of Science, ­I nnovation and Universities attached to the Department of Architecture and Fine Arts at the University of Málaga (Spain), where she is a teacher. She has published in magazines such as Boletín de Arte, Arte, Individuo y Sociedad, Aniav, Reina ­Sofia, and I Beni Culturali (Italy). One of her main research lines is the work of the Spanish artist Juan Muñoz, the central theme of her Ph.D. thesis. Isabelle Loring Wallace is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Georgia as well as Associate Director of Research and Graduate Studies. She is the author of numerous articles and catalog essays and is the co-editor of two anthologies that reflect her commitment to thinking about contemporary art within broad cultural and historical contexts: Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, co-edited with Jennie Hirsh (Ashgate/Routledge, 2011/2016) and Contemporary Art about Architecture: A Strange Utility co-edited with Nora Wendl (Ashgate/Routledge, 2013/2016). Professor Wallace is also the author of Jasper

xiv Contributors Johns (Phaidon, 2014) and is currently completing her second book on Johns that ­considers his work in conjunction with contemporaneous developments in the fields of genetics and psychoanalysis. Nora Wendl is Associate Professor of Architecture and Regents’ Lecturer at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she teaches both architectural design and theory. She is also the executive editor of the Journal of Architectural Education. As an artist, educator, and writer, her research and practice focus on the embodiment of architectural history through writing, photography, film, installation, and performance. Her publications and exhibitions have been supported most recently by grants and residencies through the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP). For NTHP, she was content lead and design co-lead for the 2020–2021 exhibition Edith Farnsworth, Reconsidered, in which the glass house was staged as Dr. Farnsworth actually inhabited it in the early 1950s: a contrast to the myth that the architect, Mies van der Rohe, originally furnished the house. Wendl has written and published widely in ­Architecture and Culture, JAE, Thresholds, Revista de Arquitectura, and Arquine, among other journals, and her academic articles have made their way into popular press—in particular “A Story of Sex and Real Estate, Reconsidered,” originally published by Thresholds, on the construction of the history of the Farnsworth House. She is co-editor, with Isabelle Loring Wallace, of Contemporary Art about Architecture: A Strange Utility (Ashgate/Routledge, 2013/2016).

Acknowledgments

In 2018, we enthusiastically convened a panel at the annual College Art Association conference on the subject of ventriloquism and contemporary art—a topic we considered both timely and rich relative to each of our interests. The range and rigor of that conversation as well as the interest it garnered amongst our colleagues in the fields of art history and performance studies inspired us to expand upon and formalize that exchange, resulting in the present anthology. No anthology comes to fruition without incurring significant debts, only some of which are acknowledged here. To begin, we would like to thank those who joined us as participants in the 2018 panel—Jane Blocker, Michael Jay McClure, Nora Wendl— as well as those whose voices have now been added to this emerging and exciting line of inquiry: Catherine Clover, Nina Elder and nicholas b. jacobsen, Katie Geha, Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernandez, Cintia Gutiérrez Reyes, Kerr Houston, Courtney McClellan, and Kate O’Connor. We also acknowledge the many artists who patiently entertained our questions, requests, and paperwork in the course of this volume’s production. If it is not obvious, please know that we do what we do out of admiration for what you have already done. We are also pleased to identify the institutions that supported us as we worked on this project: the Maryland Institute College of Art and, at the University of Georgia, the Lamar Dodd School of Art and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. We are very grateful for the support of these institutions and the sense of community they provide. Finally, we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the excellent and efficient work of our commissioning editor Isabella Vitti and editorial assistant Katie Armstrong. Their work, along with insightful feedback from our anonymous readers, made this book both possible and better. Jennie Hirsh Maryland Institute College of Art Isabelle Loring Wallace Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia

Introduction Voiceovers Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace

The Premise What recommends modern ventriloquism—a low-brow, largely defunct subset of the theatrical arts—as a lens for making and analyzing contemporary art? With origins that can be traced to antiquity and a name that derives from the Latin translation of the Greek word engastrimythos, ventriloquism has a long and complex history, but, at essence, it turns on the relationship between the body and spoken word, whose connection it foregrounds and warps in both name (en/in, gaster/stomach, mythos/ speech) and deed. For what conjoins the many diverse practices brought together under the rubric of ventriloquism, from spirit possession to Edgar Bergen and Alexa, is a strategic reconfiguration of the relationship between the voice and human body, which is, even in the most ordinary of contexts, both banal and strange. Produced by soundwaves created when air from the lungs hits the vocal folds of the larynx that are in turn shaped by the tongue and other buccal anatomy, voice is something humans both have and make and, until relatively recently, it was entirely reliant on the human body for its production. Yet, as Steven Connor reminds us, the voice comes into its own as departure. That is, we make it, in order to see it go.1 This essential fact is key to ventriloqual practices from the Oracle of Delphi forward, and it is crucial to the art considered in this volume and, perhaps, to art in general. For while voices express the speaking subject, they are predicated upon and ultimately impossible without their divorce from any corporeal site of origin. And, it is precisely this complex and tenuous relationship between body and voice, speaker and speech, image and sound, that ventriloqual practices have exploited toward various ends. In other words, in ventriloquism, and in all the speech acts, one might assemble under its name, the essential gap between body and voice is rendered visible, theatrical, and variously productive. In antiquity, for instance, when the Delphic oracle spoke prophetically on Apollo’s behalf, this misalignment of body and voice produced reverence and awe. Likewise, in an early Christian context, when the Witch of Endor seemed to conjure from her stomach the voice of Samuel from hell so that Saul might find reassurance on the eve of his battle with the Philistines, her gender-bending trickery inspired fearful belief in necromancy and magic, and set the stage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the theatrics of spirit possession and witchcraft. Subsequently, at the end of the eighteenth century, following ventriloquism’s demystification at the hands of assorted debunkers in the “age of reason,” the thrown voice became an acceptable, polyvocal form of secular entertainment—one in which the voice of a single performer was thrown in several directions to produce the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003303978-1

2  Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace illusion of a compelling, multi-person narrative that would eventually find its home in more p ­ ermanent theatrical venues. Finally, in the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, drawing on an audience first established via traveling side shows, ventriloquism assumed its modern form, made popular through music halls and vaudeville theater, in which the ventriloquist appears on stage aside a lone, prosthetic dummy. Provocative and dialogical, ventriloquism of this kind, pioneered in the UK by Thomas Frederick Parnell (aka Fred Russell) and disseminated in the US by ventriloquists like Harry Lester, who trained the next generation of ventriloquists, including, most famously, Edgar Bergen, established the psychological, inter-subjective aspects of the artform and secured the medium’s widespread popularity (Figure 0.1).2 Perhaps, for these reasons, it is the modern form of the medium that dominates our conception of ventriloquy, whose carefully managed look was preserved by the very recording technologies that ultimately displaced it: not only photography and film but also a whole host of acoustic technologies—phone, phonograph, gramophone, radio, tape recorder, and more—that ultimately made ventriloquists of us all.3 Marking the apex and end of dialogical ventriloquy as live theater, but simultaneously clearing space for ventriloquy’s transformation and wide dissemination was the curious practice of radio-ventriloquism most famously associated with Edgar Bergen, whose acts were disseminated via radio between 1937 and 1956 (Figure 0.1). Heard but not seen,

Figure 0.1  Photo of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy from NBC Radio, 1947.

Introduction  3 Bergen’s radio act, performed with his animated dummy, Charlie McCarthy, curiously stripped ventriloquism of the very thing that made it popular once upon a time: the delightful visual illusion of a speaking puppet. On radio, only his voice carried the day, and Bergen’s act, in this context, was essentially a one-man comedy routine that moved back and forth between voices and characters the audience might (or might not) match to images intermittently refreshed by the occasional appearance of ventriloquists on television. In other words, in the mid-twentieth century, ventriloquism continued as idea, even while, in practice, it was dissolving into modern, acoustic technologies that made the live stage act both redundant and antiquated.4 Indeed, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, ventriloquism became obsolete but ascendant, for the very ubiquity of the thrown voice, along with the capacity to animate inanimate, non-sentient matter effectively hid this once-remarkable, theatrical phenomenon in plain sight. In short, ventriloquism was no longer a spectacle or widely practiced art form, but, instead, the very condition of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century life. Our argument, then, is this: in a world flooded with voicemails, MP3s, and automated personal assistants, the logic of ventriloquism, because everywhere and nowhere at once, is precisely the right metaphor for thinking about the present. Aligned with contemporary culture, but seemingly outdated and anachronistic, ventriloquism is, to put it yet another way, both of the moment and sufficiently outside it—a fact that may explain why so many artists have turned to it, whether consciously or not, as a means of bringing clarity to topics that evade us when viewed head on. For our world is a patently ventriloqual one, filled with voices that are seamlessly thrown, as well as those that are overtly and intriguingly mismatched with what can be seen. In the first category, we might place conventional films, music videos, and most television programs, all of which have the capacity to throw the voice across time and space, achieving the illusion of presence at a distance. Formerly aligned with radios, talkies, and telephones, this essential trick also lies at the heart of several newer, if now ubiquitous phenomena: Zoom, Instagram Live, and FaceTime, all of which offer ­well-synchronized matches between voices and talking heads, that is, the illusion of embodied speech, but in the absence of any theatrical or comedic pretense. In the second category, by contrast, we would place phenomena that revel in disjunction, that deliberately pit ear and eye against one another by staging impossible or unlikely combinations of image and sound. TikTok and Instagram Reels, for example, allow users to suture their own images and those produced by others to a variety of home-made and readymade soundtracks. The resulting synchronized videos last fewer than 60 seconds but vary widely, reflecting the taste of various first-world subcultures, which might be amused by amateur cooking tutorials delivered in the voice of an absent (or dead) celebrity, or by images of cute animals expressing human desires and emotions, or even by speechless infants who “talk back” as a means of articulating their parents’ projected anxieties about parenthood. Available in endless permutations, videos such as these, while superficially diverse, are nevertheless alike in their essential conceit, as each relies on a jarring, but finally entertaining disjunction between what one sees and whom one hears, a phenomenon not unlike the experience of seeing an inanimate dummy give voice to words that have obviously originated elsewhere. In sum, contemporary media of all sorts, whether social or otherwise, can be seen to exploit the severance of body and voice in ways that restage the effects and, arguably, the affects, of ventriloquism. And, if today’s ventriloquy

4  Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace isn’t typically the stuff of possession, prophecy, and virtuosic talent, it’s nevertheless clear that the pleasures of ventriloquy—which are, in an important sense, the pleasures of diversion, deception, and perplexion—remain intact, if updated and, at times exploited, for contemporary audiences.

The Questions Let’s return to an essential chapter in ventriloquism’s history, when it assumed its now canonical theatrical form and was henceforth frozen in the shape of a man with a doll, or dummy, on his knee. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century and gradually dissolving with the advent of radio on which the era’s most famous ventriloquists nevertheless “appeared,” this era produced celebrities across the globe but especially in Great Britain and the US and is intriguingly related to modern art, which is widely associated with self-expression and self-reflexivity. Consider: as in the case of artistic processes such as modern painting and sculpture, the modern ventriloquist speaks for himself, even as he appears to speak simultaneously through a medium that externalizes and makes material his “voice.” Moreover, and as with modern ventriloquy, that something else—the painting, let’s say, or, in ventriloquy, the dummy—is thought to be a locus of authenticity and truth, an entity that is able to say forthrightly what cannot be otherwise declared. Thus, the well-established ventriloqual convention that the dummy, because childlike and indifferent to social mores, offers its audience uncensored insight into the figure of the ventriloquist, whom he often resembles and seems to know to an intimate degree. Thus, just as a theatrical audience might look to the adjacent, inanimate figure of the dummy for entertainment and truth-telling, so, in a fine-arts context, does the spectator turn from the artist to the speechless work of art, hoping that its inanimate surface will have been brought to life through a deceptive, but revealing and gratifying act of displacement. This kind of anamorphic structure—one in which the truth appears but only obliquely—in turn resonates with the discipline of psychoanalysis, whose essential principles were solidified alongside modern ventriloquy in the first decades of the twentieth century. The parallels are many: like modern ventriloquism, psychoanalysis embraced a fractured, dialogical sense of self; in fact, one could argue that, from different sides of the fence, psychoanalysis and ventriloquism invented the fractured self and, in their own ways, theorized the relations of its parts. As Freud famously explained, the ego’s job is to assess and regulate the competing positions of the id and superego, a job easily compared to the one undertaken by the ventriloquist’s audience, which is encouraged to evaluate the dummy’s unabashed selfishness in relation to the polite character played by the seemingly more restrained and self-conscious ventriloquist. Perhaps this suffices to link ventriloquy, a modern, popular form of entertainment, with psychoanalysis, a modern science dedicated to understanding human psychology. But there is another aspect of their correlation that bears consideration: the special prominence granted by each to the human voice. Voice, as we have said, is the very essence of ventriloquy, for what traditional forms of ventriloquism put on display in all its delectable complexity is the profound strangeness of human speech, which is at once of the subject and by the subject, a locus of truth visibly connected to its source and an agent of deception to be strategically projected upon and connected to improbable or impossible points of origin. This oscillation and essential ambiguity, needless to say, is also at the heart of psychoanalysis, which is likewise focused on

Introduction  5 the voice as a site of deception and truth. Described by Freud as the “talking cure,” psychoanalysis, like ventriloquy, stages the voice and subjects it to scrutiny. The analysand, like the ventriloquist, speaks, and the analyst, whose reticence produces the effect of the patient talking, like a ventriloquist, to himself, nevertheless attends with care to what is said as well as the connection between these utterances and their source. To this, the analyst, like the ventriloquist’s audience, listens and looks for an opportunity to catch the patient “in the act” of dissimulation or projection. As he does so, the analyst will hear things that are invariably true and false, at once a diversion and an earnest attempt to communicate. Consequently, the analyst will ask questions that apply equally to the ventriloquist’s act: does what I hear match what I see? And, what is the connection between the heard voice and the person presumed to be its author and source? Indeed, the labor of analysis is intimately linked to the pleasures of ventriloquy—a fact that partially explains why, in the twenty-first century, ventriloquism can be productively used as both a subject and an analytic tool within the context of contemporary art. As noted, ventriloquism is oddly pervasive in our culture despite being all but obsolete as an art form. It serves not only as a unifying principle for technologies that increasingly organize our lives (even as we, alongside them, appear, like the ventriloquist, intermittently mute), but also, and more overtly, as a recurring touchstone within contemporary art, which makes use of its motifs, strategies, and logics. This, it does, or so we argue, for myriad reasons: first, and most straightforwardly, to grapple with what we are calling the ventriloqual context of the late twentieth and twenty-first century; second, and more conceptually, to assess rigorously the many philosophical, psychological, and semiotic questions implicit in an art form that splits the subject and stages human speech in dialogical form; third, to engage any number of difficult subjects—whether historical, personal, or political—indirectly, that is, through the mouth of another, whose ideas and emotions are theatrically severed from their source.

The Literature Edited volumes are polyvocal by nature, both because they include many voices and because each of them in turn reprises and reanimates the words of others. Some of those “others,” because indispensable to our topic broadly conceived, we would like to acknowledge here. There is not, as yet, a literature dedicated to the place of ventriloquy in contemporary art, but there are several sources that consider it in relation to other media as well as some that engage with its history and conceptual underpinnings, including, most essentially, Steven Connor’s Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000).5 An indispensable, magisterial history of the thrown voice, Dumbstruck is erudite and thorough, and it, along with the richly illustrated text, I Can See Your Lips Moving: The History and Art of Ventriloquism (1981), authored by ventriloquist Valentine Vox, is to be credited with corralling many diverse phenomena under ventriloquism’s arc; indeed, it is to their credit that there is a long history of ventriloquism to which to point.6 Additionally, ventriloquism studies are a substantial contribution to the literature that theorizes the voice, the sticky wicket on which all ventriloqual acts, in all ages, have turned. Of course, in this they are not alone, as several scholars and theorists have been attracted to parsing the voice’s contradictions within, but mostly beyond, the practice

6  Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace of ventriloquy. In his important book, A Voice and Nothing More (2006), the Slovene philosopher and psychoanalyst Mladen Dolar approaches voice from a psychoanalytic perspective, building, as he notes, on important texts from the 1960s by Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, which, respectively, established the voice as a topic of theoretical concern.7 For Dolar, and for us writing in his wake, the voice, as it emerges within a host of canonical western texts from Plutarch to Augustine, Kafka, and Charlie Chaplin, is simultaneously a signifying mechanism, an object of aesthetic regard, and that which catalyzes both desire and thought. Another important theorist of the voice is the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero, who builds on the example of Hannah Arendt to develop the political significance and potential of the voice, given what is, for her, its radical singularity;8 in our volume, too, the voice betrays a political dimension, especially in the context of ventriloqual acts that call into question the connection between the speaker and that which is said.9 Of course, to talk of “voice” in this way is to invoke something different from what is suggested by the word when used in a literary or artistic context. Often, in that realm, the term “voice” is used to suggest not the literal formulation of sounds or words, but rather a constellation of difficult-to-pinpoint attributes that together comprise an artist’s or writer’s personal style. Their deployment in the course of writing a novel or executing a painting is an exercise, as David Goldblatt has put it, of standing beside oneself, as one speaks in another voice or even, a voice not considered one’s own. In this respect the very act of making or writing can be described in ventriloqual terms, as Goldblatt has convincingly argued. In his astute, philosophically minded assessment, art making is a ventriloqual act in which the artist is engaged with himself, but at a distance, his voice projected onto inanimate matter that seemingly speaks in turn.10 This idea is essential to several essays in the present volume that are dedicated not to art making, but to art that retains, on completion, a high degree of self-reflexivity, such that the dialogical process of their making remains evident, a thematized part of the content. A topic at once larger and smaller than voice, sound and the specific literature dedicated to sound art, which is certainly more vast than the body of work currently dedicated to ventriloquism, are also relevant here. The field of sound studies endeavors, with great success, to lay the groundwork for treating sound theoretically, in much the same way that film studies, psychoanalysis, and art history have treated the gaze. Not surprisingly, the sonic came to the fore of film and media studies long before it did in art history, most notably with works like Kaja Silverman’s Acoustic Mirror (1998), which explores the way in which female subjects on the screen are often relegated to dummy-like roles, echoing the voices and desires of their male counterparts rather than speaking for themselves.11 Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde (1992), a volume of essays edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, likewise identified sound as a lacuna in cultural studies, and, in its desire to fill that gap, it helped to establish the discipline of sound studies through a combination of primary and secondary sources. Focused on artistic, literary, and film works from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s, the essays in this book address the ways in which sound, as an art medium, brought to life avant-garde practices.12 Published in 2011, The Sense of Sound, a double issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, edited by Rey Chow and James Steintrager, is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that address the status of sound as an object.13 Continuing his focus on sound as an essential aesthetic material, in 2016 Steintrager published a translation of Michel Chion’s 2010 revision of Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, which

Introduction  7 originally appeared in French in 1998, stressing the sonic dimension of cinema as well as its historical and theoretical subordination to the eye. He investigates hierarchies of sounds—what is “noise” and what is “sound,” for example—as well as how people and institutions approach the distinction. Most relevant for this project is his encouragement of “acousmatic listening,” or the practice of consuming sound without access to visual confirmation of its origins, advocating for a means of acoustic consumption. In other words, by renouncing visual information, he encourages a mode of “listening” that recalls the dislocation inherent to ventriloquism.14 Steintrager and Chow’s 2019 Sound Objects is an interdisciplinary volume that extends their earlier project for differences from nearly a decade earlier, reuniting some of the voices in that journal and expanding the scholarly chorus to include new voices in the field of sound studies as well.15 At the intersection of art history and sound studies is the subfield of sound art, which is neither experimental music nor merely art that makes use of sound. The anthology Sound (2011), edited by Caleb Kelly, is an invaluable resource including primary sources as well as touchstone analyses of sound art.16 A champion of sound art as a neglected field within contemporary art, Kelly has published and curated widely over the past two decades, most notably producing Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (2009), which looks at artists from the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first who break or otherwise act destructively to produce novel sounds for artworks. More recently, and again working against the privileging of the visual in the historiography of contemporary art, his Gallery Sound (2017) retraces how sound has functioned within gallery spaces, assessing how artists, as well as their audiences, have exploited the acoustic possibilities and products of sound in gallery settings.17 Also useful for understanding the emergence and range of sound art practices is ­Brandon LaBelle’s 2015 Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art.18 Likewise, there is an emerging literature dedicated to assessing traditional and experimental theatrical genres, whose established lines of inquiry are productively furthered by the concept of ventriloquy. A key scholar in this regard is C.B. Davis, who centers ventriloquism in his analysis of ancient Greek drama, but also writes lucidly and with theoretical savvy about modern and contemporary ventriloquism. Additionally, the work of Johanna Frank, who writes of Laurie Anderson through a ventriloqual lens, argues that in Anderson’s work ventriloquy is productively “exposed” or admitted in conjunction with various technologies that both project and amplify her voice.19 ­Anderson, especially when her technologically informed practice is framed in relation to ventriloquy’s interrogation of the voice’s connection to the body, is an essential backdrop for work in this volume that falls into the category of performance art. A number of curatorial projects provide a context for and have, to a certain extent, laid the groundwork for our volume. An anomaly among even the quirkiest museums, the Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, remains the only institution in the world dedicated exclusively to the art of ventriloquism. Passionate about the art as well as its accoutrements, William Shakespeare Berger founded the museum and amassed over the course of four decades a formidable collection of ventriloquist dummies. Initially filling the rooms of his family’s home, he eventually built a second space to show off his private collection, which, following his death, became a nonprofit public museum to showcase his collection of about 500 dummies hailing from around the world.20 An institution whose collection is now donation-based, it continues to grow with what its curator refers to as annual “classes,” or groups of “new member” dummies that are added to the collection each year.

8  Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace Closer to the contemporary art context of our volume are three exhibitions that merit mention. In 2008, Ingrid Schaffner and Carin Kuoni co-organized The ­Puppet Show, a traveling group exhibition of sculpture, photography, and video that featured 30 contemporary artists whose work involves puppetry in both literal and metaphorical ways. First shown at ICA Philadelphia, the exhibition included artworks in the form of pointedly crafted, puppet-like objects—like Anne Chu’s silent but strung up marionettes—alongside others that document them—like ­L aurie Simmons’s photographs of creepy ventriloquist dummies shot at the Vent Haven Museum and Christian Jankowski’s video of a Puppet Conference (2003), an event that he orchestrated and administered. Taking as its point of departure Alfred ­Jarry’s Ubu Roi—itself a play that moved from a production with actors to one with puppets due to its offensive content—The Puppet Show, aside from incorporating ventriloquist dummies, marionettes, puppets of various sorts, and stage sets, foregrounded themes associated with puppetry, performance, and especially ventriloquism, which engage mechanisms for control and manipulation. 21 In 2013, the Museum of Modern Art mounted its first ever exhibition of sound art with Soundings: A Contemporary Score, an elegant show curated by Barbara London featuring 16 young artists from across the globe. 22 Designed to encourage listening, rather than simply “hearing” works of art, Soundings arguably expanded the discourse of contemporary art to include examples that foreground sound as well as effects created by it, upsetting the conventional privileging of the visual over the sonic. Most recently, and most aligned with our project, is an exhibition organized by José Luis Blondet aptly titled Not I: Throwing Voices 1500 BCE to 2020 CE mounted at LACMA in Los Angeles. 23 A diachronic and cross-cultural exploration of ventriloquism that brought together pieces from LACMA’s permanent collection, as well as about a dozen loans, this encyclopedic exhibition stretched across 4,000 years, highlighting ventriloquism and its accoutrements as both subject matter and critical method.24 Unconventional and creative in format, the catalog for the show, also edited by Blondet, comprises six so-called scripts by artists and scholars, five of which are, like the final essays in this volume, performative, creative expositions, which are either personal, as in media scholar Sarah Kessler’s overview of her relationship to ventriloquism, or more historical, as in Darby English’s poignant scripting of the trial of one of the defendants in the Emmet Till murder case. The sixth script provides the exhibition’s checklist, broken down by room.

The Essays The present volume consists of twelve essays that betray the myriad ways in which contemporary art and ventriloquism intersect. In some instances that intersection will be overt, evident in the artist’s recourse to the readily identifiable tools and tricks of ventriloquy: the mannequin, the thrown voice, a doubled and divided subjectivity. In other instances, and sometimes in conjunction with obviously ventriloqual tropes, ventriloquism will be used as an edifying hermeneutic—that is, as a set of ideas that allow viewers to make better sense of an artwork or exhibition whose reflection on voice, history, or subjectivity is enhanced by a ventriloqual frame. In still other essays, ventriloquism will serve as methodology—a way of proceeding dialogically, of standing beside oneself, and speaking, either as two, or as oneself and another. Taken together, these essays thus attest to the conceptual richness of ventriloquy as well as its pervasiveness within the field of contemporary art. The volume’s organization into four parts, while strategic and

Introduction  9 purposeful, is but one of several possible permutations. Because of this, we encourage reading with a liberal ear; this book, like ventriloquism, is dialogical in nature. The essays comprising Part I are linked through their consideration of ventriloquism in relation to the act of art making, which can be seen as a paradigmatically ventriloqual phenomenon, as Goldblatt has argued. Traditionally understood, the artist is a figure who throws his voice, animating dumb matter in an effort to achieve an adjacent vital illusion. Of course, the alternative scenario is also possible: that the artist is

Figure 0.2  Jordan Wolfson, (Female figure), 2014. Mixed media. Overall: 90 ½ × 72 × 29 in. (229.9 × 182.9 × 73.7 cm). © Jordan Wolfson. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. Photo: John Smith.

10  Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace spoken by tradition and culture, whose many voices animate the artist and lend him “speech.” The essays in this section move fluidly between these possibilities, as do the artists under consideration, who are all self-consciously engaged with the metaphorics of making and the many complexities implicit in the concept of the artist’s voice. In this respect, they align with a variety of recent ventriloqual works, including, most spectacularly, those by Jordan Wolfson, whose controversial, highly self-conscious oeuvre is ventriloqual in both form and content. A brief description of two recent works will evidence the broader phenomenon to which Part I points and serves as a more thorough introduction to the concerns that comprise the volume’s first part. Wolfson arrived on the contemporary art scene with (Female figure) (2014), a female robot who wears skimpy, diaphanous clothes and white, thigh-high boots while dancing for seven minutes to an unexpected playlist of three, abruptly cropped, popular songs: Lady Gaga’s “Applause,” Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” and a distorted version of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” (Figure 0.2). On three occasions over the course of her fifteen-minute routine, the music stops and the grotesquely masked, ­still-gyrating figure speaks, but rather than address the viewer directly, Wolfson’s platinum blond puppet recites poetry, makes pronouncements, and converses with an unseen collaborator about what to say next—all of which the figure does while backturned and engaged with the wall-mounted mirror, using a deep, presumptively male voice. Notably, that voice belongs to Wolfson. Ventriloqual tropes are foregrounded to an even greater, and still more worrisome, degree in Colored sculpture, 2016, whose title suggests that a racial dimension might underwrite its exploration of voice, violence, and power (Figure 0.3). Like (Female figure), Colored sculpture also consists of a lone figure—this time a menacing, largerthan-life, pre-adolescent boy, who also speaks, occasionally, in the artist’s voice. The figure, who is red-headed and dressed in tattered, painted-on clothes, is connected by heavy chains to an imposing, industrial armature that facilitates the sculpture’s movement, while forcing spectators to the gallery’s margins. As with (Female figure), whose saw-toothed mouth and shiny green mask conjure, among other unsavory characters, the disguised, Wicked Queen from Disney’s animated classic, Snow White, Colored sculpture recalls a slew of well-known imps, including Howdy Doody, Huck Finn, Alfred E. Newman, Chuckie, and perhaps most saliently for the purposes of this volume, Pinocchio, whose jointed limbs and marionette-like movements, it recalls, along with the story’s most essential questions: is Pinocchio a good boy or a bad one, the projection of his father’s desire, or an entity with agency of its own? Violently thrown to the floor, only to be hoisted again, where, from a suspended position in mid-air, he looms sadistically over his viewers, Wolfson’s “colored” figure appears once more, in domesticated, animated form, in a subsequent video called Riverboat song (2017)—a title that allows cautious viewers to connect the white figure in both works to Huck Finn and the violent history of American slavery. At the same time, Riverboat song and Colored sculpture, whose soundtrack consists largely of Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” are also about sexual violence, which our character seems to both inflict and suffer at the hands of unseen, or abstracted tormentors. That we are encouraged, though the voice, to link this childlike character to Wolfson, that the character stands alongside him, as his creation and surrogate, makes all of this complex and unsettling, not least because the slippery, in-essentialist logic of Wolfson’s developing career—where white does and does not mean black, where women are and are not men, where man is and is not machine (or animal), where the present is and is not the past—leaves

Introduction  11

Figure 0.3  J ordan Wolfson, Colored sculpture, 2016. Mixed media. Dimensions variable with installation. © Jordan Wolfson. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Dan Bradica.

our moral compass spinning and actively grappling with ethically charged issues in the absence of anything that can be reduced and confidently re-sutured to its artistic source.

12  Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace Engaged with similar tensions and ambiguities, the essays in Part I are three, and they range from late twentieth-century painting to recent sculptural installations and performances. The first, Isabelle Loring Wallace’s “Voice, Vivification, and Subjectivity: ­Jasper Johns Ventriloquist,” sets the stage through an analysis of the volume’s most self-declaredly ventriloqual object. It considers Ventriloquist, a bisected painting of 1983 that acts as a notional bulletin board to which works by Johns and others seem to have been pinned, and does so in dialogue with two earlier works by the artist that are aptly titled Voice (1964–1947) and Voice 2 (1967–1971). At issue throughout Johns’ oeuvre, the artist’s voice and the strange phenomenon of performing oneself, either directly or adjacently through the works, words, and bodies of o ­ thers is intensely foregrounded here, even if it is, in some sense, the invariable subject of every ambitious work, including Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which serves as this painting’s graphic substrate and most intimate interlocutor. Jennie Hirsh’s essay, “Over My Dead Body: Puppets, Performance and Paralysis in Cardiff and Miller’s ­M arionette Maker,” centers on The Marionette Maker (2014), which serves as a revealing portal into the oeuvre of the Canadian husband-and-wife artistic duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, whose career is thoroughly, if not always explicitly ventriloqual. Famous for soundscapes, soundwalks, and stand-alone sculptures, ­Cardiff and Miller’s extraordinary, uncanny caravan, filled with vignettes and mannequins and stringed marionettes that resemble the artists in states of vitality and repose, is also a meditation on voice and the apparatuses that condition and make possible its articulation, dissemination, and consumption. The last essay in this section switches our focus from the artist to the viewer, who becomes, in the estimation of Courtney McClellan, a notional ­ atala, and Ann Hamilton. Manipulated dummy for works by Amalia Pica, Antoine C into performing and instantiating the artist’s wishes, the viewer, in McClellan’s reading, becomes a prop in a larger artistic routine—one whose role is predetermined and essential to the construction of meaning. A writer and visual artist, McClellan includes her own work in this discussion as well, focusing our attention on the strangely ventriloqual phenomenon of teleprompters, which serve as yet another, ubiquitous means of filling mouths with what are often the words of others. Part II turns from artists who are engaged with the idea that art making is a ventriloqual process, to art that make use of that most essential ventriloqual prop: the dummy. Focused on works by Wael Shawky, Consuelo García, Tadeusz Kantor, and Juan Muñoz, essays by Katie O’Connor, Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández, Katie Geha, and Cintia Gutiérrez Reyes, respectively, analyze the use of puppets and dolls to act out or resist unvoiced, unspoken, or even unspeakable tensions. In all four of this section’s essays, ventriloquism is cast as a tool of revisionist history that imbues puppets, or sculptural dummies, with a psychological capacity. Like the late Israeli video artist Boaz Arad whose work we consider briefly below, they do so as a means of revisiting fraught moments in history, as well as, in some instances, their subsequent, if no less troubling telling by hegemonies that have in every way shaped the nature of that narrative. Consider this and by way of example: between 1999 and 2000, Israeli video artist Arad made a series of four videos featuring footage of Adolf Hitler, including one, on which we will focus here, entitled Hebrew Lesson (2000) (Figure 0.4).25 A compilation of ten digitized clips of Hitler delivering speeches with his characteristic, and nearly parodic barking and gesticulating, Hebrew Lesson has Hitler saying, in Hebrew, what translates to “Hello, Jerusalem. I am sorry.” An oddly mismatched statement given that its speaker never apologized for his rhetorical as well as practical

Introduction  13

Figure 0.4  Boaz Arad, Hebrew Lesson, 2000. Still from 12-second video.

plans to exterminate of the world’s Jews, this audio-visual illusion was produced by Arad’s isolation of ten clips with sounds comparable to those that comprise the desired Hebrew sentence. Yet, the final effect is not seamless; indeed, it is barely intelligible, given the deliberately imprecise way in which the video was edited. For although Arad combined source material from ten separate speeches by Hitler and faithfully tracked down German approximations of each of the required Hebrew sounds, he sutured them together without regard for the lingering disjunction between sound and image. The words, in other words, say one thing, but Hitler’s gestures continue to say something else, as does the irately impassioned tenor of his voice. What’s more, Hitler’s movements, already famously strident and jerky in their deployment, become still more so, incoherently sequenced and, of course, severed from the content they initially punctuated. Thus, while the looped video proceeds with Hitler belting out this unlikely declaration, the apology and its effects are not convincing; instead, ­Hitler appears rather more like a puppet on a string, or a doll manipulated from behind. Thus inflected and undermined by his own exaggerated gesticulation, Hitler emerges as a dummy, a parody of his own absurd and, ultimately, lethal rhetoric and oratory. 26 Puppets of a more literal kind are the centerpiece of Wael Shawky’s Cabaret ­Crusades (2010–2015), the subject of this section’s first essay. Therein, Kate O’Connor argues that Shawky uses a collection of antiquated Turinese puppets to reorient Western understandings of the Crusades in his filmic trilogy. Using an Arabic script, the artist articulates, literally, historian Amun Malouf’s perspective on nearly two centuries of military conflicts that wrested Jerusalem from Arab control. Shawky, she argues, dislocates the voice of history and projects it onto his puppets who in turn produce it both sonically and in the differently alienating form of English subtitles, which re-write history as text once again. In Part II’s second essay, “García’s Juegos: Puppets, Immunity, Torture,” Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández recontextualizes sculptor María Consuelo García’s multi-media installations, works largely absent from histories of contemporary Columbia art. By unpacking the ventriloquial blueprints at work in both Juego 1 and Juego 2 (1978–1979), Guerrero-Hernández argues

14  Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace that García invites her spectators to critique the political climate in which she made them by engaging in a form of participatory ventriloquism. This occurs, he argues, when the spectator physically handles the dolls as ventriloquist, either alone before a mirror or before others as audience. In this way, García’s props are transformed into “operational elements,” reconfiguring politics as a participatory performance whose staging involves not just the sadistic political players of the moment but also their (student) victims who attempted to closet themselves away, as is referenced by both the prop storage that is part of the work and, more dramatically, the works’ dummies, which in this project are helplessly subjected to the whims of others. Katie Geha’s essay, “Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Dummies,” assesses the role of dummies cast in Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Class (1975), a theatrical production that used dummies alongside adult characters as a way of illustrating their double consciousness as they return to the scenes of their youth, for example, the classroom. Read as a metaphor as well for the dead and departed Jews in the context of a country that witnessed their mass extermination just a few decades earlier during the Second World War, Kantor’s play engages wax figures as dummies making explicit the idea of the artist-as-ventriloquist. In turn, three decades later, the curators of the 2006 Berlin Biennale uncannily sited these same figures as sculptures, thereby shifting their status from theatrical prop to autonomous art objects. In this curatorial context, they silently awaited their viewers, hoping that, as ventriloquist, the spectator would silently imbue them with meaning. Assessing these theatrical and artistic projects dialogically, Geha’s analysis of the dummy in Kantor’s work demonstrates how the artist created viable connections between the dead and the living, and between theater and real life, thereby transcending supposedly impermeable borders, including the one traditionally upheld between object and viewer who, in attempting to make sense of these displaced and unforthcoming objects, must fill in as ventriloquist. In a slight departure from these forthrightly historical and political works, Cintia Gutiérrez Reyes’ chapter, “Dialectic Silence: Schizophonia in Juan Muñoz’s Ventriloquist Dummy,” fleshes out the many literary and filmic references—from T.S. Eliot to Samuel Beckett to Alfred Hitchcock—that underwrite Juan Muñoz’s mute, dummy-like sculptures which, through their titles and affects, instantiate, albeit ironically, a silent ventriloqual set-up. Overt in their likeness to the iconic Charlie McCarthy, Muñoz’s sculptures join with other works considered in this section in that they make an explicit connection to the conversational art of ventriloquism, again reflecting upon the complex dynamics that obtain between artist, spectator, and artwork-as-dummy, who is, in Muñoz’s work, oppressively speechless. The essays in Part III are linked by virtue of their focus on power dynamics, especially as they relate to speech and the practice of speaking for another. In these essays, and in the work to which we now turn by way of exemplification, attention to that phenomenon is made all the more complex by the inequities that mark race relations as well as relations between individuals with different gender expressions. To wit, in 2017, on the occasion of the Venice Biennale, Candice Breitz exhibited Love Story (2016) in the South African pavilion. An immersive video installation focused on different facets of the refugee crisis, it consists of six narratives, authored by three men and three women whose identities include a variety of races, nationalities, and genders, all of whom fled their native countries either because of persecution or dire political and economic circumstances. 27 Yet, Love Story, importantly, is an installation in two parts, or more accurately, in two adjacent rooms—a fact that establishes,

Introduction  15

Figure 0.5  Color Candice Breitz. Stills from Love Story, 2016. Featuring Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin. 7-Channel Installation: 7 Hard Drives. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Outset Germany (Berlin) and the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.

in spatial terms, the work’s dialogical structure and greatly complicates its humanitarian core. Indeed, what spectators encounter first is a single-channel, oversized projection that alternates between performances by two highly recognizable American actors, Julianne Moore and Alec ­Baldwin, each of whom performs short fragments of different refugee accounts while sitting alone in a director’s chair before a green screen ­(Figures  ­0.5–0.6). Clad in black and wearing variable accessories that subtly shift with each fragment they enact (they each change out their jewelry and, in Baldwin’s case, occasionally wear a pair of ­sunglasses), they describe in the first person their characters’ motivations for leaving their families, friends, and cultures in search of better lives. Gradually, the viewer, growing aware of the small changes in Moore and Baldwin’s costumes and mannerisms, comes to realize that each actor is reciting the lines of several distinct narratives, complete with a specific set of gestures, accessories, and affect. What is not readily self-evident is the weaving together of fragments of the different refugees’ personal accounts into a seamlessly edited compilation of six voices as delivered by Moore and Baldwin. In other words, there are shifts in narratives along with shifts in mannerisms and minute costume details. However, it is only upon leaving this first space, whether out of boredom or frustration, and entering the adjacent room that the viewer is able to clarify and make sense of the thrust of Breitz’s work. This second gallery space features six small monitors arranged in a semi-circle along with attendant headsets that play videos featuring a single person—three videos each feature a different man and three each feature a different woman. These narrators relay more cohesively and fluidly, and hence comprehensively, that individual’s experience as a refugee as expressed in their own words. Hearing these stories from their original source allows the viewer (who is also, importantly, a listener) to comprehend, if only retroactively, the complexly ventriloqual roles played by Baldwin and Moore. Given the order in which spectators encounter the work’s components, it is possible to say that these privileged actors speak for the refugees whose stories they usurp, edit, and perform. On the other hand, it is also possible to say that Baldwin and Moore are exposed as dummies who merely give expression to stories that originated elsewhere. Indeed, in the end, there are two love stories here, and, in Breitz’s

16  Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace

Figure 0.6  C  andice Breitz, Stills from Love Story, 2016. Top: Shabeena Francis Saveri, Sarah Ezzat Mardini, Mamy Maloba Langa/Bottom: José María João, Farah Abdi Mohamed, Luis Ernesto Nava Molero. 7-Channel Installation: 7 Hard Drives. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Outset Germany (Berlin) and the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.

work, they make complex use of one another: the love spectators project onto charismatic Hollywood stars charged with storytelling and the empathic love we feel for our fellow man, whose lived experiences both benefit from and suffer the fact of their expression by others. Similar tensions underwrite Nora Wendl’s performative essay on the fraught tale of Dr. Edith Farnsworth and her ill-fated entanglement with Mies van der Rohe, whom she hired to design a vacation house in Plano, Illinois. An object of vigorous analysis, discussion, and speculation since its completion in 1951, the Farnsworth House is named after its patron and first occupant, but, as Nora Wendl explains in her performative essay, “I Remember: On Modern Living,” Dr. Farnsworth was largely spoken for, despite being an accomplished doctor, poet, and translator. Sensitively exploring the ways in which social norms and expectations, for both women and architecture, established a problematic persona and voice for Farnsworth, Wendl also considers more recent, and perhaps more sympathetic efforts to stage her voice, including the third film in Gerard & Kelly’s ongoing series Modern Living (2016–) and Wendl’s own performative and photographic engagement with the house and its afterlives as documented in various personal, legal, and architectural documents. In this way, Wendl “remembers” Edith Farnsworth, first, by interrupting the many voices projected upon her and her house as mute “dummies,” and second, by establishing a physical and metaphorical space in which Farnsworth’s voice might appear, however queer, straight, or asexual it may have been. Part exposition, part performance, Wendl’s essay thus throws multiple voices, including her own, creating a polyphonic and ethically charged tour de force. The ethics of translation are also central to Jane Blocker’s moving analysis of Anna Deveare Smith’s Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (1993). This celebrated one-woman play is drawn from dramatic testimonies the artistactress consolidated from more than 100 conversations with individuals who were involved in and affected by the Crown Heights riots of 1991, which were triggered by a tragic car accident that led to the death of a young boy. Titled “Embolalia: Anna

Introduction  17 Deveare Smith Throwing Her Voice,” Blocker’s essay is attentive to the words Smith selected and performed to represent the Black and Orthodox Jewish communities of Crown Heights. But, in addition, Blocker attends to Smith’s faithful reiteration of the moments in which words and testimony fail, and purposeful speech gives way to or is marred by embolalia, a linguistic phenomenon designating nothing less than the limits of words and the pain that so often subtends the attempt to speak. The final essay in this section, Kerr ­Houston’s ­“Re-siting Marx: Okwui Enwezor, Ventriloquism and the Das Kapital Oratorio,” masterfully explores ventriloqual aspects of art history and curation. As ­Houston notes, in the course of his celebrated career, curator Okwui Enwezor often relied on the term ventriloquism to describe the ways in which the art world has spoken for Black artists and thereby eclipsed their subjectivity. Ventriloquy, in other words, provided Enwezor with an apt metaphor for advancing a postcolonial critique of the art world, a pursuit that drove his career for more than two decades. Using this as a point of departure, Houston focuses on a work Enwezor commissioned for the 2015 Venice Biennale for which he was also the curator: Isaac Julien’s Das Kapital Oratorio (2015). A seven-month-long reading of Marx’s famous tome, conducted by pairs of readers within the Arena in the Biennale’s central pavilion, Julien’s work was centered within Enwezor’s politically inflected exhibition. As Houston argues, this religiously inflected event, at once prescribed and performative, inverted the racial dimension of ethnographic ventriloquism (here it is white performers at the direction Enwezor and Julien, who read Marx’s text), but did so in ways that ultimately called into question racial binaries and an all-too-simple distinction between ventriloquist and dummy. The volume concludes, in Part IV, with two artistic contributions to our topic that are further aligned by their commitment to ventriloquy as a means of staging and providing access to inhuman voices. In these respects, both projects align with Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s The Great Silence (2014), a three-channel, video installation that likewise speaks for entities that cannot speak for themselves. Taking its name from a short story penned by Ted Chiang, the science fiction writer commissioned to write the script for this work, The Great Silence consists of three videos that depict scenes from Puerto Rico’s verdant Rio Abajo forest, which is home to two things the videos deftly contrast and entangle: the Arecibo Observatory, a high-tech radio telescope that searches deep space for intelligent life forms, and an endangered parrot species that serves as the installation’s subtitled, laconic narrator.28 Best understood as an extended parable that expresses observations as well as anxieties about the fate of the earth from the point of view of an endangered parrot, The Great Silence reflects on man’s ability and desire to listen, poignantly contrasting this with the parrot’s ventriloquized, unheard plea, here imagined and displaced into subtitles that move across and between the three anthropomorphically erect screens on which they appear (Figure 0.7).29 In this way, The Great Silence elicits pathos. Throwing imagined avian “voices” across the birds’ bodies, their dying ecosystem, and images recorded of and by the telescope, spectators are asked to read what they cannot hear. At the same time, the videos’ soundscape is manifestly, if opaquely rich, mixing electronic sounds such as beeps taken from a field recording at the Observatory that mingle with assorted avine sounds—chirps, tweets—and the acoustics of deep space as captured by man’s extraordinary, technologically enhanced ears.30 Part respiration and part aspiration, the work’s acoustic field thus serves as a pointed counterpart to the installation’s

18  Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace

Figure 0.7  A llora & Calzadilla (in collaboration with Ted Chiang), The Great Silence, 2014. 3-Channel HD video, 16 minutes 22 seconds. Installation view, ­Sharjah Biennial 13, 2017. Courtesy of kurimanzutto, Mexico City and the artist. Photo: Shanavas Jamaluddin. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation.

script, notionally expressed by a parrot, who reflects upon his species’ inevitable and imminent disappearance with an affective mix of proleptic nostalgia and resigned melancholy. In sum, The Great Silence is a skeptical reflection on the human quest to discover life at the universe’s edge, one that stands, for the narrator-parrot, in arrogant opposition to the more modest possibility of understanding more proximate inhuman life, including birds on the verge of extinction, who also “speak” and engage in language. That this meditation can only exist, at least for the moment, as an effect of ventriloquy, in which man speaks for and as if his inhuman counterparts, is an irony that productively underwrites the volume’s final two essays as well. Birds are also at the center of Catherine Clover’s essay, “In a Manner of Speaking,” which asks readers to read her transliteration of human and avian sounds (as well as those of bats, which are, strictly speaking, flying mammals) amidst a text that is at once expository and creative. An extension of and reflection upon three recent projects that involve dedicated listening and purposeful trans-species ventriloquy, ­Clover’s spectator-participants were encouraged, both in the gallery and in isolation in nature, to participate in a process of collective vocalizing, playing, together, at being birds and bats, mixing human sounds with those of inhuman animals, often in the animals’ presence, thereby engaging in “conversation” with them in their native tongue. A similar effect can be derived from Clover’s engaging essay, which prompts readers to sound out bird calls, as well as common English words that have been denaturalized through phonetic spelling within the text. Positioning readers as ventriloquists who throw their voices to the bats and birds, she also makes us ­dummies— readers for whom the privilege of enunciation becomes a humbling and productive challenge, even when fluent in English.

Introduction  19 Like Allora and Calzadilla’s The Great Silence, nicolas b. jacobsen and Nina Elder’s extraordinary, performative essay is also about listening to that which is endangered and seemingly mute. An artist statement followed by a series of photographically illustrated interviews conducted on-site with and between various man-made and geological structures (the Bingham Canyon Pit Mine, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, and an ordinary block of concrete, among others), the volume’s final chapter, aptly titled “LITHIC RECORD” uses the artists’ voices as a medium to speak for and with the geological formations that are the silent backdrop for all of man’s endeavors. In what Brandon LaBelle would call an instance of “acoustic ecology,” their silent re-siting of lithic lament in the form of words across the page offers textual evidence of the mountains’ history and life, detailing their endurance of human exploitation. 31 Serving both as ventriloquists and dummies, Elder and jacobsen thus stage a fictitious discourse, and through their reliance on a conversational format, they return us to the explicitly dialogical nature of ventriloquy, reminding us that this unusual art form relies as much on silence as it does on speech. Encouraging us to listen and go silent, to hear what can only be seen, and to say what can only be surmised, these artists remind us, in conclusion, of the complex ethics that underpin ventriloquy, which is always an act of appropriation and, on occasion, an exercise in empathy. Indeed, it is precisely this contradiction that underwrites all the essays in this volume, including this introduction, which has spoken, with admiration and feeling, on our contributors’ behalf.

Notes 1 Steven Connor, Dumbstruck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4–5. 2 As we explore more closely in the literature review, both Steven Connor, Dumbstruck and Valentine Vox, I Can See Your Lips Moving (London: Kaye and Ward, 1981) have been critical to our thinking about this topic. 3 Steven Connor, Dumbstruck, 366. 4 The visual dimension of ventriloquy was extended by the phenomenon of televised ventriloquy in the 1940s and early 1950s. 5 There is a body of work dedicated to thinking about ventriloquism in relation to popular music. See, for example, Joseph Auner, “‘Sing It for Me’: Posthuman Ventriloquism in Recent Popular Music,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 128, no, 1 (2003): 98–122. 6 Valentine Vox, I Can See Your Lips Moving (London: Kaye and Ward, 1981). 7 See Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 4. 8 Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 9 On ventriloquism in relation to the ethics of communication, dialogue, and speech, see François Cooren, “Ethics for Dummies: Ventriloquy and Responsibility,” Atlantic Journal of Communication 24, no. 1 (2016): 17–30. 10 See David Goldblatt, “Ventriloquism: Ecstatic Exchange and the History of the Art Work,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 389–398, and David Goldblatt, Art and Ventriloquism (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 11 See Kaja Silverman, Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 12 Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). In 1999, Kahn published Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, a richly interdisciplinary study that surveys the history of cultural production in Europe (in the first half of the twentieth century) and then the

20  Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace U.S. for a postwar context through acoustic material drawn from art, literature, film, film, theater, and music. See Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). 13 Rey Chow and James Steintrager, eds., The Sense of Sound, special issue Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22 (Summer–Fall 2011). 14 James Steintrager, ed. Sound. An Acoulogical Treatise (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016). 15 James Steintrager and Rey Chow, eds. Sound Objects (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019). 16 See Caleb Kelly, ed., Sound (Cambridge and London: MIT Press and Whitechapel ­Documents in Contemporary Art, 2011). Kelly is an academic and curator who has championed sound art for more than two decades, most recently curating the traveling exhibition Material Sound (2018), which includes artworks whose sonic identity is created through everyday materials. 17 Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009) and Gallery Sound (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). Kelly also notably co-directed for many years a contemporary art gallery specialized in sound art and has run numerous sound-based radio initiatives. 18 Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 19 Charles Bruce Davis, “Distant Ventriloquism: Vocal Mimesis, Agency and ­Identity in Ancient Greek Performance,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 1 (March 2003): 45–65; Charles Bruce Davis, “Reading the Ventriloquist’s Lips: The Performance Genre Behind the ­Metaphor,” The Drama Review 42, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 133–156; Johanna Frank, “Exposed ­Ventriloquism: Performance, Voice, and the Rupture of the Visible,” ­Michigan Feminist Studies 19 (Fall 2005–Spring 2006), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.ark5583.0019.001. 20 https://www.venthaven.org/schedule-a-tour. A final virtual tour claims that as of 2021, the collection has expanded to more than 1,000 dummies, dolls, and other puppets. 21 See Ingrid Schaffner and Carin Kuoni, eds., The Puppet Show (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 2008). The full roster of artists featured in the show is: Guy Ben-Ner, Nayland Blake, Louise Bourgeois, Maurizio Cattelan, Anne Chu, Nathalie Djurberg, Terence Gower, Dan Graham and Japanther, the Handspring Puppet Company, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Jankowski, Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Cindy Loehr, Paul McCarthy, Annette Messager, Matt Mullican, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Laurie Simmons, Doug Skinner and Michael Smith, Kiki Smith, Survival Research Laboratories, Kara Walker, and Charlie White. 22 See Barbara London, Soundings: A Contemporary Score (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013). https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1351. The 16 artists included in this show were Luke Fowler, Marco Fusinato, Richard Garet, Florian Hecker, Christine Sun Kim, Jacob Kirkegaard, Haroon Mirza, Carsten Nicolai, Camille Norment, Tristan Perich, Susan Philipsz, Sergei Tcherepnin, Toshiya Tsunoda, Hong-Kai Wang, Jana ­Winderen, and Stephen Vitiello. 23 For more on this exhibition that was mounted from November 8 to July 25, 2021, see also https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/not-i-throwing-voices-1500-bce-2020-ce. 24 In addition, Blondet commissioned three new works from Raven Chacon, Puppies P ­ uppies (Jade Kiriki-Olivo), and Patricia Fernández, respectively. Chacon revivified various whistles from LACMA’s Ancient American collection by giving them voice in his riveting Mouthpiece (for a collection of objects); Puppies Puppies (Jade Kiriki-Olivo) created three new pieces to amplify gender relations through sculptural body surrogates; and Patricia Fernández asserted her voice, and that of her grandfather, by physically reframing a series of etchings by Francisco Goya. 25 See Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 120–133. Arad has played with ventriloqual strategies not only in this series of videos that manipulate words coming from Adolf Hitler but also in other works, such as Gefiltefish (2005), in which he delivers his own mother’s words explaining how to make this traditional Jewish dish.

Introduction  21 26 Almost two decades later, Belu-Simion Fainaru, together with a team of computer scientists at the University of California at Irvine, created an interactive artwork using artificial intelligence to produce a portrait of holocaust survivor and renowned poet Paul Celan. Talking Head (2019) interacts in real time with spectators who are invited to pose questions to the speaking effigy of the poet who ultimately took his own life. Speaking for the absent poet, the software latches onto information provided by the spectator in order to produce a (relatively) reasonable response originating from the avatar. A digital dummy of sorts, Talking Head seems to be the receptacle for a voice “thrown” from an invisible source; indeed, complex computer programming makes possible delivery of Celan’s (imagined) perspective. Self-consciously cartoonish yet hyperrealistic, the portrait offers a creepy (fictive) conversation with the dead. 27 The three women who appear in Love Story are Sarah Ezzat Mardini, Dr. Shabeena ­Francis Saveri, Mamy Maloba Langa, who fled Damascus, Syria, Mumbai, India, and Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, respectively. And the three men are Farah Abdi ­Mohammed, Prof. Luis Ernesto Nava Molero, and José Maria João, who left behind Somalia, Caracas, Venezuela, and Angola. 28 See Ted Chiang, “The Great Silence,” in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016): 69–72. 29 Notably, the artists made two versions of this piece (one, a 3-channel with three screens, the other a single-channel). In the 3-channel installation, the two large screens feature video images of the forest, the observatory, the birds, and more). In a poetic gesture, the artists dedicated the third screen to showing just the work’s subtitles, i.e., the thoughts of the parrots. In other words, the subtitles in this multi-channel version are never laid over the images. Strategically isolating the subtitles was meant to express the idea of an irreducible gap in interspecies understanding. Later on, they produced a second single-channel version that likewise did not overlay the text over the images. Another key detail is that the three (deliberately) variously sized screens in the multi-channel version. Thank you to the artists for pointing this out to us. 30 We are grateful to the artists for clarifying the source of the beeping sounds in this work. 31 Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, 195–198.

References Auner, Joseph. “‘Sing It for Me’: Posthuman Ventriloquism in Recent Popular Music.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 128, no. 1 (2003): 98–122. Cavarero, Adriana. For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Chiang, Ted. “The Great Silence.” In The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Karen Joy Folwer, 69–72. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. Chow, Rey and James Steintrager, eds. The Sense of Sound, special issue Differences: A ­Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22 (Summer-Fall 2011). Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Cooren, François. “Ethics for Dummies: Ventriloquy and Responsibility.” Atlantic Journal of Communication 24, no. 1 (2016): 17–30. Davis, Charles Bruce. “Distant Ventriloquism: Vocal Mimesis, Agency and Identity in Ancient Greek Performance.” Theatre Journal 55, no. 1 (March 2003): 45–65. Davis, Charles Bruce. “Reading the Ventriloquist’s Lips: The Performance Genre Behind the Metaphor.” The Drama Review 42, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 133–156. Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Frank, Johanna. “Exposed Ventriloquism: Performance, Voice, and the Rupture of the Visible.” Michigan Feminist Studies 19 (Fall 2005–Spring 2006). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ spo.ark5583.0019.001. Goldblatt, David. Art and Ventriloquism. London and New York: Routledge Publishing, 2005.

22  Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace Goldblatt, David. “Ventriloquism: Ecstatic Exchange and the History of the Art Work.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 no. 3 (Summer 1993): 389–398. Kahn, Douglas. Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Kahn, Douglas and Gregory Whitehead, eds. Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. Kelly, Caleb. Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Kelly, Caleb. Gallery Sound. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Kelly, Caleb, ed. Sound. Cambridge and London: MIT Press and Whitechapel Documents in Contemporary Art, 2011. LaBelle, Brandon. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2015. LaBelle, Brandon. Soundings: A Contemporary Score. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013. Ray, Gene. Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, Schaffner, Ingrid and Carin Kuoni, eds. The Puppet Show. Philadelphia: Institute of ­Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 2008. Silverman, Kaja. Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. ­Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Steintrager, James, ed. Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise. Durham and London: Duke ­University Press, 2016. Steintrager, James and Rey Chow, eds. Sound Objects. Durham and London: Duke ­University Press, 2019. Vox, Valentine. I Can See Your Lips Moving. London: Kaye and Ward, 1981.

Part I

Pulling Strings

1 Voice, Vivification, and Subjectivity Jasper Johns’ Ventriloquist Isabelle Loring Wallace

I In 1982, after a decade of experimentation with abstractions rendered in the crosshatch style, American artist Jasper Johns began to make busy, illusionistic works littered with references to art history, personal possessions, and the artist’s immediate surroundings. Representative of such works and directly related to the theme of this volume is ­Ventriloquist—a composition in encaustic from 1983 that implements several of the period’s recurring strategies and a number of its recurring motifs (Figure 1.1). Establishing their relevance to the art of ventriloquism is this essay’s first task, but, ultimately, I aim to connect the preoccupations of Ventriloquist with Johns’ oeuvre more broadly, the whole of which might be described as a meditation on the idea of voice: who speaks under what conditions and with what consequences for the speaking subject.1

II The features of Ventriloquist are not unique. For one thing, Ventriloquist is one in a series of seven paintings whose common thread is an unexpected setting: the artist’s bathroom in his house in Stony Point, New York, where he lived part-time during the 1970s and 1980s. Paintings in the bathtub series have a shallow depth of field whose limit is defined by a back wall on which various images have been appended either by illusionistically rendered tape or nails. Marking the space as a bathroom is a wicker hamper and running faucet from which water descends into a porcelain tub, a sliver of which is visible just above the painting’s bottom edge. As we shall see, this motif is especially important to Ventriloquist, even if a common denominator among all the bathtub paintings. Also common to the bathtub paintings is the trope of bisection, which is, in one work, the literal effect of two adjacent panels but, more often, a topical effect of the paintings’ compositions, which often complement in credible ways Johns’ rendering of the bathroom’s architecture. 2 Ventriloquist, for example, is bisected along a vertical axis at the composition’s middle and is thus divided into two differently textured halves that appear sutured together by illusionistically rendered hinges located in the painting’s upper and lower quadrants. The left-hand side of canvas is painted so as to simulate grooves of wood, perhaps indicating a door, whereas on the right, where the palette tends more gray than brown, the texture is suggestive of stucco or stone. If bisection is a recurring feature of the bathtub series, doubling is as well, and it is operative at the level of both motif and method. There are, for

DOI: 10.4324/9781003303978-3

26  Isabelle Loring Wallace

Figure 1.1  J asper Johns, Ventriloquist, 1983, 75 × 50 in. (190.5 × 127 cm), encaustic on canvas. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

example, two bathtub paintings called Racing Thoughts: one, painted in encaustic in 1983, is colorful and lively, adorned with patches of brilliant yellow, red, and blue, while the other, painted a year later, identical in composition and nearly so in size, is executed in oil, its palette gloomy and somber, rendered mostly in gray, but with patches of brown and cream. 3 Ventriloquist, by contrast, does not have a pendant; yet, its investment in doubling is evident in its treatment of Johns’ most

Voice, Vivification, and Subjectivity  27 prominent and famous motif: an American flag that has been doubled, stacked, and rendered in orange, green, and black, only to be repeated, color-corrected, and severely cropped at the work’s left-hand margin.4 I’ll return to this complex arrangement subsequently and address Johns’ use of color in more detail, but here, suffice it to say, the concepts of division and doubling, which are pervasive in Johns’ work in this period, are essential to the practice of ventriloquy, which consists, in its most well-recognized, modern form of two performers, who are in fact one, divided by the illusion of a thrown voice. Illusionism, especially in conjunction with the idea of “speaking” through the art of others, is also pervasive in Johns’ work of the period. As noted, most paintings made by the artist in the 1980s, including those in the bathtub series, focus on a wall, on which myriad objects and images are (or seem to be) appended. And, with the occasional exception of a self-referential component, such as the prominently displayed double-flag paintings included in Ventriloquist, the things arranged for the spectator’s consumption in these works are Johns’ re-presentations of things originally made by others. Those included in Ventriloquist are typical of the period, and, with one exception to which I’ll return, they appear throughout the course of similar works executed in the 1980s.5 An untitled Barnett Newman lithograph of 1961 from Johns’ own collection, itself bisected by Newman’s signature zip, appears in the upper righthand quadrants of the two paintings called Racing Thoughts and is, in Ventriloquist, reversed.6 Also ubiquitous are Johns’ renderings of George Ohr’s collectible pottery, an example of which is seen atop the hamper at lower left in both variations of Racing Thoughts and then, again, several times over, in Ventriloquist, where seven pots from Johns’ personal collection seem to hover suggestively above the grooved surface of the room’s hinged door. In turn, the wooden door recalls Marcel Duchamp’s wellknown Étant donnés (1946–1966) and, for the aficionado, The Green Box (1934), which includes the artist’s cryptic suggestion that he make a hinge picture or “tableau de charnière.”7 Simultaneously and without contradiction, the whole of Ventriloquist recalls John Peto’s Ordinary Objects in the Artist’s Creative Mind (1887) to which Johns’ work is clearly indebted in both conceit and composition. Peto’s well-known painting features a veristic rendering of a hinged, wooden door that doubles as a trompe l’oeil bulletin board for disparate images and things, and, as with Ventriloquist, its “ordinary objects” are familiar, art-historical, and self-referential. Hence, they also bear out the idea of art as ventriloquy: an act performed for an audience appreciative of deception and highly entertained by choreographed conversations between surrogates for an artist who wishes to remain largely off stage. Of course, deflection has always been part of Johns’ art, and within the vast literature on the artist, it’s routinely said that he prefers to throw his voice and remain somehow apart from its destination.8 Easily understood in relation to the impersonal, readymade imagery of iconic, early works such as Flag (1954–1955), this strategy also bears on Ventriloquist, where the artist’s famous motif appears doubled and encourages in a literal sense the act of looking away. Because rendered at center “incorrectly” in orange and green, the double flag assumes its color-corrected form only when one looks askance and allows an afterimage to appear on the museum’s blank, presumptively white wall—a phenomenon anticipated and encouraged in Ventriloquist by the cropped image of a “proper” double flag on the painting’s left-hand margin.9 Thus, in the manner of a ventriloquist, Johns—or, more accurately, his staged “character”—occupies center stage, all the while ­ redirecting the spectator’s gaze through illusionistic tricks that effect the

28  Isabelle Loring Wallace

Figure 1.2  Jasper Johns, Voice, 1964–1967, 96 × 69 ½ in. (243.8 × 176.5 cm), oil on canvas with wood, string, wire, and metal spoon and fork (two panels), The Menil Collection, Houston. © 2022 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

semblance of life elsewhere. Or…maybe not. For, this interpretation is, like the­ Newman print, invertible, and it would be just as easy to argue, as did Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault in the decade after Johns’ debut, that it is the artist who is mortified and manipulated—a notional dummy whose expressions are an illusionistic effect of culture, language, and history, all of which are, in fact, speaking through him.

Voice, Vivification, and Subjectivity  29

III Explored directly in two gray monochromes from the 1960s—Voice (1964–1967) and Voice 2 (1967–1971)—this line of argumentation implies that the artist is spoken rather than serving as the generative source of his ideas. It derives from contemporaneous texts within the fields of philosophy and literary theory, perhaps most straightforwardly, Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” (1967), which postulated that the expressive act, whether spoken or written, is a mortifying one in which an author confronts the fact of his own constitution by languages that are both the condition and limit of his identity. Hence, in Voice, a large work that comprises two stacked panels depicting an incident seemingly in progress, we find an elegiac tone (Figure 1.2). Marking the canvas’s left-hand side is the painting’s lone, painted motif: the stenciled word “voice,” which appears, gray-on-gray, amidst a sea of subdued, non-referential marks from which only this word has emerged. And yet, as painted, “voice” finds itself in a precarious circumstance; for, sitting atop the painting’s gray field and making destructive contact with its surface is a small, wooden block, tethered by a straightened piece of coat-hanger wire to a screw eye inserted into the painting’s right-hand side.10 Rising from this point at a modest angle, the wire traverses the painting’s width from right to left, reduplicating and thus emphasizing the horizontal seam where the painting’s two panels are conjoined. As noted, the wire leads to the block whose arced, downward path is apparent from the smoothed swath of paint that extends from the top of Johns’ canvas to the topmost edge of the word “voice,” its immediate target. Nevertheless, the word remains legible—a fact that allows us to see that it, and the concept for which it stands, are already partially compromised, most especially, given the angle of the slat, the letters that form the word’s end, whose fate anticipates a more total eradication of “voice,” lost to the very medium that gave it material form. And yet, time has stopped just shy of this possibility, and the painting’s destructive slat is fixed in place, arguably because what the artist means to highlight is the predicament of the visual artist, who is ever negotiating a tension between the medium of painting and the content or “voice” he means to express. For as Voice suggests, the act of painting simultaneously gives body to voice and is the phenomenon by which voice disappears. Such reasoning is fine as far as it goes, but if Johns wanted merely to lament the violence done by representation to the expressive subject using the wooden slat to emphasize the nullifying effect that materialization has on an artist’s voice, then why did he render this endangered concept with stenciled letters that seem to suggest a priori its extrinsic, impersonal constitution? Perhaps because there are two ways of thinking about the idea of the artist’s mortification, and, in this work, Johns is thinking his way through both. In the first instance—the one that accords with the interpretation sketched and potentially undermined above—authentic, individualized expression is theoretically possible yet compromised by the requirement that it assume a communicable, iterable form, which makes it legible to others, but, at the same time, something other than itself.11 In the second, authentic, individualized expression is impossible even in theory. For however much one might cling to the romantic notion that the self remains unexpressed because deformed in the act of articulation, the author or artist, as Barthes explains: “ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely.”12 On this account, then, the problem

30  Isabelle Loring Wallace is not materialization, but subjectivity itself, which was, in the era of Johns’ debut, ­reconfigured as an extrinsic, inessential entity shaped by language and culture.13 With which of these positions does Voice accord? Relative to the idea that content is transformed by the process of its articulation, the painting’s as yet unremarked inclusion of a fork and spoon seems pertinent. They hang along the painting’s right-hand edge in staggered alignment from two additional pieces of coat-hanger wire: a longer one that runs from the screw eye discussed previously to the handle of the spoon, and a shorter one that is suspended from the perforated bowl of the spoon to the handle of the fork. Appearing throughout Johns’ work in this period, silverware here serves as a counterweight in two respects. First, on a formal level, these three-dimensional elements at low right offset the painterly actions of the wooden slat at high left, lending the entire picture a sense of balance and stasis. Second, on a conceptual level, fork and spoon link ideas of speech and expression with those of consumption and digestion with which the mouth is also associated. Their pairing with “voice” could therefore be read as a reflection on the strangeness of mouths, which are linked to two opposing, but essential activities: speaking and eating. And yet, for reasons discussed above, the inclusion of silverware also deepens the painting’s engagement with the idea of voice, reminding viewers that as much as it is associated with expressive acts, that is, with the process of giving voice to something and lending it material form, articulation is also an ingestive process, whereby ideas and sentiments are consumed at the very moment they emerge and are transformed into digestible forms. But, as we have said, the stenciling of the word “voice” throws a wrench in this argument and forces consideration of another possibility perhaps encouraged by the painting’s other linguistic elements: namely, the painting’s inscribed date and, in the opposite right corner, the stenciled letters that comprise the artist’s last name. In an aesthetic context, the inscription of the artist’s name is purposeful and commonplace, serving as a mark of authorship that confers value and authenticity on a work. But, as Lacan would observe in the course of the 1950s—that is, in the very decade Johns began to author things in his name—it is also concise evidence of the individual’s linguistic formation.14 As the analyst maintained, the name marks the individual at birth and aligns him with an authoritative (patriarchal) symbol that belongs neither to him nor his family before him. This essential fact, crucial to the analyst’s structuralist revisioning of the Oedipal complex in which the father’s name (le nom du père) substitutes for the father’s prohibitive “no” (le non du père), is especially interesting to consider in this context, given an anecdote shared by Johns in an interview with Paul Taylor in 1990.15 Exasperated by repeated questions about the origins of Flag, his most famous painting, Johns recalled an experience with his father in a park in Savannah that contains a statue of a revolutionary war hero. While standing beneath this monumental figure, Johns’ father, William Jasper Johns, shared with his son, Jasper Johns, that they were both named after the imposing military hero, Sergeant William Jasper, who lost his life raising a fallen flag. That this flag was a revolutionary war flag and not the American flag, as Johns may have thought, is beside the point. What matters is Johns’ formative exposure to the idea that the name is impersonal and extrinsic and, subsequently, his linking of that idea to Flag, which is in its own right a complex mixture of readymade and gestural elements. By contrast, “voice”—whether a sonic phenomenon caused by the exteriorization of breath, or, in a metaphorical register, the intrinsic qualities of a novel, painting, poem, etc. that seem to come from within and appear distinctive—is typically thought to be inextricable from the individual and to mark the specificity of

Voice, Vivification, and Subjectivity  31 his expressions over and against the impersonality of the subject’s name. In spite of this, and in spite of the common belief that an artist’s “voice,” or, put differently, his signature style, is beyond any sort of reductive, totalizing codification, Johns, in Voice, strips the concept of personalization, materializing (the) “voice” through a stencil that characterizes it as the dispassionate, readymade effect of a ­mass-produced template. Thus, while the painting’s slat may preserve the sense that something happens to the artist’s voice in the moment of its realization, the stenciled rendering of “voice” prevents us from imagining, à la Barthes, that “the that the internal ‘thing’ [the artist] claims to ‘translate’” is something other than a dictionary of “readymade forms.”16 Where are we? Is Voice a painting with its wires crossed, entangling the artist’s name and the idea of voice with the aesthetic of mass-manufacture? Or, is it, as I am proposing, an extension of Johns’ deconstructive project, which began, at the very beginning, with Flag, whose conjunction of readymade imagery and gestural marks famously entwined originality and repetition, eroding their hierarchical opposition. Some ten years later, Johns’ approach remained deconstructive and his conclusions re: authorship similarly impure: self and voice, he concludes, are neither original nor readymade, anterior nor merely the belated effect of language. Instead, the self is an ongoing, unceasing negotiation made possible through a process of exteriorization, and whether that process entails paint or, more simply, the voice, self-expression is as much a matter of communicating the self to others as it is an attempt to constitute and know oneself from a distance. Indeed, like ventriloquism, painting entails a division borne of the artist’s doubling, and, as we shall see, this idea, in particular, is essential to Voice 2.

Figure 1.3  Jasper Johns, Voice 2, 1967–1971, oil and collage on canvas (three panels), 72 × 50 in. (182.9 × 127 cm) each panel, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung ­Basel, ­Kunstmuseum. © 2022 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights ­Society (ARS), NY.

32  Isabelle Loring Wallace

IV Voice 2, on which the artist worked subsequently, is a colossal oil painting in three panels (Figure 1.3). Again featuring the word “voice,” the painting divides the word’s letters across three detached panels. But, even with more than 13 feet of lateral real estate, the stenciled letters that comprise the painting’s title appear crowded and compromised, presented in a state of chaotic disarray.17 In the first panel, for example, the letter V is harshly cropped, as is, to a lesser extent, the letter I; moreover, the letters V, O, and I are awkwardly close to each other and seem to be subject to unidentified pressures. The letter O, for instance, is split down the middle by a line that vertically bisects the panel and is further divided from itself and reduplicated by a white oval above that reads as if a moon within a nocturnal landscape. Likewise, the surface of the letter I, visible near the first panel’s right-hand edge, seems to have come unmoored from its base, such that it hovers immediately above itself and is, moreover, repeated in orange in the panel’s upper left-hand corner. Similarly, in panel two, the letters C and E meet comparable fates: C appears partially peeled off and bent back from itself, and E, comprising two layers, hangs off kilter, as if the nail that held it in place gave way to and prepared us for panel three, in which a portion of the letter V cropped from the left most panel, comes incongruously into view and seems to slip, making visible its shadowy double. As even a brief description bears out, division and doubling are the primary strategies of Voice 2, and Johns’ commitment to them is further emphasized by the fact that all three panels are bisected—the first vertically, the second horizontally, and the third diagonally. This emphasis on doubling, when coupled with the work’s degraded aesthetic, advances ideas already implicit in Voice. In particular, it furthers the notion that an artist’s efforts to externalize an idea and re-present it in material form result in the denigration of the work’s expressive content, as if in the process of giving voice to one’s “voice,” it becomes other than itself. As noted, Voice offers an elegiac, distilled illustration of this predicament, implying that the artist’s voice, which is already an effect of readymade symbols, undergoes a transformation in the moment of its externalization. In comparison, Voice 2 is busy and full of incident: letters split and reduplicate, slip and give way, float and rise up, dangle and hang off kilter, ossify  and assume weight. For unlike faces, which express the human subject incessantly and remain indistinguishable from the individual in the eyes of others, the voice must be conjured up and performed, sent away from the subject and into the world where it stands as the speaker’s inadequate double and proxy.18 Hence, in Voice 2, the unrelenting emphasis on the letters’ doubling and division is used to express distance and difference, as if to suggest that the surrogate that is one’s voice always says more and less than one meant to say and is never a perfect or reliable enough proxy for the one dependent upon it. Voice, then, is not a casual metaphor for the idea of art’s expressive content. Because in addition to capturing the notion that art has something “to say,” this metaphor advances the idea that art gives body to something, even as it leaves the artist’s own body behind in an act of duplication that fractures the subject and splits him from himself, making him a melancholic or bemused witness to the phenomenon of his own self-severance. From here, it is a short leap to art of ventriloquism, which is nothing if not a heightened dramatization of the properties that mark every speech act and, as I am arguing, every painting. To state the obvious: ventriloquism, in its canonical modern form,

Voice, Vivification, and Subjectivity  33 doubles the subject, and, like painting, it puts the fact of doubling on display.19 At the same time, like painting, it divides the subject, rendering theatrical the independence of the “voice,” that is, its capacity to leave the subject and split him in two. Finally, ventriloquism, like painting, is a play of animate and inanimate: on the one hand, through speech and painting, something is born, and vitality is made manifest in the form of mute materials that seem to speak; on the other hand, through speech and painting something is lost, and the mortification of the subject by language is evident both in the silence of the spoken-for artist and the paradigmatically stilled lips of the ventriloquist as the dummy steals the show. With this in mind, let’s return to Johns’ painting.

V Only a few motifs have escaped our catalog of Ventriloquist’s parts, and each in some way conjures what Herman Melville once called “the watery world.”20 I’ve noted already the bathtub and faucet at lower left, which pinpoint the setting as the bathroom of the artist’s former home and Johns as the master of his own small vessel. Indeed, vessels abound in Ventriloquist—not only the aforementioned Ohr pots that float like small craft atop the murky depths of the painting’s left side, but also the lone vase that sits prominently atop the hamper at right—at once a trick of perceptual psychology and a memento, a commemorative vase issued on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. Perceiving the relevance of this souvenir to the art of ventriloquy requires attending to its unusual, asymmetrical shape as well as the negative space around it. Doing so is easiest and most illuminating, when there is a stark contrast between cup and wall, as in Johns’ painting where the vase stands out, bright white on gray, or, as might be the case in real life, when the vase is brightly lit, casting two profile-shaped shadows on the wall behind it. In its modern form, ventriloquism is a solo act, but it is also conversational. That is, it hinges on the illusion of discourse between proximate, but seemingly discrete entities that have been called into being and divided from each other by a deceptive act of aural projection. So, too, the profiles of Elizabeth and Philip, which are properly understood as an effect of light projected upon a single entity, the illumination of which produces the illusion of two figures and thereby sets the stage for the semblance of intercourse between them. If differently conveyed, a similar idea underwrites Newman’s print, wherein the inclusion of a central “zip,” associated by him with onement and inception, is simultaneously a force of division by which the image is split, leaving once calm waters agitated in its inaugural wake. Apt, then, Ventriloquist’s inclusion of an illustration from Moby Dick, which forms the substrate of the painting’s lefthand side. Originally rendered by Barry Moser for a limited-edition 1979 publication of Melville’s novel, it depicts a sperm whale, though presumably, given the chapter’s contents, not Moby Dick as such, which is of course in keeping with Melville’s essential theme: the unknown and man’s endless projections upon it (Figure 1.4). 21 Moser’s engraving appears midway through Melville’s novel in a chapter called “The Prairie,” which is one of the book’s most self-reflexive chapters and home to some of its most extraordinary prose. In the many pages before it, the whale is cataloged exhaustively: maniacally through descriptions of the species and its variants, fantastically through reviews of its illustration in the history of art, and clinically through detailed and fascinating accounts of its anatomy—the tail, head, and crotch, for example, all get separate chapters. “The Prairie” continues this trend, taking up the whale’s face and,

34  Isabelle Loring Wallace incredibly, subjecting it to the art of phrenology. Yet, as with every effort to master the whale, including Ahab’s own masochistic attempt, this endeavor is doomed to fail. For as Melville reminds us, the whale can be spoken for, but agape and tongueless, he cannot be made to speak. 22

Figure 1.4  B  arry Moser, Moby Dick or Sperm Whale, from Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or the Whale (San Francisco, 1979), p. 357. Wood engraving, 10 ³⁄8 × 6 ½ in. (26.4 × 17.3 cm). Copyright Arion Press.

Voice, Vivification, and Subjectivity  35 Given the whale’s inclusion in Johns’ painting, it’s tempting to read it as another mute prop in the artist’s virtuoso performance. But, if we are to imagine Johns in the bath, orchestrating this recital and participating as a character within it, the painting’s point of view and, more specifically, the head-on view it includes of the running faucet, imply that subsequent spectators are in the bath as well; and with this, the positions inherent to ventriloquism begin to float and commingle—making Ahabs, Ishmaels, and whales of us all. Such fluidity is fascinating in its own right, and one could examine this phenomenon at length in relation to both Ventriloquist and Moby Dick and, indeed, the art of ventriloquism. But here, and by way of conclusion, I pursue a more modest agenda and endeavor to suggest why Johns might have engaged ventriloquism and Moby Dick simultaneously and in conjunction with this particular style.

VI As noted already, Johns’ reticence is legendary and has inspired countless historians and critics to speak on his behalf. But, following a debut comprising readymades and intellectual rebuses along with another ten years of opaque and impassive abstractions rendered in the impenetrable crosshatch style, Johns for the first time took up the eschewed art of illusion, rendering canvases like Ventriloquist that delighted his audience with the semblance of three-dimensional space. The first of these was called In the Studio (1982), and with it, the studio, along with the craft that takes place within it, was put on display and rendered theatrical (Figure 1.5).23 The first Johns’ painting to use a shallow depth of field in conjunction with illusionism, includes, but pushes to the side, a stacked pair of the artist’s recently completed crosshatch paintings that have been tacked to the wall with trompe l’oeil nails. Taking center stage and suggesting the direction Johns will go next are two pairings that evidence the artist’s emerging interest in illusion, as well as the play of two- and three-dimensional elements. Extending to mid-canvas from the bottom edge is a painted tan trapezoid that reads as a blank canvas propped against the studio wall. It’s juxtaposed against a three-dimensional element that counterbalances its direction and illusionistic qualities: a slat of wood affixed to the lower edge of the canvas and extending outward at a modest angle into the space of the spectator and artist. Just above it is a cast of a left hand and forearm made of wax, a rag held in its hand. A patchwork pattern, used elsewhere in Johns’ oeuvre, covers the whole of the arm and hand and reappears in Johns’ two-dimensional drawing of a right hand and forearm, which is tacked to the wall, as if a work on paper, by two illusionistically rendered nails. 24 There are things to say about each of these elements as they relate to the craft of painting, but what matters most in this context is the visibility Johns has granted the studio, which this work presents as a stage set on which the artist performs a set of veristic tricks not unlike those conducted by the ventriloquist, who likewise stages theatrical “conversations” between two characters, varying in their degrees of irreality, but borne of the artist’s hands and mind. On the heels of In the Studio, Johns will make a few more paintings in the crosshatch series, but gradually turn over his entire production to paintings that s­ howcase images on walls, and although only the first overtly directs our attention to the studio, all showcase paintings-inside-paintings in this theatrical, dialogical vein.

36  Isabelle Loring Wallace

Figure 1.5  Jasper Johns, In the Studio, 1982, collage and encaustic on canvas with objects. 72 × 48 in. (182.9 × 121.9 cm). Collection of the artist. © 2022 Jasper Johns/ Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

In the Studio is quiet and relatively spare, but subsequent canvases, including those in the bathtub series, are more chatty, seeming to make up for two decades of silence in the span of a few short years. In response, critics immediately claimed that Johns had “dropped the reserve”—something Johns both denied and, at other moments, confirmed. 25 Faced with this new, purportedly more forthcoming body of work, ­critics and interpreters eagerly took the bait, and in the role of ventriloquist, they ­projected on these these blank slates in an attempt to capture something and know it, to read, as Ishmael once said, the whale’s inscrutable brow. 26 Indeed, just as the

Voice, Vivification, and Subjectivity  37 ventriloquist speaks for the dummy and the critic speaks for the painting, so scholars, so I, have spoken for Moby Dick, a novel that is, like the creature at its core, a blank surface suited to every projection and receptive of every harpoon. As Melville himself put it in his chapter on the pallor of the whale: “whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at same time the concrete of all colors;” it is, he concludes, “a dumb blankness” that is nevertheless “full of meaning” and inspiring of “the fiery hunt.”27 Asymptotic and tragic, Ahab’s deranged quest, like that of the literary critic, is famously futile, ever focused upon the wrong whale as the notorious albino gets further away. Indeed, this logic obtains even in proximity and capture; for as written, Ahab’s success is also his failure, the price of which is his life and the life of the indomitable, undomesticated whale whom Ahab chases to the bottom of the sea. This is dark and heady stuff, to be sure. But, if one considers the novel’s themes through the lens of ventriloquism, a different mood takes hold. After all, ventriloquism delights in evasion and requires that one look awry, away from the live performer and source to the dummy we know will deceive us. In this way, ventriloquism not only foregrounds the unspeaking unknown in the form of the dummy but also renders theatrical our desire to project upon it and make it speak. Hence in this comedic, often irreverent, middle-brow art, desire is divorced from tragedy and instead becomes a mechanism for delight, far removed from fatalistic quests that end in the performance of their own impossibility. For, impossibility is where the illusionistic art of ventriloquism begins; as with painting, no one is fooled, nothing is captured, no inanimate object comes to life, no divinity is unveiled. The stakes are low with ventriloquism, yet the content is compelling, for what the ventriloquy puts on display is not only the dialogical fact of our own becoming in and through voice but also the generative image of our own unfulfillable desire to know and master, to speak for and be spoken. 28 Removed from the question of success or failure, this is not tragedy. It is recognition and self-knowing, a source of pleasure in the face of the mirror.

VII Let us return, in conclusion, to Johns’ painting. Visible beneath the rippled surface of the Ventriloquist’s left-hand side is the mighty sperm whale, its open mouth positioned beside Johns’ double flag. An unlikely couple, Moser’s whale and Johns’ American flags nevertheless suit the flexible metaphors under consideration here: the open-mouthed whale can be read as Johns and as ventriloquist, just as it can also be read as a voiceless dummy who either stands for Johns or is the artist’s means of producing, amidst a sea of other illusions, the appearance of a whale who speaks. 29 But, perhaps like Ahab, the viewer has been led astray not only by this red herring, but others too, for as our gaze moves from the painting’s central motifs to the cropped flag at left and the parted sea of Newman’s print above, it catches on the painting’s low horizon a glimpse of something brilliant and white: a modest, domestic object that encapsulates in miniature the humble, discursive essence of ventriloquism as captured in the form of two silhouettes that face each other and seem to speak. Notably, the vase is shaped like an upended whale headed for the depths, but in this context, it inspires neither terror nor a tragic hunt, serving instead as a modest invitation, entreating viewers to float lightly on the water’s

38  Isabelle Loring Wallace surface and engage from the bathtub’s safe perch the play of meaning and, from all sides, the illusionistic projection of voice.

Acknowledgments A version of this paper was delivered at the College Art Association conference in Los Angeles in 2018. Thanks are owed to my fellow panelists, whose essays appear in this volume, and the session chair, Jennie Hirsh, who saw the value of ventriloquism as a lens through which to think about contemporary art.

Notes 1 Ventriloquist is briefly discussed in the context of ventriloquism and Johns’ self-referential tendencies in the final pages of David Goldblatt’s book, Art and Ventriloquism (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 171–176. 2 The bathtub series began in 1983 with two untitled works—one in color and the other in black and white. The latter is, in fact, two panels sutured together. 3 For a thorough consideration of both Racing Thoughts paintings, see Fiona Donovan, Jasper Johns: Pictures within Pictures 1980–2015 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017), 89–96. 4 The American flag motif is Johns’ most famous, associated with the artist since his first one-man show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958. Beginning with Flag, (1954–1955), it has appeared in numerous variations over the course of his career, whether in isolation or as a citation within other more complex works. By virtue of its orientation, the variant seen in the center of Ventriloquist is most directly related to Two Flags of 1962, but, by virtue of its coloration and interest in afterimages, it is also linked to Flags (1965), which features the American flag painted in complimentary shades of orange and green floating on gray field above a gray version of the American flag. On afterimages, see note 9. 5 For another thorough accounting of Ventriloquist’s references, see Roberta Bernstein, ed., Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné of Painting and Sculpture, 3 (New York: The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, 2017), 231–235. See also Mark Rosenthal, Jasper Johns: Work Since 1974 (New York: Thames & Hudson in conjunction with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989), 73–75. 6 Given Johns’ theme, it is worth noting that one of Newman’s best-known works is a painting called Voice (1950). It also consists of a field divided by a single “zip.” On the relationship between Newman and Johns, see Barbara Rose, “Johns and Newman: An Encounter in Art,” in Barnett Newman, The Complete Editions/Jasper Johns, References to Barnett Newman (New York: Brooke Alexander, 1999), 2–6. 7 The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box) is a curated collection of 94 scraps written, arranged, and produced by Marcel Duchamp. The contents of the box, which are loose and unpaginated, relate to The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–1923) and date from 1911 to 1915. As early as 1914, Duchamp pursued the idea of making a facsimile, and in 1934, he announced the publication of The Green Box in an edition of 320 copies. For a bound, English translation of The Green Box, see Marcel Duchamp and Richard Hamilton, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, trans. George Heard Hamilton (New York: Percy Lund, Humphries and Co. Ltd, 1960). “Perhaps make a hinge picture (folding yardstick, book); develop the principle of the hinge in the displacements, first in the plane, second in space. Find an automatic description of the hinge. Perhaps introduce it in the Pendu femelle.” Marcel Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 27. 8 Goldblatt discusses this possibility in relationship to Ventriloquist and ventriloquism. See Goldblatt, Art and Ventriloquism, 173. 9 Johns began experimenting with “afterimages” in Flags (1965) which features the American flag painted in complimentary shades of orange and green floating on gray field above a gray version of the American flag, where the “corrected” image should appear after

Voice, Vivification, and Subjectivity  39 sustained engagement with the version rendered in orange and green. Targets (1966) has a similar format. 10 Attention is drawn to this wire by a short orange thread that hangs vertically from this wire at a point just to the left of the painting’s middle. 11 The requirement that language be iterable is explored most thoroughly by Jacques Derrida in “Signature, Event, Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The ­University of Chicago Press, 1982), 307–330. 12 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1977), 142–148. 13 Throughout the 1950s, Jacques Lacan developed his theories on the linguistic nature of subjectivity, insisting that the symbolic order is crucial to man’s individuation and development. Of foundational importance is his text of 1953 “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in the Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977), 30–113. 14 As Lacan puts it in the seminar on psychosis in 1956: In order for the human being to be able to establish the most natural of relations, that between male and female, a third party has to intervene, one that is the image of something successful, the model of some harmony. This does not go far enough – there has to be a law, a chain, a symbolic order, the intervention of the order of speech, that is, of the father. Not the natural father, but what is called the father. The order that prevents the collision and explosion of the situation as a whole is founded on the existence of this name of the father. I emphasize this. The symbolic order has to be conceived as something superimposed, without which no animal life would be possible for this misshapen subject that man is…Indeed whenever we find a skeleton we call it human if it has been placed in a grave. What reason can there be for placing this debris within a stone enclosure? For this to be possible a whole symbolic order must have already been instituted, which entails the fact that a gentleman has been Mr. So-and-so in the social order requires that this be indicated on his headstone. The fact that he was called with So-and-so extends beyond his living existence. This doesn’t presuppose belief in the immortality of the soul, but simply that his name has nothing to do with his living existence, that it extends and perpetuates itself beyond it. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. with notes by John Forrester (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 96. 15 Paul Taylor, “Jasper Johns,” in Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 244. 16 Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 146. 17 Given the size of these letters, they were likely projected and traced, rather than stenciled; nevertheless, they retain the look of a letter that was rendered with this tool. 18 See Steven Connor’s important book on ventriloquism, especially its first chapter: ­D umbstruck—A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3–43. 19 Despite a complex history that can be traced back as far as the Oracle at Delphi, today ventriloquism is perceived as a comedic form of entertainment, which is what ventriloquy became starting in the late nineteenth century. See Connor, Dumbstruck, 249–289. For a second, shorter history of ventriloquism, see Valentine Vox, I Can See Your Lips Moving: The History and Art of Ventriloquism (Kingswood, Tadworth, Surrey: Kaye & Ward Ltd, 1981). 20 This phrase appears on a few occasions in Moby Dick, starting with the novel’s first chapter. See Herman Melville, Moby Dick; or The Whale (San Francisco, CA: Arion Press, 1979; Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1981), 2. ­Citations refer to University of California Press edition. 21 This oversized, limited-edition version of the novel was published in 1979 in an edition of 250 and subsequently reprinted, at small scale, for mass distribution by the University of California Press in 1981. For an overview of literature on Moby Dick and a sense of the literature’s range, see Milton R. Stearn, ed., Discussions of Moby Dick (Boston:

40  Isabelle Loring Wallace D.C. Heath and Co, 1960); Richard R. Brodhead, ed., New Essays on Moby Dick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Robert C. Evans, ed., Moby Dick: C ­ ritical Insights (Ipswich, MA: Grey House Press, 2014). 22 Melville notes the whale’s lack of tongue, see Moby Dick, 356–358. 23 As Fiona Donovan puts it in her substantive engagement with this painting, “With In the Studio, Johns’s (sic) own practice becomes his subject.” Donovan, Jasper Johns: Pictures within Pictures 1980–2015, 79. As she notes, there is a thematic connection between this work and two other pictures of the 1960s: Studio (1964) and Studio II (1966), but as ­quasi-abstractions, these works function very differently. 24 A variation of this motif first appears in Untitled (1972), a large, four-paneled work that also includes Johns’ first experimentation with the crosshatch style. 25 “In my early work I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions… I sort of stuck to my guns for a while but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally, one must simply drop the reserve.” Cited in Mark Rosenthal, Jasper Johns: Work Since 1974 (New York: Thames & Hudson in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1988), 60. On the other hand, Johns will also say in an interview of 1994 with Barbaralee Diamonstein Spielvogel: “Don’t you really believe that this work is more revealing, Jasper, even though your iconography is more obscure.” Johns: “I’m not sure it’s not less revealing But I don’t know. What is it that work reveals? Work reveals itself, really.” See Spielvogel, “Interview with Jasper Johns,” in Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnadoe (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 297. 26 Melville, Moby Dick, 358. 27 Melville, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Moby Dick, 189–198. 28 This is not to say that ventriloquy cannot be used to serious or critical ends. Rather, I mean only to suggest that in its popular form it tends to favor comedy and eschew heady or politically charged discourse. 29 For a reading of Ventriloquist in relation to Moby Dick, ventriloquism, and homosocial desire, see Jonathan D. Katz and David Ward, Hide and Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2010), 44 and 244.

References Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, 142–148. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1977. Bernstein, Roberta, ed. Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Painting and Sculpture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Brodhead, Richard R., ed. New Essays on Moby Dick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck—A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford ­University Press, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature, Event, Context.” In Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, 307–330. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982. Donovan, Fiona. Jasper Johns: Pictures within Pictures 1980–2015. London: Thames & ­Hudson, 2017. Duchamp, Marcel. Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, eds. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Duchamp, Marcel and Richard Hamilton. The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, trans. George Heard Hamilton. London: Percy Lund, Humphries and Company, 1960. Evans, Robert C., ed. Moby Dick: Critical Insights. Ipswich, MA: Grey House Press, 2014. Goldblatt, David. Art and Ventriloquism. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Katz, Jonathan D. and David Ward. Hide and Seek: Difference and Desire in American ­Portraiture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2010. Lacan, Jacques. “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in the Psychoanalysis.” In Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, 30–113. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977.

Voice, Vivification, and Subjectivity  41 Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. with notes by John Forrester. London and New York: W.W. Norton, 1988. Melville, Herman. Moby Dick; or, The Whale. 1979. Facsimile of the Arion Press edition with illustrations by Barry Moser. Berkeley Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1981. Rose, Barbara. “Johns and Newman: An Encounter in Art.” In Barnett Newman, The ­C omplete Editions/Jasper Johns, References to Barnett Newman, 2–6. New York: Brooke Alexander, 1999. Rosenthal, Mark. Jasper Johns: Work Since 1974. New York: Thames & Hudson in conjunction with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1988. Spielvogel, Barbaralee Diamonstein. “Interview with Jasper Johns.” In Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnadoe, 290–299. New York: Museum of ­Modern Art, 1996. Stearn, Milton R., ed. Discussions of Moby Dick. Boston: D.C. Heath and Co, 1960. Taylor, Paul. “Jasper Johns.” In Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe, 244–245. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996. Vox, Valentine. I Can See Your Lips Moving: The History and Art of Ventriloquism. ­K ingswood, Tadworth, Surrey: Kaye & Ward Ltd, 1981.

2 Over My Dead Body Puppets, Performance, and Paralysis in Cardiff and Miller’s The Marionette Maker Jennie Hirsh

I will call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. —Giorgio Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?”1

Best known for their interactive sound and video “walks”—a genre they, in fact, pioneered—interdisciplinary media artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller use musical, vocal, and mechanical sounds to complicate viewers’ perceptions of subjectivity, time, space, and place. For nearly three decades, Cardiff (at first alone and then later together with her husband Miller) has used this format to lead “viewers” through spaces including public parks, museums, train stations, and city streets, each time enveloping spectators in a mobile soundscape that typically comprises Cardiff’s breathy, instructive voice (and, at times, the voices of others) in conjunction with recorded ambient sounds, all of which are necessarily layered atop the shifting, unpredictable circumstances of the work’s “viewing.”2 Initially, these sonic works relied on binaural audio recordings to create peripatetic art works with spherical sound;3 over time, and as technology has changed, their projects evolved into multi-sensorial works that incorporate pre-recorded video, shared via loaned iPods or, more recently, a work-specific app downloaded to spectators’ own smart devices.4 In their earliest iterations as well as in their more recent and more developed ones, the walks inject ­Cardiff’s voice into the listener’s head, creating a confusing condition that exceeds even the most extreme cases of eavesdropping. Put otherwise, Cardiff doesn’t just let us listen in; instead, her voice occupies and overtakes our headspace in a way that is at once seductive, intrusive, and utterly intimate. In addition to these interactive, ambulatory works, the artists have gained widespread recognition for designing minimalist, sonic installations that deconstruct and subvert the conventions of live musical performance, such as their globally toured Forty Part Motet (2001), a much celebrated work whose 11-minute loop (not including a 3-minute intermission) delivers 40 pre-recorded tracks of Thomas Tallis’ “Spem in Allium nunquam habui” (1575) that nevertheless sounds and thus feels like a live performance delivered through 40 anthropomorphic stereo stations, each headed up by a speaker that seems to “sing.” A “throwing of voices” if there ever was, The Forty Part Motet not only reproduces the phenomenon of vocals distributed according to the physical arrangement of an actual choir but also, in its initial iteration, served as a notional score for the figures featured in a number of religious paintings in whose

DOI: 10.4324/9781003303978-4

Over My Dead Body  43 proximity it was originally arranged in the Rideau Chapel at the National Gallery of Canada.5 Void of the live aspect of traditional ventriloquy—typically associated with a single speaking human being who transfers her voice to an inanimate dummy on her lap without making visible buccal movements—the piece nevertheless enables a metaphorical form of ventriloquism in which sound is transformed from a pre-recorded, auditory experience to one that evokes through spatial arrangement and sound mixing the drama and plasticity of a fully theatrical experience. While ventriloquism as we typically imagine it, with a wooden dummy whose movements articulate and gesticulate the very human sounds thrown from the speaker on whose lap it sits, doesn’t appear here, its dynamics, if scattered and repackaged, do. Such ventriloquy moves voice not only across space but also over time. This work’s “throwing” is not only a matter of displacing voice to speaker but also a jump of voice-in-situ in Salisbury Cathedral (the site of the original recording) to the National Gallery of Canada (the site of its first installation). Arguably a more physically static object than the walkworks that are, by definition, mobile, The Forty Part Motet nevertheless shares with the walks an auditory experience that is barely visible yet fully sculptural. As was typical of their practice before and after this piece, in walks and even installations, The Forty Part Motet offers snippets of ambient noise and circumstantial chatter before the music itself begins.6 As I am suggesting, a ventriloqual logic has long underwritten much of Cardiff and Miller’s practice, which will lead, in 2014, to a more direct invocation of this antiquated art form. In the interim, Cardiff and Miller’s sculptural objects, along with the complex installations that often contain them, increasingly engaged sophisticated robotics and electronics—apparatuses sometimes concealed, sometimes revealed—that generate unexpected sounds, often triggered by the viewer’s touch or shadow. On a smaller scale, the artists have animated vintage cabinets and tables and, on a larger scale, a prison complex with macabre everyday objects that beat percussively when activated by the spectator’s approach.7 The Cabinet of Curiousness (2010), for example, is a vertically oriented, wooden card catalog whose 20 drawers aligned in twin columns of ten each, has been refitted, its expected library data cards replaced by speaker drivers (Figure 2.1).8 A play on the phrase “cabinet of curiosity,” the work modifies the expectation of that genre of display: traditional cabinets are for looking at rather than touching the various collectibles of a person. Instead, this work has haptic as well as sonic components, ones designed to satisfy rather than merely pique the viewer’s curiosity. The resulting sounds and physical variations then allow for a transfer and manifestation of the viewer’s curiosity that, by her interaction, is unleashed into a manifestation of curiousness. Rather than longing to explore what is stored in the cabinet’s compartments without the permission to do—as is often the case with art objects—viewers are in fact permitted to indulge their desires to open the drawers of this piece of furniture. That said, rather than satisfying their curiosity, they may be frustrated all the more since their actions trigger sounds rather than providing access to physical objects. Relational in their execution as well as affect, the sculptures transfer agency to viewers who can pull out as few or as many of the drawers as they like, allowing them to be impromptu DJs, choosing, activating, and mixing selected audio tracks whose range includes songs, instrumental excerpts, radio, and speech.9 Ultimately, what makes Cardiff and Miller’s works, whether walks, sculptural objects, or immersive installations, feel not only haunted but also uncannily

44  Jennie Hirsh

Figure 2.1  J anet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller, The Cabinet of Curiousness, 2010. Courtesy of the artists and Luhring Augustine Gallery.

disorienting is their choreographic engagement of voices, songs, and instruments in the absence of their purported source—ambient agents or human bodies, including especially Cardiff’s own, for which we must often substitute our own body or for which artificial mechanical means have been enlisted. We, the spectators, serving as both ventriloquists and dummies, bring alive their plans. And so, insofar as their works enable pre-recorded sounds to be experienced in unlikely, denaturalized ways, it seems altogether apt to describe the majority of Cardiff and Millers’ works, especially those that are replete with displaced voices, music, and other sounds that haunt us through speakers and headphones, as ventriloqual. At the same time, how their litany of organic and artificial sounds jump out of bodies and machines, travel across time and between fiction and reality, and, perhaps most strangely, into our heads, merits a closer look, perhaps especially in relation to The Marionette Maker of 2014, the impetus for and subject of this essay. Commissioned by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, The Marionette Maker, at first glance, is consistent with the artists’ modus operandi for the past 25 years: like so many of their (earlier) works, it too offers a sculptural environment replete with modified retro-furniture that has been outfitted with interactive sound components and cluttered with vintage motorized objects

Over My Dead Body  45

Figure 2.2  Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller, The Marionette Maker installed at Palacio de Cristal del Retiro, 2014. Courtesy of the artists and Luhring Augustine Gallery.

­(Figure  2.2).  Like  so  many other Cardiff and Miller installations, its contents also include mildly scary-looking toys, orphaned books and magazines, and other nostalgic decorative touches, such as velvet curtains, that make any space feel like a hidden corner of an attic or basement of a hoarder.10 And yet in multiple ways, this modified 1970 Serro Scotty HiLander caravan stands out from earlier works in that it combines aspects of previous “theatrical” installations with those of the “bare speakers” works (like Forty Part Motet), and as I will argue, the “walks.”11 Installed for the first time beneath the 22-meter tall cupola of the elegant and sparkling ­Palacio de ­Cristal, the nineteenth-century glass-and-steel structure built for the General E ­ xposition of the Philippine Islands of 1887 in the Buen Retiro Park not too far from the Reina Sofía, the modified camper houses various small-scale, staged performances within its dimly lit interior whose natural windows and modified portals render them accessible to viewers curiously peering inside. Surreal and brooding in tone, this orphaned automotive vehicle—it remains unrigged to any car that might pull it—is overtly linked to ventriloquism. It includes a series of animated marionettes variously scaled, as well as one of their maker himself, and revels in the play of animate and inanimate, authentic and artificial, fractured and whole. A tour-de-force of mise en abyme, as I will show, The Marionette Maker thus explores, as does ventriloquism, the genres of portraiture and performance, blurring the boundaries between conscious and unconscious states, and reality and fiction, all in the context of a sonically charged and morbid array of ghastly characters and puppets who seem, having been left to their own devices, to have taken on a life of their own.

46  Jennie Hirsh Before attempting an interpretation of the work, I offer an overview of the i­ nventory of the vehicle and the various characters, as well as vignettes, in and around it. A silicon-cast, life-sized effigy of a sleeping Cardiff clad in an ivory satin nightgown stretches across the back of the vehicle where the respiration of her nearly static body is barely detectable (Figure 2.3). On and around her supine figure, whose bare arms rest on her chest and belly, respectively, are various Lilliputian creatures, composites of recycled toy parts, molded clay, the occasional feather, and the tentative apparatuses that hold them together. Some of these mechanized monsters seem trapped in a loop of hysterical shaking, while others sit fixed. Together, these little figures call to mind the characters from Alexander Calder’s Circus (1926–1931) as well as the kind of fantastical monsters that populate the Dionysiac animations of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg.12 Cardiff’s likeness appears two more times within the work: she is most readily identifiable as a doll-sized, frenzied marionette topped with a mop of her pale orange hair (familiar to the initiated from video artworks featuring her visage) located at the front of the camper where she frantically dances near a vintage coffee cup and repurposed aluminum can of Heinz Deep-Browned beans alongside a wooden horse marionette. Elsewhere, she also appears as a series of parts: another, still smaller head with a strawberry blonde mop, like her own, can be found in the front of the camper’s inside, near a pile of other body parts, perhaps awaiting assembly by the (nearby) titular marionette maker. Miller too appears as a marionette, strumming out a psychedelic rock ballad on his Gibson Les Paul Special guitar as he moves rhythmically atop the cover of a volume from the My Book House series. The haunting but low music that appears to emanate from the instrument played by this cool musician-marionette clad in a black T-shirt, jeans, and shoes is an original

Figure 2.3  J anet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller, The Marionette Maker, 2014. Detail. Courtesy of the artists and Luhring Augustine Gallery.

Over My Dead Body  47

Figure 2.4  J anet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller, The Marionette Maker, 2014. Detail. Courtesy of the artists and Luhring Augustine Gallery.

composition whose references include the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) by Neil Young and the post-rock sound of the Canadian band Godspeed You! Black Emperor.13 At the very front of the vehicle, in the place of a driver’s seat, is the small-scaled marionette maker—who is himself moved by a set of puppet strings (Figure 2.4). Clad in a long-sleeved white shirt with his tweed jacket resting on the back of his chair, his left hand busily moves a writing implement across a page of a similarly miniature notebook in the center of his desk.14 Fragmented body parts—pieces of limbs yet to be strung together for another puppet—rest on the desk as well, and nearby is another, though younger, impression of Cardiff’s face, only this time only a shell that has yet to find a full head and body. To his left is a small upright piano. The caravan hosts a number of other scenes which operate like miniature tableaux vivants embedded within the larger structure. A female opera singer and accompanying male pianist who strikes the keys of a pint-sized grand piano, both marionettes, perform together in a miniature theater complete with stage and curtain that has been set into a tired-looking wooden frame embedded in the vehicle’s exterior left side; notably, the shape of this aperture mimics that of a ticket window. Just above and to the left of this on the same side, a model of a tall ship mechanically rises and falls amidst artificial waves of cheap fabric netting bathed in a psychedelic purplish-blue lighting, enacting the (displaced) respiratory gestures at the rate we would have expected from the sleeping Cardiff as its mechanism softly mimics the humming of an artificial ventilator. On that side, too, facing and centered against the performing musicians is a mini-row of three vintage theater seats perched under a green tarp-like awning projecting from

48  Jennie Hirsh the vehicle. On the opposite (right) side of the caravan, two work boots clop along, mechanically marching with no body inside of them.15 Finally, installed into the roof of the Scotty HiLander is a slowly rotating, long vertical pole connected to a pair of old-fashioned speaker horns that sits below a generic black umbrella that is open. A sonic tapestry that blares from those speakers includes sounds recorded at the couple’s Canadian farm—stormy weather, coyotes, a neighbor’s dog, a studio cat, and more—as well an English bomber plane, all of which confuse the listener below who anxiously struggles to confirm that each sound is indeed from the artwork and not wild animals in the Buen Retiro or threatening planes flying overhead in Madrid.16 Other notable features of the interior of the main cabin include multiple, miniature reproductions of tall ships and other illustrations, including an anatomical study and an outdated encounter between colonizers and Indigenous people. Piles of National Geographic magazine carefully tied together with string dangle from the ceiling and various other publications, including Scott Turrow’s Presumed Innocent (1987), crowd the cabin, while amidst the kitchenette, various utensils, and random domestic and studio detritus—coffee cups, dissembled marionette parts, and other tools—­ suggest evidence of mad genius creativity. At once an installation fractured into distinct parts and an eerie, oneiric whole, the installation—part nightmare, part fun-house, and part private lair—can be understood in two ways: on the one hand, as a materialization of what I will argue is a Duchampian dream state in which the artists—via Cardiff’s body—serve both as the ventriloqual source and dummy-like object of their own (imagined) regard. And, on the other hand, as the heterogenous products of the self-reflexive “marionette maker” who, when considered in conjunction with Cardiff’s inanimate form, raises another possibility: that Cardiff is the installation’s dummy, intermittently brought to life by this adjacent, external force. Oscillating between these two possibilities, The Marionette Maker, as I will argue, is thus ventriloqual not only in its forms—machines and puppets who “deliver” vocal, instrumental, and ambient sounds—but also in its affect, serving as the artists’ most overt engagement with the phenomenon—ventriloquism—that arguably underwrites, in admittedly more conceptual ways, their work as a whole. Finally, as I will maintain, it is of particular importance that the artists chose to use a caravan as their frame,17 as this object serves not only as the hidden laboratory for the marionette maker’s work and wares but also as a reference to mobile theater, alluding to forms of entertainment that include traveling circuses, a point to which I will return in closing.18 For the purposes of this volume, I am especially interested in a work for which the artists introduced a motor vehicle as a container for their collection of what comes across as repurposed junk. In his essay titled as such, philosopher Giorgio Agamben incisively asked “What is an Apparatus?” as he revisited Foucault’s own investigation of the same term—in French dispositif—as part of that philosopher’s ongoing analysis of power relations and the structures designed to reinforce them. As Agamben so clearly states: [t]he apparatus is thus always inscribed into a play of power, but it was also always linked to certain limits of knowledge that arise from it and, to an equal degree, condition it. The apparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the ­relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge.19

Over My Dead Body  49 I turn to Agamben’s notion of the apparatus as a way of both highlighting and ­reconciling the ways in which Cardiff and Miller’s Marionette Maker stages, in its vignette-like, performative components as well as in its structural containment of them, a daunting but compelling network of controlled entanglements, episodes, and environments. What I want to suggest is that the anonymous characters along with the artists’ own effigies participate in physical (and, by extension, emotional) relations that allude to the connections, tensions, and obligations, whether personal, cultural, religious, or even legal, that influence and even determine human desire, resistance, and action. In seeing Cardiff and Miller—who embody an artistic partnership and a real marriage—or just the marionette maker and the musical performers, we are encouraged to think of our own performances, replete with attachment and detachment, response, and escape. And so dolls, puppets, and other items erratically and frenetically both engage and disengage with one another for us, modeling a sort of graveyard of dreams lost and found, pursued and abandoned amidst and within one another. Looking to Agamben allows me to postulate that this hermetic and haphazard world, and what happens within it, matters. Who is controlling whom? Who submits to whom? And, perhaps most pointedly, who, as audience, invests in their performative gestures? Do we act for ourselves or for others? On our own or with others? Of our own volition or under pressure from others? As an artist, a conventional ventriloquist achieves two things: first, she not only throws or displaces her human voice from her living body to an inert doll who is in turn animated by that human voice as well as any gestures that she triggers; second, she all but convinces her audience of what she has done. In other words, in projecting her subjectivity onto an object, she grants a pseudo-independence to it. Ultimately, audiences find such performances funny since, after all, dolls shouldn’t be fully human, nor should they talk, as that would usurp and transfer the power that resides in the human voice onto dangerously inhuman ground. Although not overtly political, the relations staged in Cardiff and Miller’s caravan thus put a series of apparatuses—arguably metaphorical as well as literal ones— on view, all within a colonial glass pavilion, the Palacio de Cristal erected in 1887. Importantly, this imposing glass-and-iron structure stands in dramatic contrast to the mundane and dilapidated vehicle that it encases like a gigantic vitrine. Within that secondary ­structure—the artist’s sculptural installation, e.g., the caravan itself—there are, as noted, several more layers of containment and control: a vehicle that contains a diorama of two performers inserted into one side of its exterior body; a marionette maker who sits at his work table, fashioning smaller-scaled marionettes, while exhibiting his own strings manipulated by robotics (in turn engineered by the invisible actual artists’ hands); and, of course, the artists themselves, whose presence is felt not just by the results of their engineering but by their repeated appearances within the work (she three times, he only once). Multiple scales of puppets whole and fragmented remind the viewer of control at every turn, while the abandoned cans of food and dirty dishes conjure up ideas of a mad genius hiding out and surviving in this creepy mobile home.20 Layers of manipulation and containment begin to pile up in various ways, suggesting that the vehicle holds its own apparatus while also, due to its clever siting, being entrapped within another one.21 Inserting this elaborate sculptural installation within the colonial framework of the Palacio de Cristal encourages us to think about other powerful frameworks, not only of governments and their subjugated territories but also, and rather more importantly, the ways in which all institutions, art and otherwise, dictate rules, assert models, and articulate discourses that have ramifications.

50  Jennie Hirsh At the same time, the work makes powerful art-historical references to both early and late works by Marcel Duchamp. The idea of the container holding miniature artworks recalls Boîte-en-valise (1935–1941), a portable object/museum designed to hold diminutive versions of Duchamp’s infamous readymades. In exile from Europe, Duchamp thematized his personal and artistic displacement through his suitcase, anticipating Cardiff and Miller’s more technologically grounded strategies of displacement that add voice to the mix through their signature orchestration of and attention to acoustic geography. Cardiff and Miller’s caravan—a self-­reflexive work as a traveling container—replaces Duchamp’s miniaturized readymades with clusters of found objects, like books and magazines, kitchen equipment and commercially produced food, graphic reproductions of historic ships, and plastic, manipulated dolls. In nominating readymade objects works of art, Duchamp engaged in a sort of authorial ventriloquism—at least metaphorically—by deflecting attention from himself as an artist and making the inanimate speak in new ways. Indeed, it is Duchamp’s last masterpiece, the ever-enigmatic Étant donnés (1946–1966) that continues to shock and confuse visitors who, lured to an unassuming alcove of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, find a dead and disfigured prostrate mannequin with a discomfiting gouge trapped in an odd setting with a glowing lamp and self-­consciously fake waterfall (Figure 2.5). 22 The life-size effigy of Cardiff herself wedged within the back of the vehicle rests more peacefully—more like Sleeping Beauty than the victim of a violent crime—though the correlation is undeniable. At the same time, the darkened space around the ­M arionette Maker vehicle allows the viewer to detect shadows and projections throughout the interior space, hence setting up a second Duchampian reference.23 Exploring this connection between Duchamp and Cardiff and Miller not only inscribes the ­Canadian duo in a longer art-historical trajectory formally but also suggests that they, like Duchamp, are using (what appear to be nearly) readymade means to put pressure on norms with much bigger stakes. While he used his sculptural installations to undermine ideas of authorship and authenticity, Cardiff and Miller redirect us to dynamics that far exceed the art world. Instead, they make us consider the ways in which life at all levels literally has strings attached to it, ligatures tugged at and torn, as we project our voices (and desires) onto other subjects and objects. Indeed, Duchamp’s own usage of containers, as well as the suitcase, as both a motif and a strategy, come to mind. The Marionette Maker likewise is its own box-in-a-valise, a traveling container only larger in scale overall. In collecting together these theatrical vignettes, the artists seem to revitalize their past work as a surrogate dummy through which they can theorize about bigger tensions at work in society, like that between autonomy and control. Recuperating strategies and structures as in their work Opera for a Small Room (2005), which also cannot be entered, and Paradise Institute, which can, this work offers not a full-blown retrospective but rather a variation on that theme by offering a primer on their practice that samples their earlier work and compresses 20 years’ worth of art making into a single chamber.24 Cited too in The Marionette Maker is Playhouse (1997), which uses a cinematic projection of a single performer in a miniature theater echoed by the small diorama installed here before three theater seats.25 At the same time, we are reminded of Cabin Fever (2004) whose container is a more refined and beautifully crafted cabinet that alludes to museum displays, it too entrapping mysterious violence via excerpts of dialogue from The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) mixed with the sound of unidentified gunshots.26 And, perhaps above all, we are reminded of Road Trip (2004), which combines a conversation

Over My Dead Body  51

Figure 2.5  M  arcel Duchamp, Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz ’d'éclairage … (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas…), 1946–1966. 7 feet 11 ½  in × 70 in × 49 in (242.6 × 177.8 × 124.5 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the Cassandra Foundation, 1969, 1969-41-1. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Association Marcel Duchamp.

between Janet and George (as opposed to Cardiff and Miller) about a series of faded slides in a carousel that they review and discuss as if they had been taken by Miller’s grandfather on a monumental road trip from British Columbia to New York in search of oncological care before Miller had been born. 27 Though not strictly an audio “walk” in format, The Marionette Maker not only requires the viewer to trace the caravan’s perimeter in order to view what is occurring in the interior and staged on its exterior but is also about ambulatory viewing itself. The artwork may be parked, but we cannot be if we want to digest fully what is happening within its various compartmentalized vignettes as well as its vehicular

52  Jennie Hirsh whole. And if this was not obvious from the get-go, the idea of walking around the ­(seemingly ­temporarily) parked container but stopping to take inventory of its constituent parts is recast here by the detail of a fragmented pair of mechanized feet that lack a body and stick out on the ground from middle of the vehicle’s right side. Perpetually in motion as if marching away from the vehicle, these prosthetic feet forever walk in place. Trapped in place forevermore, they suggest a kind of purposelessness and futility to the actions that we undertake. The overall retro look of the vehicle also suggests a failure (or refusal) to move forward; ironically, this static connection to a moment in the past is paradoxically wedded to the incredibly complex programming and coding that make possible the advanced robotics that enable the work to exist.28 This presentation of the work in an archaic-looking apparatus sets up a mindset for ventriloquy whose logic underwrites the work as a whole especially in its acoustic dimension. It is precisely this marriage of high and low culture—which is underscored by the conflation of high and low tech—that likewise enriches the ventriloqual dynamics of this work. The very popular art forms of mobile theater and side show that the scary puppets and defunct caravan conjure are here cast together with the towering voice belting out Goethe’s words set to the Romantic notes of Pyotr Ilyich Tschaikovsky’s Op. 6: VI “None But the Lonely Heart,” a Russian translation of a melancholic poem that appears in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s second novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–1796). 29 And of course listening to those vocal and piano notes intermingling with the psychedelic rock coming from Miller’s marionette stand-in similarly embeds further the high–low cultural tension in the work. Further underscoring the importance of the non-contemporary, old-fashioned aesthetic of the work, then, is the way in which gazing at the archaic loudspeakers that spin atop the caravan, reminiscent of mid-twentieth-century military stations, starkly contrasts with this elegant late nineteenth-century glass hall. In conclusion, it is the voice—whether Cardiff’s own singular voice or the harmonized multiple voices in a choir—that demarcates the oeuvre of these artists, drawing them into ambulatory adventures, occupying their thoughts, and prompting them to question, ultimately, their own internal voices. What this work does—one of the few that lacks Cardiff’s sexy and intrusive confessional, commanding, and controlling content—is draw the viewer into a series of experimental notes from and notations on the process of connecting bodies (human and otherwise) to the vocal spirits that can enliven them. A carefully reconstructed camper that appears to be rotting is not just an orphaned vehicle but a body as well; the fact that the artists manage to cast it simultaneously into multiple roles—it is a laboratory and a museum, a theater and its workshop, a coffin and a bed—allows them to paralyze the viewer long enough to interrogate the originality, integrity, and artificiality of her own, and indeed perhaps any, voice. Blurring the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness, dream (or nightmare) and consciousness, or even death and living, this work shows automatized actions and movements, whether those of a piano-player and the singer he accompanies, or the marionette maker and his future dolls, ultimately drawing the viewer into a world that is at once trivialized and magnified. What allows this work to haunt its viewers more than perhaps a group of marionettes and other discarded articles gone wild should is precisely the way in which both speaking out and suppressing, rehearsing, and repressing unfolds. Part crime scene, part workshop, part reality, and part dream, The Marionette Maker, echoing Duchamp’s own dream-like gesture in the Étant donnés, takes the

Over My Dead Body  53 viewer out of time for a more contemporary yet still Duchampian dream that travels into the minds of the inanimate titular character and also the absent (but effigized) artistic duo through the convulsive (and compulsive) reflexes of low-tech toys and puppets who live amongst the dust and debris of and as the madness and machinations resident inside all of our bodies. Throwing voices, pre-recorded musical sounds, and other bodily reflexes, onto and between variously scaled bodies and three-dimensional objects, the work entraps a perpetual loop of habits, gestures, and actions that are forever controlling and controlled by one another. But by commingling—or animating—the inanimate with what appear to be “real” likenesses of the artists themselves, the work asks powerful questions about the portraits that one’s possessions and patterns can provide of the absent body. In this sense, the work makes a forensic gesture, suggesting that one’s sense of who someone is, as well as what controls or even just motivates someone’s behavior, can be identified by cobbling together material clues, clues that perhaps allude to the ventriloqual impulse that, if not performed, is operative within the human psyche as we act, and react, to the voices we imagine coming from the mouths of others. At the same time, these objects and their (absent, or at least sleeping or dreaming) owners, puppeteers, or ventriloquists weave together a complex matrix of apparatuses that allude to ventriloqual behaviors while expanding that system of Surrealist surrogacy to prey upon a vaster sensory landscape. In one of the artists’ most recent ventures, their video Night Walk for Edinburgh (2019), Cardiff’s voice instructs the listener as follows: “There’s another arrow. Look into this crevice in the wall. It’s a marionette. So who’s the puppet master?”30 Perhaps that question can be seen as an invitation to think not only about a little orphaned doll wedged into a wall but also a call for us to think about the voices in all of our heads—and indeed those around us, including the law, however defined—that drive us to act, to follow someone else’s lead, or to choose otherwise (Figure 2.6).

Figure 2.6  Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Night Walk for Edinburgh (screen grab), 2019.

54  Jennie Hirsh The Marionette Maker and the elaborate apparatuses that surround him and his mobile home workshop thus ask larger and more significant questions about human agency and authorship, what ultimately drives us to do things, and how we welcome and resist power dynamics, whether personal, institutional, or societal. They urge us to wake up, or at least to acknowledge the ways in which life, to a certain extent, involves sleepwalking our way through.

Notes 1 Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 2 Cardiff inaugurated this “walk” genre in 1991. See Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller (Long Island City, NY: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA, 2001), 14. 3 Binaural sound is produced by recording with microphones in the ears of a dummy’s head; when replayed, it produces sound as a three-dimensional experience. 4 Some of the early walks are site-stable in that they are shown with a monitor that features a recording of Cardiff walking; others ask the spectator to walk, guided by Cardiff’s breathy voice as her guide, promoting a dynamic between the recording and participant that stages a power dynamic as well as (at times) intense intimacy. Experienced with headphones and a hand-held screen, participants circulate amongst members of the public who happen to be moving at will in the same spaces as those engaged in the work—for example, with the Alter Bahnhoff Video Walk (2012) in the train station in Kassel, or, more recently, with Night Walk for Edinburgh (2019) meandering through the labyrinthine streets of Edinburgh. 5 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller, 140. See 139–147 for a full description and documentation connected to The Forty Part Motet (2001). 6 We will return to this meta-level of commentary further on in this analysis. 7 See Pandemonium: Janet Cardiff/George Bures Miller (Philadelphia, PA: Eastern State Penitentiary, 2005). Perhaps one of their most ambitious site-specific works, Pandemonium (2005) mounted in the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia resurrected the sounds of incarceration in Cell Block 7 (2005) by literally transforming leftover prison accoutrements (toilets, chairs, cans) into parts of instruments. 8 Something Strange This Way: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (Aarhus: ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, 2014), 65–70. Experiment in F Minor presents a similar (potentially cacophonous) orchestra on a table 2013, 72-channel audio installation including speakers, photosensors, and wooden worktables, 96 ¹⁄8 × 72 × 30 inches. Courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York. Experiment in F# Minor is a collection of bare speakers of all shapes and sizes set upright on a large table into whose edge light sensors have been embedded; shadows of the visitor’s movements in the installation provoke different sounds and instrumental tracks to emit from the table. 9 Similarly, for their more recent Instrument of Troubled Dreams (2018) piece commissioned for the thirteenth-century Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, they modified the 72 keys of a 1980s Mellotron, an heir of sorts to the church organ and ancestor to more contemporary synthesizers, programming each “to play a different sound effect, vocal track or musical fragment.” Cardiff and Miller speak of trying to create an orchestra with an organ that could be played by one person electromagnetically through an instrument invented by the British and used by the Beatles in the 1960s for hits like “Strawberry Fields.” https://oudekerk.nl/en/news/podcast-cardiff-miller-episode-2/. In other words, as an unwitting ventriloquist who can touch the keys, the visitor, at least temporarily, releases a combination of “notes” in an exquisite corpse, mixing sounds of water, narrative snippets composed for the occasion, and notes recorded from the church’s own 1742 Vater-Müller organ for any who sit in the makeshift rows of chairs arranged in the middle of the dramatic church nave for this purpose. Thus each touch of the keyboard forms part of a conversation between

Over My Dead Body  55 the person and a key, which, mechanically, responds with a sound in a dialogical fashion. Traditional ventriloquists throw their voices but seem to unleash sounds from a wooden dummy whereas, in this spectatorial engagement with a highly sophisticated machine, the viewer strikes wooden keys that then belt out unexpected sounds. For more information on this project, in general, see https://oudekerk.nl/en/programma/cardiff-miller/. Accessed October 1, 2020. The artists had already modified an upright piano in Pianorama (2005) which combines a mechanical device that hits the keys, triggering both artists’ voices to come out of speakers — it’s as if the piano is a participant in one of their “walks” only the discussion is not about a place but rather a “hypothetical film.” See The Secret Hotel: Janet Cardiff + George Bures Miller (Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2005), 35–41. 10 Dark Pool (1995), the work which inaugurated their joint practice, offers an in-medias-res view into a hybrid space, part attic or garage littered with junk, such as horns, chairs, slides, toy cars, Twinings tea canister, books, dishes, and other “mechanical paraphernalia” activated acoustically by viewers whose movements through the installation trigger them, and part abandoned creative space or laboratory dedicated to studies whose nature remains deliberately unknown and unknowable. Richard Torchia refers to Dark Pool as a self-portrait of the artists themselves at work. See Richard Torchia, “Beat Poetry,” in Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Pandemonium (Philadelphia, PA: Eastern State Penitentiary), 15, citing Cardiff describing Dark Pool (2005) as “…a portrait of George and me working away on these things” in an interview with Robert Enright and Meeka Walsh, “Pleasure Principals: The Art of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller,” Border Crossings 20, no. 20, issue 78 (Winnipeg, Manitoba 2001), 31. 11 Serro Scotty trailers were produced between 1957 and 1997; in April of that last year, production ceased in following a fire that destroyed the factory in Irwin, Pennsylvania. See https://tincantourists.com/wiki/serro-scotty/. 12 Cardiff notes her love of Calder in the November 14, 2014 conversation that she has with Miller and João Fernandes at the Reina Sofia on the occasion of the exhibition of The Marionette Maker’s premiere. https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/multimedia/encounteraround-exhibition-marionette-maker. 13 See comments by Cardiff Miller studio on their Youtube page that includes a recorded excerpt of the work. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqaEPgjv50g&list=LLBD9GyGp5muO25M9gGI_-nA&index=181. Accessed September 15, 2020. 14 Of course, this is not an actual driver’s seat in that the Serro Scotty is a trailer that is designed to be hooked up and pulled by a car or truck proper; that said, he sits symbolically as if he could be the driver of this vehicle. 15 This alludes to one of Miller’s earliest works. 16 The sound of not visible airplanes flying above recalls FOREST (for a Thousand Years…) (2012), the outdoor speaker installation conceived for Documenta 13 (2012) in ­K arlsraue Park, a 30-minute soundscape that combines different sounds of aerial artillery to produce a chronological collage of violence stretching across centuries. The work comprises 18 shoebox-size speakers and 4 subwoofers arranged discreetly in the underbrush, with tree stumps to sit on and uses Ambisonics, a technology created in the 1970s by an Oxford mathematician, to produce three-dimensional soundscapes from the various sounds that they have captured. What’s fascinating (and in some ways extreme) about this work, is that it is almost purely sonic: the images we experience are those produced imaginatively in our own minds, although the work evades total iconoclasm by clearly engaging the nature in which the viewer sits and listens. This work is on permanent display at Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, whose bucolic setting is ideal for this work. 17 Miller associates the work’s form with the scene of an actual vehicle present for practical reasons (such as supplying them with a coffeemaker) during their original installation of FOREST (for a thousand years…) (2012) at Documenta 13. 18 Another artistic duo’s work comes to mind in this context as well. Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni are interdisciplinary video artists whose cinema “truck” Videomobile (2018) made for and about Palermo, host city for Manifesta 12 (2018), installs three video monitors into the exposed interior of the truck that had been driven around Palermo and its environs in order to record illuminating conversations with residents of the city as a way

56  Jennie Hirsh of giving a pathway into local perspectives on life, art, local mores, and more. That work, like that of Cardiff and Miller, in turn alludes not only to the tradition of mobile cinema trucks that would bring projections to smaller towns lacking a proper cinema theatre for viewing but also traveling sideshows memorialized by cinema, such as the one featured in La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954). Cardiff discusses Calder in a lecture delivered at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on April 6, 2017. Listen to “An Overview of Installations and Walks,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW_NOKFwywM. Accessed August 1, 2020. In the “encounter” conversation with João Fernandes, for the Museo Reina Sofía, Miller slips and attributes Calder’s Circus to Joseph Cornell, though this suggests they were thinking as well about the magical miniature diorama worlds created by that artist. 19 Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 20 Miller emphasizes the importance of giving into losing control as an aspect of imaginative practice in the already cited conversation with Cardiff and João Fernandes. Listen at: https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/multimedia/encounter-around-exhibition-marionettemaker. Accessed May 15, 2021. 21 In this sense, the idea of scaling up or scaling down, with worlds within worlds, brings to mind commonplace toys, like a series of Russian dolls, or art works like Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten (1977). What makes the thematization of scale even more unnerving are objects like the horse, tucked just behind the marionette maker himself: is it an oversized child’s toy or a miniature Trojan Horse? If the latter, then perhaps hubristically unlocking the mysteries of this vehicle will ultimately punish the overly curious voyeur. 22 T.J. Demos, “The Portable Museum,” in T.J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 11–66. 23 See T.J. Demos, “Sculptures for Traveling,” in T.J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 67–126, esp. 68–72. 24 Opera for a Small Room is a cabin filled with speakers, amplifiers, record players, and stacks of old records. As the lights go down, a male voice tells a story, followed by an automated orchestration of lights and segments of operatic recordings on the turntables. Uncharacteristically, this work begins with a male voiceover, unlike most which, when featured, rely on Cardiff’s female voice. Sourced from a thrift store in Western Canada, this collection of 30 or so records having belonged simply to a certain “R. Dennehey” inspired the artists to invent a biography for him. Like so many works, Opera for a Small Room invites the viewer to imagine, spy on, and snoop through the possessions of an absent, spectral presence. See also Christy Lange, “Opera for a Small Room, 2005. The Impossibilists,” in The Killing Machine and Other Stories 1995–2007, eds. Ralf Beil and Bartomeu Marí (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2007), 174–187. Lange notes (on 175) that the work looks like a “clandestine radio DJ booth” or “an Alaskan radar-reader’s hut in the middle of a dark winter.” I would argue instead that the work also reads like a storage crate for art revealed, making simultaneous reference, for example to Marcel Broodthaers’s fictive Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles (1968) or even Joseph Kosuth’s Box (One and Three Boxes) (1968). What was at stake for each of those artists was rather different, but the crate as a typology should be recalled here, even if overall we feel like we are snooping around the “elaborate amplifier for the [2000] albums, like a diagram of their owner’s cluttered, chaotic mind,” 175. 25 See Clara Meister, “Voice,” in Janet Cardiff: & George Bures Miller: Works from the Goetz Collection, ed. León Krempel (Münich: Haus der Kunst, 2012), 16–25, for an analysis of Playhouse as well as documentation of the work accompanied by beautiful study drawings for the projects. Other works playing with shrinking down the scale of theatre include The Muriel Lake Incident (1999) and The Paradise Institute (2001). The plywood exterior of these two works merges art work with its container, granting the work a sort of protective shell while also asserting its autonomy. Interestingly, Playhouse mixes the sound of the singing performer with Cardiff’s speaking own. 26 See also Nora M. Alter and Alexander Alberro, “Nature,” in Janet Cardiff: & George Bures Miller: Works from the Goetz Collection, 45–53; Alter and Alberro liken the cabinet structure of Cabin to the Étant Donnés (1946–1966).

Over My Dead Body  57 27 See Alexandrina Buchanan, “Cardiff and Miller’s Road Trip (2004): Between Archive and Fiction,” Archivaria 73 (Spring 2012): 19–41. Buchanan examines the mechanics as well as metaphors at work in this installation, ultimately considering the value of the archive, even if fictional, as she argues this slide collection must be. 28 Of course, as mentioned at the outset of this essay, that tension is typical of nearly all of the artists’ sculptural installations. 29 The piano player, or a near replica of him, reappears a year later at the 14th Istanbul biennial in a work titled Sad Waltz and the Dancer Who Couldn’t Dance (2015) at Vault Karaköy the House Hotel. The music in that work is by Edward Mirzoyan played by Arjen Seinen. This work of course recalls Playhouse (1997) as well in terms of its structure as a miniature theater with a singer. See excerpt of Sheila Leirner video of the work as shown at the Istanbul biennial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLsTpUERflI. Accessed ­October 1, 2021. 30 One can still download this entire walk via the exhibition’s website. https://www.fruitmarket.co.uk/exhibitions/night-walk-for-edinburgh/.

References Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Blegvad, Maria Kappel, ed. Something Strange This Way: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Aarhus: ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, 2014. Buchanan, Alexandrina. “Cardiff and Miller’s Road Trip (2004): Between Archive and ­Fiction.” Archivaria 73 (Spring 2012): 19–41. Cardiff, Janet. “‘An Overview of Installations and Walks’ Lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on April 6, 2017.” Listen to “An Overview of Installations and Walks.” Accessed August 1, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW_NOKFwywM. Cardiff, Janet and George Bures Miller. “The Instrument of Troubled Dreams.” Produced by Tjitske Mussche. Podcast Cardiff & Miller. January 7, 2019. 5:29. https://oudekerk.nl/en/ news/podcast-cardiff-miller-episode-2/. Cardiff, Janet, George Bures Miller and Jo Fernandes. “Encounter around the Exhibition The Marionette Maker.” November 20, 2014. Accessed May 15, 20. https://www.­ museoreinasofia.es/en/multimedia/encounter-around-exhibition-marionette-maker 21. Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller. Long Island City, NY: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA, 2001. Courtney, Julie, ed. Pandemonium: Janet Cardiff/George Bures Miller. Philadelphia, PA: ­Eastern State Penitentiary, 2005. Demos, T.J. The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge: MIT, 2007. Enright, Robert and Meeka Walsh. “Pleasure Principals: The Art of Janet Cardiff and George ­ ctober Bures Miller.” Border Crossings 20, no. 78 (Winnipeg, Manitoba 2001). Accessed O 1, 2020. bordercrossingsmag.com/article/pleasure-principals-the-art-of-janet-cardiff-andgeorge-bures-miller. Fruitmarket. Nightwalk for Edinburgh. Exhibition website. https://www.fruitmarket.co.uk/ exhibitions/night-walk-for-edinburgh/. Krempel, León, ed. Janet Cardiff: & George Bures Miller: Works from the Goetz Collection. Münich: Haus der Kunst, 2012. Lange, Christy. “Opera for a Small Room, 2005. The Impossibilists,” in The Killing Machine and Other Stories 1995–2007, eds. Ralf Beil and Bartomeu Marí, 174–187. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2007. Leirner, Sheila. “Excerpt of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, ‘Sad Waltz and the Dancer Who Couldn’t Dance.’” September 6, 2015. 1:16. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=GLsTpUERflI.

58  Jennie Hirsh Oude Kirk. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Exhibition website. Accessed October 1, 2020. https://oudekerk.nl/en/programma/cardiff-miller/. Schneider, Eckhard, ed. The Secret Hotel: Janet Cardiff + George Bures Miller. Bregenz: ­Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2005. Tin Can Tourists. “Serro Scotty.” Accessed October 1, 2020. https://tincantourists.com/wiki/ serro-scotty/.

3 Putting Words in Your Mouth and Images in Your Eyes Courtney McClellan

The Dummy Not all objects that look have eyes. Not all objects that speak have mouths. These eyeless objects look with intent. They look with an iris, an aperture, a hole. There is an impulse to look out, to orient oneself in space. Cameras, still lives, drones, and one-point perspective have confirmed this instinct. However, looking out while also being looked at is another feeling entirely. I am reminded of this every time I see tape covering the camera’s eye on a laptop. It is strange to be the object for an object. How odd to be looked at and then commanded to act via an animated inanimate. There is a version of human-to-object looking to which I have become accustomed. Prolonged gaze with an object has been normalized by television. TV watchers are trained by documentarian Errol Morris, late night infomercials, and YouTube tutorials to be looked at eye to eye with only a thin glass barrier between them and the eyes on screen. It’s like eye contact, but isn’t, since the eyes we see never see us. This kind of looking—premised on the interpersonal phenomenon of eye contact, but void of reciprocity—has become commonplace in an era dominated by content streaming. We have been lulled into this false comfort, even found pleasure in this simulated, clunky earnestness that is actually solicitation. A look, and then a verbal pitch. “Now, You, Unknown Listener, do what I say, say what I say!” This kind of duplicity and solicitation is not foreign to works of art. Artists often use art objects to command viewer thought, action, and engagement. The portrait, a representation of the human figure, is a prime example. Portraits pretend to return (or at times, ignore) the viewer’s gaze. Like the screen, the illustration of the human subject is flat but alludes to space. The gaze serves as a pact between the viewer and portrait subject—negotiated by the artist. The staring contest suggests co-existence. Eye contact shared between depiction of the human form and the human form itself establishes a fiction of co-presence and contiguous space. Many art objects invite or demand speech. Perhaps more exciting and fear-inducing is the way in which looking can lead to action. In the practice of ventriloquism, both the ventriloquist and dummy perform, but the ventriloquist imposes and imbues the object with life, giving it gesture, animation, and, most importantly, voice. The thrown voice is the spell, but also breaks it. The artist is no longer alone. She now lives in the object too. The art of ventriloquism can be structurally aligned with the visual arts: the artist plays the part of the ventriloquist and the artwork the part of the dummy who appears to speak. The art object has been crafted to serve the desires of the artist. In this way, the artist may act outside of herself, taking all credit and blaming all folly.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003303978-5

60  Courtney McClellan But, what of the viewer? Is the spectator not animated by the work of art? A figure whose strings are pulled? Always, ventriloquism proposes a doubling of the body— intention and action extending beyond the artist’s physical boundaries and limitations. But the object is as much a medium as an actor. A conduit for the artist, the observed art object also cues action and, in prompting reaction, becomes the observer or audience. In a strange twist, sculptures become spectators. Consider for example, Bruce Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) in which Nauman relegates the act of performance to his viewer. Unlike Walk with Contrapposto (1968) or Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1968), in which he records his own action, Nauman forgoes the artist’s body. Using video within the installation, Nauman casts the viewer as performer and art object as observer. In instances such as these, looking and speaking have been traded among performers. The viewer willingly, but unwittingly, becomes the dummy, the figure that offers her sight, speech, and gesture to the whims of the artist. The viewer is the front, the character, the performer, while the artist is the director. A ventriloquist diversifies subjectivity with humor and emotional resonance, playing both vulnerable interlocutor and tyrannical stage manager. The work becomes a stage for looking and listening. Viewership becomes a performance—a silent dialogue rather than a passive act. Roles are permeable, and the audience occupies more than one. The viewer/actor splits and then serves as both the dummy and the audience who intends to watch the performance unfold. In turn, the viewer watches himself (and reflects upon himself) within the framed context of the artist’s precisely choreographed dialogue. In what follows, I explore the possibilities of this expanded ventriloqual mode, focusing on works made by Amalia Pica, Antoine Catala, and Ann Hamilton. Additionally, I will explore what it feels like to be the ventriloquist by addressing my own work and studio practice.

Listening Material I saw Amalia Pica’s work for the first time in 2014 at the List Center at MIT. The exhibition of this contemporary Argentinian artist was sparse yet effusive. The readily identifiable materials appeared to be items from a Target shopping list: glass cups, a rake, string lights, and cardboard. These functional objects contrasted with the more conventional art materials used: bronze, marble, even photocopies. Some items—like the occasional potato—seemed to come from another list entirely. This inventory was punctuated by the way this subset of objects related to one another: they plunged, dangled, and posed; they leaned in and held each other; midsized sculptures rested on the floor, while tangled light installations crept up the wall. A few small sculptures perched on a narrow pedestal. The sculptures relied on the modernist, white museum gallery for not only authority but also spatial lyricism, like the white page beneath a concrete poem. The hesitant amalgamations appeared to be alone, but not lonely. Eavesdropper (2011) is a lithe installation of empty glassware dotting a large wall. Sea blue, ochre yellow, and chartreuse green glass speckled the surface and reflected light. Not evenly or conventionally spaced at the expected 54 inches from the floor, they were instead glued to the wall at various heights, the lip of the cup flush with the surface. All were hung at eye-level, or various, imagined ear levels. The title suggests a specific action: one was to press one’s ear to the cup in order to hear something or

Putting Words in Your Mouth and Images in Your Eyes  61 perhaps nothing. I stood back to observe the eavesdropping instruments at the ready. Yet because I was alone in the gallery, I could perform the act of eavesdropping but I did not witness it with my eyes. Cut across the length of the space was If These Walls Could Talk (2010), the concave counterpart to Eavesdropper’s convex (Figure 3.1). Comprised of two parallel wood frames covered in drywall and spread three feet apart, the sculpture reads like a corridor when seen from the one-sided opening. The walls’ interior exposed wood studs with tin cans tethered to one another by taut string stretched across the narrow space of the corridor. From the external view, the walls were dotted with routed holes that are the same diameter as the cans. From the inside, they are revealed as aluminum cylinders. Charming and anachronistic, the idea is familiar—a tin can telephone for whispers and yells from a treehouse I’ve imagined but never visited. With so many rudimentary phones on this large-scale switchboard, it was impossible to tell which cans were connected. In other words, the fragile material of communication was offered, but I couldn’t take the call. I diverted my eyes, closed them, and leaned into one of the exposed listening/speaking tin cans. Yet, like the scenario produced by a seashell at the beach I could only hear ambient noise or the slight echo of the empty gallery. If someone or something would have answered, with whom would I have asked to speak? What were the chances that another viewer would have been on the other end of this particular line? Returning from the aural to the visual, I walked back around to inspect the wall’s interior. The string now appeared as a web. Had I tried to pass through, the connective lines would have ensnared me. The stuff of communication, however chaotic, was visible, but there is no record of the listening experience.

Figure 3.1  I nstallation view, Amalia Pica, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, 2013. Photo by Peter Harris Studio. Courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center.

62  Courtney McClellan Staged in small groups on the other side of the gallery is the series of ­free-standing Catachresis Sculptures. The mid-sized pieces stand on two chair legs or recline against the wall. Playing on the anatomical names for parts of insensate objects, Pica creates hybrids. The series title Catachresis Sculptures speaks to a misapplication of language. Their translation to sculptural form supplies uneasiness to the structures that rely on the viewer referencing objects in colloquial bodily terms: the leg of a chair braced against the arm of a rake, the elbow of a pipe resting on a cantilevered shelf, the lip of a bottle kisses the wall’s smooth surface. Human in scale, sculptures populate the space. I am not alone. In this room I have walked into an event in progress. The objects are even paired together, as if conversing among themselves. These stagnant beings force me to become aware of my own living body. For instance, am I mirroring the degree of recline assumed by that upright rake? In and among these works, I recall the strangeness of finding human features, or the suggestion of human features on objects, but perhaps more alarming, I become aware of the occasional object-like quality of my own figure. Paused and moving, we occupy space together. My arms dangle at my side or create a right angle similar to the crooked pipe. My figure is a stand-in too. Acoustic Radar anchored the show not only because it held the largest footprint in the exhibition but also because it extended the most overt invocation to look, speak, and listen (Figure 3.2). Recognizable as the curved horn of a gramophone, the object, because of its large scale, acted as spatial enunciation. The sculpture, made of cardboard, required that one crouch on the ground in order to engage. As I kneeled down and placed my ear next to the small hole at one end,

Figure 3.2  I nstallation view, Amalia Pica, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, 2013. Photo by Peter Harris Studio. Courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Putting Words in Your Mouth and Images in Your Eyes  63 I averted my eyes, facing away from the sculpture. I made a trade: I would listen rather than look. As with Eavesdropper or If These Walls Could Talk, I waited for sound to tunnel toward me. By now I understood my body to be material: I was an extension of the device. Pica’s title Acoustic Radar foregrounds sound as action, movement, and vibration, all forms of spatial mapping. The ear is a biological instrument and radar a tool for heightened presence and detection. Reception and interpretation supersede any actual production of sound. With my ear tuned, I heard a few noises in the gallery, but mostly I heard nothing at all. I thought of John Cage sitting down to play 4΄33˝. Although I realized that in this exhibition I wasn’t the waiting audience, I was the piano. Pica’s work requires a dexterous dummy: the sculptures are in need of an observer, a speaker, and a listener. This exchange between myself as puppet and the artist as ventriloquist holds the artist’s needs and desires ever present. The exhibition itself was silent, enhanced by the bare gallery. Yet, the silence was made loud by the many perked, literal, and figurative ears. I was the object, intended to wait attentively too for the artist’s instruction. I had performed a gesture in a controlled way for a listening object in service to a listening artist. I was a host for sound. But as the dummy, I was also the listening soloist, both in the audience and on stage.

Ready Mouthpiece In 2012, Catala mounted i see catastrophes ahead (2012) at 47 Canal.1 It consists of a variety of three- and two-dimensional objects whose relation to one another is initially unclear. An extension of the subject and form of the exhibition, the press release is a work unto itself.2 It uses standard press-release language, except for the colorful emojis peppered throughout. Among the date, time, and location, the emojis take their intended place as information graphics and emotional cues, much like talk-show audience stage directions that tell the audience when to clap and go silent. A cartoon cloud, a magician’s hat, a wide-eyed kitten activates the text through image, even as the document holds tight to the original intention of a press release, that is, to offer concise, replicable information about the upcoming exhibition. Catala’s amendments are a reminder that press releases are a script, a transfer of information, a direction to be relayed without analysis or alteration. Yet, Catala’s use of images complicates that transmission. Prophetic in tone, the pictogram press release primes the audience for the formidable task of seeing the exhibition. I was alerted: anticipate puns, wordplay, and thinly veiled illusion. I never did see Catala’s work in person, but I don’t think that would bother him. As if planned for a digital resting place, the work seems to be made with an online gallery in mind. Catala’s kinetic sculptures combine image, object, and video, all of which are accessible via his website aaaaaaa.org.3 Void of the spatial, embodied demands of Pica’s dummy, Catala’s works desire intellectual presence, acute looking, and controlled execution on the part of his viewer. The hyper-linked titles are pacifying, like Everything will be okay, or filled with dread, like i see catastrophes ahead. Video documentation coupled with the images provides a description of sound: his sculptures whirr, purrr, pulse, and pump. In all images, viewers are absent. Instead of seeing Pica’s work within white walls and echoing space, I viewed them at my desk. Images of the works were grouped and sorted, so I could see them in the correct order. This was a first hint at Catala’s brand of ventriloquism. There was a

64  Courtney McClellan correct order in which to view the works. Within the images, cords, wires, and plugs were shown tangled on the floor—no need to hide the strings. The exhibition itself takes the form of a rebus, a puzzle in which the sound of words is illustrated as an accumulation of pictures. Each of the five sculptures invokes one word from the title, i see catastrophes ahead (a numerical discrepancy I will attend to below).4 Constructing the exhibition as a puzzle foregrounds Catala’s expectations of the audience, they are not passive viewers; they are necessities, vital to the completion and delivery of the work. When Catala throws his voice, someone must catch it. A description: At hip level, a projection of a car drives over a stock commercial image of ice. The road is icy—I SEE. In one corner is a black, metal three-sided platform with an animal body resembling a miniature Egyptian sphinx. A digital cartoon cat head rotates above the reclined animal figure. CAT. In the center of the room is a smooth, clear plastic-cast figure of only a buttocks. ASS. Inside the human-scale fragmented mannequin, a Mac mini is visible with cords winding down the metal stanchion on which it sits. I noticed all of the fragmented bodies—­highlighting the possibility for the body to become a thing. Diagonal to the work is a bright wall-hanging print of a red slide in a red frame. The work transforms as if the object is inhaling and exhaling breath. The painting’s inhale shows the canvas to actually be latex. ­Further, the inhale reveals a recess image beneath the slide drawing, a carved ­T ROPHY is outlined (Figure 3.3). Nearby, an erect screen alternates between the back of a head and a lower case “a”. AHEAD. This description indicates the circuitous and materially complex nature of the work, but it also makes clear: the act of parsing is the gesture I perform as dummy. Catala’s work rings of 1970s conceptualism and questions of audience agency, but it differs from the relational aesthetic of the 1990s, wherein one participates in a communal experience. I am not activator or participant. I was not there to pull a physical lever or push a button. Instead, Catala was commanding my thoughts. I was to participate in an intellectual rally—a back-and-forth that resulted in the formation of language. I assisted the artist by constructing meaning, closing a loop. As dummy, I am a necessity. However, anyone among us might do. I am the last step in a chain of information. Catala has carefully fed me words, and I was a ready mouthpiece. I see this viewer engagement in relation to Claire Bishop’s notion of delegated performance, in which artistic presence is outsourced to a classified performer.5 Bishop documents a rise in artistic acts carried out by hired performers sought for their identity, skill, or profession, which differs from that of the artist. This outsourcing requests authenticity, not just action from the performer. Catala’s work similarly depends upon a not so dumb dummy to unravel the riddles set out by the artist. What differs from Bishop’s examples of delegated performance, as exemplified by Allora & Calzadilla or Phil Collins, is specificity. I am just one puppet, conceivably, of many. In these works, performance, however subtle, is required of the audience rather than a named delegate. Catala, by contrast, is the being behind the curtain, pulling the strings to lead his puppet to a correct, singular conclusion. The rebus seems to offer an answer, something so rare in contemporary art.6 There is transmission of the exact thought of the artist to the viewer. Art, here, seems boiled down to communication at its most direct, void of interpretation. Without the physical cues of sight into sound, the work demands a presence of mind, a telepathy of sorts. Catala’s work expects

Putting Words in Your Mouth and Images in Your Eyes  65

Figure 3.3  A  ntoine Catala, Trophies, 2012. Latex, aluminum/wood frame, pump, tube 57 × 39 × 4 in. (144.78 × 99.06 × 10.16 cm). Image courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal, New York. Photo: Joerg Lohse.

the viewer to unscramble and transcribe image and object into text in order to reveal meaning. But, beyond how voice is thrown, there is also what is being shared. I see catastrophes ahead: a phrase of overt doom has been planted in my mouth. This is no neutral statement. What did I say, or agree to, when I was repeating the words fed to

66  Courtney McClellan me? What catastrophe am I driving toward, and what agency do I—do we have—to divert from this path? Catastrophe implies the irreparable. The ventriloquist doled out fear and control, which I confirmed and repeated politely.

Silent Eye Before Pica and Catala, and before the widespread adoption of streaming platforms and iPhones capable of high-definition photography, artist Ann Hamilton made a prediction. In Face to Face (2001), Hamilton transposed sight and sound by using her mouth as a camera.7 Loading light-sensitive paper into her cheek, and then parting her lips to create an aperture for light to pass through, she exposed the paper in order to create a photographic negative. A pinhole camera, a simple structure for producing images, requires a light-tight container with a single opening. Hamilton’s camera was constructed from space within her body. A machine for making words, the mouth served as room for making images. The images created from that negative are shaped like an ellipse, mirroring the form of an open mouth but also an almond-shaped eyelid (Figure 3.4). Hamilton’s viewer sees a photograph mounted on a wall and simultaneously looks out from the inside of the artist’s body. Differing from Pica’s object that needs a body and Catala’s objects that depict the body, Hamilton created an embodied object as a means to make an image. The receiving viewer has access to a viewpoint unnatural to the eye. Reflecting on the work, Hamilton notes, “the word pupil comes from the latin puppilla, which means little doll or puppet.”8 The reflection or depiction of the audience Hamilton portrays is miniature, scaled to the aperture and negative. The puppet here is diminutive, capable of being captured. Think of the tiny reflection seen when looking deeply into someone’s eyes. Words are not supplanted in her mouth, but instead, an image is projected out—however small. The audience is the beholder, but also a token of the photographic process. Hamilton’s looking creates a photograph, an object, but also a document of the action. As the secondary viewer (or tertiary if Hamilton herself is the primary

Figure 3.4  A nn Hamilton, Face to Face 2. Pigment print. Edition of 3 with 2 ­artist’s proofs. Published in 2001 by Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. Image size: 3.5 × 10 in., paper size: 22 × 18 in. Courtesy of Ann Hamilton Studio.

Putting Words in Your Mouth and Images in Your Eyes  67 audience), I am able to see what the mouth saw in that moment. The blur of ­movement in the image reinforces the performative nature of the work. Looking as performance recalls Vito Acconci’s Blinks (1969) in which the artist walked down a New York street while holding a camera at chest level and took a picture each time he blinked his eyes.9 A document of the mechanized eye, blinking is an automatic bodily gesture. Like Acconci, Hamilton snapped an image that she herself did not see. The performative gesture of the ventriloquist synchronized the dummy’s perception. The Face to Face images are documents of a performance, but, of course, they are portraits too. The photographs collapse subject and viewer. Like the painted portrait, the images produced from Hamilton’s action entice the gaze. Rather than the artist’s hand rendering the subject, it is the artist’s mouth that records the likeness. The artist again negotiates a pact, but here it is between stages of viewership. All current and future viewer’s return the artist’s gaze (of sorts). These contiguous and co-present viewers look and look back. There is a vulnerability in Hamilton’s kind of looking. The act of opening one’s mouth for enough time to expose the negative is an odd gesture, rarely performed outside of a dentist’s office. Mouth agape, not seeing eye to eye, but eye to mouth. The gesture requires the ventriloquist to give up her voice: in order to create this image, the artist must be silent. Trading sound for the ability to control and construct is fundamental to the art of ventriloquism. Direct expression is sacrificed for greater effect and artistry. In this work, surrogacy is not one directional. The artist plays host so that the viewer can see from multiple vantage points. Hamilton sacrifices her voice, and some artistic control, in order for the viewer to see inside, and have themselves reflected back within the image. The eye holds vibration and motion; the mouth looks out. As the dummy, I see it all. This work is a precursor to that of Pica and Catala, but perhaps more provocatively, a predictor of these works and times. There will be a shift in tone. Hamilton proposes a tenderness, a mutual exchange between ventriloquist and dummy. She delicately engages and disengages her powers of sight and sound, storing some in the art object, the photograph. Mechanization is not relegated to the puppet, but the artist’s voice is sacrificed in order to replicate her subject/audience. The gesture of looking is still centered on the body, albeit not in the site of vision. Further, the art object may hold information that neither the artist nor the viewer can immediately access. Equity between artist and viewer is novel. Hamilton models balance, but in doing so points to a potential tipping point for viewer agency. In the later works discussed, gestures of seeing, listening, and speaking are handed off to objects. Pica and Catala duplicate a hierarchy rather than deny it. Interpretation remains, but control rests steadily in the artist’s hand.

The Ventriloquist My experiences as a dummy piqued my curiosity about the role of ventriloquist. ­Viewing Pica, Catala, and Hamilton, I was asked to catch someone’s voice and share my sight. As an artist, I wondered what it must be like to pull the strings, to deaden my visage, and throw my own voice. What might a work of art gain from this dynamic? And, what artistic control might still slip away from me, no matter how hard I try to hold on to it? Inevitably, this exchange speaks to expectation, social scripting,

68  Courtney McClellan and compliance. So, how do I engage this hierarchy, doling out demands, whether i­ntellectual, social, or emotional, to my dummy—you?

Allusion Device For the past two years, I have been using found domestic objects and craft materials to create teleprompters. Developed in the 1950s by 20th Century Fox, teleprompters are electronic displays that project transcribed text. They were initially intended for use in the film industry, though today they are regularly employed in newscasts and political speeches.10 The teleprompter requires the sight of the reader to instigate speech. But, of course, this is not any speech, but speech that is smoother and more calculated, leading to an unnatural cadence and, on occasion, potent persuasion. Poet and author Kevin Young writes, “Teleprompters are proxies of a sort. But the machines provide something else: a mechanical ease with language.”11 When an orator uses a teleprompter, the person watching via television on their couch at home is the primary viewer; the live audience is secondary. The device facilitates a powerful allusion; it allows the performer to look directly into the camera in order to deliver a precise oration, all the while seeming to maintain unflinching eye contact. The trickery here is part technological and part emotional. The teleprompter allows the orator to look into the camera’s eye, offering a familiarity and ­immediacy—a purposeful break in the fourth wall. In return, the viewer gets to feel like he/she/they are the only one in the room, eye to eye with the orator and locus of power. This framing is the perfect delivery system for feigned intimacy, an emotional sleight of hand. Or as comedian Chris Rock said, “The ability for one person to talk to 1,000 people is FREAKISH.”12 The message delivered is precise. Further, the words are not those of the reader, but instead, a collective of speech writers and PR teams, the Cyrano de Bergerac of our time. Teleprompters come in many forms, but they all include a few elements: reflective surfaces, mirrored text, and a camera aperture. Historically, teleprompters were large pieces of equipment that needed a sound stage and industrial cameras. Today, they are still used at political rallies and press events, but most teleprompters are iPad and iPhone compatible. The shift in scale and ease makes them highly accessible. No longer relegated to a theatrical set, the form and skill the teleprompter brings can be ubiquitous. YouTube offers endless channels of DIY instructions, explaining how to use reflective plastic and a cardboard hood to create your own. The videos often note that the teleprompter would be useful when filming a convincing and professional make-up tutorial or instructional clip. Given the teleprompter’s domestication, I began to reimagine teleprompters using familiar objects like picture frames, old suitcases, and music stands (Figures 3.5 and 3.6). Additional materials include things that can be bought at a Joann Fabric and Craft Store: grommets, lime green felt, baby blue velvet, and office supplies. The text that my teleprompters display generally consists of commands but also Candy Conversation Heart phrases like “I’m Yours” or “Call me” (Figure 3.6). These short phrases not only direct what the viewer says but, more importantly, prompt delivery cues and script response. The directions cover what to say, but also how to say it. Moving the text around offers new phrases along with a shift in tone. At times with added emotional prompts, like “with malice” or “tenderly,” the sculptures

Putting Words in Your Mouth and Images in Your Eyes  69

Figure 3.5  C  ourtney McClellan, Teleprompters, 2018. Faux molding, vinyl, vinyl n ­ etting, picture frames, velvet, grommet, clip, slide. 8 × 7 × 24 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

inform the viewer/performer how to feel. The phrases on the screen implant thought but they also provide stage directions—thought with intended action—and further gesture toward controlling the dummy, who can enact tone and gesture without thought. It is important that these objects are saturated in nostalgia, a well-traveled means to exact control over an audience. With the use of 8" × 10" picture frames and boxy suitcases, personal history and family tradition become the position from which anachronism grows. Nostalgia is, of course, a means to harness sentiment in order to fabricate shared experience that never actually existed. Slavic literature professor and nostalgia scholar Svetlana Boym wrote about the complex relationship between reflective nostalgia, or personal longing for the past, and restorative nostalgia, retroactive attempts at collectively rewinding the clock.13 Subsequently, these fabricated teleprompters were my attempt to reveal the complexity of reflective nostalgia crashing into the political arena of speeches crafted by external voices. Politicians inflect their speeches with personal nostalgia in order to pull at social heart strings. This personal gesture diverts attention from a more calculated manipulation of hope, fear, and the desire for an imagined past. The certainty the teleprompter provides should give the dummy pause—“what am I saying, exactly?” If alerted to the duplicity, they may ask, what happens when we let old things tell us what to say and how to feel?

70  Courtney McClellan

Figure 3.6  C  ourtney McClellan, Teleprompter, 2018. Vinyl, microphone stand, clipboard. 60 × 24 × 24 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

Call and (Mechanized) Response Through a performing viewer and a ventriloquist artist, these works mine the gap between seeing and knowing (a gap that, as an artist, I may problematize and delight in, indefinitely). Simmering under the surface of these objects is fear. They reflect (and reflect upon) a loss of control and, as viewers and social beings, a surrender of agency. It is not that these artists suggest that control will be given over, but instead that it might be released, little by little. This constitutes not only a fear of automation but also a curiosity about the ease of a mechanized response. We don’t have to catch thrown voices and use them as our own. We are not simply an iris or an aperture. We are not mouthpieces either, nor a receptacle, receiver, or sentient eye. We are not objects or materials, not yet.

Putting Words in Your Mouth and Images in Your Eyes  71

Notes 1 Antoine Catala, “Aaaaaaa.org,” accessed January 2, 2014, www.aaaaaaa.org. 2 47 Canal. Accessed October 30, 2022. https://47canal.us/media/pages/exhibitions/i-see­catastrophes-ahead/2293155166-1589917020/pr.pdf. 3 Antoine Catala, “Aaaaaaa.org,” accessed October 9, 2019, www.aaaaaaa.org. 4 The word “catastrophes” is broken into two of the five sculptures included in the exhibition. 5 Claire Bishop, “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity,” October 140 (Spring 2012): 91–112. 6 Catala’s rebus stands in contrast to Rebus (1955) by Robert Raschenberg. Catala’s rebus directly correlates works and images, while Raschenberg’s rebus is impossible for the viewer to solve. 7 Ann Hamilton, “Ann Hamilton Studios,” accessed September 19, 2022, https://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/objects/face_to_face.html 8 Ann Hamilton, “Ann Hamilton Studios,” accessed September 19, 2022, https://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/objects/face_to_face.html 9 Vito Acconci, “Blinks (1969),” accessed June 10, 2020, https://www.vitoacconci.org/ portfolio_page/blinks-1969/. 10 Joseph Stromberg, “A Brief History of the Teleprompter.” Smithsonian.com (2012), 1–4. 11 Kevin Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017), 411. 12 Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee Season 2 Episode 6, “Chris Rock” Starring Jerry ­Seinfeld aired 18 July 2013, YouTube. 13 Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents,” The Hedgehog Review 9, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 14.

References 47 Canal. “Antoine Catala: I See Catastrophes Ahead.” Press release. https://47canal.us/media/ pages/exhibitions/i-see-catastrophes-ahead/2293155166-1589917020/pr.pdf. Acconci, Vito. “Blinks (1969).” Accessed June 10, 2020. https://www.vitoacconci.org/ portfolio_page/blinks-1969/. Bishop, Claire. “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity.” October 140 (Spring 2012): 91–112. Boym, Svetlana. “Nostalgia and Its Discontents.” The Hedgehog Review 9, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 14. Catala, Antoine. “Aaaaaaa.org.” antoine catala. Accessed October 9, 2019. www.aaaaaaa.org. Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Season 2 Episode 6, “Chris Rock” Starring Jerry Seinfeld aired 18 July 2013. Youtube. Hamilton, Ann. “Ann Hamilton Studios.” Accessed October 9, 2019. http://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/objects/face_to_face.html Stromberg, Joseph. “A Brief History of the Teleprompter.” Smithsonian.com (2012): 1–4. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-teleprompter-88039053/. Young, Kevin. Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017, 411.

4 Dislocated Voices Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades Kate O’Connor

In an unbridled, personal anthropomorphism we speak for things, as if things were speaking to us, reading their meanings for us, in voices of their own which are, at the same time, of course, only our altered voices dislocated.1 —David Goldblatt

I believe in language much more than history. History is a human creation and it is a form. In order to make a translation from this abstract form into a readable form, I use history as a base, therefore, I create a language which enables the act of translation. 2 —Wael Shawky

In 2010, Egyptian contemporary artist Wael Shawky (b.1971) located in the b ­ asement of Turin’s Museo della Marionetta, a 200-year-old collection of wooden puppets that belonged to the Lupi family, a dynasty of Italian puppeteers. Ragged and rotten, decaying in the humid basement, the puppets left Shawky entranced. He recalled discovering the collection saying “it was the most beautiful collection I’d seen.”3 With the support of Michelangelo Pistoletto at Cittadellarte in Biella, Italy, the Lupi family agreed to lend over 120 marionettes for Shawky’s use. So began the Cabaret Crusades (2010–2015), a three-part film series performed entirely with marionettes that follows historical accounts collected by French-Lebanese historian Amin Maalouf. In his book Les croisades vues par les Arabes (1983), Maalouf drew from a comprehensive collection of documents by contemporary Arab historians as well as eyewitness accounts from the period of the Crusades dating from 1095 to 1204. In popular accounts of Western historians, the Crusades were a series of history wars fought on behalf of Pope Urban II and for which the Crusaders traversed land and sea in the name of reclaiming ownership of the Holy Land Jerusalem. Battles were fought between Christians and Muslims across the Levant in a highly politicized quest for power. Shawky’s films critique and deconstruct the Western perception of the ­Crusades by restaging the events using marionettes who converse entirely in classical Arabic. Titled The Horror Show File (2010), the first of the Cabaret Crusades covers the initial four years of the Crusades, beginning with the Pope’s sermon at the Council of Clermont in 1095, which led thousands of Franks to march against the Turks who at that time had taken over Jerusalem (Figure 4.1). The second film, titled The Path to Cairo (2012), begins in Jerusalem in 1099 immediately following the battle in which the Christian Crusaders had reclaimed the kingdom. Shawky’s final, and arguably most stunning installment, titled The Secrets of Karbala (2015), runs at DOI: 10.4324/9781003303978-6

Dislocated Voices: Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades  73

Figure 4.1  W  ael Shawky, Cabaret Crusades I: The Horror Show File, 2010, HD video, color, sound, English subtitles, 31 minutes 49 seconds. Detail of Italian puppets from Turin’s Museo della Marionetta. © Wael Shawky; Courtesy ­Lisson Gallery.

a feature-length of 120 minutes and covers the final 60 years of the Crusades, ending in 1204 with the destruction of Constantinople. This essay analyzes how the marionette, through the metaphorical framework of ventriloquism, functions as a powerful historiographic tool in Cabaret Crusades. The dislocated voice, as conceptualized by David Goldblatt in his book Art and ­Ventriloquism (2006), refers to the process of ventriloqual exchange in which the voice is removed from its original source and redirected through a body to which it doesn’t belong, that of a puppet, for example. Beyond Goldblatt’s philosophical and aesthetic theorizations, more can be said about the political dimension of ventriloqual strategies and the way they allow artists to give voice to the alternate side of established histories. As I will argue, Shawky’s use of the dislocated voice, “embodied” by marionettes “speaking” in Arabic, presents a challenge to long-established and indoctrinated histories. Indeed, Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades trilogy insists that the act of translation is in its own right a throwing of the voice that governs the way we remember and document historical events.

An Alternate Crusades Maalouf’s 1983 text Les croisades vues par les Arabes (The Crusades Through Arab Eyes) offers an historical account of the Crusades that considers both Eastern and Western perspectives, revealing the brutality and corruption that has bled through both camps.4 Judith Wielander argues that Maalouf’s book “opened the eyes of both the Western and Arab worlds to the remote cruelty perpetrated in the name of a vague religious resentment, but actually driven by complex socio-economic issues.”5

74  Kate O’Connor She suggests that Maalouf’s alternative depiction of the Crusades revealed a far more complex history in which the events evolved from much more dynamic socio-­ economic crises rather than simply “glorious defensive battles to conquer Jerusalem in the name of God.”6 Maalouf exposes the barbaric behaviors of every player in the Crusades: Christian Crusaders resort to cannibalism, roasting their enemies on a spit, while Muslim leaders order the assassination of their own relatives, all in the name of land, power, and economic prosperity. Inspired by the compelling brutality of Maalouf’s writing, Shawky sought to translate the original historical documents used in Maalouf’s book into creative visual forms. Shawky follows Maalouf’s trail of historical documentation, returning to the original sources, channeling them in his films through the mouths of marionettes, which itself is a form of translation. Drawn to the precise details of the writings of Arab historians, Shawky insists that it is important to engage existing documentation of historical events. For example, reflecting on the making of The Path to Cairo, Shawky says: I took the exact sentences by an Arab historian called Usama ibn Munqidh. He was also the Ambassador from Damascus. It was his responsibility to go to ­Jerusalem ­ amascus and and to make an agreement—a peaceful agreement—between D ­Jerusalem. And that was the only Arab city, the first, to make this sort of agreement with the Crusaders. And Usama ibn Munqidh was responsible for that. I took his writing, as it is, and he is now represented by one of the marionettes in the second film—the marionette plays and sings his words.7 In The Path to Cairo, the marionette playing Usama ibn Munqidh performs the Arab historian’s written documents word for word in the form of song (Figure 4.2). But Shawky also says that “part of being that precise is to also be critical about how much we believe in the texts.”8 Through the use of marionettes, Shawky draws the critical validity of the established history of the Crusades into question since, by their very nature, puppets exist on the boundaries of belief and doubt, fact and fiction. Throughout the Cabaret Crusades series, Shawky never hides the marionettes’ strings, emphasizing that while we know they are manipulated objects, we willingly give ourselves over to the illusion of their agency. South African artist William Kentridge describes this phenomenon as “an unwilling suspension of disbelief,” whereby the audience is always aware of the artifice taking place yet can’t help but believe in the puppets regardless.9 Significantly, a narrative told by puppets is inherently suspicious because they do not operate of their own volution but rather as a consequence of someone else’s movements. Thus, the Cabaret Crusades owes much of its critical power to the mechanism by which these ventriloquized marionettes operate. The entire script for the Cabaret Crusades trilogy was written in classical Arabic and recorded in Egypt. A classical Arabic dialogue further complicates the authoritative Western perspective of the Crusades as it encourages non-Arabic speaking audiences to confront the significance of the language through which history is spoken. It also bears implications for the ventriloqual exchange that occurs since a non-Arabic speaking audience essentially reads the script through subtitles, rather than through the thrown voice of the marionettes, a point to which I will return later in the chapter in regards to interpreting the film’s dialogue.

Dislocated Voices: Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades  75

Figure 4.2  Wael Shawky, Cabaret Crusades II: The Path to Cairo, 2012. HD video, color, sound, English subtitles. Dimensions variable. 60 minutes. Detail of the marionette playing Usama ibn Munqidh. © Wael Shawky; Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

The Dislocated Voice Goldblatt’s book Art and Ventriloquism offers an interpretation of ventriloquism as a metaphorical tool for understanding the artistic process. Therein, he draws a parallel between the ventriloquist’s stage act and the performative exchange that occurs between the artist and the artwork. He draws this relationship from Heidegger’s essay “The ­Origin of the Work of Art” (1950), which deems the origin of the artist and the origin of the artwork inseparable from one another.10 Goldblatt explains, “the dummy defines (identifies) the ventriloquist. In Heidegger’s words, ‘Neither is without the other.’”11 Without the ventriloquist, the puppet is an inanimate doll. Without the puppet, the performer has no medium through which to displace the voice. Drawing on this logic, Goldblatt states that, “art, like ventriloquism, requires speaking in another voice… In ventriloquism, even an ordinary exchange takes on a certain edge. And, like art, ventriloquism is meaning through a medium.”12 Here Goldblatt is primarily concerned with understanding the role of the artist by drawing a comparison to the ventriloquist. Goldblatt’s research has been criticized for presenting an all-encompassing analogy, but what is significant about Goldblatt’s work in the context of this essay is his consideration of the ways in which an artwork speaks for itself.13 This is further amplified when considering the ways in which a puppet can seem to take on a life of its own, granting artists a sense of freedom to say things they may otherwise not be able to say. As Goldblatt observes, ventriloquism could be used as a paradigm for “more deviant pursuits”: Perhaps ventriloqual exchange can help us to understand what Hegel calls a “voiceless” history or in general help us to interpret more freely aspects of a silent world whose voice we are constructing as we, at the same time, pretend to listen—

76  Kate O’Connor that sometimes the voices of others are also our own, and sometimes our own are also those of other, for example, more powerful voices.14 Hegel’s notion of a “voiceless past” insists that in order to attain the status of history, memories require the external expression of language.15 Or, in other words, history is constructed by translating memories into language. Hegel was concerned with an era pre-history and pre-language; however, Goldblatt proposes that ventriloquism opens the door to a more immediate repressed and silenced world, arguing that ventriloquism can give voice to the otherwise unspoken and translate unspoken memories into a type of historical language. Unfortunately, Goldblatt concludes with this possibility and does not extend it to specific examples of ventriloquism in art practices. As this essay demonstrates, there is certainly more to be said about artists giving voice to the alternate side of established histories, particularly through uses of puppetry and ventriloquism. ­ rabic Remediating a predominantly Western history of the Crusades into a classical A spoken history communicated through puppets, Shawky reveals the limitations of language and translation, where details are always subject to misinterpretation. Importantly, Shawky takes advantage of these limitations, as it is precisely the ambiguity of language and translation that affords him the opportunity to insert alternative modes of representation into the long-established and entrenched historical narrative of the Crusades, further deconstructing and deauthorizing history. In Cabaret Crusades, the narrative relies primarily on dialogue, with every event relayed through fragments of conversation between puppets. This makes the films difficult to follow and sometimes banal and unsuspenseful. As a result of Shawky’s attempt to convey the number of major political players from both Christian and Muslim camps, the films move quickly and mercilessly through countless names and details of locations of events. Despite the disorienting effect of constantly being introduced to new names and faces, Shawky’s marionettes are captivating. Their often unnamable faces instill a sense of wonder and curiosity. Whether they are carrying out evil deeds, or celebrating a political marriage or religious ceremony, the marionettes move in such a hypnotic way as to lure the audience into believing they are somehow in control of their own bodies, even to the extent that the simple opening and closing of their mouths can appear to carry minute changes of expression in line with their voice and speech. Significantly, the speech and the sound of the marionettes’ voices in Shawky’s ­C abaret Crusades is critical for interpreting the moral or political dimensions of their actions. This is due to the fact that while puppets leave no trace of changing emotions or behavioral patterns in their unmoving expressions, they can elicit emotions once they are given a voice. As Steven Connor writes: Voices are produced by bodies: but can also themselves produce bodies … When animated by the ventriloquist’s voice, the dummy, like the cartoon character given voice, appears to have a much wider range of gestures, facial expressions, and tonalities than it does when it is silent. The same is true for any object given a voice.16 But why does a puppet, whose voice is always provided by another, offer such a compelling medium for revealing a voiceless history? In other words, how is it that the puppet can enable the translation of the unsolicited or the unspoken? Moreover, why

Dislocated Voices: Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades  77 is the ventriloquist’s puppet often crass, vile, and politically incorrect? What happens when we dislocate the voice from its source and attribute it to a puppet instead, knowing full well that the voice originates elsewhere? The conviction inspired by a puppet’s possession of a dislocated voice is quite a strange phenomenon and can trigger involuntary responses in audiences. For example, when ventriloquist Paul Winchell made his debut on television, the boom-operator, who was likely familiar with recording on-screen conversations, made an involuntary slip. For those watching at home, the dialogue from Winchell’s puppet was barely audible as every time Winchell spoke through his puppet while animating its mouth accordingly, the boom-operator would shift the microphone toward the puppet instead.17 Of course, there was no sound coming from the puppet and the boom-operator must have known this but, on impulse, had thought that since the puppet was speaking it required a microphone. The phenomenon of the dislocated voice is a puppet’s most compelling quality, and this may be what drew Shawky to the puppet and its capacity to convincingly speak on behalf of another.

Disparate Beginnings Shawky’s decision to use marionettes partially derives from their relationship to the idea of manipulation. In many ways, the marionette offers a rudimentary metaphor for thinking about control and acts of political manipulation. A key example of this is Shawky’s restaging of Pope Urban II’s 1095 speech delivered at a critical moment in both the history of the Crusades and in the production of Shawky’s project. The ­Horror Show File depicts the moment when Pope Urban II addressed the Council of Clermont with a call to arms for the beginning of the Crusades. Shawky’s interest in this speech lies primarily in its contested written documentation in that the Pope’s address was not documented at the time it was given and was only written into the historical archives many years after the fact; to date, documentation of the speech now exists in four possible versions.18 For Shawky, inconsistencies in the written documentation are significant as they tell us “something about writing history, and how do we believe in history, and how much we believe in it.”19 Reading four different versions of the speech also convinced Shawky of the voice’s power: When I read the speech by Pope Urban II [that initiated the Crusades in 1095], I could see so clearly that it was really about manipulation. You need to be an extremely strong speaker to convince people to walk for four years [laughs]. How can you do this? Half the crusaders died on this trip—but they believed in something. It was a religious cause, of course—but you need to have someone very, very persuasive to convince you to do such a thing. 20 The persuasiveness of the Pope’s speech loomed large for Shawky, but throughout the course of the Cabaret Crusades Shawky continuously draws the narrative of the Crusades further and further back, offering a series of possible and seemingly disparate beginnings, thus opening the written history up for interpretation. The half-hour-long Horror Show File opens with a scene from The Plague of Justinian in Constantinople (541 AD) with lifeless bodies being wheeled away on wooden carts. They move with the delicate motion distinctive to marionettes, where the manipulation of the strings grants them an air of fragility and weightlessness. The ragged condition of these

78  Kate O’Connor antique wooden puppets has a grotesque beauty throughout this opening sequence, the paint on their bodies flaking and scratched, their faces smeared with filth and seeming to glisten with a dying sweat. Shawky films a close-up of a puppet’s wooden palm fading in and out of focus, as though the puppet itself is somehow on the brink of mortality. Immediately, the life of a puppet becomes tangible, palpable, emotional, and turbulent. The uncanny experience of perceiving emotion in the eyes of a puppet hinges on a layering of strategies used by the artist; indeed, Shawky’s technical decisions go beyond the choice of materials and into the realm of cinema. He frames his puppets cinematographically, zooming into and fading out of the screen images, revealing how the affective power of the films relies on more than linguistic sounds. In other words, these techniques reach further than textual language ever could in translating narrative history. Shawky’s process incorporates, layers, and juxtaposes a variety of devices including puppetry, language, voice, and cinematography to bring the puppets to life on screen. Shawky’s decision to open the trilogy with the pivotal event of The Plague of Justinian that occurred centuries prior to the Crusades has narrative and political consequences for the trilogy as a whole. As Sameer Rahim states, “perhaps 50 million people died in that plague, making the Byzantine Empire ripe for Arab conquest 100 years later—a takeover that eventually prompted the Christian reconquest.”21 By opening the trilogy with a re-enactment of the devastation of the plague, Shawky offers an alternative, stratified history of the Crusades. Here we might see history operating according to Foucauldian archaeology, as long forms of investigation creating links between disparate events.22 Foucault emphasizes stratification as a form of historical analysis, which differs from methods that emphasize causal successions and totalizing definitions. Instead Foucault asks, “which strata should be isolated from others?”23 Foucault aims to move “away from vast unities like ‘periods’ or ‘centuries’ to the phenomena of rupture, of discontinuity.”24 Similarly, Shawky ties together a series of strata for the structuring of the Cabaret Crusades, including events that occurred long before the documented dates of the Crusades. In addition, Shawky highlights some of the more banal events that took place during the Crusades, such as celebrations and weddings. For this reason, I suggest that Shawky engages in long forms of investigation and illustrates the political complexities underlying these seemingly disparate events. Further, Shawky reveals how the history of the Crusades does not begin at one singular point, but has instead a layered history that unfolds and splinters across time. Extending beyond the dates marked by a Western history of the Crusades, he denounces history as a systematic set of dates and markers and reveals the ongoing layers of human construction and manipulation that lie beneath the surface of the Crusades. Similarly, the third film, The Secrets of Karbala begins with a flashback to October 680 AD when Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammed, was killed in the Battle of Karbala. Two marionettes dressed as Muslim pilgrims are shown circling the Kaaba in Haram, discussing the fate of Hussein (Figure 4.3). In an interview, Shawky relays Hussein’s story: The fourth successor of the Prophet Muhammed, named Ali, was the cousin and husband of the prophet’s daughter Fatimah. Assassins killed Ali; then his two sons Hasan and Hussein, considered the grandsons of the prophet, were also murdered. Hussein had refused to pledge allegiance to the Sunnah Ummayad caliph. As a consequence, Hussein moved from his home town, Medina, to Mecca, and then headed for Kufa, after the people there sent messages to him. On the way,

Dislocated Voices: Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades  79 his caravan was intercepted and he was killed, in the Battle of Karbala, on Oct. 13, 680. The Shia are always crying about the killing of Hussein and claim that the Sunnah were responsible, but the Sunnah maintain that they did not kill Hussein. 25 As he had done with the Pope’s speech from 1095, Shawky pulls information from Arabic history to highlight the ambiguities within historical narratives. Shawky is not concerned with assessing blame for the death of Hussein; rather, he is interested in the unstable and volatile nature of the event and its consequences. In retrospect, it has been identified as a pivotal moment in Islamic history that perhaps catalyzed the split between Sunni and Shia. By beginning with this flashback to October 680 AD in The Secrets of Karbala, Shawky states that he has attempted to combine what happened long before the Crusades with what happened in the Arab world because of this religious division. Many Arab historians believe that it is the main reason for the weakening of the Arab region during the Crusades, and still today. 26 More than this, The Secrets of Karbala offers layer upon layer of detail about the internal relationships between Arab leaders and the ongoing battles between Sunni and Shia; the film concludes with a brutal depiction of the political and economic bickering between the Catholic and Orthodox. Each of the events depicted in Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades reveals aspects of the political foundation that underwrites what we call “History.” As a dislocated narrative that ties disparate, seemingly extrinsic points in time, the Cabaret Crusades serves as a remediated and ventriloquized history that illuminates the perspective of the Arab historian.

Figure 4.3  Wael Shawky, Cabaret Crusades III: The Secrets of Karbalaa, 2015. HD Film, color, sound, English subtitles. 2 hours. Detail of marionettes dressed as Muslim pilgrims circle the Kaaba in Haram and discuss the fate of Hussein. © Wael Shawky; Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

80  Kate O’Connor

A Subtitled History Throughout the Cabaret Crusades trilogy, Shawky uses subtitles—a practical ­necessity that nevertheless reveals gaps and discontinuities within the written history of the Crusades. During the production of The Horror Show File (2010) in Italy, Shawky was one of the only people on set who understood the classical Arabic script. Hence, Shawky read the script on set while the puppeteers were performing so they could time the movement of the puppets with the dialogue. Many of the production crew, puppeteers, cameramen, cinematographers, and set and costume designers, then, had to approach the artwork with a certain degree of blindness. Wielander recalled that even “Wael’s directions in English were translated into the many Italian dialects involved. The marionettes played their parts in largely incomprehensible stories, with Wael providing the meter for the dialogues and monologues of the various characters in classical Arabic.”27 The Italian crew were, like Shawky’s marionettes, carefully manipulated to produce a remediated version of the Crusades articulated with an unfamiliar Arabic voice. The crew’s distance from the specific language used—­ classical Arabic—further highlighted the significance of ambiguity in the process of constructing historical narratives. The gaps and silences that occur through language barriers offer a valuable lesson for participants and audiences to Shawky’s work: that while history is perceived as collective knowledge, all access to history occurs on an individual and subjective level. Additionally, Shawky had chosen to produce each film in one of the three major European countries that played a primary role in orchestrating the events of the Crusades, namely, Italy, France, and Germany. Throughout production, the European crew members were confronted with a challenge to their conventional knowledge of the Crusades by navigating unfamiliar terrain and taking direction without fully understanding the specifics of the script. Similarly, while watching the films, non-Arabic speaking audiences are required to engage with the dialogue of the puppets via subtitles. The subtitle is integral to a foreign audience’s interpretation of the film as, according to Hamid Naficy, it contributes “to the film’s overall accent.”28 Moreover, as Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour explain, they offer a means of access: We need to make sense of the foreign on our own terms. We have to define what is foreign to our individual experience, before we can hope to understand the roots of collective misunderstanding. Subtitles offer a way into worlds outside of ourselves. They are a unique and complex formal apparatus that allows the viewer an astounding degree of access and interaction. Subtitles embed us. 29 Here, Egoyan and Balfour suggest that subtitles allow us to anchor ourselves to unfamiliar worlds. Via the subtitle, foreign audiences are, to a degree, embedded in the conventions and connotations of another language. However, and perhaps more importantly, Egoyan and Balfour touch on the concept of collective misunderstanding. Subtitling in a sense requires a level of assimilation. In order for the narrative to reach a wider international audience, the language must be dislocated, translated, and then relocated to the original sound and image that operates at a different pace. In this way, the process of subtitling parallels modes of ventriloquism, the difference being that the language must be translated rather than simply relocated. In the case of the Cabaret Crusades, subtitles demand that non-Arabic speaking audiences address

Dislocated Voices: Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades  81 the problems of accessing a translated history of the Crusades from the point of view of Arab historians and witness accounts, as it raises—puts on display—the complexities of translating one language into another. Indeed, subtitles reveal gaps and disruptions in the translation of history. As ­Egoyan and Balfour suggest, when reading subtitles audiences are required to come to terms with their own foreignness and to therefore acknowledge the interruption that occurs through the process of translation. However, if conventionally understood, the subtitler’s primary task is to make this process of translation as seamless as possible. Henri Béhar relates the process of subtitling to the act of ventriloquism. He states: Subtitling is a form of cultural ventriloquism, and the focus must remain on the puppet, not the puppeteer. Our task as subtitlers is to create subliminal subtitles so in sync with the mood and rhythm of the movie that the audience isn’t even aware it is reading. We want not to be noticed.30 Like ventriloquism, subtitling is a form of communicative deception. Subtitling and ventriloquism trigger an illusion or a trick of the mind whereby a part of the brain is aware that there is a level of disconnect between what is perceived and the artifice at work, yet gives itself over to the narrative. Subtitling, like ventriloquism, simultaneously reveals and disguises the relationship between what is spoken and who is speaking. More than this, Béhar fails to note the critical differences between subtitling and ventriloquism. Subtitling inherently problematizes contextuality in a very different way than ventriloquism in that it presents a visual distraction from the speaking body. Additionally, subtitling is not a throwing of the voice from one source to another, but an added layer of dislocation where the audience attempts to read tone of voice and listen to tone of voice simultaneously. In Shawky’s work we hear the ventriloquized voice in classical Arabic, thrown from the reader off-scene, and channeled through the mouth of a marionette. However, non-Arabic speaking audiences must also direct their attention to the written subtitles in order to follow the dialogic narrative. At this stage, the subtitler’s desire “not to be noticed” is near impossible. As an international contemporary artist, Shawky’s work primarily reaches Western contemporary art audiences, and the artist was likely aware of the layers and obstacles he had constructed between language and dialogue. In fact Shawky had originally planned to present the script in English to cater to an international audience, yet he quickly altered his decision stating that, “since it’s based on the Arab historians, it has to be extremely classical Arabic, completely.”31 As a result, Shawky’s interest in the translation of language extends across multiple modes of representation in his work, through puppetry, a classical Arabic script, and subtitling, to deconstruct the history of the Crusades to the highest degree.

Alienated Voices Within conventional film, subtitling can be problematic since direct access to dialogue is considered essential for establishing character and an immersive viewing experience. In contrast, Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades intentionally breaks from these techniques and employs methods of alienation to reveal the constructed nature of the films and likewise, the constructed nature of the history of the Crusades. Fragmented

82  Kate O’Connor dialogue, monotonous vocal language, unorthodox styles of music and soundtrack, and juxtapositions of humor with scenes of bloodshed and brutality: these techniques, all of which are linked to or in conversation with the use of subtitles, create the experience of alienation from a truth that cannot be straightforwardly or simplistically relayed. Rather than engaging with traditional forms of character development, Shawky finds alternative ways to establish the elements of a character. When characters are first introduced, a subtitle of their names and roles appears briefly beside them, such as “Peter the Hermit, Priest of Amiens.” Moreover, if a character holds a position of authority, other characters will refer to their full title or their honorary title before speaking to them. For example, in The Horror Show File, Pope Urban II is accordingly referred to as “Father.” Additionally, and as with traditional film, identity and character development are inflected by costume design. Kings and queens don crowns, and peasants dress in torn rags. The crusaders bear a red cross on their torso, while the Muslims wear tunics and turbans. Where Shawky most strikingly departs from traditional forms of character development is through the voicing of the marionettes. Often, he pairs marionettes with deep monotonous voices, generally devoid of emotion, ventriloquized by the abrupt movement of their mouths opening and closing in rhythm with their speech. In The Horror Show File, for example, we first hear the voice of Pope Urban II, a droning sound imbued with an authoritative and guttural timbre. In one exception to this tendency, however, which occurs during the ransack of Antioch in 1097, Fairuz, the guardian of the Tower of the Two Sisters, is portrayed as a chubby-faced, snout-nosed marionette with a manic laugh and a mischievously pinched voice. He snickers from high up in his tower as he agrees to double-cross the ruler of Antioch by allowing Bohemond’s soldiers into the city. Another departure from the deep authoritative male drone is offered by the youthful, high-pitched voice of the child Seljuq Sultan in Mosul: with legs wiggling off the edge of his far-too-large throne, this marionette is filmed from a high angle as he addresses his people reading from a scroll. The rapid pace of his wooden jaw opening and closing draws attention to the speed and monotony of his rushed speech, confirming that he is a child desperate to finish reading a script that he has been given. And yet the subject matter of his speech is dark and barbaric as he warns his people of the Franks who, low on supplies, are resorting to killing, roasting, and eating the flesh of spies (Figure 4.4). Were it not for the childlike signifiers—the high sound of his voice, the size of his body in relation to the throne, the infantile wiggle of his legs—the audience’s reaction to the language might not be quite as severe. This inconsistency between character and language has a way of making meaning strange: dark sentiments should not possibly come from a child, and yet the conviction of the ventriloquized voice allows a degree of disquieting authenticity. We view the marionettes’ conviction and their construction in tandem. Hence, the use of ventriloquized marionettes opens up a creative platform for audiences to question to whom these words really belong. The soundtrack and musical elements help break up the monotonous dialogue of the Cabaret Crusades, as characters often burst into song to relay their emotional turmoil. In The Path to Cairo, Alice, the daughter of Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem, begs for her father’s mercy by singing passages of an ancient French poem The Song of Roland from high in a tower while being surrounded by children whose youthful voices ring out from behind her in a soft choir as they sing the story of Charlemagne’s victory over the Muslims during the eighth century. Shawky also

Dislocated Voices: Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades  83

Figure 4.4  W  ael Shawky, Cabaret Crusades I: The Horror Show File, 2010. HD video, color, sound, English subtitles, 31 minutes 49 seconds. Detail of the child ­Seljuq Sultan in Mosul warning his people of the Franks who had resorted to cannibalism. © Wael Shawky; Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

makes use of an eclectic soundtrack that ranges from vaudeville to contemporary ­ gyptian electronic instrumentals. Perhaps one of the most unnerving scenes in The E Horror Show File is set in 1097, in Edessa, where Baldwin is adopted by Thoros, the Armenian ruler; specifically, since Thoros had no sons to carry on his rule, he arranged an adoption ceremony for Baldwin to be his son. In this, Shawky had no easy task: the adoption ritual requires the adopted to undress and to crawl under the white cloaks of his parents, first his father, then his mother. With the marionette’s strings still attached, Baldwin is manipulated to kneel awkwardly on the ground and lower his head, backside in the air, as his parents stare aimlessly into the distance. This scene bizarrely begins with the slow strum of a guitar followed by the abrupt sound of an electronic drumbeat and a fast-paced acoustic soundtrack. The villagers witnessing the adoption ceremony wiggle, bob, and spin to the music in the background in a brief moment of celebration and raw humor, quickly dampened by Baldwin’s brutal beheading of his new mother and father in the scene immediately following his adoption. Their lifeless bodies are dragged away spattered with blood, and their heads are placed on spears and left on display as the villagers watch on, now motionless and ghostlike, as though they are terrified of what is to come ­(Figure 4.5). Shawky employs these techniques to allow audiences to interpret possible depictions of turmoil, frustration, anger, and grief. Shawky has explained that the puppets were initially selected for their roles based on their facial expressions. However, once assigned their respective roles, the puppets would then take on a life of their own and begin dictating to the director. Shawky says, “I never forced any puppet to take on the role of Duqaq or Radwan or anybody else. You have to do what the puppet tells you to do.”32 Likewise, director Garri

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Figure 4.5  Wael Shawky, Cabaret Crusades I: The Horror Show File, 2010. HD video, color, sound, English subtitles, 31 minutes 49 seconds. Detail of the decapitated heads of Thoros and the Queen of Edessa. © Wael Shawky; Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

Bardin, known for his films using puppetry and stop-motion animation, such as The Coiling Prankster (1988), noted a similar experience when assigning roles for puppets: The puppet must be born. The important part of the work with the production’s creative team is to find a character who’s going to fit into the dramatic structure of the whole film…. But as soon as the puppet’s ready, everything changes and he’s dictating to you what’s right for him, what’s going to make him more expressive, what camera angles to use, and so on. He stands up to your dictatorship and imposes his own. It’s incredible how demanding a puppet can be.33 Both Shawky and Bardin speak of the puppets in ways that imply their autonomy and resistance. While Shawky made deliberate choices about their speech, he also describes a tension that emerges between puppet and puppeteer, at times, perhaps unexpectedly, evident, as when a puppet appears to be in control of its puppeteer. In the case of Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades, the accessibility and believability of the alternative narrative is due in large part to the puppet’s ability to hijack the voice and perform the role of an emancipated dictator. Here we can return to the example from The Horror Show File in which a marionette embodies the role of Pope Urban II to deliver the infamous speech before the Council of Clermont in 1095. The marionette hijacks the role of the Pope to deliver a classical Arabic translation of an already unreliable source, and yet the marionette manages to hold space on set with assertive conviction. Our ability to believe, or to want to believe, in the autonomy of a marionette then leads us to question how susceptible we are to believing in all forms of historical representation.

Dislocated Voices: Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades  85 Throughout the history of puppet theater, audiences are reminded of how puppets can appear to express inherent behaviors and ulterior motives. When discussing the roles for The Path to Cairo, Jacques Sapiega lists the names of the main characters from murderers, to tyrants and alcoholics, wondering: are [the puppets] as Shawky puts it, tinged with a naivety that shelters them from the vileness of good’s battle with evil? Or on the contrary, do these puppets embody a level of bestiality proper to these sinister players on the stage of history?34 These are complex questions that pull us back to the origins of ventriloquism, where puppets were once, or perhaps always, believed to inhabit a necessary evil waiting to be activated via the voice. A puppet’s life transcends the historical roles it performs. For example, in Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades, the marionettes appear as different characters throughout the films, alternating between royalty and peasantry, good and evil. All the while, they are neither actors nor performers. They fulfill their roles with complete authenticity, and yet they are capable of altering their disposition at any given moment. Indeed, there is something sinister about the marionettes’ mutability and the conviction of their temperament. This in turn bears implications for the historical roles they represent as well as for the narrating of history. Shawky’s marionettes reveal the internal violence and fragility of the individual players of the Crusades, thus removing the grandiose call to heroism in narrative history. But, because they are themselves mere props, any claim to right or wrong is suspended: hence, there is no steadfast outcome, there are no winners or losers. All that is left is language, suspended between body and voice. Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades teases out the political and ethical dimensions of narrating the history of the Crusades. He says, “partly, I can see that what I am trying to do is criticism, but it is also criticism of the way we believe in history—in written history. And to make this criticism clear, I don’t change anything in the texts.”35 Instead, Shawky enlists puppetry to translate historical texts into a notably visual form, an overtly staged form, an obviously contemporary art form, a manifestly subtitled form, a palpably alienated form, and most importantly, a ventriloquized form. As such, Shawky’s films reveal how the dislocated voices of puppets can operate as a historiographic tool for fragmenting and destabilizing established histories via the act of ventriloquism. The strangeness of the puppet as an artistic device makes us question the nature of historical information, how it is communicated, where the information is coming from, and to whom it really belongs. These ideas are exposed via the logics of ventriloquy, through a dislocation between bodies and voices. By reading Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades through the metaphorical framework of ventriloquism, we are led to contemplate broader ideas of speech action and authorship: who has authority over our collective historical narratives and why? Shawky’s work demands that we bear witness to systems of power and agency, and how they inform our worldviews. ­Ventriloquism allows language to take on an element of disruption whereby artists can creatively navigate new ways of understanding the politics of communication and the ways that we recall and translate information.

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Notes 1 David Goldblatt, Art and Ventriloquism (London: Routledge, 2006), xii. 2 Wael Shawky, “Wael Shawky on Translation: A Conversation between Baş ak Şenova and Wael Shawky,” in The Translation, eds. Adrian Notz and Baş ak Ş enova (Zurich: Cabaret Voltaire, 2013), 17. 3 Wael Shawky and Faye Hirsch, “In the Studio: Wael Shawky,” Art in America, April 1, 2013, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/wael-shawky-in-thestudio/. 4 Maalouf’s text was later published in English, see Amin Maalouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes, trans. Jon Rothschild (London: Saqi, 2006). 5 Judith Wielander, “Cabaret Crusades: The Horror Show File,” in Wael Shawky: Cabaret Crusades, ed. Doris Krystof (Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen; Bielefeld: Kerber, 2015), 76. 6 Wielander, “Cabaret Crusades,” 76. 7 Wael Shawky, “Conversation between Wael Shawky and Doris Krystof,” in Wael Shawky: Cabaret Crusades, ed. Doris Krystof (Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen; Bielefeld: Kerber, 2015), 147. 8 Wael Shawky, “Futur 3 Artist Talk: Wael Shawky im Gespräch mit Doris Krystof (06.11.2014),” interview by Doris Krystof, KunstsammlungNRW (November 14, 2014), video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeBNBGNVfwY. 9 William Kentridge and Dan Cameron, “An Interview with William Kentridge,” in William Kentridge, eds. Neal Benezra, Staci Boris and Dan Cameron (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001), 69. 10 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 17. 11 David Goldblatt, “Ventriloquism: Ecstatic Exchange and the History of the Artwork,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 3 (1993): 393. 12 Goldblatt, Art and Ventriloquism, xi. 13 Jonathan Neufeld suggested: “if everything can be explained in terms of the analogy, the explanations begin to take on the appearance of just-so stories.” Jonathan Neufeld, “Art and Ventriloquism by Goldblatt, David,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 2 (2007): 239. 14 Goldblatt, “Ventriloquism: Ecstatic Exchange,” 397. 15 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 137–138. 16 Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35. 17 Charles Bruce Davis, “Reading the Ventriloquist’s Lips: The Performance Genre behind the Metaphor,” The Drama Review 42, no. 4 (1998): 148. 18 Shawky discusses these versions at length in an interview, see Wael Shawky: Al Araba al Maduna, ed. Susanne Pfeffer (Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2012, exhibition catalog), 75. 19 Shawky, “Futur 3 Artist Talk,” interview by Doris Krystof. 20 Shawky and Hirsch, “In the Studio.” 21 Sameer Rahim, “Pulling the Strings,” Apollo 185, no. 649 (2017): 48–54. Doris Krystof similarly argued, “this pandemic, which returned at regular intervals for over two centuries, is seen as one of the causes of the economic and military weakness of the Byzantine Empire, which ultimately paved the way for the Crusades.” See, Doris Krystof, “Introduction,” in Wael Shawky: Cabaret Crusades, ed. Doris Krystof (Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen; Bielefeld: Kerber, 2015), 34. 22 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 4. 23 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 4. 24 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 4. 25 Shawky and Hirsch, “In the Studio.” 26 Shawky and Hirsch, “In the Studio.” 27 Wielander, “Cabaret Crusades,” 80.

Dislocated Voices: Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades  87 28 Hamid Naficy quoted in Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, eds. Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 143. 29 Egoyan and Balfour, Subtitles, 30. 30 Henri Béhar quoted in Subtitles, eds. Egoyan and Balfour, 85. 31 Wael Shawky in conversation, see Rahim, “Pulling the Strings,” 48–54. 32 Wael Shawky in conversation, see Jacques Sapiega, “Shaping a View of History: Seeing through the Eyes of the Other,” in Wael Shawky: Cabaret Crusades, ed. Doris Krystof (Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen; Bielefeld: Kerber, 2015), 102. 33 See footnote 26 in Sapiega, “Shaping a View of History,” 102. See also Garri Bardin, “la marionnette selon Stanislavski, propos recueillis par Anna Ivanova-Brashinskaya,” PUCK: la marionette et les autres arts, 15 (2008). 34 Sapiega, “Shaping a View of History,” 103. 35 Wael Shawky, Wael Shawky: Cabaret Crusades, ed. Doris Krystof (Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen; Bielefeld: Kerber, 2015), 147.

References Bardin, Garri. “la marionnette selon Stanislavski, propos recueillis par Anna Ivanova-­ Brashinskaya.” PUCK: la marionette et les autres arts (2008): 91–96. Benezra, Neal, Staci Boris, and Dan Cameron, eds. William Kentridge. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001. Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford ­University Press, 2000. Davis, Charles Bruce. “Reading the Ventriloquist’s Lips: The Performance Genre behind the Metaphor.” The Drama Review 42, no. 4 (1998): 133–156. Egoyan, Atom and Ian Balfour, eds. Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: ­Routledge, 2002. Goldblatt, David. Art and Ventriloquism. London: Routledge, 2006. Goldblatt, David. “Ventriloquism: Ecstatic Exchange and the History of the Artwork.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 3 (1993): 389–398. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Krystof, Doris, ed. Wael Shawky: Cabaret Crusades. Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung ­NordrheinWestfalen; Bielefeld: Kerber, 2015. Maalouf, Amin. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, trans. Jon Rothschild. London: Saqi, 2006. Neufeld, Jonathan A. “Art and Ventriloquism by Goldblatt, David.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticsim 65, no. 2 (2007): 238–240. Notz, Adrian and Baş ak Şenova. The Translation. Zurich: Cabaret Voltaire, 2013. Pfeffer, Susanne, ed. Wael Shawky: Al Araba al Maduna. Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2012. Rahim, Sameer. “Pulling the Strings.” Apollo 185, no. 649 (2017): 48–54. Sapiega, Jacques. “Shaping a View of History: Seeing Through the Eyes of the Other.” In Wael Shawky: Cabaret Crusades, ed. Doris Krystof, 84–119. Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung ­Nordrhein-Westfalen; Bielefeld: Kerber, 2015. Shawky, Wael and Doris Krystof. Futur 3 Artist Talk: Wael Shawky im Gespräch mit doris Krystof (06.11.2014). KunstsammlungNRW, November 17, 2014. Video. https://www.­ youtube.com/watch?v=oeBNBGNVfwY. Shawky, Wael and Faye Hirsch. “In the Studio: Wael Shawky.” Art in America. April 1, 2013. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/wael-shawky-in-the-studio/.

Part II

Dummies

5 García’s Juegos Puppets, Immunity, Torture Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández

There was a very deep feeling of repression and pain. —María Consuelo García

In 1973, after studying advertising for three years at Universidad Javeriana, María Consuelo García (b. 1953) began her studies in sculpture in the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the nation’s largest and most important public university. This last year of the presidency of Carlos Lleras, and indeed also the last year of the so-called Frente Nacional (1958–1974), was a period when the two main political parties (the Partido Liberal Colombiano, or PLC, and the Partido Conservador Colombiano, or PCC) agreed to rotate power in order to exclude leftist movements and parties, and to counter the influence of former dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, who had taken control in 1953 in a peaceful coup d’état conceived by both parties in order to impose political order on the country. The next year, in 1974, the first open elections were held: Alfonso López was elected president, supported by social movements, worker unions, and students who still identified him as the former leader of a dissident faction within the PLC strongly critical of the Frente Nacional. The first months of the new government seemed to announce important changes since López did not continue the state of siege applied by previous presidents and instead gave legal status to two large unions and re-established diplomatic and commercial relations with Cuba. However, López’s true intention to “maintain the bipartisan balance in the political arena” soon came to light.1 He appointed as Minister of Government Cornelio Reyes (a conservative accused of having directed a group of paramilitaries and killers) and continued the economic policies of previous governments, strengthening the neoliberal project that allowed exports to increase and demoted the strategy of import substitution, much to the detriment of the middle and lower classes as well as workers. Reaction was swift. In 1974, students of the Universidad Nacional seized control of the Hortúa Hospital, and, subsequently, in 1975, workers from state offices, banks, construction companies, and one of the largest sugarcane emporiums in the country went on strike. Later, workers and citizens of Barrancabermeja, the country’s major oil city, carried out a civic strike. Civil mobilization reached its peak in 1977 when inflation increased to 35% (having already increased from 17.9% in 1975 to 25.6% in 1976). 2 On September 14, the largest unions in the country called for a national civic strike to demand wage increases, price control, political and trade union rights, land for peasants, and the reopening of universities. The government’s repressive response was almost immediate with massive layoffs in official and private institutions and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003303978-8

92  Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández companies. Public universities were closed several times and remained so for months. The new government re-imposed the state of siege and gave the army even more autonomy over the control of public order than former presidents had. The presence of war tanks circulating the streets became normal again, as was the use of verbal war councils with the one held in 1977 being the largest in the country’s modern history. The military police restricted individual freedoms, and it also became normal to see military police in the corridors of public university buildings, especially at the Universidad Nacional, which used video cameras to record the comings and goings of students and professors alike.3 While political activists began to disappear during López’s government, it is Julio César Turbay’s subsequent presidency (1978–1982) that is characterized by the systematic violation of human rights, illegal detentions, torture, and disappearances.4 Promoting these actions, Turbay’s Security Statute, which gave judicial powers to Colombia’s National Police and followed guidelines from the National Defense Doctrine, aimed at “the survival of the nation” against internal enemies, including students and performance artists. 5 This specific statute was part of a complex local and regional modernity marked by extant colonial, economic, and moral structures; the rise of drug trafficking; and the growth of Colombia’s National Army and guerrilla groups, in addition to a long social history of exclusion and marginalization. Turbay was criticized by local and international human rights organizations.

Figure 5.1  María Consuelo García, [left] Juego No.2 and [right] Juego No.1, 1978–1979, at 28 Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales, November 1980. The caption reads: “For the first time in the history of the Salon, the public comments that the best work was awarded the first prize. Set of the María C. García’s winning work.” El Tiempo (newspaper) n.d. Clip from García’s personal archive. Courtesy of María Consuelo García.

García’s Juegos: Puppets, Immunity, Torture  93 In this context, García produced her artworks Juego No.1/Game No.1 (1978) and Juego No.2/Game No.2 (1979), both of which were selected for the 28th Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales in 1980, organized at the Museo Nacional, in a year when many young artists participated (Figure 5.1). Juego No.1 won first prize. And yet despite the fact that both works were the first to include video and puppets in the history of the biannual Salón, and the fact that her video was the third produced by a Colombian and exhibited, they remain largely ignored by art historians in Colombia. The only texts that have commented on these works, until now, have been a handful of short descriptions published at the time in newspapers and magazines as part of reviews of the Salón.6 At the Salón, the works were placed next to one another and against a wall, with Juego No.2 to the left of Juego No.1. The installation made clear that the artworks were “sister” works (as the artist stated) with similar structures.

Ventriloquism as Polyphonic Performance The arrangement of these works invited the exhibition’s visitors to read and engage first with Juego No.2, which included ten ventriloquist dummies representing figures from parliament and local social and political life. The dummies were placed in an open chest, reminding the public that puppets like this are like “things small enough to be left behind,” under beds or in boxes, and are “the size of fetishes, saints’ relics, voodoo dolls, and talismans.”7 Interestingly, García not only visited a magician in order to learn how to make her dummies’ mechanisms but also made the dummies using plaster and glue, using tricks employed in the making of traditional effigies of saints and virgins, as if parodying the infant and dressed Madonnas while also pointing out pagan elements in Catholic tradition. These dummies were slightly reminiscent of actual figures drawn from national political and social life. For instance, attendants identified one dummy as former dictator Rojas Pinilla, leader of the Alianza Popular Nacional at the time.8 Another dummy was meant to evoke Turbay, while a third evoked Goyeneche, a homeless man with dementia who was an independent candidate for congress and the presidency several times. He was actually supported and protected by the students of the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá where he was given shelter and exhibited as their leader in parody demonstrations against the country’s politicians both in and out of office.9 Behind the chest, on the wall, was a flag and, to the right of it, a black plinth on top of which was a packet of parchment-like mimeographed manuscript pages showing how the dummies functioned, including a short text inviting visitors to manipulate them. Much in line with the participatory happenings that the artist had come to know through artist Gustavo Sorzano (who had returned from New York City to teach at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá) and theatrical experiments promoted in Bogotá during the late sixties, partially inspired by ­A lejandro Jodorowski’s “Mouvement panique,” García opened the possibilities for action, while also acknowledging that “puppets are not made to order or script.”10 On the wall, just above the box, was a picture the artist had taken of the dummies in the open chest, offering spectators an idea as to how the dummies were initially arranged and subtly inviting participants to replace the puppets in the chest in a similar way.

94  Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández

Figure 5.2  María Consuelo García, Juego No.2, 1979, at 28 Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales, November 1980. Credit and courtesy of María Consuelo García.

Juego No.2 also included a chair where spectators, one by one, could sit and play with a dummy facing an oval, full-length mirror that allowed those in front of it to see their own bodies and gestures (Figure 5.2). That type of mirror, it is worth recalling, historically served as an iconic reference in both a carte-de-visite, for the celebration of one’s social image, and as repertoire for narcissism and memory. Nonetheless, the inclusion of the mirror also forced spectators, most of whom had never used a ventriloquist dummy before, to become aware of and experience the difficulties inherent in performing ventriloquism. While playing with the dummy, participants not only experienced the impossibility of appearing spontaneous in the specular image but also

García’s Juegos: Puppets, Immunity, Torture  95 had the experience, recounted hundreds of times by puppeteers and ventriloquists (among them, Nina Simonovich-Efimova whom I will introduce below) of w ­ rangling, unsuccessfully, with unwieldly puppets and dummies. Playing in front of the mirror gave the spectator-ventriloquist an awareness of how the dummy’s material structure determines, and even programs, its movement. Furthermore, this difficulty was necessarily entangled with the political figures represented. So, even if one had the dummy (politician) sitting on one’s leg and made it “talk” by having one’s arm inserted within it, the figure had political and power “structures” and programs that determined its gestures, actions, and speech—“structures” and programs with which the participant had no option but to negotiate. Juego No.2 was neither a simple caricature criticizing politicians’ imperfections nor the mere continuation of what José Hernán Aguilar’s criticism of García’s pieces describes as “the more classical political-figurative tradition of Colombian art [namely painting and sculpture] ([Fernando] Botero [(b. 1932)] included).”11 And so, even if Aguilar did correctly identify the artist’s interest in rejecting the abstract tradition found in sculptors like Edgar Negret (1920–2012) and painters like Carlos Rojas (1923–1997), he glossed over significant aspects of García’s work. Much like having one’s rebellious child sitting on one’s thigh, Juego No.2 induced both corporeal and affective contact and struggle, partially recalling the fable with which Augusto Boal opened his Games for Actors and Non-actors: the story of Xua-Xua and her struggle to accept that her child “born inside her […] was also somebody else, someone with his own needs and desires.”12 Along these lines, it is worth remembering visual artist Nina Simonovich-Efimova too, one of “the first artist-intellectuals to stage professional puppet productions in Russia,” who defined “the notion of the puppet as […] obedient actor” and recognized that puppets in general, and especially her famous Big Petrushka, had a magic life of their own.13 In this sense, even if one knows that García’s spectators-ventriloquists were making the movement and sounds of the dummies, it is also clear that “the dummy neither speaks nor acts for or in the name of his vent. [It…] is supposed to speak or act” for itself.14 Furthermore, it is a commonplace of ventriloquism that dummies say what might be socially unacceptable or, at least, socially and politically different and dissociated from what the ventriloquist would publicly say and think. Ventriloquism demands constant negotiation with results “not at all preordained.”15 To put it another way: ventriloquism actually and effectively demands that the spectator-ventriloquist speak both in her voice and in another’s in such a way that she “must efface herself as speaker while simultaneously promoting herself as listener.”16 This is to say, the ventriloquist needs to work in the gap between the two. This is particularly true in the case of Juego No.2 where the mirror duplicated, contrasted, opposed, and opened up a space for repetition and disassociation for the playing participant both between her own image and that of the dummies. Here I recall Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt and Jacques Lacan’s “Mirror stage.” In Brecht’s conception, the spectator-ventriloquist relates with her image “in the form of emotions which do not have to be identical with those” she stages and hands over for criticism, while asking “the audience to understand the motives behind it.”17 For his part, Lacan argues that there is a complex development of the ego that in adulthood has to do with “the function of imagos, which is to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality—or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt.”18 Additionally, it is also possible to think of the reflection of humans in/ on things (dummies) since, as Arjun Appadurai stated, “human actors encode things

96  Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández with significance… [and] it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context,” as well as social and psychological tensions of the human actors. Additionally, it is also possible to think of the reflection of the thing and human co-movement.19 In fact, the mirror in Juego No.2 should be understood less as a prop and more as an operational element within a game, illuminating the political and social context and network in which, so to say, one breathed life into the dummies (and the politician) and also breathed with them (and lived or assumed a position in political life and public sphere).20 The mirror, in other words, was an operational element for experiencing and staging “co-presence” with the dummies and for making visible the complex network of political power the dummies help to thematize. Juego No.2 broke the fourth wall between spectator and actor by exposing an element of a network in which a participant should be regarded as both actor and spectator or “spect-actors,” as Boal would call them Games. Effectively distanced from the “classical political-figurative tradition of Colombian art, Juego No.2 is best understood as a game and site of play where ideas, desires, affects, and even economic relations, usually masked under ideology, social status, and roles, became legible. Hence, paraphrasing François Cooren, I would say that Juego No.2 is not merely an assemblage of diverse elements and materials, but rather a polyphonic performance of competing and overlapping voices, gestures, texts, passions, principles, values, decisions, and statuses. This polyphonic performance involves the ventriloquist and the dummy as well as “a series of entities and figures convoked, invoked, and evoked,” that is, ventriloquized, in the interactions of the two.21 In this sense, Juego No.2 invites the adoption of “a much more radical view of ventriloquism” according to which the ventriloquist’s intentions “cannot be given a special status outside and preceding” both the dialogue and confrontation of voices in public, private, and institutionalized spaces, and social and political networks where “the ventriloquist himself must be seen as having been ventriloquated as much as ventriloquating [sic.].”22

The Corpse as Venter Juego No.1 included a slightly larger than human-size marionette’s wooden torso and limbs, the marionette’s control, five large marionette heads (each with a hook capable of connecting it to the torso), and an open wooden structure (Figure 5.3). On the wall behind the structure was a black cloth giving the installation a theatrical look, while slightly in front of the structure was a white pedestal with a TV monitor on it. The monitor displayed an edited video showing García’s friends and classmates playing with the torso in the entrance hall of the Architecture building at Universidad Nacional where, as mentioned, military police usually recorded students going in and out of the building. Juego No.2 and Juego No.1 mirrored and contrasted with one another: they consisted of ventriloquist dummies and a marionette, an open chest and an open wooden structure, a black and a white plinth, and a mirror and a TV monitor, respectively. I would initially like to read this contrast in conjunction with Margaret Williams’ discussion of two origins of puppetry: a “magic” origin identified in the ventriloquist and small puppets and a second possible provenance linked to images of deathlike “funerary figures, memorial statues, even the corpse itself;” images with which one may even dance. 23 Theater director Edward Gordon Craig, who defended the second origin and fiercely belittled his contemporary actors by describing them as

García’s Juegos: Puppets, Immunity, Torture  97

Figure 5.3  M  aría Consuelo García, Juego No.1, 1978–1979, at 28 Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales, November 1980. El Tiempo (newspaper) n.d. Clip from García’s personal archive. Courtesy of María Consuelo García.

dummies that imitated, impersonated, and expressed emotions, insisted actors should be like or could be replaced by “Über-Marionettes.” Though he never clarified what an Über-Marionette would actually be, scholars continue to debate whether it would have been a life-size or greater than life-size marionette, or an actor encased in armor.24 Craig briefly described the Über-Marionette as part of a play of death, an ‘actor’ that should go beyond life and “aim to clothe itself with a deathlike beauty while exhaling a living spirit.”25 Given that Craig’s “Über-Marionette” has nurtured the imagination of many theater and puppet practitioners around the world, including in the work of Colombian (puppet) theater directors Carlos José Reyes and Enrique Vargas, among others, the “Über-Marionette” is an apt reference for interpreting García’s Juego No.1. 26 Recalling the Über-Marionette allows us to approach García’s play with death in her video and installation. For instance, note how, in the second part of the video, an Afro-Colombian student dances with the headless wooden torso, which exhales the living spirit of music of African heritage, played with a xylophone. Yet, as we shall see, Craig’s concept also serves as a reference for García’s play about death, and how she intended to develop it by involving both ventriloquism and marionettes. In order to understand García’s play of death, and the significance of this dance, I first need to attend to the open wooden structure central to Juego No.1. From it hung both the torso and heads, which in turn contained hooks from which hung a human-scale, faux feather boa scarf, a black tailcoat, an army-green coat with medals and badges, a general military service green hat, and a presidential sash that could be worn by both the marionettes and humans.27 The wooden structure was slightly reminiscent of an Italian teatrino, that is, the framework used in puppet shows and coincidentally of a size similar to one teatrino that Carlos José Reyes had at the Alacrán Theater. 28

98  Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández Nonetheless, rather than being the stage for the marionette in action, this structure looked and functioned like a closet for keeping the torso, heads, and clothes. Yet, it was not a mere compartment where elements of a disassembled almost life-size marionette were stored. In contrast to what she did in Juego No.2, García opened the closet and demonstrated, as Williams has correctly stated, that the “reduction to object status [of puppets] is [always] incomplete [since…] the marionette retains that ‘after-life’ that lingers around any figure with which an audience has emotionally identified.”29 Furthermore, García opened the storage and staged the now motionless and silent disassembled body of the marionette playing the part of a corpse that had once had life and exhaled a living spirit in a dance recorded in the video reproduced in front of the wooden structure. Of course, this “life” is neither the metaphorical life of the marionette as thing nor the supernatural life of it as fetish or medium of necromancy. Rather, it is about the recognition that the current stillness of the stored puppet recalls memories of joy and loss inherent to human life. And this is so not only because puppets, as Eric Neutzel stated, may be regarded as extensions of the primal relation to the lost or absent mother-uterus, intermediary objects between the child and the absent “Other.”30 It is also because Juego No.1 offers a deeper and more uncanny nuance when it is noted that the opened closet was a way in which the artist used transparency to both expose and make invisible the lockers and closets where students of the Faculties of Art and Architecture not only kept their belongings but also hid themselves when the military police entered their buildings violently to beat and even abduct for further torture students, many of whom eventually became desaparecidos, that is, individuals who never returned dead or alive following their abduction. The term likewise refers to someone on the brink of “dis-appearing” from public memory, hence the Plaza de Mayo mothers’ use of their children’s pictures to depict their desaparecidos. Juego No.1 not only opened the closet as stage but also and subtly staged the “storage” in the verbal sense, that is, the hiding. Juego No.1 takes advantage of the puppet as an extension of the primal relation to what is lost or absent and offers an uncanny intuition of that never objectifiable void of the lost friend or absent student from which the stored parts and clothes of the marionette may rise up and serve toward her/his acknowledgment.31 That García’s play of death intended to stage silently how objects and students co-participated in a struggle for life should now become clear. While in Juego No.2 co-presence meant breathing life into dummies and breathing with them; in Juego No.1 there is an unexpected and motionless play whereby the artist stages the storing of oneself and things, where co-presence means something akin to expiring like and with the marionette. Breathing and expiring can be regarded as opposites. However, García offered a more interesting situation when designing the heads as she did. As in Juego No.2, the heads not only referenced figures of the national, political, and military elite, but they also had the mouths of ventriloquist dummies.32 In this sense, Juego No.1 seems to be in dialogue with Juego No.2. The latter invites us to think of ventriloquism as a polyphonic performance of the competing and overlapping voices, bodily gestures, and passions of the participant and other actors convoked, invoked, and evoked. For its part, Juego No.1 invites us to assume a view of ventriloquism according to which the emphasis might be displaced from the “loqui,” call, voice, and expression, to the venter, torso, corpus-corpse, and the uterus-belly characteristic of the, at times, androgynous or double-sexed Pulcinella.33 In other words, Juego No.1 suggests that ventriloquism not only consists of the more recognized and celebrated aspect of the

García’s Juegos: Puppets, Immunity, Torture  99 discursive, audible, and expressive/expressed. It also consists of the intuitive, i­ naudible, and repressive/repressed. This is usually obscured by scholars’ use of the term “vent” in place of naming the ventriloquist, in a metaphorical, metonymical nexus that neglects to account for what lies underneath such an identification: the intuition of that never objectifiable depth of the other, and even of myself as other as Paul Ricoeur would say,34 and from which what is stored may rise up and serve toward an acknowledgment of the absent, lost, abducted other, and even (my)self as that other.

Video, Immunity, Exception A section of the second part of the video opens with three light-skinned actors: a woman with make-up clad in the blue boa, a man wearing the black tailcoat with a red flower attached to it, and a second man wearing the army-green hat and coat. The actors appear just a few steps in front of the wooden structure, resting against a brick wall. At first, the military man flirts with the woman, and then she and the first man flirt with each other and engage in foreplay (one hears giggles and purrs), before a marriage is celebrated with a toast. The military serviceman acts as waiter, pouring blue champagne for her and red champagne for her man. After the toast, the couple pours the large remnants of their glasses into one glass and gives it to the military officer, who toasts while smiling at the camera. In between the flirting and the toast, a darker-skinned, smiling, and androgynous figure wearing a balaclava slightly folded into a hat appears on-screen from the left side and, holding an unplugged electric drill with the drill-bit oriented toward the couple, passes in front of the group toward the right side. One realizes that this figure is actually a woman, who dances with the marionette and stays on-screen for just a few seconds since the officer reacts quickly, hitting her with his baton-ben and repelling her as she goes off camera. He then turns to the couple and says “public order is perfectly normal.” Significantly, the darker-skinned female actor’s baklava was never included in the props hanging on the open wooden structure in either the installation or the video, and her drill evokes the kind of tool that would have been used in building the wooden structure. Doubly marginalized in the game-play and “public order,” she can be understood, to paraphrase Giorgio Agamben, as an “exception” in that she is included both in a scene of exemplary figures of the game-play where she does not belong and as a banned and abandoned figure, “exposed and threatened on the threshold” of the scene.35 Contrary to the actors, who represent a community of the social and political elite, and the military, and who are both ventriloquist and ventriloquized, she does not speak. And, given the reaction of the elite and the military, she may be a guerrilla, a thief, a worker, a student, an artist, or whatever figure the establishment would have identified as subversive. Yet, she was neither ventriloquist, nor ventriloquized; instead, she embodied but did not impersonate political, economic, racial, and social discourses, affects, and fears, much like the abjected “venter” and headless torso García used for recasting the issue of immunity and exclusion-exception. Roberto Esposito has insightfully commented that immunity and the correlated notion of immunization are not only to be assumed in terms of the ancient Roman concept of immunitas as a distribution of proper roles.36 He has correctly stated that immunity is also to be understood as a distribution against impropriety, against any element capable of threatening privilege and order, and capable of breaking

100  Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández the protective wall of exception from conditions of impropriety (i.e., v­ ulnerability, ­precariousness, etc.).37 And immunization, he argues, is to be regarded as how communities act against an internal but marginalized enemy, and how communities instruct and transmit the appropriateness of roles, voices, bodies, and actions.38 Understanding immunization as action against internal enemies and as communication, one may understand the role puppets sometimes have had in how a community figures its fears regarding an Other, while at the same time using sacrifice to purify the community’s impropriety. In the early twentieth century, Petrushka, the Russian version of Pulcinella, was employed in agitprop theater in the Soviet Union for attacking kulaks denounced by relatives, neighbors, and friends and liquidated by Stalin in the 1930s.39 In capitalist countries, puppets have also been instrumentalized; for instance, Remo Bufano’s agit prop and didactic puppet show From Sorcery to Science (1939), presented at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow was not only “close to the rhetoric of moral certainty […] of the medieval mystery plays” but also served as a means for indoctrinating capitalism and imposing democratic values both locally and abroad, while legitimizing and promoting the witch-hunt of communism both at home and within the sphere of U.S. influence.40 Such transgressive aspects of puppets have been unilaterally neutralized, “separated from their traditional roles in ritual, state performance, and anti-authoritarian resistance,” and have even been cast “as safe entertainment for children, socially productive education methods, and as propaganda techniques for public relations and advertising.”41 That is exactly what Aguilar’s comments did in inconceivably equating García’s puppets and play to Joan Ganz Cooney’s program Sesame Street. But I would argue that García’s puppets work differently, especially in Juego No.1. Like many other young adults at the time, she frequented theater and attended plays produced by groups like Teatro la Candelaria and Teatro la Mama, which adopted collective creation under the influence of figures like Bertolt Brecht and Peter Weiss. She was also familiar with the rebirth of Puppet Theater in the city, which, had notably relied on mostly puppets for children and hardly ever included ventriloquist dummies, which were typically relegated to magic shows. Significantly, she understood the need to combine play and games, theater, and puppets in order to stage a play of death and also to transform her sculptural work into what I call the social sculpture of ventri-loquism, a social sculpture that introduces participation and performativity, opens a space of game and play in a complex network of power, desires, affects, silences, losses, and exclusion, and recasts torture as a way of working through collective trauma that affects us through the apprehension of our vulnerability. Torture, it must be recognized, is a violent effort not always aimed at uncovering a secret or other information held by the tortured. “Torture, regardless of its degree of sophistication or the intensity of pain or terror it produces, is a practice aimed at breaking the dignity of human beings.”42 It is basically a display of dominion that not only seeks to reduce victim’s physical and mental abilities but also to ventriloquize her/him since its ultimate purpose is the victim’s repudiation of her/himself and the control of the victim’s speech and will.43 Torture produces ventriloquist dummies as well as silent marionettes. Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry recounted that when he was tortured he incriminated himself by “inventing absurd political crimes, and even now I don’t know at all how they could have occurred to me, dangling bundle that I was.”44 Along these lines, Muriel Montagut recalled victims who described their bodies as “crypts” or described their

García’s Juegos: Puppets, Immunity, Torture  101 existence using expressions like “I live but do not exist” and “I am here, I am not here anymore.”45 Torture produces not only ‘talking heads’ but also deep and lasting pain and silence related to the guilt of having been forced to involve or betray oneself and others along with a terrible sense of fear of having being dispossessed of one’s body, speech, and will. Torture exerted under the logic of immunization becomes a resource for breaking the physical and mental will of a person, ultimately affecting psychic structure and social ties, since it breaks the link one has with the other in front of oneself, and the other one addresses when one talks to oneself.46 Needless to say, García and many others watched these experiences unfold with their fellow students at ­Universidad Nacional. Understanding this helps us to recognize Juego No.1 as a complex work and encourages us to revisit what has wrongly and superficially been interpreted as political caricature by media and art critics who analyzed it at the time.47 Regarding the media, I would like to point to two key sequences that immediately follow the dance. The first is a series of close-ups that develop into medium shots recording one head at a time (connected to the dressed torso in the work). The heads’ mouths open and close while the movement of the lens at times produces out-of-focus images, and the audio suggests someone mumbling, nervously giggling or reacting to giggles. This seems to problematize the difference identified by most scholars concerning the voices of ventriloquist dummies and marionettes. While dummies seem to have voices of their own, marionettes’ voices do not belong or even appear to belong to them. Yet, in the first series of shots, the framing, camera angle, and movement of the lens leave room for indecision as to who mumbles, who giggles, and why. The video thus imagines something that oscillates between ventriloquist dummies and marionettes; moreover, it also points to the fact that on television such traditional differences may be irrelevant. The video production and editing may not just depict the puppet as Mark Levenson demanded, that is, it may do more than merely record what happens in front of the lens when the human puppeteer is in control.48 Rather, it may show the editors as puppeteers-ventriloquists too, much in line with montage and Stephen Kaplin’s idea of “docu-puppetry.”49 The second sequence shows the participants’ rising hands lined up one next to the other and passing one head at the time, from left to right, until each head is apparently connected to the torso, only to be raised by an invisible force while unintelligible voices seem to reach a peak of excitement. Taken together, these actions suggest both coronations and decapitations, the latter of which is already suggested by the installation. Coupled with the ambiguity of the aforementioned series, the role of participants is likewise ambivalent. This is not to say, for instance, that they are torturing the heads. What I want to consider, taking both series into account, is that torture is never limited to the violence exerted on a person in a hidden room, as it was usually portrayed and banalized in television series like the American series Kojak, 50 broadcast in Colombia and Chile in the late seventies and subtly used for justifying abuse and torture exerted by a policeman in the context of National Defense Doctrine. As Serge Portelli states, “torture originates where it is not practiced: in collective mentalities,” and the media plays a key role.51 Torture precedes the act of violence and continues after the act through the further exclusion of the victim, or the simple lack of understanding that what happened to the victim is “what happened to us.”52 When García was awarded the first prize, several journalists interviewed her. As mentioned previously, she was very interested in collective creation and actively acknowledged the participation of Luis Fernando Barriga (a professor at

102  Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández Universidad Javeriana who recorded the play and co-edited the video with the artist), as well as the 15 students from the Universidad Nacional who participated in the play and recording session, and appeared in the last shot of the video. In an interview that I had with the artist, she stated that it was symptomatic that the media had never mentioned either the university or the participants; moreover, the media had reduced the work to mere political caricature. In this interview, she observed: GARCÍA:  I

talked to them about the students who participated in the video [but not even a word of it was printed]. I think [journalists and newspapers] did not want to accept that students of the Universidad Nacional participated.

[…] AUTHOR:  The

video was clearly political, and also had to do with disappearances of other students… GARCÍA: Sure. AUTHOR:  It has a trauma component…. It is not just about comedy and caricature. GARCÍA:  Yes, indeed. At the exhibition, there was [also especially among students] a very deep feeling of repression and pain.53 In addition to staging storage with its open wooden structure, the TV in Juego No.1 is an “intimate box” that recalls not just a teatrino, as Peter Frank suggested, nor just the origins of TV through the figure of Stookie Bill, the name of each of the ventriloquist dummies used in John Logie Baird’s experiment with mechanic television.54 The TV monitor in Juego No.1 is also, as I will argue, a device for spectacle and the staging of blindness. Here I turn to Charles Chaplin’s The Circus (1928), in which the tramp unexpectedly becomes part of the clowns’ performance. When he tried to escape from the police “the audience laughs and applauds, mistaking his desperate struggle for survival for a comedian’s virtuosity—a routine that suggests that comedy is to be sought precisely in such cruel blindness, unaware of the tragic reality of a situation.”55 One could interpret García’s work as mere political caricature in her intentional making invisible and exposing politics and traumatic aspects of storage and spectacle in puppetry. Indeed, it is no coincidence that, thanks to her strategic staging of blindness, an extract of her video was appropriated by Colcultura (a state-funded institution later transformed into the Ministry of Culture) for television advertisement of the Salón in 1980. Therefore, one can agree with Williams’ suggestion that puppetry, and in particular ventriloquism, is less a matter of form—that is, a stage play using puppets—than it is a required “mode of spectatorship,” for which one needs to be highly attentive to fiction as that which makes us feel and think rather than just being taken in by illusion and entertainment, which is usually, and superficially, said about puppetry’s public and mirrors.56 If torture and trauma should not be reduced to the dyads of perpetrator/victim and traumatic event/trauma, then García’s work should not be reduced to a dyad either: the artist and her work/caricature-politicians. Torture, trauma, and García’s Juegos can be better explained at the level of the community—a form of attention and critical reply to its members that, paraphrasing Achille Mbembe’s insight on cultural trauma, have already “allowed themselves to be duped, seduced, and deceived” and even ventriloquated by dynamics of immunization and fear.57

García’s Juegos: Puppets, Immunity, Torture  103 For this very reason, it is important to underline that García’s Juegos were also games and plays about life. She celebrated life through resistance and subversion and through spontaneous choreography that explored the life-death of puppets while challenging the audience to reflect on their participation in ventriloquism, and in a collective mentality that pretended to legitimize or just ignore torture in a culture of fear. In a sense, García’s Juegos reminds us that Iulia Slonimskaia criticized Craig’s ideas of the origin of marionettes in Greek temples, proposing instead that they emerged in women’s Dionysian rituals and “folk cult processions,” rituals and processions that, according to Ross S. Kraemer, were women’s response to myths where their “socio-sexual status” was being threatened.58 In other words, marionettes might also be regarded in Juegos in terms of a possession that enabled, at least temporarily, the participant’s defiance of normal roles and involvement in activities not permitted and her/his reformulation of a struggle to own one’s life and voice. Significantly, the only scripted shot of the video preceded the smiling group of participating students; it showed the marionette’s torso, along with a head separated from it, falling to the floor. Partially inspired by the death of the clown in Federico Fellini’s I Clowns (1970), García’s video was predominantly produced collectively under the effects of alcohol and in the hall where military police usually installed their cameras.59 As such, one should recall that Fellini’s film, made for Italian TV, began with a series of shots where clowns are identified as a small town’s grotesque outsiders since the “circus is set up in the shadow of the local mental asylum with its barred, prisonlike windows.”60 Contrary to The Circus, the show’s attendants within I Clowns and García’s video are no other than Fellini’s and García’s film and video-play clownish crews, who knew what was going on in the stages. I Clowns and the video both explore a “funeral laughter” that “links death with rebirth, crisis, change, and renewal.” Fellini embraced carnival for confronting the “rigid tyranny of fascism” and the “confining aesthetic of social realism (neorealism).” On her part, and besides the coincidence that Juego No.1 received the prize at a Salon organized in the Museo Nacional building and a former regional prison also known as “el Panóptico,” García embraced puppets and fiesta as a way of confronting desapariciones, torture, and trauma. She did so as a way of distancing from the rigid militant and ideological art produced by her professors of graphic arts in a collective known as Taller 4 Rojo, and from modernist and high-culture figurative pictorial and sculptural traditions of Colombian art, Fernando Botero included. Critically distancing from Marta Traba’s very influential, bourgeois idea of the artist as the person who “reveals the desires of her community,” the young García combined theater, the outmoded idea and popular art of puppetry for adults, and the rather new practices of performance, participation, and video art in Colombia, a gesture that local art critics largely ignored.61 In a sense, her Juegos and, especially, video remind us that Fellini wanted “to make the cinema finally do justice to the clowns’ talent and energy” and transgressive power.62 Nonetheless, Fellini’s I Clowns critiques both neorealist and Hollywood films while recognizing that a long tradition of art film was disappearing along with the art of clowning. For her part, García somehow identified in video and installation the possibility and promise for a contemporary artistic practice that would not only allow both a critical and political rebirth of popular transgressive traditions but also offer a less hierarchical and ideological, but more participative art that, in this case, would also encourage participants, the public, and even the artist to work through collective trauma.

104  Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández As previously stated, to date, García’s Juegos remain ignored by art history: they have been neither exhibited nor discussed since 1980, when the video was first labeled lost—a state of affairs that continued until I recovered it in late 2019 for the project “Genesis of Video Art in Colombia.” Assessing the Juegos’ legacy and explaining the reasons why it has been ignored remains difficult and complicated. Those reasons may lie in local art history and criticism’s limitations for fairly assessing performance and video art, prejudices against video, television, and popular arts, and the lack of interest in interdisciplinary research conjoining theater, puppetry, and film in the Colombian art-historical context.63 In addition, in contrast with conceptual artwork mostly related to the then in-vogue graphic arts, photography, and architecture, ­Juegos brought together the ancient art of puppetry and the incipient art of video in order to perceive the darkness of the time, of a complex and paradoxical, if not traumatic local and regional modernity.64 Herein lies García’s value: in Juegos, she brought together two different and marginalized arts—both in significant need of having their first critical history written in Colombia—which performed a disjunction of time, as well as a polyphony of ventriloquating and ventriloquated subjects (and objects) who experienced the exploration and complication of contemporaneity in Colombia of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Notes 1 Mauricio Archila, Idas y venidas, vueltas y revueltas: Protestas sociales en Colombia, 1958–1990 (Bogotá: ICANH-CINEP, 2003), 109. 2 Salomón Kalmanovitz, Economía y nación (Bogotá: Siglo XXI, 1985), 479. 3 Antonio Mejía, Ingeniería Eléctrica en la Ciudad Universitaria (Bogota: UNAL, 2011), 16. María Consuelo García, Interview by Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández, May 8, 2019. 4 Archila, Idas y venidas, 112. 5 Joseph Comblin, El poder militar en América Latina (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1978), 67. 6 In addition to Aguilar’s and Valencia’s text quoted later in this text, see: Galaor Carbonell, “Salón XXVIII de Artes Visuales,” Arte en Colombia 14 (1981): 23–24; and Gloria Valencia, “Muñecos y arte video,” El Tiempo (November 28, 1980). 7 Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life (Chicago: The University of ­Chicago Press, 2011), 39. 8 Gloria Valencia, “Arte joven para un país joven,” El Tiempo (November 26, 1980), 1-D. 9 Andrés Ospina, “El evangelio según Goyeneche,” El Blogotazo (blog) (October 1, 2010). 10 Paulo César León, “El Teatro La Mama y el M-19, 1968–1976,” Historia y Sociedad 17 (2009): 226. Peter Schumann, “The Radicality of the Puppet Theatre,” The Drama Review 35, no. 4 (1991): 79. 11 José Hernán Aguilar, “Salón Atenas vs. Salón Nacional,” Re-vista del Arte y la Arquitectura Colombia 2, no. 6 (1981): 19. 12 Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors (New York: Routledge, 2002), 15. 13 Dassia N. Posner, “Life-Death and Disobedient Obedience: Russian Modernist Redefinitions of the Puppet,” in The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, eds. Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and John Bell (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 139. 14 François Cooren, Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Incarnation and Ventriloquism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010), 102. 15 John Bell, “Playing with the Eternal Uncanny: The Persistent Life of Lifeless Objects,” in The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, eds. Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein and John Bell (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 50. 16 David Goldblatt, Art and Ventriloquism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 39. 17 Bertolt Brecht, “On Chinese Acting,” The Tulane Drama Review 6, no. 1 (September 1961): 133, 136.

García’s Juegos: Puppets, Immunity, Torture  105 18 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton & Company, 2007), 78. 19 Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective ­(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5. 20 This could metaphorically and partially ‘correspond,’ for instance, to voting and desiring the politician to speak for oneself, actively participating in social, political, and even armed movements against the government or State, being violently subjected by State power or being beneficiated by it, etc. 21 Cooren, Action and Agency in Dialogue, 112. 22 David Carroll, “The Alterity of Discourse: Form, History, and the Question of the Political in M. M. Bakhtin,” Diacritics 13, no. 2 (1983): 74. 23 Margaret Williams, “Including the Audience: The Idea of ‘the Puppet’ and the Real ­Spectator,” Australasian Drama Studies 51 (2007): 120. 24 For each position, see: Irène Eynat-Confino, Beyond the Mask: Gordon Craig, Movement, and the Actor (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 88; Andrea Ferrari, Theatrum mortis: la marionetta nel teatro di regia (Azzano San Paolo: Edizioni Junior, 2009), 5; and Patrick Le Boeuf, “On the Nature of Edward Gordon Craig’s Über-Marionette,” New Theatre Quarterly 26 (2010): 106. 25 Edward Gordon Craig, “The Actor and the Über-Marionette,” The Mask 1, no. 2 (1908): 12. 26 Enrique Vargas (1940) is the founder of the world-renowned Teatro de los sentidos in Barcelona. He participated in Bread and Puppets Theater. In 1978 Vargas founded the theater group Retablo tiempo vivo at Universidad Nacional, where he adopted both critical realism and folk tales. It was at the University where García meet Vargas for first time, when she was already working on her puppets. On his part, Carlos José Reyes (1941) directed, between 1971 and 1982, the Teatro el Alacrán and its puppet theater for children known as La ventana del Alacrán, where some plays involved both large puppets and actors. Reyes had done this (using large cardboard puppets) in his adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s Big Mama’s Funeral in 1968. See: Eduardo Gómez, “Los años ochenta en el teatro colombiano,” Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico 15 (1988): 120; and Ospina, Premio vida y obra, 46. 27 The colors of the band were those of the flag included in Juego No.2, and partially those of the national flag, but could also be interpreted as the colors of the liberal and conservative parties and of the military. 28 This is something of which García was not aware. Ximena Ospina, Premio vida y obra 2008: Carlos José Reyes (Bogotá: Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá, 2010), 55. 29 Margaret Williams, “The Death of ‘The Puppet’?” in The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, eds. Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein and John Bell (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 18. 30 Eric Neutzel is quoted in: Sarah Boxer, “Pulling Strings: The Geppetto Effect,” The New York Times (January 17, 1998), Section B, page 9. 31 I paraphrase here Eric Neutzel and Michel Foucault. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of The Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), 245. 32 Three of them could easily be related to López and Lleras (former liberal presidents) and Turbay (then liberal president in 1980), meaning Turbay was ‘represented’ in both artworks. Another fourth head might contextually recall Bertha Hernández de Ospina, who in 1980 was a leader of the Conservative party who played a key role in the 1953 coup d’etat against Laureano Gómez and later led the National Women’s Organization supported by the dictator Rojas Pinilla. The fifth head represented an anonymous general officer. 33 Martha Feldman, The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 22. 34 “Oneself as Another suggests from the outset that the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other, that instead one passes into the other, as we might say in Hegelian terms. To ‘as’ I should like to attach a strong meaning, not only that of a comparison (oneself similar to another) but indeed that of an implication (oneself inasmuch as being other).” Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 3. 35 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans Daniel Heller-­ Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 22–28.

106  Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández 36 Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 5. 37 Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 3. 38 Esposito, Immunitas, 174. 39 Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 305. 40 John Bell, American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 141. 41 Bell, American Puppet Modernism, 6. An example of neutralization using puppets as a “socially productive education method” is found in the program of “functional education” for adults in India and other former British colonies, for which Bil Baird worked in the sixties, and whose a paternalistic colonialist approach affirmed that the “illiterate adult, has problems of perception” and “it is difficult for him to attribute meaning to symbols.” Thomas B. Keehn, “Foreword,” in Puppets and Population, eds. Martha Keehn and Linda Burgess (New York: World Education, 1972), 7. 42 María Eugenia Vázquez, Escrito para no morir: Bitácora de una militancia (Bogotá: ­M inisterio de Cultura, 2000), 247. Author’s translation. 43 Muriel Montagut, El ser y la tortura (Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, 2016), 44. 4 4 Jean Améry, “Torture,” in The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary, ed. William F. Schulz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 84. 45 Montagut, El ser, 146. 46 Elizabeth Lira, “Guerra psicológica: intervención política de la subjetividad colectiva,” in Psicología Social de la Guerra: trauma y terapia, ed. Ignacio Martín-Baró, 138–159 (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1990). 47 García, Interview. 48 Levenson is quoted in: Steve Tillis, “The Art of Puppetry in the Age of Media Production,” The Drama Review 43, no. 3 (1999): 184. 49 Stephen Kaphlin, “Puppetry into the Next Millennium,” Puppetry International 1 (1994): 37. 50 Kojak was a very popular crime drama TV series, starring Telly Savalas, inspired by Selwyn Raab’s book Justice in the Back Room (1967). 51 Serge Portelli, Pourquoi la torture? (Paris: Vrin, 2011), 14. Author’s translation. 52 Montagut, El ser, 146. My italics. 53 García, Interview. 54 Peter Frank, “Video Art Installations: The Telenvironment,” in Video Art: An Anthology, eds. Ira Schneider and Beril Korot (New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1976), 204–209. 55 Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 2008), 5. 56 Williams, “The Death,” 23. 57 Achille Mbembe, “The Colony: Its Guilty Secret and Its Accursed Share,” in Terror and the Postcolonial, eds. Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2010), 35. 58 Posner, “Life-Death,” 136. Ross S. Kraemer, “Ecstasy and Possession: The Attraction of Women to the Cult of Dionysus,” The Harvard Theological Review 72, no. 1/2 (1979): 80. 59 García, Interview. My translation. 60 Helen Stoddart, “Subtle Wasted Traces: Fellini and the Circus,” in Federico Fellini: ­C ontemporary Perspectives, eds. Frank Burke and Marguerite R. Waller (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 55. 61 Marta Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, ­1950–1970 (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2005), 156. 62 Stoddart, “Subtle Wastes Traces,” 60. 63 Traba’s unilateral and aggressive attitude against video was correctly denounced and criticized by Jonier Marin. On the other hand, Miguel González, Eduardo Serrano, Álvaro Barrios, and Alberto Sierra, the four main curators and art critics at the time, hardly

García’s Juegos: Puppets, Immunity, Torture  107 discussed theater, puppetry, and film. Jonier Marín, “Marta Traba y la Retaguardia,” El Tiempo. Lecturas Dominicales (August 11, 1974). 64 Here I paraphrase Agamben’s understanding of contemporaneity. Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” in What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 53.

References Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. “What Is the Contemporary?” In What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, 39–54, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Aguilar, José Hernán. “Salón Atenas vs. Salón Nacional.” Re-vista del Arte y la Arquitectura Colombia 2, no. 6 (1981): 17–21. Améry, Jean. “Torture.” In The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary, eds. William F. Schulz. 80–87. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Archila, Mauricio. Idas y venidas, vueltas y revueltas: Protestas sociales en Colombia, ­1958–1990. Bogotá: ICANH-CINEP, 2003. Bell, John. American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Bell, John. “Playing with the Eternal Uncanny: The Persistent Life of Lifeless Objects.” In The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, eds. Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein and John Bell, 43–52. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Boal, Augusto. Games for Actors and Non-Actors. New York: Routledge, 2002. Boxer, Sarah. “Pulling Strings: The Geppetto Effect.” The New York Times (January 17, 1998): Section B, page 9. Brecht, Bertolt. “On Chinese Acting.” The Tulane Drama Review 6, no. 1 (September 1961): 130–136. Carbonell, Galaor. “Salón XXVIII de Artes Visuales.” Arte en Colombia 14 (1981): 23–24. Carroll, David. “The Alterity of Discourse: Form, History, and the Question of the Political in M. M. Bakhtin.” Diacritics 13, no. 2 (1983): 65–83. Comblin, Joseph. El poder militar en América Latina. Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1978. Cooren, François. Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Incarnation and Ventriloquism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010. Esposito, Roberto. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Stanford: ­Stanford University Press, 2010. Esposito, Roberto. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Eynat-Confino, Irène. Beyond the Mask: Gordon Craig, Movement, and the Actor. ­Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Feldman, Martha. The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. Ferrari, Andrea. Theatrum mortis: la marionetta nel teatro di regia. Azzano San Paolo: Edizioni Junior, 2009. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of The Human Sciences. New York: Random House, 1970. Frank, Peter. “Video Art Installations: The Telenvironment.” In Video Art: An Anthology, eds. Ira Schneider and Beril Korot, 204–209. New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1976. García, María Consuelo. Interview by Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández. May 8, 2019. Goldblatt, David. Art and Ventriloquism. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.

108  Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández Gómez, Eduardo. “Los años ochenta en el teatro colombiano.” Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico 15 (1988): 109–120. Gordon Craig, Edward. “The Actor and the Über-Marionette.” The Mask 1, no. 2 (1908): 3–15. Gross, Kenneth. Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. Kalmanovitz, Salomón. Economía y nación. Bogotá: Siglo XXI, 1985. Kaphlin, Stephen. “Puppetry into the Next Millennium.” Puppetry International 1 (1994): 37–39. Keehn, Thomas B. “Foreword.” In Puppets and Population, eds. Martha Keehn and Linda Burgess, 5–8. New York: World Education, 1972. Kraemer, Ross S. “Ecstasy and Possession: The Attraction of Women to the Cult of Dionysus.” The Harvard Theological Review 72, no. 1/2 (1979): 55–80. Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function.” In Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, 75–81. New York: Norton & Company, 2007. Le Boeuf, Patrick. “On the Nature of Edward Gordon Craig’s Über-Marionette.” New ­Theatre Quarterly 26 (2010): 102–114. León, Paulo César. “El Teatro La Mama y el M-19, 1968–1976.” Historia y Sociedad 17 (2009): 217–233. Lira, Elizabeth. “Guerra psicológica: intervención política de la subjetividad colectiva.” In Psicología Social de la Guerra: trauma y terapia, ed. Ignacio Martín-Baró, 138–159. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1990. Marín, Jonier. “Marta Traba y la Retaguardia.” El Tiempo. Lecturas Dominicales. August 11, 1974. Mbembe, Achille. “The Colony: Its Guilty Secret and Its Accursed Share.” In Terror and the Postcolonial, eds. Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, 27–54. Malden, MA: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2010. Mejía, Antonio, Ingeniería Eléctrica en la Ciudad Universitaria. Bogotá: UNAL, 2011. Montagut, Muriel. El ser y la tortura. Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, 2016. Ospina, Andrés. “El evangelio según Goyeneche.” El Blogotazo (blog). October 1, 2010. Ospina, Ximena. Premio vida y obra 2008: Carlos José Reyes. Bogotá: Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá, 2010. Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Portelli, Serge. Pourquoi la torture? Paris: Vrin, 2011. Posner, Dassia N. “Life-Death and Disobedient Obedience: Russian Modernist Redefinitions of the Puppet.” In The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, eds. Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein and John Bell, 130–143. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Schumann, Peter. “The Radicality of the Puppet Theatre.” The Drama Review 35, no. 4 (1991): 75–83. https://doi.org/10.2307/1146164. Stoddart, Helen. “Subtle Wasted Traces: Fellini and the Circus.” In Federico Fellini: ­C ontemporary Perspectives, eds. Frank Burke and Marguerite R. Waller, 47–64. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Tillis, Steve. “The Art of Puppetry in the Age of Media Production.” The Drama Review 43, no. 3 (1999): 182–195. Traba, Marta. Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950–1970. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2005. Valencia, Gloria. “Arte joven para un país joven.” El Tiempo. November 26, 1980, 1-D. Valencia, Gloria. “Muñecos y arte video.” El Tiempo. November 28, 1980.

García’s Juegos: Puppets, Immunity, Torture  109 Vázquez, María Eugenia. Escrito para no morir: Bitácora de una militancia. Bogotá: ­M inisterio de Cultura, 2000. Williams, Margaret. “Including the Audience: The Idea of ‘the Puppet’ and the Real S­ pectator.” Australasian Drama Studies 51 (2007): 119–132. Williams, Margaret. “The Death of ‘The Puppet’?” In The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, eds. Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein and John Bell, 18–29. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: ­Routledge, 2008.

6 Dialectic Silence Schizophonia in Juan Muñoz’s Ventriloquist Dummy Cintia Gutiérrez Reyes

There is a realm in black and white interrupted only by the color of the sand, which reveals itself as a voice in the desert. It seems that, suddenly, we could meet Giovanni Drogo, tired of the silence whose calm is interrupted only by the echo of his own words. Guarded among battlements, Drogo, the main character in Dino Buzatti’s novel The Tartar Steppe, awaits something in this hostile world of absences and voids. The noble mission for which he seemed destined is at risk of becoming pathetic if life only means waiting: “What a boring life it was going to be (…) It seemed obvious that their former hopes, their warlike dreams, their constant waiting for the enemy had been no more than a pretext to give life some significance.”1 This feeling of hopeless waiting is manifest in numerous installations by the sculptor Juan Muñoz (1953–2001), an essential, late twentieth-century Spanish artist. He is perhaps best known for installations such as Wasteland (1986), Conversations Piece (1999), and Double Bind (2000), which he exhibited at the peak of his career at the Tate Modern in London, just after receiving the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Spain and planning a retrospective exhibition of his work in Washington, DC that traveled to Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston. Muñoz’s growing recognition is grounded in the fact that while acknowledging a prominent Spanish legacy of artists, including Velázquez and Goya along with popular cultural and religious celebrations, such as El Zangarrón, Holy Week, or Los Cabezones, he did not leave aside the influence and research of international creators, such as Marcel Broodthaers, Charles Ray, or Carl André. Consequently, Muñoz became part of a new wave of international artists such as Robert Gober, Kiki Smith, Thomas Shütte, and Jeff Wall, among others, who began to revisit both the figure and the possibility of narrative in contemporary art. There are three vital elements in Juan Muñoz’s narrative work: a ventriloquist’s doll, which appeared for the first time in the Wasteland and remained a recurring motif in his repertoire, evident, for example, in two versions of Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior (1988, 2000);2 a dwarf, who emerges in 1988 as a protagonist in significant works such as The Prompter (1988), Dwarf with Parallel Lines (1989), or, as a female version, with Sara in Front of a Mirror (1995); and, last, the anophthalmia used in his series of roly-poly figures between 1990 and his death in 2001.3 Starting in 1986, and throughout the remainder of his career, Muñoz repeatedly turned to the figure of the ventriloquist, whom he rendered in the reduced scale of a dummy. Although ventriloquism requires the separation of performer and dummy for its artistic efficacy, in Muñoz’s work there is confusion between the role of the performer and the role of dummy. Concentrating on this core element

DOI: 10.4324/9781003303978-9

Dialectic Silence: Schizophonia in Ventriloquist Dummy  111 of his artistic work, I will address first the influences and elements that inform Muñoz’s ­installations, particularly as they concern the ventriloquist dummy, such as Velázquez’s portraits of dwarfs in Habsburg Spain, when dwarfs entertained the royalty; the circus barracks and the exhibition at the entresorts of dwarfs and other “abnormal” creatures; and finally the dianoetic smile, as defined by Samuel ­B eckett, and as applicable to the spectator who feels uncomfortable, exposed, or, put otherwise, on the spot in Juan Muñoz’s installations, given the sculpture’s spatial disposition and facial expressions, which seem to be murmuring in silence about the viewer’s presence. The essay will then turn its focus to two groundbreaking installations. The first, Wasteland (1986) (Figure 6.1), emphasizes, as I will argue, the relation between Muñoz’s dummy and the well-known pop culture figure Charlie McCarthy, doll of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, thereby illustrating Muñoz’s avid research into contemporary idols of popular culture. At the same time, I will connect the conflation of ventriloquist and dummy with Muñoz’s late twentieth-century religious and creative crises, which were deeply connected to voice and silence as well as dissociation. Throughout, I will stress the dissociation of the voice from its source grounded on the McGurk effect, “a cross-modal effect resulting from conflicting information coming from different senses, namely sight and hearing,”4 and introduce a new concept I have termed dialectical or “schizophonic silence.” The second work I consider is Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior (1988, 2000) (Figure 6.2), 5 and although it is considered a transitional installation in Muñoz’s work, it is essential for clarifying the distinctions between the ventriloquist’s dummy, the humanoid, and, finally, the dwarf, which are, in turn, crucial for understanding aspects of Muñoz’s figuration,

Figure 6.1  Juan Muñoz, Wasteland, 1986. ©Juan Muñoz Estate.

112  Cintia Gutiérrez Reyes

Figure 6.2  J uan Muñoz, Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior, 2000. ©Juan Muñoz Estate.

both symbolically and formally. This argument will then be linked to the plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s TV episode The Glass Eye in order to provide a new interpretation of Muñoz’s installations and practice more broadly.

Elements and Influences behind Juan Muñoz’s Ventriloquist Dummy The ventriloquist dummy in Juan Muñoz’s installations reflects two phenomena: the condition of perfect solitude and that of waiting monotonously for something that never happens. In Wasteland (1986) and Ventriloquist Looking at a Double I­ nterior (1988–2000), among others, the figures, through their facial expressions, seem to

Dialectic Silence: Schizophonia in Ventriloquist Dummy  113 laugh, murmur, or even hiss words, though the installation is devoid of sound. Instead, Muñoz’s stories resonate psychologically inside our heads, not unlike the dwarf used by the Hapsburgs, whose contagious laugh inspired mirth among their guests. In an interview, Muñoz explained that the House of Habsburg in Spain bought this dwarf precisely because he suffered from a strange disease, probably gelastic seizure, which caused him to break into hysterical laughter with no reason.6 The royal family would show him off after banquets for entertainment, and his laugh was so contagious that nobody could resist; finally, when they grew bored, they would return him to his chambers in the palace until the next celebration.7 Similarly, Muñoz’s characters try to coax us with their smiles but do so in silence. Nevertheless, a laughter resonates in our head triggered by the “loquacious mimicry of the sculptures’ gestures”8 when the conscience associates certain gestures of the mouth, as a smile, with sounds. As I am suggesting, this type of silence penetrates memory like an echo until it becomes a maddening humming, histrionic rumor that mutes like the pathetic laugh of dwarfs, buffoons, or other characters painted by Velázquez in El bufón Calabacillas ­(1635–1639) or El niño de Vallecas (1635–1645). Their pathetic smiles and engrossed gazes show a mental disorder as was very common among the “lowlifes of palace.”9 If Muñoz’s work reflects Velázquez’s influence, Wasteland, Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior (1988), and the dwarf in Dwarf with a Box (1988) can also be connected to a circus show called entresort or Halls of Mistery. As described by Hughes Le Roux and Jules Garnier, an entresort is “any booth which contains a permanent show without beginning or end, an establishment which the public only walks through” where one might find “dwarfs, monstrosities, learned flees and tattooed women” and the ventriloquist dummy on exhibition.10 According to Rubén Polanco, Muñoz’s sculpture workshop assistant, the inspiration for the Madrid artist to create the ventriloquist’ and dwarfs, among other figures, was Hugues Le Roux’s and Jules Garnier’s book Acrobat and Mountebank (1890), which he found in a street market in London and made the cornerstone of this project.11 Muñoz extends the exploration of the human body toward characters that historically have been reduced to the status of pathetic figures or clowns, transforming the body “from a goddess into a demon, from a demon into a monster, and finally from a monster into a masterpiece.”12 Moreover, this preference for what can be considered grotesque bodies—the dwarf, the ventriloquist doll, etc.—even beyond his native Spanish cultural influences: Velázquez, Goya, El Zangarrón, or Los ­Cabezones— reveals that Muñoz’s work overall had a satirical capacity to question what is socially considered “normal.”13 In fact, he also developed a second, related iconography inspired by the entresort or Halls of Mistery evident in works such as Four Laughing at Each Other (1999) or Thirteen Laughing at Each Other (2001), which consists of life-size figures, laughing on the bleachers, perpetually amused by whatever stands before them in the space of the gallery. Our mere presence is enough to inspire the sculptures to break into unceasing laughter. This laughter inspires two questions: why am I laughing (along with the sculptures) and why are they (the sculptures) laughing at me? As Muñoz has said: “Do I feel sorry for myself or is it him I feel sorry for? I don’t know if it has to do with the grotesque, in the sense of provoking it, or with the experience of otherness (…).”14 As the artist seems to suggest, this laughter may result from exposure to our interior monstrosity, which is the other within. For example, works such as Enano con Tres Columnas (1988) and Sara con espejo (1996) invite us to reflect on the discomfort we feel when

114  Cintia Gutiérrez Reyes we see a dwarf. The first work shows a dwarf at the end of the room, next to the wall, looking forward, and in front, on the sides, emerge three Solomonic columns. The spectator immediately discriminates between the dwarf and the sizes of the columns. The second piece displays a dwarf called Sara looking at herself in a mirror, and when the spectator approaches, both images of the bodies are reflected, and again there is a contrast in size. Moreover, Muñoz postulates that it is not the size that causes this feeling; it is because we fear that the creature will see us as abnormal.15 This feeling also emerges in relation to Four Laughing at Each Other (1999) and Thirteen ­L aughing at Each Other (2001). The spectator experiences himself as a ridiculous creature even before he has committed a shameful act. So, these four installations are ones in which Muñoz uses the figure of the dummy/dwarf to show, without ambiguity, the proximity between laughter, amazement, and anguish. In this ambiguous, liminal zone, comicality and tragedy trap the spectators in a predicament that is common to all of Muñoz’s installations. These installations—and especially Wasteland (1986) and Many Times (1999)—invite us, thanks to their compositions and the placement of their figures, to enter and traverse Muñoz’s universe without knowing if we are part of the story he is narrating or an interloper or spectator operating with full immunity. This uncertainty builds tension inside the spectator, who feels uncertain and out of place. Laughter, which the sculpture encourages, becomes the only bearable way out through a last gesture of despair. It is a laugh that Samuel Beckett defines as dianoetic: “It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs—silence please—at that which is unhappy.”16 Hence, it’s clear that Muñoz introduces us to this world in a way that is not innocent, soliciting our presence where we do not belong, where laughter is threatened by the sinister. Something analogous happens in the 1976 short story “The Smile” by J.G. Ballard, in which the smile of a doll seduces the narrator, who eventually transforms the facial expression into the macabre grimace of an embalmed person. It is the smile that we can see in the ventriloquist’s dummy in Wasteland (1986).

Wasteland: A Space for Waiting The Wasteland installation consists of a small sculpture that takes the form of the dummy, Charlie McCarthy, the most famous character of the ventriloquist Edgar ­Bergen. He is seated on a shelf over a tiled floor, whose geometric motif was inspired by Italian baroque architect Francesco Borromini’s floorings in the seventeenth-­ century church Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome. The orphaned bronze ventriloquist doll sits in solitude without his ventriloquist, legs hanging and smiling mouth frozen in a grotesque rictus. The floor occupies the whole space in the room, forcing the spectator to walk across it, while the shelf breaks the hypnotic continuity of the ground, creating a hidden area behind the dummy that seems to imply another presence or possible action. As Muñoz said: “I would like the spectator to be able to move around the installation as an actor moves on stage.”17 From 1937 to 1956, Bergen had a significant impact on American radio with the program titled The Chase and Sanborn Hour, which was broadcast on Saturdays on NBC, even though few listeners knew that one of the “performers” was a doll.18 Hence, it is not insignificant given that Muñoz chose him for a model for his sculpture (Figure 6.3). As he notes: “I made a perfect copy of one such ventriloquist’s doll

Dialectic Silence: Schizophonia in Ventriloquist Dummy  115

Figure 6.3  Charlie McCarthy. © Old Radio.

because a ­ventriloquist is always a storyteller. However, a ventriloquist’s doll without the ventriloquist also becomes a storyteller.”19 Charlie, who is one of the most famous wooden dolls in pop culture, along with Pinocchio, became a member of Edgar Bergen’s family. Furthermore, his daughter, actress Candice Bergen, became a ventriloquist doll in her own right, sitting on her father’s right knee, next to Charlie. As she recalls: When Charlie was there, my Dad would sit him on one knee and me on the other, and he’d put a hand on both our necks, and when he squeezed my neck, I’d move my mouth, and when he squeezed Charlie’s neck, he’d move his. As Charlie and I yammered away at each other across my father, mouths flapping soundlessly, behind us, smiling politely, sat my Dad, happily speaking for both of us. 20 Candice’s story affirms that liminal space in which the ventriloquist’s doll is situated: apart from the human, though, at the same time, identified with the human.

116  Cintia Gutiérrez Reyes The figure of the dummy in Wasteland, abandoned by the ventriloquist, demands ­attention with his rictus, behaving like a sonic presence that poses another way of representing words through what is unspeakable. Sculptures do not speak, Muñoz recalls, “and yet there is something in the dummy’s voice that finds its echo in the very core of the spectator.”21 Here I should stress that for Muñoz and others there is an important difference between sculptures and statues. As the artist has observed, during the Second Republic in Spain (1931–1936), some religious images had their heads chopped off, and their eyes and noses torn to transform them from statues to sculptures. They were still physical entities, says Muñoz, but no longer a source of belief and faith. So the statues were mutilated to avoid “feeling” their voices. 22 Relatedly, Juan Muñoz, in an interview, recalls his fascination with an image of the Virgin in a procession during Seville’s Holy Week. So strong was his impression that he wished to have the religious experience, he says, that made the devotees shake or cry in front of the image. Yet, Muñoz also claimed that nobody would ask twentieth-century artists to create an image for adoration. Nevertheless, the voice in Muñoz’s Wasteland resonates in the viewer’s head like a prayer, perhaps because of the connection between Muñoz’s work and the influence of Italian architect Francesco Borromini. According to Muñoz, the baroque architect may not have believed in God, yet remained capable of configuring liturgical space wherein spectators could express faith and have it confirmed. Muñoz says that his contemporaries do not have to satisfy demands related to faith, and so artists of his generation assume a kind of freedom to create only according to what they feel and about themselves, though at a certain point end up with very little or nothing to say.23 The paradox, however, is that to transmit this resulting crisis, Muñoz engages traditional elements from Catholic churches created (mainly) by Borromini. One also sees this strategy at work in Muñoz’s Del borrar (1986), a precedent of Wasteland. In this installation, on the “altar-ledge” next to the ventriloquist’s dummy, the artist placed a schematic drawing, made on a bronze plate, of Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome, a church known as “San Carlino” for its small dimensions. It is intriguing how the doll, the vaudeville, establishes a dialogue with a church dedicated to its saint’s name (Carlino-Charlie). We can conclude that the sculpture of the ventriloquist dummy usurps the sacred saint’s place. This upsetting by the ventriloquist’s dummy of the sacred appears still more dramatically in Wasteland, where instead of a schematic representation of a church one finds a recreation of the two-tone tessellations featuring arrows at Borromini’s Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza church in Rome. 24 As Muñoz puts it: “… one space engenders the other, there is a multiplication of spaces, and each of them implicitly contains all the others.” The eye’s attention falters off-center, between geometric figures that instantly claim the other, or, as Muñoz describes it, “the motionless is presented as a centrifuge.”25 At Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, the central and lateral nave guide the believer toward the crossing and finally to the place in front of the presbytery, a privileged location for an epiphany. But in Wasteland, Muñoz places the figure of the ventriloquist dummy in the epiphany’s location; it is seated on the shelf where it “imposes both his presence and his time in suspense” and generates a “feeling of an invisible omniscience.”26 As mentioned previously, the path of attention in Borromini does not move toward seclusion, veneration, or the sacred; instead, it is directing the eye to search for, as Juan Muñoz mentions, “a god that will appear or where the gods have just fled or where

Dialectic Silence: Schizophonia in Ventriloquist Dummy  117 the appearance of the divine takes too long.”27 Thus the desolate space of Wasteland becomes controversial: the spectator walks through a place where the geometric pattern on the floor emphasizes a sense of spiritual loss, as Muñoz said: “My work is about a human being in a dark room, waiting for nothingness.”28 Moreover, the floor patterns encourage a sense of loss and uncertainty: if one looks down, the effect is dizzying. And if one looks up, one finds a dummy who sits and returns the viewer’s gaze with a sardonic smile. Indeed, the spectator remains alone with the ventriloquist’s dummy waiting for something transcendent, either faith or a revelation, which never happens. Helpful here are the words of St. Augustine, who wrote: “I wandered, O my God, too much astray from Thee my stay, in these days of my youth, and I became to myself a waste land.”29 These words could reflect the idea of denizens walking in this wasteland who become aware of the one on the other side, the dummy to whom the motifs on the ground lead, who occupies the reality of what is sacred, the presbytery, as a metaphor for the spiritual dimension of existence. The saint evokes the voice of God, and yet, instead of situating a sacred figure, the spectator finds a ventriloquist’s dummy, whose facial expression activates the voice of our conscience; that is, our memories. This usurpation happens because Muñoz’s work evokes what I am calling “schizophic silence,” an idea derived from work in sound theory by Murray Schafer (1977), Steven Connor (2000), and Mark ­Stuart-Smith (2012). Muñoz’s Wasteland exemplifies this concept well in that therein natural sound has been displaced by psychological sound.30 This switching ensues because Muñoz’s installation continually resorts to the so-called McGurk effect: the use of visual elements that are part of the viewer’s subconscious imaginary, both in terms of form and associable sounds. According to Steven Connor: The McGurk effect demonstrates how ready we are to hear something that we think ought to be there, but is not. The striking thing about the McGurk effect is that no matter how many times one sees or hears it in action, it does not seem possible to countermand the brain’s determination to conjure a sound that is not there to correspond with the speech movements that are. We are, it seems, as helpless before our determination to hear voices, or to hear them in a certain way, as the psychotic is before the self-born voices that torment him.31 In Wasteland, psychological sound is the ventriloquist’s dummy and his rictus. ­However, elsewhere in his practice, Muñoz uses drums, as in Many Drums (1994), or bells in ­Ballerina on Optical Floor (1989), or laughing characters in Many Times (1999). Each of these elements activates sound in the spectator’s mind without an audible presence. And so, according to the McGurk effect’s notion that we inevitably associate certain objects with their sounds, when we see the ventriloquist-less dummy in Wasteland, the viewer automatically needs to hear him. And yet the installation is silent, leaving the viewer to switch to an internal voice.32 Muñoz creates in Wasteland a dialectical silence, in which “silence continues to be, inevitably, a form of language and therefore an element of dialogue.”33 Yet, it is important to stress that the dialogue is internal. As Lynne Cooke has written: “Caught center stage, alone and vulnerable, the spectator is exposed not to the gaze of another—Muñoz’s figures are typically withdrawn, absorbed, or otherwise distracted—but rather, he or she becomes subject to a specularity of the divided self.”34 So, in Wasteland, as in the art of ventriloquism more generally, the self and the otherness of the dummy are, in fact, two aspects of subjectivity.

118  Cintia Gutiérrez Reyes So Wasteland is a space for faith in which the dummy occupies the place of the sacred, the altar, and usurps the saint’s role to emphasize that there is no spiritual voice anymore. Instead, the spectator sees a dummy, but Juan Muñoz has placed him without his ventriloquist, and this absence actives a psychological voice: the voice of our consciousness. As the artist said: “He sits there, waiting for you in order to talk. He still does not speak, but his identity endows him with some capacity to tell a story.”35 The (arguably orphaned) doll without his ventriloquist seems to keep talking and does not give up. That stubborn attitude resembles that of persecuted Christians living in the fifth century in North Africa under Vandal King Hunneric, who, refusing to embrace the Vandals’ Arianism, had their tongues cut out and yet, miraculously, continued to be able to preach the Word of God in their ablated condition. 36 With the body speechless, the voice has been restored as if it were miraculous, a metaphor for God, who, to promulgate his doctrine, seizes the speech of his servants. Moreover, the relationship between the ventriloquist and his doll is very dependent and personal. Muñoz wrote that in the dressing room, hours before a performance, the ventriloquist and the doll could greet each other insofar as “one has a tongue, the other language.”37 In this way, since the voice is disconnected from its origin, the ventriloquist begins talking to narrate himself through the dummy. The “I” is transposed, lost, and the unknown speaking body reflects a crisis of authorship: Who is talking? The dummy? The ventriloquist? Like this, the rambling voice we hear in our head while we walk through Wasteland is a wanderer without a subject to claim for its origin. Muñoz’s interest in the idea of an indeterminate relationship between the voice and its source inspired him to name his installation Wasteland after T.S. Eliot’s 1922 renowned, fragmented poem of the same name, a collection of discrete voices whose relationship to the author remains unclear and tenuous. Muñoz told Adrian Searle that after reading Eliot “you have the impression it’s a voice in an empty room.”38 This statement makes sense because the poem’s opening epigraph is the story of the Cumaenan Sibyl: “I have seen with my own eyes the Sybil hanging in a jar, and when the voice asked her ‘What do you want?’ She answered, ‘I want to die.’”39 Borrowed by Eliot from Petronius’ Satyricon (1st century AD), this fragment belongs to a parodic-burlesque tradition that evokes the anti-heroic end of the prophetess. Sibyl asked Apollo to live as long as grains of sand fit in a handful of earth, but she forgot to ask for eternal youth. Her disgust at life reflects the affliction of the characters created by Eliot, and, as we are arguing, Muñoz. Last, Ovid in Metamorphoses (8 AD) says that Sibyl, consumed by old age, could not be seen by anyone and yet could be recognized by her voice.40 With this in mind, Muñoz notably used devices that enabled him to display a disembodied physical voice, much like that of the consumed Cumaean Sibyl, including “[m] aterials that are surprising in the hands of a sculptor: music, sound, voice.”41 With them, he created works to be broadcast on the radio—Building for Music (1993), A Man in a Room Gambling (1997), Will It Be a Likeness? (1996), A Registered Patent (2001)—and used this disembodied medium to reach a broader public. His persuasive “storyteller voice” spread through the waves of a medium in which space dematerializes, leaving only imaginary territory, where fiction and reality overlap. In these radio pieces, Muñoz’s voice splits from its source and thus becomes a “ventriloquized” voice because it originates in a place invisible to the listener: the radio. That disengagement of the voice from a natural source is best referred to as schizophony.42

Dialectic Silence: Schizophonia in Ventriloquist Dummy  119 Therefore, in Juan Muñoz’s radio pieces, the listener experiences the other side of schizophony: there is a voice, but no recognition of its source. Consequently, his radiophonic works highlight the search for a narrative language and could be considered another part of his sculptural work. They analyze the connection between sound and vision. Furthermore, to do so, Muñoz’s voice describes situations and actions that depend on sight, so the spectator, transformed into a listener, must reconstruct in his imagination, subjectively, what the artist has said. For example, in the piece Building for Music (1993), created for Sonsbeek 93 (Arnhem, Netherlands), the artist narrates the fictitious destruction of a building that was never built, the Concerthalle in Arnhem. He begins the description with the phrase: “Allow me an image.” Paradoxically, it is via a medium, the radio, that does not need images that the author asks the listener to picture. However, this request makes sense when he begins to describe the rooms and the plan of the building. In the same way, this effect happens in A Man in a Room, Gambling (1997), a succession of radio programs where Juan Muñoz described card games. To be able to follow the description, the listener must know the deck of cards. Therefore, the radio pieces move away from psychological sound, as in ­Wasteland, to focus on physical sound. Thus, in both cases, from the process of creating Charlie’s sculpture to the radio pieces, Juan Muñoz is scrutinizing the options of ventriloquism. This misunderstanding of sight and hearing, which is crucial for the performance of ventriloquism, became part of Muñoz’s development as an artist. First, in Wasteland, the sculpture suggests a psychological voice, making a strong tie between image and sound. On the other hand, in the radio pieces, the voice suggests mental images. But the crisis that Muñoz asserts in Wasteland is not only religious. The end of the twentieth century brought a crisis of credibility in modernity, a disbelief that Muñoz considered a consequence of artists becoming reader-writers of their work, a self-­centered attitude that obviated the viewer. As a consequence, the artist avoids projecting his emotions and therefore excludes the possibility of telling stories. Muñoz uses the expression “wasteland” to refer to that drift of modernity that coincides with Eliot’s title and, as mentioned, his 1986 installation. Some critics, on the one hand, have connected Muñoz’s floor in Wasteland with the geometric pieces by minimalist artist Carl André such as Still Blue Range (1989) or 50 Triangles Forming a Square (1969);43 on the other hand, his dummy recalls the iconography used by the conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers in his installation Monsieur Teste (1974). As Muñoz explained, Wasteland is an image about the temptation to reinvent (…) the dummy shows the possibility of representing the zero point of significance of the human figure just as the ground takes the cube or square as zero point in your annotation status.44 He concludes that what is essential is what is added; that is, the experience of the spectator in front of the cube. Besides, when he uses the dummy as the zero-point image of the human being in Wasteland, Muñoz means that the image is not important, yet our psychological projection upon the image is. As a result, one can conclude that Wasteland is emblematic of Muñoz’s commitment to revitalizing figurative sculpture and is part of the first generation of similarly motivated figurative American and European sculptors of the late 1980s, including Robert Gober, Mike Kelley,

120  Cintia Gutiérrez Reyes Thomas Schüte, Katharina Fritsch, Paul McCarthy, Stephan Balkenhol, Charles Ray, Kiki Smith, and Jeff Wall, who likewise used the sculpted figure to give their work a narrative structure. During the creation of his ventriloquist’s doll, Muñoz explained his fascination with Degas’s L’Homme et le pantin (1878) in which the painter Henry Michel-Lèvy appears in his studio as if he were a ventriloquist together with the pantin, or doll, leading him to visit the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon a dozen times to see the picture. Further, Muñoz analyzes Vermeer’s painting The Geographer (1669) in his 2001 literary work On the Precision of Distances, which he accompanied with two images: a cutout and a drawing of one of his 1986 notebooks.45 The text describes the main character, the geographer, recalling what Muñoz had said about his doll: “It appears somewhat disinterested. It rather seems that it is looking at the shadow of the person who walks on the ground.”46 Taking this into account, both the geographer and the doll seem absent-minded, distracted by something beyond the spectator. Adjacent to the cutout of Vermeer’s work, on the adjoining page of the notebook dated to 1986—the year he finished Wasteland—the sculptor included a small doodle of a figure sitting on a folded tapestry with the shape of a mountain and wrote: “Study the possibility of making the carpet.”47 This horizontal element, the carpet, had already been used the year before by the artist in Minarete para Otto Kurz where he had placed the carpet horizontally, as if it were the plan of a city, and locates the place where the voice resides, the minaret, as a vertical element. Muñoz said: “They become inhabited by other voices and other lives and, in time, other things grow from them. I think that without the carpet, I would not have made the floors.”48 In Wasteland, the floor replaces the carpet and the doll the minaret. Furthermore, what is disturbing about Muñoz’s 1986 notebook of a figure sitting on a folded tapestry and with the shape of a mountain is the presence of a second figure on the left of the page, on the top, who appears as if he is going to possess the main character. A spirit? A ghost? The automaton is always double, Muñoz concluded.49 This relationship of the automaton with the double appears clearly in Paul Valéry’s novel Monsieur Teste (1986) whose narrator wrote: Read what follows and you will see that the only company, the only society that the narrator or double seems willing to tolerate (and that will begin soon by that of Monsieur Teste), it is that of the absolute solitaries who bear multiplicity in them, who double, triple and multiply.50 That is to say, in the case of Monsieur Teste, what happens is something similar to Charlie in Wasteland. They are both solitaires, dummies without their ventriloquist. As such, they become multiple projections of the spectators who enter the installation or read the book. The personification of Monsieur Teste as a ventriloquist doll was used by Marcel Broodthaers in his 1974 piece with the same name in which a middle-aged automaton with rosy cheeks and a caricatured face examines the pages of the August 1975 issue of the international magazine L’Express, whose cover mixes current affairs (“Giscard Au Zaire”) with other issues (“L’Amour Après 60 Ans”).51 The affinities between installations by Muñoz and Broodthaers go beyond the formal aspect, namely, the creation of a space-room, where the spectator can move, and the use of an anthropomorphic figure, a ventriloquist’s dummy in Muñoz or the automaton in Broodthaers.

Dialectic Silence: Schizophonia in Ventriloquist Dummy  121 In fact, both installations establish a symbolic link with the title of literary texts: Muñoz’s Wasteland (1986) is ineluctably connected to Eliot’s poem, while Broodthaers’s invokes Paul Valéry’s novel Monsieur Teste. In both cases, the doll borrows its voice from the narrator, who makes his look-alike doll talk when they meet. He knows the doll as well as himself, as if he had made it, like a puppeteer who has created his puppet or a tailor his suit. In this way, the ventriloquist’s dummy costume becomes the shelter for the ventriloquist’s body, who is in hiding, resulting in an identity conflict, a confusion of roles, one that creates a liminal space between the I and the Other. This intersection explains why in 1987 Muñoz stopped alluding to an absent ventriloquist and instead created a hybrid figure which unified the dummy and the ventriloquist in one body, as seen in the protagonist of his work Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior (1988).

Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior: A Space for Liberation In Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior (1988; 2000), a ventriloquist’s dummy seated with his back to the viewer on a little wall contemplates two enigmatic scenes sketched with white chalk on a black raincoat-like fabric. What’s more, there is a mechanism that moves the dummy’s mouth, though no ventriloquist, and he remains silent.52 The drawings remind us of stage sets and film noir storyboards. Art critic and friend of the artist Adrian Searle confirms that Muñoz was very familiar with numerous horror films in which a ventriloquist doll as protagonist came alive, including The Great Gabho (1929), Dead of Night (1945), Magic (1978), The Dummy (1979), Avargal (1979), and “The Glass Eye” (1957). 53 Indeed, Muñoz was a particularly avid follower of the British film director Alfred Hitchcock, who had a significant influence on works including Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior and Dwarf with a box, both from 1988 as well as an Untitled drawing from 1992. Of particular note is “The Glass Eye” (1957), the first episode of the third season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, an American television series that ran from 1955 to 1962. First broadcast on Saturday, October 6, 1957, at 9:30 PM on the CBS network,54 Stirling Silliphan adapted the episode from Scottish writer John Keir Cross’ short story of the same title.55 Starting with the discovery of its titular foreign object, “The Glass Eye” tells the bizarre story of a woman named Julia and her great love, Max Collodi. While cleaning the apartment of his deceased Aunt Julia, Bernard, the off-camera narrator, finds a glass eye, the discovery of which prompts him to tell Julia’s story to his wife in flashback. In love with the famous ventriloquist Max Collodi56 all of whose performances she had dutifully followed, Julia sent him a series of letters in which she begged to meet him. Max eventually agreed to meet her in his hotel room, where she found the ventriloquist, in the dark, next to his doll George. After five minutes of conversation, she prepared to leave the room, but before doing so could not resist touching her beloved, whose inert arm made her scream. The scuffle caused Max to fall to the ground, at which point one of his glass eyes rolls onto the carpet and is picked up by Julia while George, standing up at the table, shouted that she should leave. An uncanny reversal is thus revealed: Max was the ventriloquist’s dummy, and George was the ventriloquist who passed as a dummy because he was a dwarf. The story concludes when Bernard returns to the present and mentions that there is a small traveling circus with a strange clown who is a dwarf with a patch in the left eye. We can deduce from the episode’s final scene that the dwarf, following the hotel

122  Cintia Gutiérrez Reyes incident, pulled his eye out to place it in Max, the dummy, so that they might be able to continue delivering the show. Inspired by Hitchcock’s episode, the ventriloquist’s dummy mutates in ­Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior (1988–2000), where it is no longer the figure inspired by Charlie McCarthy but rather a new hybrid character that appears fortified in a small humanoid form, assuming qualities of both the dummy and the ventriloquist. 57 The sculpture thus points to the ambiguity set out by Hitchcock’s plot in which the dwarf speaks through the life-size dummy. The artist’s commitment to this idea is evident from the fact that as the ventriloquist’s dummy appeared in a second iteration of the work in 2000, though this time with a new mechanism: the figure moves its lips to recite an inaudible monologue, while remaining absorbed in the mirrored drawings of the inside of his room. Notably, the installation’s sketches correspond to the scene in “The Glass Eye” episode in which Julia visits and sits before Max in his hotel room. Their conversation in the television episode is a plane–counterplane sequence, an envisioned cinematographic language schematized in Muñoz’s sketch with the front and rear view of the sofa in the foreground, which corresponds precisely to where Julia appears in the television episode. In contrast, the background of these mirrored drawings corresponds to the views of Julia and George. However, the spectator, who will probably stand behind the figure, will identify with George as she would occupy his visual perspective. There are two additional compositions by the artist, also based on this episode: Dwarf with a Box (1988), an installation in which the dwarf appears standing on a table, was inspired by the moment in which the dwarf expels Julia from the hotel room after she discovers his secret, and four years later, Muñoz’s drawing Untitled (1992), in which the ventriloquist’s doll holds a mask, while in the lower plane, there is a head missing its left eye, illustrating the scene in which the ventriloquist’s doll takes off his mask to reveal himself as a dwarf with Max Collodi’s head missing an eye. Muñoz wrote referring to the 2000 version of his Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior that [t]he dummy that moves its mouth is the image in the mirror, distorted. True, yet nonetheless a reflection. The deepest of all feelings is strangeness, and the prattling dummy is doubly strange because everything that shapes it and that makes it exist is already alien to it.58 As a result, the image of the dummy, silent but moving his mouth, trying to speak, questions self-reference or identity principles such as “I am me” and “I am here.” The juxtaposition between what is there—the dwarf dressed as a dummy—and what is seen—the ventriloquist’s doll—likewise emerges in the raincoat drawings that the dummy contemplates in the Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior installation. The figure in Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior is a hybrid of dummy and ventriloquist. But in Hitchcock the dwarf is the ventriloquist hiding inside the dummy, but the real dummy is Max Collodi, who is made of wood. The drawings’ dramatic quality, the fact that they appear as if storyboards without actors, relate to Muñoz’s sculptures because “if the drawings succeed in conveying an emotion, it’s because they might give the sense that something has happened or is going to happen,” Muñoz said. “Either you’re too early or too late. It’s always the wrong moment.” In them, the empty spaces of the cabin, walls, and sofa seem to have not

Dialectic Silence: Schizophonia in Ventriloquist Dummy  123 only the need to listen but also the will to be heard. The ventriloquist’s dummy, endowed with a mechanism of speech that moves its mouth, no longer demands the spectator to project thoughts, thus becoming independent of his or her discourse to propose his own. Thus, ­Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior establishes a new variation of “schizophonic or dialectical silence.” One still cannot hear the message and yet manages to understand exactly how the event is not representing the viewer: it is a scene in which the viewer has to (but never can) discover a secret. Similarly, Muñoz enables a prospect of sound—the doll can gesticulate the word, thanks to the mechanical movement of his mouth—that acts under the rules of silence because there is no audible voice.59 Thus, the dissociation between sound and the gestures suggests the impossibility of real communication. In 1988, the year in which Muñoz made the first version of Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior, the figure of the dwarf George appears as the main character in his works Dwarf with a Box, Enano con Tres Columnas, and Dwarf over a ­Column. Muñoz mentions how he found the model for the dwarf: “I asked my friends in Madrid if they knew where I could find a suitable model. Someone advised me to go to this bar and talk with a waiter who knew a man called George.”60 Coincidentally then, both the ventriloquist’s doll of Hitchcock’s television episode and the dwarf who finally acts as a model are called George: a mirrored and remarkable reflection in which the metonymic object usurps the identity of the other. And so the identities of the dwarf and the ventriloquist’s doll are literally confused and in dialogue in Muñoz’s repertoire; indeed, they duplicate to narrate from inside the costume, as in Double Dwarf (1989) or NY Floor Piece (1991). Finally, the dwarf George, figuratively tired of being the ventriloquist’s doll, leaves the costume in Untitled (1991), a work in which Juan Muñoz shows the remains of the mold in which the dwarf has left his indexical trace in attempting to escape the hegemony of the dummy. Once released from the mask, the dwarf appears, yet again, crossing the moorland in Wasteland to play the main character in the Dwarf with Parallel Lines (1989) in which Muñoz transforms the Baroque-inspired kinetic floors into a new pattern, which resembles the zigzagging ones that appear in the film Orphée (dir. Jean ­Cocteau, 1950) or Eraserhead (dir. David Lynch, 1977). In the latter, which portrays a heterocosmic world, everything coexists at the same time, either real or imagined.61 Likewise, Muñoz’s characters multiply their identity to liberate the other, who is no longer relegated. Therefore, the double, knowing that he is unique because he is a hybrid, a personal combination, becomes aware of being an individual. This empowered “thoughtform” or spawn breaks the disguise to stand in the foreground.62 For that reason, Henry Spencer, the protagonist of Eraserhead, loses his head and lets the monster free, while being surrounded by a dream-like decoration with a barren tree, the quintessential symbol of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (1952), which critics have repeatedly connected to Juan Muñoz’s sculptures.63 Already witnessed elsewhere in Muñoz’s work, this gesture liberates the other, the dwarf, who was dressed as the ventriloquist’s doll in installations like Wasteland or Del borrar, so that he could become the main character in Dwarf with Parallel Lines or The Prompter (1988). Muñoz seems to have thought that we were living in a period of Beckettian impossibility and hopelessness. As mentioned above, as a late twentieth-century Spanish artist, he started from skepticism—with a crisis in faith—to a role defined by the freedom to feel and speak. Moreover, Muñoz stated, “I sometimes feel that I have very little or nothing to say.”64 As such, perhaps the dwarf ends up cornered under

124  Cintia Gutiérrez Reyes a prompter’s box in the installation The Prompter (1988)—a scene that recalls the so-called Lady in the Radiator from Eraserhead—where he could possibly try to hum the words: “I’m just a ventriloquist’s doll, just that and nothing else.”65 Briefly, after so much repeating of the other, “neither the dummy nor the dwarf knows who they are. They do not belong to each other, they do not want to know if the other can see itself; it is worthless.”66

Conclusion I hope to have elucidated Muñoz’s exploration of how ventriloquism and the concept of “schizophonic silence” connect consciousness and what the spectator can see with unconsciousness, his memories, and their interaction, thanks to the McGurk effect in which hearing and vision interrelate and determine our perception. To that end, my essay has analyzed Muñoz’s Wasteland installation in which a kinetic floor inspired by Borromini forms a wasteland in which to meander until reaching the site of a ventriloquist’s dummy on an altar. A space traditionally assigned to saints, this place of veneration is here occupied by the ventriloquist’s dummy who, in lieu of evoking religious faith, activates the inaudible yet psychologically inflected voice of the viewer’s conscience. The dummy with a mocking smile is essential since laughter in the work of Muñoz, which harkens back to Velázquez, announces an emotional shift as a grimace through time, in turn evocative of Beckett’s definition of dianoetic laughter. And so it manifests not only the aforementioned religious crisis but also a profound artistic one. As noted, Muñoz insists that late twentieth-century artists do not produce devotional sculptures, leaving them free to narcissistically narrate their own condition. Yet something in that self-centered freedom haunts these supposedly liberated artists: the fear of having nothing else to express. Foregrounding this idea, Muñoz invites spectators to establish meaning for Wasteland, but through their own voices. Hence the installation’s meaning remains self-reflexively open as the work refuses to assert who is “talking”: the author? the dummy? Or the viewer? In this manner, Muñoz’s characters participate in an aesthetic of nihilism whereby ventriloquist’s dolls, dwarfs, and dollies have been torn out from circus spaces called entresorts or Halls of Mystery.67 As an artist, he creatively introduces us to an atrocious vision that confronts the misery of the human condition, its subjects’ liminality with moral monstrosity and physical monstrosity whereby the terror of “normal beings” is seen through other people’s eyes, the freak, and feeling of “difference.” These transient shadows of vaudeville, saints, myths, and seers coexist, lost in an endless plain, as in the poetic Wasteland by T.S. Eliot, from which Muñoz borrows the notion of unique relations between sound and silence insofar as different cultures, voices, epochs, languages, and geographical spaces converge in Eliot’s groundbreaking poem. Muñoz’s works likewise comprise a palimpsest where different arts, periods, silent voices, and narratives collide. And so he extracts misplaced characters who seek an author, just as Luigi Pirandello had famously stated. Seen in this way, the interpretation of these sculptural elements requires the active participation of the spectator who, transformed into an unconscious creator according to the theory of schizophonic silence set forth above, projects new stories onto this mise en scène.

Dialectic Silence: Schizophonia in Ventriloquist Dummy  125 This continuous intersection of pop culture characters, such as Charlie ­McCarthy, and elements from circus iconography, along with high culture symbols, such as General Drogo from The Tartar Steppe, Vermeer’s The Geographer, L’Homme et le pantin by Degas, or Monsieur Teste by Paul Valéry, signals a fracture, as Umberto Eco announced, of the boundaries between arts and their means of expression. The relationship with Hitchcock’s film noir or more experimental movies of David Lynch, like Eraserhead, more specifically, opens a new reading to the works of Muñoz that makes us succumb to the terrible doubt of “he is I.”

Notes 1 Muñoz establishes a parallel between Dino Buzzati’s novel The Tartar Steppe (1940) and his architectural pieces such as minarets, towers, or battlements; see Muñoz interviewed by Poinsot. Jean-Marc Poinsot, Juan Muñoz: Sculpture de 1985 á 1987 (Bordeaux: Capc Musée d’Art Contemporain, 1987), 43–44. For the quote, see Dino Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe, trans. Stuart C. Hood (New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1952), 153–154. 2 Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior has two versions. The first one from 1988, and a second one, a reinterpretation, from 2000, one year before Muñoz’s passing away. The second version is formally the same as the first, except for a mechanical system that moves the dummy’s mouth. 3 Anophthalmia is a congenital birth defect in which a child is born without one or both eyes. For further information: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/anophthalmiamicrophthalmia.html. However, Juan Muñoz uses the concept in a more ambiguous way, as we never know if the sculpture was created without an eye, or it was subsequently pulled out afterward. 4 Umut Baysan, “McGurk Effect,” in The Illusions Index (web), ed. Fiona Macpherson, accessed February 28, 2020, https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/mcgurk-effect. 5 Muñoz made two versions of Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior: the first in 1988 and the second in 2000. The second is a revision of the first; for the 2000 version, Muñoz uses the same elements, but additionally includes a mechanical device in the dummy’s mouth. I see this work as transitional because the ventriloquist’s dummy is no longer ­Charlie but rather an anthropomorphic figure that seems to instantiate a transition to George the Dwarf. In this essay, I will separate both versions with a “;” to indicate when I refer to both versions. 6 Juan Muñoz does not specify to which of Velazquez’s dwarfs he refers to in his 1990 interview with James Lingwood. On the other hand, there is much talk recently about this syndrome due to Todd Philips’s film Joker (2019). The seizure consists of epileptic episodes characterized by sudden and uncontrollable bouts of laughter or crying, see John Kerringham and Sloka Iyengar, https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/types-seizures/ gelastic-and-dacrystic-seizures. 7 James Lingwood, Juan Muñoz: Monologe & dialoge/Monologues & Dialogues (Zurich: Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 1990), 64. 8 Anna Adell Creixell, “Los umbrales de la percepción,” Lápiz 246 (2008): 34. 9 Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, “Monstruos, enanos y bufones,” in Monstruos, enanos y bufones en la corte de los Austrias (a propósito del «Retrato de enano» de Juan van der Hamen), ed. Mena Marqués (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1986), 9–13. 10 Hugues Le Roux and Jules Garnier, Acrobat and Mountebanks (London: Chapman and Hall, limited, 1890), 58–59. 11 Imprescindibles. Juan Muñoz, poeta del espacio, dir. by Manel Arranz and Anna Solana (TVE, 2011), accessed October 16, 2019, http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/ imprescindibles/imprescindibles-juan-munoz-poeta-del-espacio/2398188/. 12 Fernando Castro Flórez, El espacio inquietante del hombre: el lugar del ventrílocuo. Unas reflexiones sobre la obra de Juan Muñoz (Murcia: CENDEAC, 2005), 22. 13 Marina Warner establishes a dialogue between Muñoz’s work, Goya, and traditional Spanish festivals such as Carnival or Corpus Christi, where costumed characters with huge

126  Cintia Gutiérrez Reyes heads stroll through the city, in “Here Comes the Bogeyman: Goya, the Late Grotesque, and Juan Muñoz,” Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art, vol. 2, eds. Karen Kelly and Lynne Cooke (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 2001), 99–121. 14 Adrian Searle and Juan Muñoz, “Third Ear,” in Juan Muñoz. La voz sola. Esculturas, dibujos y obras para la radio, eds. James Lingwood adn Bartomeu Marî (Madrid: La Casa Encendida with Obra Social de Caja Madrid, 2005). 15 Imprescindibles. Juan Muñoz, poeta del espacio, 27’33. 16 Samuel Beckett, Watt (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 70–71. 17 Jean-Marc Poinsot, Juan Muñoz: Sculpture de 1985 á 1987, 16. 18 Although the interaction between the dummy and the ventriloquist is an eminently visual trick in a radio space, therefore, a space for sound, it made sense because during the 1930s and until the 1950s there was a marketed magazine called Photo-Carnival. A Radio Guide’s Picture Panorama of Broadcasting, which documented and presented the characters appearing on radio programs. Moreover, Charlie McCarthy is the central theme of one of the issues, see http://www.charliemccarthy.org/about-charlie.html. On the other hand, the performance of ventriloquists on the radio was not exclusive to Edgar Bergen with Charlie because, during the 1950s, Peter Brought and his doll Archie Andrews enjoyed full recognition on the BBC. On the other hand, the ventriloquist’s drafts were drawn in New York during 1981, although the figure was not made until 1985, and exhibited in 1986. Cristina Iglesias, Juan Muñoz’s widow, confirms in an interview that he modeled the ventriloquist from a type of dummy of the 1930s, see Mark Stuart-Smith, “Juan Muñoz and Silence: Images and Words,” 111. 19 Jordi Colomer and Juan Muñoz, “Diálogos,” Lápiz 99–101 (1994): 382. 20 Candice Bergen, Knock Wood (London: Corgi, 1986), 23. 21 Juan Muñoz and James Lingwood, “A conversation, September 1996,” see Monologe & Dialoge/Monologues & Dialogues, 35. On the other hand, in 1996, the sculptor described how much he would have liked to create a night-murmuring sculpture, which could produce sounds in the dark when there was no one there. With the lights turned off, the sculpture would say something unknown, and everything said would be inaudible, and when the light was finally turned on, the sculpture would again be inert. 22 Jordi Colomer and Juan Muñoz, “Diálogos,” 378–387. 23 Jordi Colomer and Juan Muñoz, “Diálogos,” 378–387. 24 On a notebook page (c. late 1980s) with the heading: suelos (floors) a note reads: 1. ­“Borromini-Sapienza.” JMNB_19.63, see Mark Stuart-Smith, “Juan Muñoz and Silence: Images and Words,” 107. Influence of Borromini on the artist had already been acknowledged by Muñoz and is decisive in the configuration of his floors with kinetic effects used for the first time in Wasteland (1986) and then subsequently in variation in works such as The Prompter (1988) and Dwarf with Parallel lines (1989), amongst others. 25 Juan Muñoz, Escritos/Writings ed. Adrian Searle (Madrid: La Central/Museo Reina Sofía, 2009), 87. 26 José Luis Brea, “Juan Muñoz: Nada es tan opaco como un espejo,” Sur Express 1 (1987): 32–40. 27 Quote of Heidegger, Juan Muñoz, Escritos/Writings, 98. 28 Fernando Castro Flórez, “Algo (no) va a ocurrir,” COAM 327 (2002): 84–95. 29 Interpretation of the title by Viorica Patea, see T.S. Eliot, La tierra baldía, bilingual edition, Viorica Patea (Madrid: ­Cátedra, 1998), 191. 30 Mark Stuart-Smith, Juan Muñoz and Silence: Images and Words (Ph.D., Birkbeck: ­University of London, 2012), 152. 31 Steven Connor, “Panophonia” (Conference, Pompidou Centre, February 22, 2012). 32 Absolute silence, as John Cage believed, does not exist since something always occurs that produces a sound, see John Cage, El silencio, trans. Marina Pedraza (Barcelona: Ardora, 2002), 34. 33 Susan Sontag, Estilos Radicales, trans. Eduardo Goligorsky (Madrid: De Bolsillo, 2014), 56. 34 Lynne Cooke, “Juan Muñoz and the Specularity of the Divided Self,” Parkett 43 (1995): 23. 35 Jordi Colomer and Juan Muñoz, “Diálogos,” Lápiz 99–101 (1994): 382. 36 William Berriman, An Historical Account of the Controversies that Have Been in the Church, Concerning the Doctrine of the Holy and Everblessed Trinity: In Eight Sermons,

Dialectic Silence: Schizophonia in Ventriloquist Dummy  127 preached at the Cathedral-Church of St. Paul, London, 1723 and 1724 (London: T. Ward and C. Rivington, 1725), 326–327. 37 Juan Muñoz, Juan Muñoz: Escritos/Writings, 96. 38 Adrian Searle, “Introduction,” in Juan Muñoz: Escritos/Writings (Madrid: La Central, 2009), 24. 39 “Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: ‘Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις’; responbat illa: ‘ἀποθανεῖν θέλω’,” see Petronio, El satiricón, ed. Lisardo Rubio Fernández (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1978), 75. 40 Ovidio, La Metamorfosis, eds. Consuelo Álvarez and Rosa María Iglesias (Madrid: ­Cátedra, 2003), 713. 41 Jordi Colomer and Juan Muñoz, “Diálogos,” 382. 42 Murray Schafer, El nuevo paisaje sonoro (Buenos Aires: Ricordi, 1959), 58. 43 Although Neal Benezra analyzed this idea in 2001, and Juan Muñoz confirms that such a reference exists; the sculptor clarifies, then, that it is easier to find these floors’ sources in Baroque architecture, especially in palaces and churches, see Jean-Marc Poinsot, Juan Muñoz: Sculpture from 1985 to 1987, 16. 4 4 The lowest possible point of energy of a quantum mechanical system is an analogy of what happened with the human figure representation in sculpture during the twentieth century. The human being is inside a dummy. See Jean-Marc Poinsot, Juan Muñoz: Sculpture de 1985 á 1987, 14. 45 Juan Muñoz, Escritos/Writings, 61. This text had been published in 1997 with the title “Two in One,” in Juan Muñoz: Monologe & Dialoge/Monologues & Dialogues, ed. James Lingwood, 107. 46 Jean-Marc Poinsot, Juan Muñoz: Sculpture de 1985 á 1987, 14. 47 Juan Muñoz, Escritos/Writings, 63. 48 James Lingwood and Juan Muñoz, “A Conversation. September 1996,” in Monologe & Dialoge/Monologues & Dialogues, ed. James Lingwood, 37. 49 Jean-Marc Poinsot, Juan Muñoz: Sculpture de 1985 á 1987, 14. 50 Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste, trans. Salvador Elizondo (Madrid: Piel de Zapa, 2005), 94. 51 Bruce Jenkins, “Postscript: The Impossible Cinema of Marcel Broodthaers,” in The ­Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film, eds. Graeme Harper and Rob Stone (London: WallFlower Press, 2007), 163. 52 This situation radically differentiates it from the previous work, Wasteland (1986), in which the doll appears in the foreground, and there is no possibility of surrounding it. 53 Mark Stuart-Smith, Juan Muñoz: Images and Words, 112. The list of films contains The Great Gabho, dir. by Erich von Stroheim, James Cruze (James Cruze Productions, 1929); Dead of Night, dir. by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, and Robert Hamer (Ealing Studios, 1945); The Glass Eye, dir. by Robert Stevens (Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, 1957); Magic, dir. by Richard Attenborough (20th Century Fox, 1978); The Dummy, dir. by Frank Perry (The Königsberg Company/Warner Bros. Television, 1979); Avargal, dir. by Balanchander (P.R. Govindarajan and J. Duraisamy, 1979). For Muñoz, the most influential is The Glass Eye, as discussed in this paper. However, what binds these films is the idea of the ventriloquist’s dummy coming to life, but the spectator never seems to know for sure if the dummy is autonomous from the ventriloquist. Again, Muñoz is referring to the liminal space between the doll and the ventriloquist, where he questions identity and the origin of voice, either from consciousness or unconsciousness or a mixture of both. 54 Horace Newcomb, Encyclopedia of Television, vol. I A–C (London and New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 2075. 55 John Keir Cross, The Other Passenger: Eighteen Strange Stories (London: John W ­ esthouse, 1944). 56 The name Max Collodi is a reference to Carlo Collodi (1826–1890), the pen name of Carlo Lorenzini, best known for being the author of the fairy tale novel The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883). 57 Sheena Wagstaff, “Un espejo de la conciencia,” in Permítaseme una imagen. Juan Muñoz, ed. Lynne Cooke (Madrid: Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía (accented I), 2009), 34. 58 Juan Muñoz, “El ventrilocuismo es una forma de polifonía,” in Juan Muñoz, Escritos/ Writings, 97.

128  Cintia Gutiérrez Reyes 59 Another piece in which he uses this mechanism is Shadow and Mouth (1996). This installation shows two figures sitting down. The one at a table looks toward the other who is turned backward toward and facing a wall moving his mouth mechanically. 60 Juan Muñoz: Monologe & dialoge/Monologues & Dialogues, ed. James Lingwood, 63. 61 Aarón Rodríguez, “Hacer filosofía en Twin Peaks,” in Regreso a Twin Peaks, eds. Raquel Crisóstomo and Enric Ros (Madrid: Errata Naturae, 2017), 236. 62 Tulpa is a Tibetan word that means “to build.” The concept was first used in the West by the anthropologist Evans-Wentz in 1954. He translated it into English as “thoughtform,” which means the possible translation of an imaginary object or entity to reality thanks to a clear and sustained visualization, see Walter Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Great Realization (Buenos Aires: Kier, 1994), 211. 63 Some of the critics are Sheena Wagstaff in “Un espejo de la conciencia,” in Permítaseme una imagen. Juan Muñoz, ed. Lynne Cooke (Madrid: Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, 2009), 31; or Fernando Castro Florez, El espacio inquietante del hombre: el lugar del ventrílocuo. Unas reflexiones sobre la obra de Juan Muñoz (Murcia: CENDEAC, 2005), 33. 64 Jordi Colomer and Juan Muñoz, “Diálogos,” 383. 65 The analysis of Eraserhead in relation to the work of Juan Muñoz represents a new line of inquiry and will be the subject of future research. The plot and the scenes of Lynch’s film not only influence works such as The Prompter (1988) and Arti et Amicitiae (1988) but also share the kinetic floors that appear in both Muñoz’s Dwarf with Parallel lines (1989) and Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée (1950). On the other hand, this song of resignation was hummed by George, the ventriloquist doll in John Keir Cross’s story, “The Glass Eye,” in The Last Passenger (London: John Westhouse, 1944), 29. 66 This reflection on the work concerning two dwarfs is the closing of an unpublished interview conducted by Luís Lozano at the CGAC on June 17, 1996. See Imprescindibles. Juan Muñoz, poeta del espacio, dir. by Manel Arranz and Anna Solana (TVE, 2011), accessed October 16, 2019, http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/imprescindibles/ imprescindibles-juan-munoz-poeta-del-espacio/2398188/. 67 For a description and images of the circus spaces and characters see Hugues Le Roux and Jules Garnier, The Acrobats and Montebanks (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890).

References Baysan, Umut. “McGurk Effect.” In The Illusions Index (web), ed. Fiona Macpherson. Accessed February 28, 2020. https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/mcgurk-effect. Beckett, Samuel. Watt. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Bergen, Candice. Knock Wood. London: Corgi, 1986. Berriman, William. An Historical Account of the Controversies that Have Been in the Church, Concerning the Doctrine of the Holy and Everblessed Trinity: In Eight Sermons, preached at the Cathedral-Church of St. Paul, London, 1723 and 1724. London: T. Ward & C. ­R ivington, 1725. Brea, José Luis. “Juan Muñoz: Nada es tan opaco como un Espejo.” Sur Express 1 (1987): 32–40. Buzzati, Dino. The Tartar Steppe, trans. Stuart C. Hood. New York: Farrar Straus & Young, 1952. Cage, John. El silencio, trans. Marina Pedraza. Barcelona: Ardora, 2002. Colomer, Jordi and Juan Muñoz. “Diálogos.” Lápiz 99–101 (1994): 378–387. Connor, Steven. “Panophonia,” Conference, Pompidou Centre, February 22, 2012. Cooke, Lynne. “Juan Muñoz and the Specularity of the Divided Self.” Parkett 43 (1995): 20–23. Creixell, Anna Adell. “Los umbrales de la percepción.” Lápiz 246 (2008): 28–47. Cross, John Keir. The Other Passenger: Eighteen Strange Stories. London: John Westhouse, 1944. Eliot, T.S. La tierra baldía, ed. Virica Patea. Madrid: Cátedra, 1998. Flórez, Fernando Castro. “Algo (no) va a ocurrir.” COAM 327 (2002): 84–95.

Dialectic Silence: Schizophonia in Ventriloquist Dummy  129 http://www.charliemccarthy.org/about-charlie.html. Imprescindibles. Juan Muñoz, poeta del espacio, 27’33. Imprescindibles. Juan Muñoz, poeta del espacio, dir. by Manel Arranz and Anna Solana (TVE, 2011). Accessed October 16, 2019. http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/imprescindibles/ imprescindibles-juan-munoz-poeta-del-espacio/2398188/. Jenkins, Bruce. “Postscript: The Impossible Cinema of Marcel Broodthaers.” In The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film, eds. Graeme Harper and Rob Stone, 155–165. London: WallFlower Press, 2007. Kerringham, John and Sloka Iyengar. https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/types-seizures/ gelastic-and-dacrystic-seizures. Le Roux, Hugues and Jules Garnier. Acrobat and Mountebanks. London: Chapman and Hall, 1890. Lingwood, James. Juan Muñoz: Monologe & Dialoge/Monologues & Dialogues. Zurich: Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 1997. Muñoz, Juan. Juan Muñoz: Writings/Escritos, ed. Adrian Searle. Madrid: La Central/Museo Reina Sofía, 2009. Newcomb, Horace. Encyclopedia of Television, vol. I A-C. London and New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004. Ovidio. La Metamorfosis, eds. Consuelo Álvarez and Rosa María Iglesias. Madrid: Cátedra, 2003. Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E. “Monstruos, enanos y bufones.” In Monstruos, enanos y bufones en la corte de los Austrias (a propósito del «Retrato de enano» de Juan van der Hamen), ed. Mena Marqués, 9–13. Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1986. Petronio. El satiricón, ed. Lisardo Rubio Fernández. Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1978. Philips, Todd. film Joker, 2019. Poinsot, Jean-Marc. Juan Muñoz: Sculpture de 1985 á 1987. Bordeaux: Capc Musée d’Art Contemporain, 1987. Schafer, Murray. El nuevo paisaje sonoro. Buenos Aires: Ricordi, 1959. Searle, Adrian. “Introduction.” In Juan Muñoz: Escritos/Writings, 5–33. Madrid: La Central, 2009 Searle, Adrian and Juan Muñoz. “Third Ear.” In Juan Muñoz. La voz sola. Esculturas, dibujos yobras para la radio, 119–128. Madrid; La Casa Encendida, 2005. Stuart-Smith, Mark. Juan Muñoz and Silence: Images and Words. Ph.D., Birkbeck, University of London, 2012. Valéry, Paul. Monsieur Teste, trans. Salvador Elizondo. Madrid: Piel de Zapa, 2005. Wagstaff, Sheena. “Un espejo de la conciencia,” In Permítaseme una imagen. Juan Muñoz, ed. Lynne Cooke, 25–50. Madrid: Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, 2009. Warner, Marina. “Here Comes the Bogeyman: Goya, the Late Grotesque, and Juan Muñoz.” In Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art, vol. 2, eds. Karen Kelly and Lynne Cooke, 99–121. New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 2001.

7 Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Dummies Katie Geha

For the fourth Berlin Biennale in 2006, curators Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Giono, and Ali Subotnick staged a series of exhibitions in derelict buildings along the Auguststrasse in the city’s Mitte section. Works of art were installed at unconventional sites, such as an empty church, a vacant stable, private homes, a dance hall, and a cemetery. A sculpture by the Polish theater director and artist Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990), one of at least three dummies by various artists in the show, was placed in the old Jewish School for Girls. Walking into a former classroom whose walls were painted green, viewers saw a boy dummy sitting on a wooden school bench, his legs dangling above the ground. The mannequin, outfitted in a blonde wig, brown slacks and jacket, and black shoes, appears almost alive, his hands in his lap and head down as if praying or deep in thought. Bench from “The Dead Class” (1984) is one of the four versions of this sculpture, which Kantor modeled after the props he created for his best-known play, The Dead Class (1975). In that production, the child dummies appeared like dead avatars attached to their adult selves: live actors whose faces were painted white to match their dummy ghosts (Figures 7.1 and 7.2). If a dummy mimics aliveness, as an uncanny approximation of the breathing body, can it also mimic deadness? Kantor believed that the confrontation between mannequin, actor, and viewer in his theatrical works allowed for the revelations of life and death. In this essay, I will discuss Kantor’s use of wax figures in his theatrical work, paying close attention to his role as a teacher, conductor, and, finally, a ventriloquist in The Dead Class. Further, I will examine the inclusion of Kantor’s dummies in recent contemporary art exhibitions, tracking how they move from theatrical prop to autonomous art objects and thereby blur the distinction between theatrical and artistic contexts.1

Conductor The Dead Class was first performed in Warsaw in 1975 by Kantor’s theater group Cricot 2. Although I have not seen the play performed live, I have watched a filmed version of the play with English subtitles, directed in 1976 by revered Polish cinema and theater director Andrzej Wajda. 2 For the purposes of this paper, I will refer only to this filmed version. In his theatrical experimentations, Kantor often included himself in his productions, standing on stage and witnessing the play unfolding. To preserve this aspect of the play’s live performance, Wajda kept his camera close to Kantor throughout the film. “I thought that even if I couldn’t capture

DOI: 10.4324/9781003303978-10

Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Dummies  131

Figure 7.1  T  adeusz Kantor, Schulbank aus: Die tote Klasse (school bench from “The Dead Class”), 1975. Installation view. Photo: Uwe Walter.

Figure 7.2  Tadeusz Kantor’s props-in-action for The Dead Class 1975. Photo: Wojciech Szperl.

132  Katie Geha the whole spectacle on film,” he explained, “I might be able to at least show Kantor at work within it.”3 Acting simultaneously as teacher and conductor—the ultimate ventriloquist of live actors and dummies alike—Kantor raises his hands, waves his arms, and leads the class through a series of recitations, inciting the action of the play. The film begins with the camera advancing slowly into the small dark cellar of the Galeria Krzysztofory, an avant-garde association that housed Kantor’s Cricot 2 Theater. To the left is a series of wooden school benches where the actors, dressed in funereal black, sit tight next to one another. To the right sits Kantor on a tall stool, watching the audience enter the cramped space as a teacher might watch his class arrive. Wajda frames Kantor from behind, inhabiting his view as he watches the audience members take their seats. Kantor shields his eyes from a bright stage light, turns around, and walks to the back of the space, throwing his right arm quickly in the air as a maestro would to signal an orchestra to begin. He leans against an arched doorway to watch the proceedings, and the audience then disappears from Wajda’s view until the end of the film, when we hear their applause. While keeping Kantor a central figure throughout, Wajda records the action of the play, of which there is plenty. In his notes on The Dead Class, Kantor wrote, “The stage action consists of a chain of sequences, which do not form a logical point.”4 Non-narrative and filled with metaphorical possibilities, the play mines the anguished and often absurd rituals of life and death.5 The play begins in earnest when the old actors silently raise their hands like ­attentive students, then slowly walk backward through the arched doorway where ­Kantor stands. As “Waltz François” plays, the actors march back into the classroom, burdened by the child wax mannequins carried in their arms or hanging on their backs. One dummy, attached to a bicycle, is rolled into the classroom by his adult self. Throughout the hour-long production, the actors shout nonsense in unison, weep together, chant the names of the dead, and, in a scene filmed outside of the theater, frolic in the Polish countryside, only after they have been freed from their childhood counterparts. Meanwhile, Kantor moves about the stage, watching and leading the actors. Wajda turns his camera on Kantor again and again, often in close-up, as Kantor looks bewildered or nods his head, encouraging the various actions on stage that at times appear almost slapstick in their humor one moment and then tragic, filled with loss and regret, the next. The final shots of the film show the empty schoolroom strewn with the papers and banners accumulated during the rituals of the play, as the actors continue to chant and shout offstage to the sound of the waltz. Kantor walks in and, once again, props himself against the doorway. The camera pans out, revealing the abandoned dummies’ blank faces, finally settling on a close-up of a mannequin’s shoe hovering above the floor. The audience applauds. In 1975, the same year The Dead Class debuted, Kantor wrote a manifesto ­describing his new “Theater of Death” genre. He created five subsequent productions in this novel theatrical form.6 The Dead Class, as the basis for his theory, illustrates his rejection of naturalism in theater through the use of mannequins which “created artificial equivalents to life, which turned out to be more alive because they submitted easily to abstraction of time and space.”7 Kantor’s “Theater of Death” is less about the dead and dying and more about an

Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Dummies  133 encounter with death through the living. Although scripted, this form of theater does not rely on traditional dramatic structure or character development; rather, the actors embrace the absurd through their performed actions. Kantor eschewed illusionism and narrative in his productions in order to better access reality, which is itself non-narrative and often absurd. It is through the concept of death, which emerges via his productions in his employment of mannequins, that Kantor felt he could most directly incite in the viewer a notion of a lived life, filled equally with tragedies and triumphs. Kantor began making dummies for his productions as early as 1938, when he founded a puppet theater in Kraków, and he continued to employ wax figures throughout his career. Through the making of the sculptures, Kantor was able to continue his work as a visual artist, and he soon found that the dummies were easier to ­manipulate than actors. And yet, his role as a ventriloquist was different from that of the traditional ventriloqual set-up, whereby a ventriloquist throws the voice to give life to the doll, since in Kantor’s case the dummies appear mostly dead and do not speak at all. Nevertheless, Kantor needed the relationship between the actor and the dummy to elicit his “Theater of Death.” In this theory, Kantor devised a kind of oneto-one-to-one (actor, dummy, and audience) relation between deadness and liveness. He writes: “The MANNEQUIN in my theater will be a MEDIUM through which passes a strong feeling of DEATH and the condition of the Dead. A model for the Live ­ACTOR.”8 The actor-mannequin relationship becomes complicated when the spectator is introduced; like another dummy, She not only sits silently and watches but also, like a ventriloquist, animates the play through her own experience and interpretation. Kantor describes his technique as a method of returning audience members to the emotional foundations of theater: IT IS NECESSARY TO RECOVER THE PRIMEVAL FORCE OF THE SHOCK TAKING PLACE AT THE MOMENT WHEN, OPPOSITE A HUMAN (A SPECTATOR), THERE STOOD FOR THE FIRST TIME A HUMAN (AN ACTOR), DECEPTIVELY SIMILAR TO US, YET AT THE SAME TIME INFINITELY FOREIGN, BEYOND THE IMPASSABLE BARRIER.9 The connection established between actor, spectator, and dummy, beyond the ­impassable barrier, allows death and life to fluctuate between the three. The dead are indistinguishable from the living; the dummy, which acts as a conduit between living and the dead, underscores this idea. As a sculpture in a theatrical production, the wax mannequin elicits the shock and dread of seeing a corpse. Echoing the corpselike dummies, the actors dressed as the dummies with their faces painted white, also appear both dead and alive. It is through the work of the audience, the third role ­implicitly cast in Kantor’s production, that life and death, as well as memory and regret, or even nostalgia, might be conjured. In an interview from 1986, Kantor describes the audience of The Dead Class as witnesses. He admits they should feel “ill at ease”: “... it is good if the audience cannot decipher the meaning of the production. It is good if people feel dumbfounded and shaken while leaving the auditorium.”10 Dummy, actor, audience member: the entities are set up in tandem with one another by Kantor, thus, according to Kantor,

134  Katie Geha destroying illusion and any sense of illustrative drama in his theater. Working d ­ irectly with the realization that death is built into our very existence from childhood ­onward, Kantor animates all three roles—dummy, actor, and audience—as he stands on stage throughout, witnessing and conducting the action of the play. Circot 2 performed The Dead Class in 1991 in New York, almost six months after Kantor’s death. According to Mel Gussow’s New York Times review, the production suffered without the director’s presence. Recalling other, earlier productions, he wrote, “Though the plays were scripted and rehearsed, they seemed to be happening only in the immediate present and, as our conduit, Kantor refined the structure as the play was in progress.” Without the conductor, the pace apparently slowed and the action felt more rehearsed. Yet, the reviewer concedes, “The Dead Class continues to invade the audience’s subconscious with its ritualistic images of war and death.”11 Kantor first began to experiment with the idea of the conductor in a 1967 performance on the shore of the Baltic Sea. Two years earlier, he had traveled to the U.S., where he discovered the kinds of experimental works he was making in Poland had a name in America: Happenings. Made popular by artists such as Allan Kaprow, a happening was a kind of total art that melded theater with everyday life.12 Kantor states that such actions were “powerful because they made use of physical reality.”13 In The Sea Concert, his own Happening, Kantor employed his friend, the Polish painter Edward Krasiński, to act much like an orchestra conductor. He stood on a stepped podium in the water facing away from the audience, who watched the sea’s horizon from lawn chairs plunged into the water (Figure 7.3). In coattails, Krasiński “conducted” the sea in front of him, waving his hand to indicate the entrance of

Figure 7.3  Tadeusz Kantor, The Sea Concert, 1967. Performance featuring Edward Krasiński at the Baltic Sea. Photo: Eustachy Kossakowski.

Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Dummies  135 five motorbikes that loudly rumbled across the beach. With the flick of his right hand, a tractor approached. He fired a gun, and suddenly a lifeboat appeared on the horizon. Finally, he ended the performance by throwing a bucket of fish toward the seated audience.14 The absurdist gesture of conducting a natural phenomenon, such as the sea, is what makes this concert so appealing. Humans cannot control the rhythms of such a vast living force. At best, we can move along with them; at worst, we drown and die.

Ventriloquist as Medium In The Dead Class, Kantor assumes the role of conductor. He turns his attention to calling forth the dead, becoming a medium of sorts. Often, he referred to The Dead Class as a séance, which explains the actors’ seemingly nonsensical incantations that serve to channel those on the other side. In his notes on the play, Kantor describes his direction for the actor’s babbling dialogue: The imperative is to bring down sentences, statements, actor’s part to different tenses modes of declension ways of conjugation to obliterate their life-affirming meanings and functionality to reduce them to etymology to phonemes morphemes verbally chorally in a linguistic orgy in a gibberish sing-song until they become one long groan.15 It is through the voice of the actor that the evidence of the spirit emerges. The play as a séance recalls the tradition of ventriloquism. As a teacher and conductor, Kantor elicits the action of the play, encouraging associations with the art of ventriloquism. It is his role as a medium that evokes necromancy, the ancient act of channeling the dead by inhabiting their bodies and communicating with them through the voice. In the Middle Ages, Christians viewed ventriloquism as a form of witchcraft, a way to speak to both the dead and the living. After all, a dummy animated by a human voice appears like a possessed object. An inanimate object, given life by a thrown voice, amounts to a level of trickery that would not be seen as a form of entertainment until the late eighteenth century.16 In the Jewish faith, a “dybbuk” refers simply to a demon or a dislocated soul. The term was first used in European Jewish folklore in the seventeenth century to describe the realm of the unsettled spirit wandering between life and death. It is also the theme of a play that greatly impressed Kantor when he saw it in Kraków in 1938, just one year before the Nazis invaded Poland: The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds, written in modern Yiddish in 1914 by Szymon Ansky.17 Not unlike The Dead Class, the production mines the thresholds between the living and the dead.18 Ansky’s love story follows a traditional narrative structure, telling the tale of an unhappily arranged marriage. When the bride, Leah, protests the marriage

136  Katie Geha by speaking in a man’s voice, it is reasoned that she must be possessed. An evil spirit—in fact, a dead former lover—cleaves to the young woman, who must endure a series of failed exorcisms. In the end, she escapes to the spirit world to be with her true love in death. Ansky remarked that his play was about the will of the individual versus the collective.19 The “dybbuk” allows for a rupture in normative society: as the spirit speaks through Leah, a form of ventriloquism as necromancy, a hinge ­between life and death, grants her freedom. In stills of the 1922 production, one that traveled for years and which Kantor would have seen, Leah’s face is a ghostly white. She is surrounded by the townspeople dressed in black with their faces also painted white. In a later filmic version, the dybbuk, its face a ghoulish skeleton, appears to hold Leah tenderly. Séances and exorcisms are fundamentally dramatic events. The art of ventriloquism, like the art of vanquishing evil spirits, requires an audience. In The Dead Class, however, it is not immediately called forth. The dybbuk could be as obvious as their childhood, now gone in old age. Or it could be a reference to the death camps in World War II, when more than 90% of Poland’s Jews were killed. Or, more specifically, it could be Kantor’s attempt to communicate with his own father, who was murdered in one such camp. 20 Perhaps the details of who is less important than why. Why call forth dead with half-alive actors and their dummy selves? When a medium activates the dead, directing them to speak once more with their own voices, the boundary between the living and the dead becomes blurred. Kantor’s vision of a “Theater of Death” is made complete through the voice of the deceased rising through the vocal cords of live actors: “It is fascinating that art—not only theatre but art in general,” Kantor writes, “occurs when our awareness of everyday life is pushed to its final limits, when we encounter the notion of death, eternity, and life.”21 In Kantor’s The Dead Class, the actors, cradling their lost childhoods in their arms, channel the dead through their absurd language and actions. Kantor’s ventriloquism through his manipulation of actors carrying their dummy selves reveals to the audience the thinly veiled line between past and present, and life and death. And yet, it is well known that most mediums are also con artists. Taking advantage of someone mourning, the medium intimates privileged knowledge of the dead, promising a connection with those in the world beyond. Or, more typically, the medium speaks about the dead so broadly that the mourner assumes the ventriloquist’s role, projecting any number of associations onto their lost loved ones. A medium and a ventriloquist, at heart, are performers. For the work to be successful, they must develop a spectacle so convincing that it seduces the participant into faith, selling the fantasy that the living can communicate with the dead. Kantor’s work as a medium is just as fake as his wax mannequins. Kantor wrote of the artist as hustler: Imitation and deceptive similarity, which serves the conjurer in setting his TRAPS and declaring the spectator, the use of ‘unsophisticated’ means, slipping away from the realm of aesthetics, the abuse and fraudulent deception of ­A PPEARANCES, practices from the chest of the con-artists!22 It was through deception, Kantor reasoned, that truth and, more importantly, reality might finally be conjured.

Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Dummies  137

Dead Objects How can an object, having never been alive, be dead? The German writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811)—who himself met an untimely death—saw the marionette, gracefully moving by its strings, as a completely unselfconscious being. In his well-known essay The Master and the Marionette, written in 1810, the year before he shot himself, Kleist probes consciousness and its follies, relating self-knowledge to the Fall of man. The marionette, pulled by the strings of its god-like master, rivals the grace of a human dancer. Elaborating on Kleist’s theory, art historian Richard Shiff aligns the natural with the mechanical: “Because puppet movement accords with efficient mechanical principles, it must unambiguously express its nature, as well as representing nature in general.”23 The binary between living human and dead dummy becomes ambiguous, as Shiff argues that the operation of a mechanism is not entirely artificial: “Perhaps one should say (in Kleist’s view at least) there can be nothing unnatural about effective artifice; instilling dance in his puppets, the puppeteer finds himself dancing.”24 And later Shiff asserts, “A heartbeat is not only natural, but also regular and automatic, like a mechanism.”25 Kleist and Shiff argue for an aliveness in the puppet due to its activation by live bodies. For them, it is enough for an object to closely mimic the actions of the ­human being, to appear natural, to express human consciousness without necessarily possessing it. The movements of the puppeteer and the puppet collaborate in the action, slipping between reality and artifice. In The Dead Class, the wax mannequins cannot be animated by their live actor counterparts, yet their aliveness remains intact through their life-like qualities—glass eyes, natural hair, and veins that are carved into their hands. Kantor too claims that his dummies possess a consciousness, a “higher consciousness, attained after the ‘completion of their lives.’”26 To become sentient, the dummy must first die.

Dummies on Display In a surreal sequence shot outside in the Polish countryside, Wajda’s film of The Dead Class briefly displays Kantor’s wax dummies as autonomous sculptural objects. As the elderly actors scramble up a steep grassy hill, a line of dark-clothed bodies silhouetted against the brilliant blue sky, they arrive in a field and awkwardly dance, ­appearing like marionettes without strings. Wajda’s camera pans out, slowly revealing their ­audience: the child wax figures, who are sitting on benches in the field. The ­actors pay them no mind; indeed, detached from their former selves, the elderly players appear giddy with joy. It as if Kantor’s exorcism has finally succeeded. The dummies, now fully dead autonomous objects, sit silently and watch, perhaps portending their future display in contemporary art exhibitions. This is a brief, yet significant moment in the recording as it is the first time we see the school children outside of the classroom, divorced from their adult counterparts. Kantor is also absent from the scene. He is not in the field, conducting the action. The ventriloquism takes on new resonances without his presence and distanced from the actors. The objects are no longer wax dummies at the service of actors, metaphors of past lived lives. Now they exist as autonomous objects, sculptures in their own right. When displayed subsequently in museums and galleries as works of art, their fakeness is illuminated. In exhibition, the dummies fully inhabit the role of the mannequin, appearing hollow, disused, and forgotten, now more dead than ever before.

138  Katie Geha Props from The Dead Class and the wax mannequins made directly in response to it have appeared in several contemporary exhibitions over the past 15 years, often without reference to their original theatrical context. In Kantor’s play, the weight of the dummies’ deadness, their inability to move whether attached to or carried by the live actors, produced in the viewer a sense of dread—an uncanny encounter between life and death. In the space of the exhibition, the wax figures of children at school desks take on a different affect, one that points not to the aliveness of the puppet, as Kleist and Shiff would argue, but rather to its inanimate objecthood: an object that appears dead recalls the dead. 27 The curators of the fourth Berlin Biennale, as I already noted, placed one of K ­ antor’s child mannequins at a desk in an empty room of a disused former Jewish School for Girls. At the time of the exhibition, the building had been locked up since 1996, when it was officially returned to the Jewish community during the restitution process following German Reunification.28 Not unlike Kantor’s own notions of art elucidating “death, eternity, life,” one of the curators of the exhibition, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan—who also employs wax figures in his own work—describes the Biennale’s loose premise: “It’s an exhibition about letting things go, about losing, surrendering, sometimes about dying. So in a way it is an exhibition about life, but as reduced to its simplest elements: You are born, you live and then you die.”29 Kantor was inspired to create the benches for The Dead Class when, on a seaside stroll, he discovered a classroom through the windows of an old building.30 The B ­ erlin Biennale curators staged a similarly unexpected encounter for Kantor’s dummy, placing it within a decrepit school building in the center of the city’s former Jewish neighborhood. No longer attached to its adult actor, the dummy’s function lays in the ambiguous terrain of a prop, a memory, a debased thing.31 Sitting alone at a desk, it is returned squarely, almost dumbly, to an actual school room. The Jewish School recalls plainly the atrocities perpetrated against the Jewish population in Berlin, an echo of Kantor’s original incantation of the murdered dead from Poland. Roberta Smith, writing in the New York Times, called the building a “readymade time capsule” that was so dramatic in its presentation alone, it “almost didn’t need art.”32 Adrian Searle, in the Guardian, articulated the mood of emptiness, loss, and remembrance by describing another work by a Polish artist in the School for Girls: “Robert Kuśmirowski’s Wagon is a lifelike mock-up [of a cattle truck], a death-like fake—a somehow weightless thing of matchwood, paper, Styrofoam and paint.”33 Kantor’s wax dummy too becomes a “death-like fake,” a stand-in for the lost Jewish schoolgirls, the awful history of Berlin. In Sarah Hromack’s astute assessment of the Biennale, she writes: In removing Kantor’s bench so far from its original context, while, ironically enough, positioning it within a site that could have easily served as one of his sets, this boy in short pants appeared as little more than another dead student.34 Without any connection to the original production, nor any wall text or explanation of its origins, the dummy loses much of Kantor’s rich metaphorical resonance. The dead dummy sits there in a school permeated with the residue of death—autonomous, hollow, always, and forever looking down. Whereas a narrative, albeit simple, emerges in the placement of his work in the Berlin Biennial, the wax school children emerge clearly as autonomous art objects when

Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Dummies  139 placed in group exhibitions arranged next to other works of art. In 2012, ­Kantor’s mannequin and school bench were shown again in Berlin, this time in a group ­exhibition in Berlin’s German Historical Museum entitled Desire for Freedom: Art in Europe since 1945. In this show, Kantor’s singular dummy, looking down, is placed with his hands on the bench as if holding himself up. The work is installed in the center of the room surrounded by museum stanchions, further marking the dummy as a work of art, not to be animated. The exhibition purported to bring together a group of European artists who grappled with what it meant to come to terms with authoritarian regimes. After opening in Berlin, the exhibition subsequently toured throughout Europe, ending its run at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków. Such an ambitious tour firmly established Kantor as one of the foremost Polish avantgarde artists while simultaneously casting his dead dummy as a nationalistic propaganda tool, a site of defiance against Hitler and later, Stalin’s communist rule. Hence proving that, at the hands of curators, Kantor’s wax mannequins can take on any number of various readings. Kantor’s work has been given great consideration in the history of theater studies. However, little is written on his oeuvre in the history of art. Thus, it is telling that his placement by curators within exhibitions works to establish a larger visual art narrative. For instance, in both The Desire of Freedom and in The Jewish Museum’s 2009 group exhibition Theaters of Memory: Art and Holocaust, a version of Kantor’s Boy at Desk was placed in direct proximity to the work of French artist Christian Boltanski. The curator, Norman L. Kleeblatt, Chief Curator at The Jewish Museum, thematically paired Kantor’s dummy from The Dead Class with the images of school children used in Boltanski’s installations. And, in the Berlin show, Kantor’s work was installed across from Boltanski’s Le Lycée Chases en 1931 (1987), a series of blown-up, closely cropped high school graduation photos of ­Vienna’s Jewish Gymnasium class of 1931. From 1941 to 1942, the school was a site of collection before deporting Viennese Jews. Every photograph is lit with a large lamp, as if to mark the individual nature of each person against the collective erasure perpetrated by the Nazi state. The curators of the Jewish Museum’s 2009 permanent collection exhibition Theaters of Memory: Art and Holocaust, installed Kantor’s dummy on a plinth in the center of the gallery directly in front of Anselm Kiefer Die Himmelspaläste (The Heavenly Palaces) (2004) and across from Christian Boltanski’s Monument (Odessa) (1989–2003), a series of six ghostly found portraits of school children lit by a string of lights (Figure 7.4). In this installation, Kantor’s mannequin is barefoot and looks unkempt, his wig ruffled. The dummy sits at a crude makeshift desk, with a large wooden cross next to him. Acquired by the museum in 2005, the sculpture also served as a prototype for a bronze replica that Kantor had made to mark his mother’s grave, where he is also now buried. Clear markers of death, these museum installations of Kantor’s dummy plainly ­situate the sculpture in the realm of art and the Holocaust. In 1989, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote a scathing column in the New York Times about the trivialization of art that makes the industrialization of mass murder its subject. ­Theorist ­Theodor Adorno famously claimed that writing poetry after Auschwitz was ­“barbaric,” and Wiesel argued that such atrocities could not be represented in a ­direct manner: “Auschwitz is something else, always something else. It is a universe outside the universe, a creation that exists parallel to creation. Auschwitz lies on the other side of life and on the other side of death.”35 Theorist Ernst van Alphen uses the

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Figure 7.4  Installation view of the Jewish Museum’s 2009 permanent collection exhibition Theaters of Memory: Art and Holocaust showing Kantor’s dummy piece in relation to Anselm Kiefer, Die Himmelspaläste (The Heavenly Palaces), 2004 and Christian Boltanski Monument (Odessa), 1989–2003.

term “Holocaust effect” to describe works of art that do not necessarily illustrate the ­Holocaust, but rather, like those of Boltanski and Kantor, use other methods to recall in the viewer a sense of enormous loss, dread, and regret. Alphen describes the ­effect as being produced by the performative “re-enactment of a certain principles that ­define the Holocaust.”36 Rather than use direct evidence of the genocide, artists such as Boltanski, Alphen argues, mimic the processes of verification, using photographs and replicating archives. Boltanski’s photos act like evidentiary facts, and

Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Dummies  141 yet, they are merely photos lifted from a yearbook years before Vienna was invaded. ­Similarly, Kantor contends in his “Theater of Death” manifesto that the past, memories, and even tragedies cannot be re-performed necessarily, but rather must be called forth through abject absurdity, like a room of elderly school children burdened by their past dummy selves. Neither Boltanski nor Kantor use evidence of the Holocaust to directly illustrate their works, but rather rely on the viewer to recognize the tropes of memories, to ­recall for themselves their school days. Have you ever entered a kindergarten classroom as an adult and marveled at the small desks and chairs? The innocence of youth is tainted through the knowledge of what will transpire. Boltanski’s photos of schoolchildren, blown-up and blurred, are as abstract and empty as Kantor’s mannequins. It is in school, after all, where we recite back what the teacher tells us, an action that makes dummies of us all. Boltanski’s installation of photographs of school children surrounded by lights also conjures the dead, referencing reliquaries or alters. Boltanski creates both an ­ evidence” archive and a monument through the use of mundane school pictures as “ of the Jews murdered. In The Dead Class, Kantor conducts the action, acting as the medium/ventriloquist in a séance that channels any number of other dead things—childhood, the atrocities of war, our personal losses, and disappointments. Kantor’s mannequins served the purpose of his play, as a formal device to summon what was lost. And it would please him to know that his wax dummies displayed in contemporary art exhibitions remain empty, dead objects. Stripped of their ­association with his theatrical production, the objects are no longer tied physically to the actors and psychologically to the audience, to Kantor, or even the curators who framed them as art objects by presenting them in art museums. The work of teacher, ventriloquist, conductor, or medium—whatever you want to call the entity that animates art—is finally transferred to the viewer. The very act of witnessing Kantor’s mannequins helps us remember that we’re alive. Now, the dead dummies wait forever suspended in anticipation, imploring us to fill them, to make them dead again. The Dead Class One last dead dummy. Kantor remade his sculpture of the bench of schoolchildren dummies, which appeared in the field in Wajda’s film, in 1989. The work was displayed in another group exhibition, La Fine del Mondo (The End of the World), at the Centro Pecci in Prato, Italy, in 2016. Its vernissage coincided with the museum’s re-opening, celebrating a new entrance designed by Dutch architect Nio Maurice: a rounded flat gold attachment that wraps around the former building and looks as if it just fell from outer space. Sleek and contemporary, it’s as far as you can get from a decrepit school room or dank cellar space. And yet this exhibition, which featured some 50 international artists, was still consumed with thinking about the past. According to the curatorial statement: The audience will experience the feeling of being projected thousands of light years away to view our current world as if it were a fossil, geological eras from the present time, resulting in a feeling of being suspended in a limbo between a now distant past and a still distant future.37

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Figure 7.5  Tadeusz Kantor, Children at Their Desk from The Dead Class, 1975 in installation at Centro Pecci, Prato, Italy, 2016.

Curated by the director of the museum, Fabio Cavallucci, the show presented itself as contemporary art exhibition-cum-natural history museum. At the entrance to the exhibition the visitor was greeted by Giovanna Amoroso and Istvan Zimmermann’s Australopithecines (2016), a sculpture of two upright early humans made after the life-size dioramas found in natural history museums. 25 In this exhibition, all objects are dead objects. Take for instance, Jimmie Durham’s Petrified Forest (2003), an installation of a corporate office caked in dust as if it were an ancient artifact newly discovered; or Adalberto Giazotto’s collection of minerals and gems, placed in large vitrines and dramatically lit from above. The exhibition took a theatrical approach, as the works were visually staged to mimic and amplify museological display methods. Kantor’s sculpture, originally made for the theater, thus brought a sense of performance to the gallery space— however as a silenced art object. The group of wax mannequins were situated in the center of a large gallery (Figure 7.5). The child dummies are dressed in black, ­arranged in various figurations, with their hands placed on their laps or on their desks and heads slightly bowed or looking straight ahead. The benches are on a series of wooden planks. At the front of the sculpture, burned into the planks is the phrase “La Clase Se Morte.” Placed in a contemporary gallery space, surrounded by the work of others, the dummy school children look like discarded dolls from another time, abandoned and lost. To the side of the dummies on a blue wall hangs Marlene Dumas’s Female (1992–1993), 100 framed drawings of female faces simultaneously macabre and fragile (Figure 7.6). 24 Made with watercolor and ink wash

Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Dummies  143

Figure 7.6   I nstallation of Tadeusz Kantor, Children at Their Desk from The Dead Class, 1975 with Marlene Dumas, Female, 1992–1993 at Centro Pecci, Prato, Italy, 2016.

and modeled after photographs, the faces blur at the edges. Lined up one after the other, Dumas’s faces, like Kantor’s dummies, appear expectant, relying on the viewer to read their vaguely vacant ­expressions. Kantor’s original mood of loss and remembrance, the dead ­returning, is restored through the adjacency of the works. “Life can only be expressed in art through the absence of life,” Kantor wrote, “through an appeal to DEATH, through APPEARANCES, through EMPTINESS, and the lack of ­M ESSAGE.” In the presence of Dumas’s drawings and in various contemporary art exhibitions, ­stanchioned off or placed on plinths, Kantor’s props now fully mute, inhabit the realm of objectivity, another dead thing.

Acknowledgements Thank you to Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace for encouraging me to write on Kantor and for their thoughtful edits throughout. For your swift responses to all my research queries, thank you to Tomasz Piertucha from Cricoteka. Grateful acknowledgment also goes to Joe Geha, David Raskin, and Wendy Vogel who all read drafts and offered invaluable and generous feedback.

Notes 1 Several retrospectives of Kantor’s paintings and sculptures have been mounted in recent years at museums such as Sao Paulo’s Sesc Consolação in 2016, Zurich’s the Migros ­Museum of Contemporary Art in 2008, and the numerous exhibitions put on by Cricoteka, the

144  Katie Geha Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor in Warsaw. These exhibitions largely place his art objects in context with his theater works. For the purposes of this essay, I will concentrate on Kantor’s inclusion in group exhibitions that largely omit his theatrical lineage. 2 Four other recorded versions of the play exist. Wajda’s version is the most readily available ­online. Kantor later disowned this version for being too literary and representational. See Magda Romanska, The Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor: History and ­Holocaust in Akropolis and Dead Class (New York: Anthem Press, 2012), 195. 3 Romanska, The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor, 194. 4 Tadeusz Kantor ed., “From the Director’s Notebook, 1974,” republished in Michal ­Kobialka, “Spatial Historiography: The Dead Class,” in Further on, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 261. 5 Kantor’s references for the play range from Polish Jewish writer Bruno Schulz’s “The Old Age Pensioner” (a Surrealist short story about an old man who returns to his childhood classroom) to Stanislaw Mickiewicz’s Tumor Brainowicz (portions of which Kantor appropriates). Much has been written about these references as well as Kantor’s reckoning with his childhood and the atrocities of the Holocaust. See Magda Romanska, The ­Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor or the various texts on Kantor by Michal Kobialka, specifically Further on, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre ­(Minneapolis: ­University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 6 The productions include The Dead Class (1975), Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), Let the Artists Die (1985), I Shall Never Return (1990), and Today Is My Birthday (1991). Kantor died before Today Is My Birthday was finished so Circot 2 Theater completed the work posthumously. In the final production, the role of Kantor was played by an empty chair. 7 Tadeusz Kantor, “Theater of Death,” republished in Michal Kobialka, Further on, ­Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre, 232. 8 Kantor, “Theater of Death,” 236. 9 Kantor, “Theater of Death,” 237. Kantor’s note appears in all caps. 10 Michal Kobialka and Tadeusz Kantor, “Let the Artists Die? An Interview with Tadeusz Kantor,” The Drama Review 30, no. 3 (Autumn, 1986): 181. 11 Mel Gussow, “Tadeusz Kantor’s Troupe Carries On,” The New York Times, June 14, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/14/theater/review-theater-tadeusz-kantor-s-troupecarries-on.html. 12 See Jeff Kelley, Childsplay. The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley, CA: UC Press, 2004). 13 Michal Kobialka and Tadeusz Kantor, “Let the Artists Die? An Interview with Tadeusz Kantor,” 181. 14 Eustachy Kossakowski, “Tadeusz Kantor’s Happenings,” in Tadeusz Kantor, ed. Heike Munder, exhibition catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition “Tadeusz Kantor” at the Migros-Museum für Gegenwartskunst Zürich, August 30 to November 16, 2008 (Zürich: Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2009), 35. 15 Tadeusz Kantor, “From the Director’s Notebook, 1972–75,” republished in Kobialka, ­F urther on, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre, 245. 16 For more on the history of ventriloquism, see Valentine Vox, I Can See Your Lips Moving: The History and Art of Ventriloquism (Surrey, England: Kaye and Ward Ltd, 1981). 17 Agnieszka Legutko, “Possessed by the Traumatic Past: Postmemory and S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk in Kantor’s The Dead Class,” in Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context, eds. Magda Romanska and Kathleen Cioffi (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 175. See also S. Ansky, “The Dybbuk and Other Writings,” ed. David G. Roskies, trans. Golda Werman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 18 Kantor saw the production in April 1938. It was directed by Yevgeny Vakhtangov in 1922 and toured with the Habimah, the national theater of Israel, throughout Europe. See Magda Romanska, The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor, 260. 19 Rachel Elior, Dybbuks and Jewish Women in Social History, Mysticism, and Folklore (Brooklyn, NY: Urim Publications, 2008), 124–126. 20 Kantor is often referred to as purposely “ambiguously Jewish.” His mother was Christian and his father was Jewish. His father was persecuted for political activity. See Michal Kobialka, Further on, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Dummies  145 21 Michal Kobialka and Tadeusz Kantor, “Let the Artists Die?,” 180. 22 Kantor, “Theater of Death,” 235. Kantor’s emphasis. 23 Richard Shiff, “Puppet and Test Pattern: Mechanicity and Materiality in Modern ­Pictorial Representation,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and ­Technology, Art and Literature, eds. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson ­(Stanford: Stanford University Press 2002), 329. 24 Shiff, “Puppet and Test Pattern,” 329. 25 Shiff, “Puppet and Test Pattern,” 339. 26 Kantor, “Theater of Death,” 234. 27 According to Kantor’s archivist, four of the figures with benches were made in the early 1980s, some five years after the play. Email exchange with Tomek Piertucha, June 18, 2020. Upon further research into his various art exhibitions, it could be surmised that the new dummies may have been created for the 1983 exhibition “Présences Polonaises” at the Centre Pompidou, organized by the Łódź art museum. 28 To read more about the history of the building and its relationship to the Biennale as a whole, see Sarah Hromack’s illuminating graduate thesis: A Theater of Absurdity: ­Parody, Power, and the Politics of Display in the 4th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, self-published, https://sarahhromack.net/content/3-writing/17-a-theater-of-absurdity/ hromack_thesis_2007.pdf. 29 Nancy Spector, “Animal Testing: Interview with Maurizio Cattelan Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick,” originally printed in Of Mice and Men: 4th Berlin Biennale for ­C ontemporary Art, eds. Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick ­(Berlin: KW Institute 2006) and excerpted on the Biennale website: https://www.­ berlinbiennale.de/en/kataloge/1297/animal-testing. It is significant to note that Cattelan has made work that also recalls the classroom. Charlie don’t surf (1997) shows a mannequin seated at a desk turned away from the viewer, pinned to the desk by pencils through his hands. This work was also included in the Desire for Freedom Exhibition discussed later. In the catalog for that exhibition, Cattelan’s work appears directly after Kantor’s. See The Desire for Freedom: 30th Council of Europe Exhibition, ed. Monika Flacke (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2013), 111–112. Accessed via the online catalog: https://www.sandstein.de/­verfuehrungfreiheit/en/katalog/04/08/tadeusz_kantor_lang. php. 30 Kobialka, Further on, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre, 224. 31 An unintelligible text appears on the desk. When asked, Kantor’s archivist did not know what the text was. Email exchange with Tomek Piertucha, June 19, 2020. Jaromir Jedliński references the books in his catalog essay: “The books, which are lying on and under the desks, contain useless knowledge. They are dead, like the stiffened, lifeless creatures that sit at these desks.” Jaromir Jedliński, “Tadeusz Kantor,” in The Desire for ­F reedom: 30th Council of Europe Exhibition, ed. Monika Flacke (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2013). Accessed via the online catalog: https://www.sandstein.de/verfuehrungfreiheit/en/­ katalog/04/08/tadeusz_kantor_lang.php. 32 Roberta Smith, “Berlin’s Biennial Brings a New Art Scene to an Old City,” The New York Times, May 6, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/06/arts/design/06bien. html?searchResultPosition=3. 33 Adrian Searle, “Memory Lane,” The Guardian, March 28, 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2006/mar/28/2. 34 Hromack, A Theater of Absurdity: Parody, Power, and the Politics of Display in the 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, 101. 35 Elie Wiesel “Art and the Holocaust: Trivializing Memory,” The New York Times, June 11, 1989, Section 2, Page 1, https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/11/movies/art-and-the-­ holocaust-trivializing-memory.html. 36 Ernst van Alphen, “Visual Archives and the Holocaust: Christian Boltanski, Ydessa ­Hendeles and Peter Forgacs,” in Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective, eds. Antoon van den Braembussche, Heinz Kimmerle and Nicole Note (Dordrecht: Springer ­Netherlands, 2009), 137. 37 Fabio Cavalucci, “The End of the World,” in The End of the World, ed. Fabio Cavalluci (Cinisello Balsamo, Milano: Silvana Editorial, 2016), 45.

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References Alphen, Ernst van. “Visual Archives and the Holocaust: Christian Boltanski, Ydessa Hendeles and Peter Forgacs.” In Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective, eds. Antoon van den Braembussche, Heinz Kimmerle, and Nicole Note. Dordrecht, 137–155. Netherlands: Springer Netherlands, 2009. Cavalucci, Fabio. “The End of the World.” In The End of the World, ed. Fabio Cavalluci, 45. Cinisello Balsamo. Milano: Silvana Editorial, 2016. Elior, Rachel. Dybbuks and Jewish Women in Social History, Mysticism, and Folklore. Brooklyn, NY: Urim Publications, 2008. Gussow, Mel. “Tadeusz Kantor’s Troupe Carries On.” The New York Times, June 14, 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/14/theater/review-theater-tadeusz-kantor-s-troupe-­ carries-on.html. Hromack, Sarah. “A Theater of Absurdity: Parody, Power, and the Politics of Display in the 4th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.” Self-published. https://sarahhromack.net/­ content/3-writing/17-a-theater-of absurdity/hromack_thesis_2007.pdf. Jedliński, Jaromir. “Tadeusz Kantor.” In The Desire for Freedom: 30th Council of Europe Exhibition, ed. Monika Flacke. Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2013. https://www.sandstein. de/verfuehrungfreiheit/en/katalog/04/08/tadeusz_kantor_lang.php. Kobialka, Michal. Further on, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Kobialka, Michal and Tadeusz Kantor. “Let the Artists Die? An Interview with Tadeusz ­Kantor.” The Drama Review 30, no. 3 (Autumn 1986): 177–183. Kossakowski, Eustachy. “Tadeusz Kantor’s Happenings.” In Tadeusz Kantor, ed. Heike Munder, 22–46. Zürich: Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2009. Legutko, Agnieszka. “Possessed by the Traumatic Past: Postmemory and S. Ansky’s The ­Dybbuk in Kantor’s The Dead Class.” In Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context, eds. Magda Romanska and Kathleen Cioffi, 162–180. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2020. Romanska, Magda. The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor: History and ­Holocaust in “Akropolis” and Dead Class. New York: Anthem Press, 2012. Searle, Adrian. “Memory Lane.” The Guardian, March 28, 2006. https://www.theguardian. com/culture/2006/mar/28/2. ­ ictorial Shiff, Richard. “Puppet and Test Pattern: Mechanicity and Materiality in Modern P ­Representation.” In From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and ­Technology, Art and Literature, eds. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, 327–350. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Smith, Roberta. “Berlin’s Biennial Brings a New Art Scene to an Old City.” The New York Times, May 6, 2006. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/06/arts/design/06bien.html?search ResultPosition=3. Spector, Nancy. “Animal Testing: Interview with Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick.” In Of Mice and Men: 4th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, eds. ­Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick, 6–12. Berlin: KW Institute, 2006. Wiesel, Elie. “Art and the Holocaust: Trivializing Memory.” The New York Times, June 11, 1989. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/11/movies/art-and-the-holocaust-trivializing-memory. html.

Part III

Speech Acts

8 I Remember On Modern Living Nora Wendl

I remember. I remember the slow walk into the shaded house and putting my two bags, one for each hand, on the patterned brick floor. I remember the smooth warm wood of the stair, the way that each step held my weight as I descended. I remember stepping onto the cool patio, open to the desert horizon, and feeling the Pacific Ocean in my chest, my eyes watering at the new memory of the absence of it. I remember walking to an empty house where a man with bright blue eyes and silver hair asked if he could sweep the space for us. I remember with a small shock that I have gray hair, too.

Sitting in a circle on warm grass, sheltered by the pink, sun-drenched walls of Antoine Predock’s La Luz (Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1967), my students and I give voice to everything we have experienced walking for hours slowly, side by side, through houses, the landscape, and a geodesic dome, our feet scraping the tangle of brush covering the high desert floor. We read to each other from our notebooks, leaning into our circle to speak up when the wind roars around us. It is a slow process, deliberate, and intimate. Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly call this “listening.”

I Consider this image from Gerard & Kelly’s four-chapter Modern Living (2016–), an ongoing series of live performances and films: it contains a fragment of house and a fragment of woman (Figure 8.1). The woman is airborne, as if she’s been lifted and thrown, the camera catching her in the moment that her legs buckle. Her body is doubled backward, and she has grabbed the white curtain next to her for balance. She is too strong for the curtain to break her fall, and this photograph suggests that she might tear it out of its track. Where the fabric is stretched taut, it is nearly transparent, and we see through it just a glimpse of the landscape beyond. We can only guess what happens in the moment after—whether the curtain breaks, sending her to the floor, or whether it holds, allowing her to right herself, shake the length of it out, and smooth it back into place, as if nothing happened. Like all photographs, it does not betray a future. But it does cast a knowing glance at the past. This is a still image from the third chapter of Modern Living, which took place in September 2017 at the Mies van der

DOI: 10.4324/9781003303978-12

150  Nora Wendl

Figure 8.1  G erard & Kelly, Modern Living, 2017. Performance view: Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, presented by the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Pictured: Julia Eichten. Photo: Robert Hickerson. Courtesy of the artists.

Rohe-designed Edith Farnsworth House (Plano, Illinois, 1951). The woman tumbling backward is “Wo,” a hybrid character invented for this performance, who speaks and moves both as the performer, Julia Eichten, and as Dr. Edith Farnsworth, the woman who commissioned Mies van der Rohe to design this glass house in 1945 and inhabited it alone from 1951 to 1969. In this photograph from Eichten’s live performance, in her fight against the house and against gravity, she reproduces an entire history of Dr. Edith Farnsworth’s body being narrativized as at odds with the house she commissioned, if not the world she inhabited. This is a body that has been spoken over, spoken for, spoken in lieu of, spoken with, and spoken against for nearly 100 years by writers, historians, and artists, including myself. Dr. Farnsworth (1903–1977) was depicted in the media nearly every decade of her life, from her upbringing on Chicago’s wealthy Near North Side to the early stages of her career as a physician at Passavant Memorial Hospital in Chicago, which was announced in the Chicago Tribune Society Section as a “curious thing.”1 Here, at the age of 38 and a newly minted doctor, Dr. Farnsworth was described as “a tall, handsome girl with a splendid physique and much enthusiasm for her chosen avocation.”2 By 1949, she was making national headlines as the first medical professional to conduct successful clinical trials of a synthetic version of the hormone ACTH, which she was using in an experiment to treat nephritis, a kidney disease that was, before her research, often fatal. Her choice to hire van der Rohe to design a house in the country kept her in the public spotlight.

I Remember  151 In the October 1951 issue of Architectural Forum, the house made its media debut. The article debuted just months after Dr. Farnsworth was given the keys to the structure, and it is the origin of the narrative that although she commissioned Mies to design the house, paid for it, and indeed lived there for nearly 20 years, she was the wrong person for it. The first-published photographs, by Bill Hedrich, showed the house nearly empty, with just a few simple pieces of her furniture arranged at odd angles and her black poodle waiting patiently outside the front door (Figure 8.2). In this article—titled, simply, “Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth house in Fox River, Ill.”—she is not celebrated as the namesake of the house or as a patron of the architect, but imagined as a temporary and inconvenient tenant who will eventually disappear: Mies is convinced that architecture should be no more than the shell within which each occupant produces his or her own dwelling. To put it another way: no romantic self-portraits of the architect, no inflexible portrayals of clients (who, in the long view, may turn out to have been only temporary tenants). Mies believes that his architecture must be objective, impersonal, a quiet and simple space, a backdrop against which each individual and all human life in its great complexities can develop freely—and develop in changing ways, from generation to generation, long after such striking clients as Dr. Edith Farnsworth are gone.3

Figure 8.2  B  ill Hedrich, photograph of Farnsworth House, 1951 (Mies van der Rohe, Plano, Illinois, 1951), Farnsworth Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.

152  Nora Wendl In March 1952, Letters to the Editor written in response to this article focus on her body again—this time, not erasing it, but recreating it as non-human, the perfect mechanical “bride” to match the unusual structure. As Roger Allen, an architect in Grand Rapids, Michigan wrote: I spent a lot of time figuring out the ideal female tenant of that H-beam and glass canoe and finally, with an assist from a printer in the composing room of the Oklahoma Times, I got it…. “The bride is bolted together in sections and moved forward on rollers.”4 These slights establish a pattern of re-membering her body, either through the actual removal of it, or by the perverse act of re-imagining it as non-human. 5 The Architectural Forum article dismisses Dr. Farnsworth, an act perhaps in defiance of how vocal she had been throughout the process of design and construction of the structure. She had demanded operable windows (and got them); had fought to get a sixfoot-tall wardrobe for her clothes and her stereo, which also acted as a partition for privacy, and insisted that this closet match the height of her own body, a dimension at odds with the proportions that van der Rohe desired for the house; and, ultimately, she rejected the furniture the architect ordered for the house—furniture of his own design. By the time the house was complete in March 1951, she and the architect were no longer on speaking terms. And, by the time the completed house made its media debut in October 1951, they were already embroiled in a lawsuit—he sued her for one final, unpaid bill, and she countersued him for fraud. She alleged that he had misrepresented the cost of the house—originally quoting her $40,000 for designing and constructing a house that would eventually cost over $70,000—not to mention the leaking roof and other flaws. When this article came out, her very ownership of the house was at stake as van der Rohe had placed a lien on the structure. With Dr. Farnsworth’s countersuit of van der Rohe, the architect, the client, and the house itself were placed on trial. A one-room house completely enclosed by thin glass panels and uninterrupted by any interior walls, held 5 feet above the ground by a series of eight wide-flange I-beams painted white, it challenged conventional architectural language of the 1950s. In its debut in Architectural Forum, it was described as “clear air-born architectural form,” “an entirely new vocabulary of house architecture,” and “impersonal but beautiful.”6 The same article defensively positions “the most important house completed in the U.S.” as out of the aesthetic comprehension of most Americans: “[i]t is intended to challenge not only the standards of architecture; it challenges, also, the standards by which most men work and live….”7 In other words, it was not designed to shelter a family, to do that very basic thing that most post-World War II housing did—to ensure the continued procreation of the nation— but was “addressed directly to the spirit.”8 The home was, in effect, queer—as queer as any non-reproductive male or female American citizen would have been perceived as being in that era. Indeed, it was perfectly matched to its inhabitant: Dr. Farnsworth was a single woman who had excelled in her medical career in a time when only four women were allowed per graduating class at her alma mater, Northwestern University Medical School—a “female quota” established because four people constituted a dissection unit, and men and women weren’t permitted to be in the presence of the same cadaver.9 Despite structural disadvantages, Farnsworth completed her M.D. in 1938 at Northwestern University and joined Passavant Memorial Hospital as a Resident

I Remember  153 in Medicine. From this point, her career as a physician, researcher, and academic advanced rapidly. However, the historiography of the house has never lived up to either the experimental nature of Dr. Farnsworth or the experimental nature of the architecture. At the hands of architectural historians, the house became the lovechild of a rumored heterosexual union between the client and the architect. This was introduced by historian Franz Schulze, who meditated at length on Dr. Farnsworth’s body in Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (1985): Edith was no beauty. Six feet tall, ungainly of carriage, and, as witnesses agreed, rather equine in features, she was sensitive about her physical person and may very well have compensated for it by cultivating her considerable mental powers. Doubtless it was these that attracted Mies to her in the first place, and in turn persuaded her that he was a great talent in his own right.10 Schulze speculates that Farnsworth could not have been “seized by such rage as she later felt without perceiving that Mies had hurt her personally, not just disappointed her professionally,” and even quotes an unnamed editor in Newsweek who, after the architect’s death, suggested that van der Rohe had once said that “the lady expected the architect to go along with the house.”11 As Paul B. Preciado has written, this discourse, based entirely on rumor, lends an opacity to this otherwise transparent structure: a strange narrative tension between the urgency with which the house is identified as the lovechild of a heterosexual union, and the fact that the historical accounting of this union lacks any evidence.12 What kind of re-membering is this history? What does it mean to be both kept a part of the narrative of the historical past while also being reconstructed by it, to the extent that one’s desires are spoken for—“she expected the architect to go along with the house”—and one’s body is recalled in words and phrases meant to reconstruct it as undesirable or even monstrous in the mind of the reader? History is both the act of recalling historical events and humans and inventing historical events and humans, a process that has confused any ability to adequately understand and historicize Dr. Farnsworth. The speculation on Dr. Farnsworth’s body and its habits, its re-­membering and re-animating by historians, makes it evident that her body is indeed part of the architectural history of the Farnsworth House—as much as any other artifact. When a woman’s body is the subject of architectural history, it is not her body that is discussed, but the (often male) perception and narrativization of it—what it looked like, where it went, what it did, with whom, and when. This process of reading and re-counting previous narratives—historians ventriloquizing other historians—serves to reinforce problematic and even false narratives, particularly of bodies that are themselves already subject to being spoken for.13 There are few models for practicing historical interpretation, particularly architectural historical interpretation, that do not rely primarily on text, which is especially susceptible to this flaw.14 In this essay, I will consider what it means to use one’s body as the site for interpreting architectural history—particularly when the architecture it is interpreting was built for clients whose bodies are actively politicized for being “queer.” I will look to two performances that took place at the Farnsworth House in 2017—Gerard & Kelly’s Modern Living and my own, I Listened—both re-interpretations of architectural history performed within the architecture that is the physical setting of that history. This

154  Nora Wendl essay will consider the ways in which a live, performer’s body acting out and speaking on behalf of the historical body rebuilds that body as an active agent, breaking the hold of the plot-driven, linear, and historical narrative that distorted the historical subject. These performances are not considered ends unto themselves in telling that history, but rather part of the process of necessarily transforming architectural historiography. Modern Living is a performance project that takes place in canonical modern houses but does not take architecture as its explicit subject. Instead, Gerard & Kelly research the lives that unfolded in these spaces; they design and perform episodic choreographies—both movement and spoken word—that reveal the relationship ­ dynamics that were once at play in them. Drawing from historic letters, photographs, essays, and other archival materials of the former occupants of each house, they speak (sometimes repetitively) words and phrases that encapsulate the relationships sponsored by the structure: between the client and the architect; between the architect and the house; between the client and the house. As part of the process of creating these choreographies, they conduct an on-site listening practice with their performers, asking them to occupy the grounds and the houses silently for a few hours, writing down everything that they notice about the architecture, and everything that comes up as an associative memory in response to it. Fragments of this writing become part of the final performance: words and phrases spoken out loud to describe the relationships between the performer and the house; between the performer and their own history of intimate partners—as domestic spaces come with implied intimacy. The performers’ bodies become a “living political archive,” their own history spoken alongside the history of the architecture within which they perform, which is the history of the lives that have been lived there.15 The thread drawn through all of these relationships is desire, from which all architecture springs. If the architecture that facilitates these atypical relations is the rare exception to the norm, we still lack the language to describe them, let alone the methods of properly historicizing them. What made modern architecture modern was its way of re-­ imagining how we might live, even providing spaces for queer and unusual family formations before they were socially or culturally acceptable. Gerard & Kelly argue that Modern Living examines the “livability of queer space—its pleasures, tensions, and impossibilities.”16 The queerness of three of the four houses in which Modern Living has been performed is quite obvious—the Glass House (New Canaan, Connecticut, 1949) was (sometimes) home to a homosexual couple, architect Philip J­ ohnson and his partner David Whitney; Eileen Gray’s E-1027 (Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, 1929) was home to bisexual Gray and her lover (at the time), Jean Badovici; Rudolph Schindler and Pauline Gibling Schindler had an unconventional married life in the R.M. Schindler House (West Hollywood, California, 1922) with plenty of room for lovers and “sleeping baskets” on the roof, which allowed sex out in the open rather than in bedrooms. Unlike the subjects of the other chapters in Modern Living, however, Dr. Farnsworth’s sexual orientation was not in the open—perhaps this is why it has been the subject of so much historical speculation. A chapter of her memoir was omitted at the hands of two women who were her close friends, and this omission facilitates what Preciado refers to as Dr. Farnsworth being “closeted” by historians who repeat the van der Rohe-Farnsworth love story. In the absence of absolute explicit clarity about her sexuality, it is spoken for by historians. If Dr. Farnsworth did live fully out,

I Remember  155 she did not leave an explicit record of it—even deploying carefully ambiguous language in her memoir when writing of her friendships with women. Some of this could be contextualized as evidence of her status as a physician, researcher, and professor during the homophobic McCarthy era, when Farnsworth’s love life would have been scrutinized. The line between private and public life that Farnsworth carefully toed is itself a subject that Modern Living encompasses, in lieu of truth. For 20 years, I have had a relationship with Dr. Farnsworth’s words. I have, in a sense, allowed them to occupy me, without demanding from them absolute clarity. Returning to her archive regularly, I have read and typed simultaneously, allowing her sentences, poems, and other text fragments to flow through me and onto the page. This is a form of listening as well as a form of embodying her: I have found a surprising resonance between her memories and my own. I have performed and produced interventions into many aspects of her archive: identifying in her photographs, poems, and memoir what I believe to be the irreducible traces of her voice. Most recently, I have inhabited the Farnsworth House itself, listening and recording sounds in the structure as part of the performance piece I Listened (2017) in order to document her absence from it. Each of these has been an attempt to inhabit something that Dr. Farnsworth once inhabited—it is an occupational historiography that seeks to be the opposite of narrative-driven historiography. It has, at its core, empathy. Constructing history in this mode is not a matter of truth-seeking, but a matter of simultaneously giving voice to self and subject. The artist Mary Kelly, with whom Gerard & Kelly studied, puts at the center of her work a distinction between “the practical past”—that is, one’s own life experiences, “the situational account related to our everyday lives”—and the larger rubric of history, which American historian Hayden White calls “the historical past,” the official account of an event based upon witness statements and other facts.17 Due to my own relationship to Farnsworth’s archive as an artist and a writer who has been visiting it for nearly 20 years—the same amount of time that Farnsworth lived in her house—there is a polyphonic nature to this essay and to my research. This essay explores both the ventriloquizing tendencies of authoring history and the possibilities of producing polyphonic histories that do not seek to diminish or reduce the historical figure, but rather seek to remember her by speaking and listening, in turn. Dr. Farnsworth will speak in moments punctuating this essay.

II released from dimensions that I was used to thinking of as mine. So wide, so long, so thick and with certain traits thrown in, always through the refractions of other people’s eyes. But now there was nothing to limit one’s transcending.18 1. I have memorized this passage from Dr. Farnsworth’s unpublished memoir by reading her tangled handwriting over and over. Written when she was in her 70s and living in Italy, these pages are not a diary. She tells her version of events from the perspective of the end of her life, with distance, often less concerned with the details of the external world, and more concerned with

156  Nora Wendl the impacts of places, events, and people on what might be called her internal world.19 In this passage, where she recalls standing on the deck of a ship as it approaches Mt. Vesuvius, alone, in her twenties, she doesn’t describe the volcano, but what its presence does to her—releasing her from other people’s limiting constructions of who she is or could be: but now there was nothing to limit one’s transcending. 20 2. For Dr. Farnsworth, such moments of transformation were the substance of her memoir, rendered in her own particular voice, flashes of sensuality and self-awareness. 3. Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly use Farnsworth’s memoir in order to compose the four scores of this chapter of Modern Living. According to the artists, we live in an age of “information and answers…a world in which our desire for knowledge is immediately satisfied, but [our] desire for transformation is not.”21 My account of their performance at the Farnsworth House is itself an act of transformation, as this chapter of Modern Living currently exists in a series of photographs, clips of film footage, their scripts, interviews and online articles, and an unpublished interview I held with them at a coffee shop in Albuquerque, New Mexico in July 2018. 4. Here is what I can imagine it was like to attend this performance in September 2017: an audience approaches the Farnsworth House as if this were a typical tour. They move around the house freely, standing at varying distances from the glass structure. The trees have just begun to turn for the season, their green leaves are shot through yellow and orange. In the first in a series of digital images that the artists have shared with me, two dancers emerge from the five-foot gap between the bottom of the house and the soggy meadow floor. In slow movements, they push themselves away from the ground, working their way toward the first flight of white travertine steps. Resisting the earth’s natural, gravitational pull is a herculean effort for both bodies and buildings. The woman, “Wo,” performed by Julia Eichten, pushes her face into a travertine stair, twisting for her next push against gravity. Each gesture brings her closer to the interior space of the house; the man, “Man,” performed by Zack Winokur, follows her lead (Figure 8.3). The house dissolves under the marks of the performers’ silent interactions with it—in the errant dirty footprint on a white-painted column, in the unmaking of architecture and body as upright. There are no other photographs of this score of the dance, or the transition to the next, as “Wo” enters the house alone. I can imagine that some audience members follow her; others, perhaps unsure what to do, remain outside. The glass house is perfect for such a performance. It is a theater. 5. I listen as Brennan and Ryan describe what happens next. It is a summer afternoon in the high desert. Empty coffee cups litter the table between us, and the sun is lightly burning our skin. This is where “Farnsworth seeps in,” Brennan tells me, “the physician, the researcher, the observer of life.”22 To him, it is still happening in the present tense. “Does she say anything?” I ask. “She speaks in instructions,” he tells me, “she says, ‘elevate the occiput, shake the cranium, bend the knee, lengthen the backs of the legs.’”23 She is an X-ray. As she does this, she is interacting with the furniture, moving through the house. Eventually, her language is replaced by music, something simple, rhythmic and deep, like a heartbeat, a pulse. 24 Her body and her voice are born out of this language.

I Remember  157

Figure 8.3  G erard & Kelly, Modern Living, 2017. Performance view: Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, presented by the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Pictured: Julia Eichten and Zack Winokur. Photo: Bradley Glanzrock, LStopMedia.com Courtesy of the artists.

6. She begins to speak. I am holding the script now. 25 Here is a passage from it: 12 am–midnight Waiting for the sound of a passing car That winter night New Year’s Eve First night in the house A bare, sixty-watt bulb on an extension cord Foam mattresses on the floor Took a bath 1 am Ruins The Acropolis Light trans-piercing the glass Your red F150 pickup truck White towels over the seats The silent meadows 2 am Your words landed on my left ear Dark spectacle of night The telephone rang, shattering the solitary scene

158  Nora Wendl 7. As Eichten speaks, she orients her body relative to the hours on the face of an analog clock that nobody can see. As she turns her body in the direction of each hour—12 o’clock straight ahead, 6 o’clock directly behind her—she conjures both her own memories of that hour and Dr. Farnsworth’s. Those lines attributed to Farnsworth are drawn from her memoir, references to her inhabitation of the glass house: of her relationship with the house and with the architect. Farnsworth spent her first night in the glass house on December 31, 1950—on rubber mattresses, under the glare of a 60-watt bulb that lit up the snow-covered silent meadows, exposed and without curtains, and she made her bed, a foam mattress on the floor. Farnsworth’s neighbors called—the telephone rang, shattering the solitary scene—and insisted on walking her over to their place to celebrate the New Year. 8. The memories that belong to Eichten are drawn from various phases of her life from childhood to adolescence to adulthood—mostly memories and scenes from her relationships with past lovers. We are presented with what the glass house conjures up in the associative logic of her intimate history, from her experience walking the grounds, sitting inside the house, inhabiting it. This is the history of Eichten’s own body and sexuality, recollected during her first experiences with the glass house. 9. 9 pm Your unbroken silence Coffee drains from my bloodstream 2 or 3 martinis in Your shirt unbuttoned one time too many When you spoke, the rat tat tat of the machine gun A storm a flood or other act of God Mom plays NPR to put me to sleep I will miss dancing with strangers 10. Every love story has an origin story, and the one that historians have created for Dr. Farnsworth centers on the night that she met Mies van der Rohe. Your unbroken silence is from her memoir, and it refers to van der Rohe’s silence on the night that Farnsworth met him and invited him to design a house for her. She recalls his presence at a friends’ dinner table and his silence as the three women spoke around him. A storm a flood or other act of God are the very words that Dr. Farnsworth writes to describe the moment that he spoke. 11. As written by historian Alice T. Friedman, meeting van der Rohe is thrilling to Dr. Farnsworth. “Thinking back on that night, Farnsworth remembered her excitement: ‘The effect,’ she wrote, ‘was tremendous, like a storm, a flood, or other act of God.’”26 Narratively, this could sound like love at first sight. In the full context of the quote in her memoir, what’s been argued as her lovestruck language could have been, quite simply, the sarcasm she was known for: ‘I am wondering whether there might be some young man in your office who would be willing to design a small studio weekend-house worthy of that lovely shore.’ The response was the most dramatic for having been preceded by two hours of unbroken silence. ‘I would love to build any kind of house for

I Remember  159 you.’ The effect was tremendous, like a storm, a flood, or other act of God. We planned a trip to Plano together so that I could show him the property. 12. Sandwiched between fragments of Eichten’s love stories—Coffee drains from my bloodstream, 2 or 3 martinis in, Your shirt unbuttoned one time too many, When you spoke, the rat tat tat of the machine gun—Farnsworth’s statements are almost closeted again, bumping up against what might be read as another romance. Collapsed into Eichten’s body and voice, Farnsworth’s and Eichten’s worlds intertwine, and the you becomes both any lover Dr. Farnsworth may have had, and any lover in Eichten’s past. You is both the most intimate to the performer, and the most unknown to the audience. She is, after all, alone in this house. 13. In Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart opens the chapter on “Voice/ Possession” with a thought exercise: “Let’s say I am thinking about my love for your voice—not the sources of my love for your voice, but what it is I love when I love your voice. What is the “object” of this love?”27 she asks, addressing the singularity of the voice that we love, which is immaterial, but somehow contains the beloved. 14. Who is speaking? How do we discern the truth—which memory is Eichten’s, and which is Farnsworth’s? Consider this performed over and over, during the course of several hours and tours of audiences to the house. Imagine Eichten’s voice as perishable. 28 A voice takes air, wears out, is an extension of the body, dies with us—and it’s in the accident, in the human “replaying” of the same fragment of a memory, that a mistake will inevitably be made that reveals us—a gasp, a stutter, a silence. When we are so involved, Gerard & Kelly suggest, we cannot consciously construct ourselves. 15. In an unplanned silence, an open mouth forgets the words. The listener ­a nticipates the next sound. This anticipation might be heightened when the audience member hears Eichten saying you, over and over, the you that is any former lover belonging to the performer, the you that is van der Rohe, the you we have each heard ourselves called in this context, the intimate you. Perhaps, hearing you on this particular September afternoon in this particular glass house, you keep your distance, not wanting any part of another’s story projected upon you. 16. You is so personal a pronoun as to not even need a name when the beloved is addressing us. How does one begin to create the historical record of that? “My dear, they were just too close to create a record,” an historian friend told me, offering the notion that in historical silence lies an intimacy that leaves no trace: what he meant was that the absence of a record of a relationship between Dr. Farnsworth and van der Rohe made it likely that they were together.29 Historian Alice T. Friedman offers another way to view the silence of an intimacy that leaves no trace: missing from Dr. Farnsworth’s memoir for a brief period of time was a chapter that describes her life in Greenwich Village in the 1920s, among queer denizens. At the time of its disappearance, her complete memoir had been in the hands of the two women friends who had invited Mies and Edith to dinner, and who, Friedman suspects, “had every reason to keep their relationship with each other and with Edith a secret as a generic ‘friendship.’”30 The chapter re-­ appears in her collected papers at the Newberry Library years later.

160  Nora Wendl 17. This was a period that Farnsworth refers to in her memoir as her years of vague expansion.31 There are fragments of this period of her life—when she was in her 20s—that can be found in her memoir as they were archived, but it’s not easy to categorize her as a lesbian. She is friends with Molly Dewson, feminist and political activist, and her partner, Polly Porter, the social worker whose family had a summer home in Castine, Maine, where Farnsworth’s family spent summers. She spends a winter in Paris with Katharine Butler Hathaway, who would later also buy a house in Castine, staying in squalid studio rooms on the Left Bank.32 18. We used to drink hot chocolate with brioches at the Coupole in the late afternoons while the rain streamed down outside, and talk about Toshihiko and about life, and all our thoughts and experiences. ‘Like Miss Furr and Miss Skeene who went to Paris to be gay,’ Katharine would say, and we would laugh and laugh.33 19. If this seems to offer a certain direction, a certain read on Farnsworth, she follows it with a pivot: I do not remember now, and probably did not then, how gay Gertrude Stein’s characters were in Paris. Gertrude has been out of fashion for some years and probably already then there were few readers who recognized the privations which drove Miss Furr and Miss Skeene to Paris, to be gay. Katharine’s were categorical and profound, but the skies of Paris dripped nothing but drops of sordidness and vice upon a life of singular delicacy and seclusion.34 20. Miss Furr and Miss Skeene are the two main characters in a story by Gertrude Stein that appeared in the July 1923 edition of Vanity Fair. In it, two women’s lives have an ambiguous evocation: Mrs. Furr becomes Miss Furr, Miss Furr and Miss Skeene are gay, they are in the presence of men, they are not in the presence of men, they live together, they live apart. 21. The two friends go their separate ways in the spring, and they reconnect many years later, after Dr. Farnsworth heard that Katharine had married somebody by the name of Daniel Hathaway.35 Dr. Farnsworth has lunch with Katharine in Maine at her new house in Blue Hill, Maine, which she and Dan Hathaway purchased after she sold the house in Castine that they could no longer afford. While Dan serves them, as Edith describes in her memoir, an exceedingly good luncheon, she notes that he is unrestrainedly effeminate and that Katharine is ill at ease. 36 She concludes the memory with this: Katharine and I fumbled for communication in this new situation. 37 22. Whether what Farnsworth is writing is true is impossible to know. In her dismissive description of Dan Hathaway, and her depiction of the discomfort between she and Katharine, two old friends at lunch, one reads the possibility of open secrets: this was the ultimate function of the midcentury “closet,” as Preciado writes—“not so much hiding or blocking knowledge” of the truth of relationships and sexualities, but concealing “the knowledge of the knowledge.”38 But to understand all of that would be to read between the lines of Dr. Farnsworth’s memoir in ways that problematically parallel how historians have chosen other chapters of her memoir to “prove” a relationship with van der Rohe. Attempting to project a clear understanding of Dr. Farnsworth’s sexuality is another layer of trying to create an historical narrative that follows typical patterns. It is another version of ventriloquism, of projecting the historian’s words onto the life and body of this historical subject.

I Remember  161 23. In truth, Dr. Farnsworth had an ongoing and complicated relationship with public discourse. When Elizabeth Gordon published her account of “an unnamed woman’s” complaints of the Farnsworth House in the infamous 1953 House Beautiful article, “The Threat to the Next America”—two years before the trial concluded—it was under the banner of McCarthyism: the notion that the International Style was coming to destroy American democracy, to force Americans to give up their privacy and their possessions.39 McCarthy’s “Fight for America” campaign, as Preciado notes, began as a hunt for communists and “converted into an operation to uncover gays and lesbians holding institutional positions.”40 The same discourse that might hold van der Rohe responsible for a flawed, leaking structure—albeit by using Red Scare tactics—would also deny privacy and civil rights to gay and lesbian Americans. 24. Even the act of writing her own account of her life—a private act—proved to be one that met with interference, as it became clear that it had the potential to become public. In the last years of her life, Dr. Farnsworth was visited by John Maxon, an official with the Art Institute of Chicago, who came to her villa in Italy and offered to be her literary executor: to modify her memoir toward a reconciliation between ‘a great architect and a great client’!41 Edith declined, and described it, in a letter to her sister, as the height of ghoulishness.42 25. She continued to exist, independent of the glass house that she commissioned, independent of the narrative that suggests she is at most a supporting character in the history of architecture. Beginning in the late 1960s, she worked closely with poet Eugenio Montale (before his Nobel Prize) to translate his poetry into English and—if her correspondence with her sister is to be believed—fell in love: imagine meeting your soul mate, at my age!43 By “soul mate,” did she mean it in a romantic sense, or in the sense of meeting someone whose entire being resonates with your own, sex aside? 26. And yet, the fragments of Farnsworth’s writing that Eichten speaks during her performance in the house describe the building, but not its effect on Dr. Farnsworth, nor any glimmer into this interior world of soul mates and secrets. It was not day or night/Some flying creature strikes the pane…There is no stillness in nature/ Next to the Fox River…Those tired, dull Sundays…The austere silence. Though the house is rendered here as embedded in nature, silent, murderous to birds, we are not given access to the transformative potential of this structure upon her life, when the house began to become a home to her, or Farnsworth’s rendering of it in poetry as luminous walls, secluded by reflection. Even given all the facts of the structure, we miss its meaning to her, its impact on what she calls, in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius, her transcending. 27. But the fragments of Farnsworth’s writing that Eichten speaks in her performance of Modern Living do begin to break down the plot lines of the problematic narrative structure by rejecting the mimesis of typical historiographies. Instead, she fragments the phrases spoken or written by the client alongside episodic memories of her own past. Out of these emerges a positioning of historiography as a praxis, altering the relationship between the past and the present. History is always limited in its interpretation if the historian doesn’t commit to dwelling in the inhabitant’s inner world: in Modern Living, the performer stretches the discourse a bit—pulls it taut, like the white curtain in Eichten’s hand, so that it becomes almost transparent. We can see clearly, for just a moment, what would

162  Nora Wendl be visible without the distance of time. And then, the curtain snaps back into place—opaque again. 28. In writing her introduction to her English translation of Eugenio Montale’s Provisional Conclusions (1970), the outcome of their months working together in Milan, when Farnsworth thought of him as a “soul mate,” she identifies the way that Montale uses you in his poetry: ‘You’ is one, or it may be all; it is the companion, even though…it may be personally unknown. It is the creature, or the essence, to be adored, the loss of which is the most intolerable…And once in a while, by a fulminating ricochet, ‘you’ becomes evil…by another rebound of paradoxes, ‘you’ may become ‘I.’44 What I call you is an expanding of my own dimensions, she seems to suggest; what I call you is an extension of myself. 29. I have inhabited her memoir by reading it over and over, and in dwelling in it I am reminded of the things that dwell in me. 30. Is it still a research relationship when you have read somebody else’s memoir so many times that their memories begin to become your own? When the language of them is so vivid that the images that the text recalls lodge in your mind not as a language but as a vision? I have read over and over her description of emerging from one of the tunnels along the Autostrada in Rome, at the season when the slopes and embankments beyond the opening at the end of the tunnel were blazing with the pure yellow of the broom which seemed to cover them completely. I have read it so frequently that when I moved to the desert where broom is everywhere (we call it chamisa here), I thought I had seen it before, had experienced its explosive color already. Here is how that passage in her memoir ends, which is also how I felt when I realized it was not my own memory: I found myself deeply and unaccountably shaken.45 31. When we listen, do we hear just that which is familiar to us? Why was it that the memory of the Autostrada in Rome, Farnsworth’s memory of falling through the burning hole at the end of the tunnel reminded me, as I sat in the silence of the reading room when I was in Rome when 9/11 happened? I first learned of it through the voice of the vendor at the art supply store, “the two buildings, so sad,” he had said, holding my hand. My first visual memory of the images of it were the ones published in the magazines I saw in racks and on stands, images of people falling against the backdrop of the sky and the towers. Why was it that it made me recall my attempts to call my mother using the international phone card she gave me? The robotic prompt told me to “push 1 to make a call,” over and over—and, since the lines were all jammed—“your call cannot be completed.” The voice of the prompts was my mother’s voice—AT&T was her first major voicework client—robotic, giving me instructions, when what I wanted was to hear my mother’s actual voice. 32. And when I am alarmed that I didn’t realize these things sooner, I return to Farnsworth’s statement, written at the end of her memoir: You write about your life only if you are willing to show yourself while you were doing the living, or at least now that you are doing the remembering.46 There are moments in her memoir in which she breaks narrative and turns to address the reader directly: she refers to the reader as you. In suggesting this relationship to the reader, does she occupy them with her voice, her memory? In another woman’s memories, I find my own. I do the remembering.

I Remember  163 33. What Gerard & Kelly reveal is that their performance isn’t about the truth of the history of the Farnsworth House, but about performing relationality between an interpretation of the past and an interpretation of the present. This does not promise coherence, but it also does not lie. 34. This dance score concludes with Eichten leaving the house. Her departing words as she crosses the threshold from inside to outside recall, again, another threshold, Farnsworth’s first night in the house: That winter night Waiting for the sound of a passing car I watch as she exits the house and joins “Man” on the porch. The film continues, but I have closed the window.

III When there was nothing left in her archive to read, I turned to the house. To read a space, I thought, might begin with listening to it. Wearing a pair of binaural microphones, I walked into the all-glass house. I wore a dress I had purchased in New Mexico, one that had been made the same year that the house was commissioned, which is the same year that the first atomic bomb was tested near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in a desert that was deemed “empty” but was in fact occupied by indigenous communities, ranchers, and others for whom the land was a source of all life. The same year that the desert floor was sucked up into the sky and rained down as glass, Dr. Farnsworth and Mies met in this mid-western floodplain to imagine a glass house. Histories of occupation can be resistant to language, or at least resistant to narrativization, which desires one agenda, a consistent set of characters. I wanted to listen for this resistance. I wanted to embody it. I thought it might be possible to listen for what it had been like for her to occupy this space. Though architectural history traffics in the visual—photographs, drawings, correspondence—sound might come closer to being an architectural artifact. When we receive sound, it can envelope us, Susan Stewart writes, we receive it as “a touch, a pressure. [Sounds] touch not only our ear membrane but also the entire outer surface of the skin.”47 I wanted to produce some form of evidence of her occupation, and thought that by wearing clothing that made sounds like hers, by walking through the house comfortably barefoot, doing ordinary things—sitting, opening a book, turning a page—I might produce something that, later, heard by an audience could be mistaken for her. Recording these sounds, I thought I might have another trace of her—a little more evidence of her existence, or, as she put it in her memoir, proof that her shadow fell somewhere. I sat, for the most part, in silence. The silence in this house is not monolithic, it is the silence between sounds or words. It is the silence of a page turning of the anticipation of the next line of a poem.48 This silence, the silence that creates the possibility of listening, could only exist when I did not move and did not speak. It was not the same silence of the reading room, punctuated by those startling moments that occurred in reading her memoir, when a memory of hers would trigger one of my own. Walking through the house, wearing the dress, I was alone, and although I listened, I heard nothing (Figure 8.4).

164  Nora Wendl

Figure 8.4  Nora Wendl, I Listened (58:15–58:40), 2017. Digital print on glass, 28.8 in. × 21.6 in.

Even years later, in the early evening, with the last light of the day bleeding out of the room, I sit at my desk, and I listen to the sounds I had recorded—my hands brushing against expensive leather furniture, my weight sinking into a Barcelona chair, the sound of my own breathing, strained by the dress, and the deep quiet of laying on the bed for a time. When I hear it, I can also feel it, my hands folded across my chest, my breathing finally steady. I listen to myself inhabiting my body in this glass house. I listen for the accidental moment in which I might slip into being her, in which I might stop hearing myself and hear her instead. This is impossible because I remember all of it. I remember closing my eyes against the disorienting feeling of being able to see so much, so far. I remember that none of this made me feel any closer to her.

IV In the moment that opens this essay and still glows through my computer screen, Julia Eichten falls backward, visible only in fragments: arm, face, hair, gray skirt, and matching top. She has not yet succumbed to gravity. In Dr. Farnsworth’s archive, a photograph exists of a woman making the same gesture, but horizontally, after the fall, so to speak: a woman lying on her back on a striped day bed, her right arm lifted, the back of it draped over her forehead in a gesture of apparent defeat (Figure 8.5).

I Remember  165 Her eyes are closed, her gray skirt falls around her folded legs. She is still wearing her shoes: it is as though she has just arrived after a long day and collapsed onto the bed. It is the only photograph in Dr. Farnsworth’s archive in which a woman’s body is evident in the house. I, too, have embodied this image. In the unknown woman’s gestures, many possibilities emerge: this is a moment of defeat, exhaustion, satisfaction, or perhaps, deflation. I projected this photograph onto a scrim hung from the ceiling of a garage I had available to me during a summer residency. I positioned the camera and curled up on the floor of the garage. I draped a hand over my face—we were twins, me lying on the floor, amid the husks of insects and dried up leaves and decades of dust, light raking in under the gap below the garage door, and the Defeated Woman of the past, time-traveling through the light of the projector, projected upside down so that she appeared to be floating, facing down toward me (Figure 8.6). This image has “become” Dr. Farnsworth over time. The gesture of defeat that the unknown woman in the image is making fits the narrative that has been told of Dr. Farnsworth, again and again, repeated until it has become the received “truth”— that she was a tragic figure. Without the ability to speak, one’s credibility is based

Figure 8.5  P  hotograph of unknown woman in the Farnsworth House, undated, back stamped “Gorman Child Photography,” Farnsworth Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.

166  Nora Wendl

Figure 8.6  Nora Wendl, Unknown woman, Farnsworth House, 2013. Chromogenic print, 24 in. × 36 in.

upon one’s comportment. Like Eichten’s gesture in Modern Living, the photograph I took is just one moment registered in an image. In creating these re-performances of an actual historical image and releasing them into the stream of content on the glass house and Farnsworth’s history within it, we disrupt and confuse the flow of images from which history is constructed. By other women posing this way, we reveal what has always been true—the original image is not Farnsworth at all. History is constructed in the absence of the actual bodies that produced it. It is a narrative re-membering of those bodies and the events of the past that relies on the curation and organization of fragments of that past as its only proof. For nearly two years—from March 2020 until January 2022—I worked with the National Trust for Historic Preservation to transform the interpretation of the Farnsworth House by furnishing it as Dr. Farnsworth did early in her 20-year inhabitation. For this

I Remember  167 re-furnishing of the house, titled Edith Farnsworth, Reconsidered, the furniture that one typically sees on a tour of the Farnsworth House—all designed by Mies van der Rohe in the 1920s for houses and pavilions in Europe—was moved out. In its place were replicas of Farnsworth’s furniture from a specific era bracketed by two defining events: 1951, when she first took ownership of the house, and 1954, the year that the Fox River flooded her house for the first time. As if those waters never rose, reproductions of her furniture completed the setting: a 1952 Florence Knoll table sat in the dining area, covered with place-settings by Russel Wright; a newly built version of the daybed on which the unnamed defeated woman languished was covered in throw pillows; chairs by Jens Risom and Bruno Mathsson filled out the entry and living spaces, respectively. And Dr. Farnsworth’s original wardrobe was recreated without operable doors: conceptually, if not actually, holding space for what she kept private. On the Franco Albini table in the southeast corner of the house, near an Olivetti typewriter like the one she owned, we placed original editions of books that she read. For this exhibition, I revised the tour script used by guides at the Farnsworth House to reinforce this new historical narrative: Perhaps she wrote poetry at this Franco Albini table. You’ll see here a few copies of poems that she wrote while living here. [Feel free to read one if you wish!] Since the best possible version of this tour would be given seamlessly, as if these were the guide’s own words, I e-mailed the guides the script to practice. They repeated this new script for years, gesturing to new objects in the same way that they repeated the original script and gestured to different objects in order to reinforce the previous narrative of the house as lovechild. This exhibition was, of course, delayed. The United States declared a state of emergency on March 13, 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic—two weeks before the tour season for Edith Farnsworth, Reconsidered was to open. The National Trust for Historic Places closed all of their sites as states across the country issued stay-athome orders for citizens until further notice. This tour season, which was just one facet of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s initiative, Her Turn: The Campaign for Where Women Made History, was suspended until June 2020. The programming was immediately translated online, into the only shared commons that we still had while we all sheltered at home, waiting for the virus to pass. The Farnsworth House website hosted news about the reorganization of the interior of the house next to an advertisement for Alex Beam’s (then) recently published book, Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modern Masterpiece, in which the author speculates further upon Dr. Farnsworth’s love life, describing her as a “spinster kidney researcher” who beyond her rumored relationship with Mies van der Rohe also had a sexual relationship with her violin teacher, Mario Corti.49 Taking advantage of the absence of visitors, a film crew snuck into the house in its new configuration to test lighting for a new film Maggie Gyllenhaal is producing which purports to tell the story of the “love affair” between Dr. Farnsworth and van der Rohe. The exhibition and tour season that reflected Dr. Farnsworth’s actual life and her devotion to experimentation in both her research and patronage of architecture are at odds with the book and forthcoming film that both sensationalize her life in the old, familiar ways, though the NTHP supports both—if not financially, in advertising and access to the house. In the twenty-first-century U.S., financial support for cultural sites has been gutted to the extent that any opportunity for public interest which might be translated into financial capital outweighs the integrity of historical accuracy, even in the very institutions charged with maintaining and preserving it.

168  Nora Wendl In this context, in which even the National Trust has abdicated responsibility for historical accuracy in heritage sites, it is perhaps inevitable that history has become a subject taken up by artists—perhaps it is even necessary. Institutions do not construct, remember, and repeat narratives of the past, individuals do. Institutions choose which narratives they desire, as their allegiances change. Even what is fixed in place will not hold. In early January 2022, the Farnsworth House was, once again, filled with reproductions of furniture that Mies van der Rohe designed in the 1920s for Villa Tugendhat (Brno, Czechia, 1930) and the Barcelona Pavilion (Barcelona, Spain, 1929)—returning the narrative of the house to its encyclopedic revolutions around van der Rohe’s oeuvre as the dust of the Her Turn initiative settles. A movie will appear in which Maggie Gyllenhaal-as-Farnsworth makes a fool of herself for Male Lead-as-van der Rohe, and the clock will turn back, ever so slightly, reminding us of a woman’s place in this history as a supporting character, a trope. Everything we had done to prepare for Edith Farnsworth, Reconsidered is forgotten. After all, the only inviolable body is the body of history. To transform a historical narrative, as Mary Douglas argues in Purity and Danger, is to breach a social boundary, which “creates ‘pollution’”—in this case weakening or degrading the integrity of the institution that maintains this structure’s history.50 Sherry B. Ortner likens this to the body, “which is vulnerable to both the entry of potentially dangerous matter from the outside…and the loss of vital matter from the inside.”51 Ortner warns that the violation of the boundaries of these inviolable bodies—institutions and narratives underpinned by patriarchal structures—will be met with strong, even violent, reactions.52 Perhaps this is why the renewed interest in Dr. Farnsworth—the forthcoming movie, the book—simply silence her again. This morning, I received an e-mail with images of the house in its exhibition configuration. Full of replicas of her furniture, it almost appears as if Dr. Farnsworth has just left it, briefly, to go for a walk. In these images, the house is dialed to an historical moment in which the trial is still ongoing and her ownership of the house hangs in the balance. There are dishes on the table, awaiting a meal and guests that will never arrive. A poem lies on the Franco Albini table, a reproduction of one she authored herself. It describes her poodle grazing on clotted wings and robins’ skulls, followed by a line that asks a charged question: Would you, one day, pick my bones?53 Some authoring history will continue to pick her bones, to shop Farnsworth’s memoir and the historical sources that borrow from it for the precise phrases and fragments of sentences that will fit structured plotlines or resonate with stereotypical versions of a woman. But emerging historical practices that require listening to a subject’s words, embodying them, and allowing an historical subject to inhabit you—the performer, historian, artist—to speak through you as you associate those words with the present, should remind us that the power of the past, of history, is not its reconstruction in the present, but our construction of our own relation to it. We must construct out of the past something that can transform us. The historical past, Hayden White reminds us, is a narrative constructed as an end in itself—it is nothing anybody has actually lived or experienced—and often that narrative aligns with current social and cultural mores. 54 The narrative of the past will never be more radical than the present will allow it to be. This should not stop us from creating new historiographic approaches despite the inevitability of their being immediately silenced; of their existing only in episodic fragments of video, photograph, text. When the performer, historian, or artist engages in this historiographic

I Remember  169 practice—placing themselves alongside their historical subject—it is not just the historical narrative of past events that emerges, but the lived past, the practical past, the past which Hayden White describes as “the past of repressed memory, dream, and desire….”55 This is the past that we turn to when confronted with the question “What ought I (or we) do?”56 It is the one that we turn to in uncertain times. It is the one that begins, I remember.

Notes 1 “Society Section,” Chicago Tribune (February 1, 1942): 66. 2 “Society Section,” Chicago Tribune (February 1, 1942): 66. 3 “Houses: Architect & Client,” Architectural Forum: The Magazine of Building (October 1951): 160. 4 “Letters to the Editor,” Architectural Forum: The Magazine of Building (March 1952): 86. 5 Re-membering, in this essay, refers to both the process of being historically accounted for, as well as re-formed, re-designed, re-narrativized in the process. 6 “Houses: Architect & Client,” Architectural Forum: The Magazine of Building (October 1951): 155. 7 “Houses: Architect & Client,” Architectural Forum: The Magazine of Building (October 1951): 157. 8 “Houses: Architect & Client,” Architectural Forum: The Magazine of Building (October 1951): 157. 9 The “female quota” began at Northwestern University Medical School in 1926. “By 1963 nine [women] were admitted and in 1978 there were sixty.” The reason for four women is that it constituted a “natural dissecting unit and, at that time, it was deemed unseemly for men and women to dissect at the same table.” The idea that men and women could not be in the presence of the same naked body—even a dead one—pervaded medical education until the mid-1960s. See Leslie B. Arey, “Chapter X: Maturity Attained: 1926–1979,” in Leslie B. Arey, A History of the Feinberg School of Medicine (Chicago: DigitalHub. Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center, Northwestern University, 1979), 253. 10 Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: The University of ­Chicago Press, 1985), 258. 11 Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: The University of ­Chicago Press, 1985), 258, 253. 12 Paul B. Preciado, “Mi(E)S Conception: The Farnsworth House and the Mystery of the Transparent Closet,” trans. Keith Harris, in Society + Space, November 4, 2019, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/mies-conception-the-farnsworth-house-andthe-mystery-of-the-transparent-closet. 13 The realization that historians ventriloquize other historians in producing history was made on the College Art Association panel “Performance, Voice, and Embodiment: Ventriloquism in Contemporary Art,” moderated on February 21, 2018, by Professor Jennie Hirsh, with panelists Isabelle Loring Wallace, Michael Jay McClure, Jane Blocker, and Nora Wendl. That panel inspired this volume. The comment was made by panelist Michael Jay McClure. 14 This mode of practice is an emerging model, and a moment predicted by architectural theorist Sylvia Lavin at the turn of the twenty-first century, when she argued that history-making would become an active project, one that considers architecture to be an event, and that “[h]istorical work may even become of interest to nonhistorical thinking.” See Sylvia Lavin, “Theory into History; Or, the Will to Anthology,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58, no. 3, Architectural History 1999/2000 (September 1999): 498. 15 Paul B. Preciado, “Mi(E)S Conception: The Farnsworth House and the Mystery of the Transparent Closet,” trans. Keith Harris, Society + Space, November 4, 2019, https:// w w w.societyandspace.org /articles/mies- conception-the-farnsworth-house-andthe-mystery-of-the-transparent-closet. 16 “Modern Living,” Projects, Gerard & Kelly, accessed September 1, 2019, http://­ gerardandkelly.com/projects/modern-living/.

170  Nora Wendl 17 Juli Carson, “Aesthetics of an Untethered Past,” in Mary Kelly, et al., Mary Kelly: The Voice Remains (Works in Compressed Lint 1999–2017) (New York: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 2017), 164. 18 Edith Farnsworth, “Memoir,” unpublished ms. in three notebooks, Farnsworth ­Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, unpag. 19 During a series of years that she only refers to in her memoir as a period of “vague expansion,” Dr. Farnsworth remembers the freedom possible in her solitude and travel as a young woman. This is a period of years scholars have been unable to define, between 1923 and 1933, speculating only that she used this time to have an affair with her Italian violin teacher, though the evidence is lacking. After a period of study in Italy, she traveled across Germany, Austria, and France, where she rented an apartment on the Left Bank with other artists, including the writer Katharine Butler Hathaway. 20 Edith Farnsworth, “Memoir,” unpublished ms. in three notebooks, Farnsworth ­Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, unpag. 21 Natilee Harren, “Artists at Work: Gerard & Kelly,” East of Borneo: Contemporary Art and Its History as Considered from Los Angeles (September 2, 2014), https://­eastofborneo. org/articles/artists-at-work-gerard-kelly/. 22 Author’s conversation with Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly in Albuquerque, New Mexico, July 31, 2018. 23 Author’s conversation with Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly in Albuquerque, New Mexico, July 31, 2018. 24 Musical rhythm is provided by Lucky Dragons’ Sara Rara. 25 “Clockwork: Julia,” script provided by Gerard & Kelly. 26 Alice T. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and ­Architectural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998), 131. 27 Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 107. 28 The artists attribute their idea that the human voice contains a “perishable materiality” to the artist Mary Kelly. Author’s conversation with Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly in Albuquerque, New Mexico, July 31, 2018. 29 Author’s conversation with Kevin Harrington, Chicago, IL, October 2014. 30 Alice T. Friedman, email to author, March 30, 2020. 31 Edith Farnsworth, “Memoir,” unpublished ms. in three notebooks, Farnsworth ­Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, unpag. 32 Edith Farnsworth, “Memoir,” unpublished ms. in three notebooks, Farnsworth ­Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, unpag. 33 Edith Farnsworth, “Memoir,” unpublished ms. in three notebooks, Farnsworth ­Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, unpag. 34 Edith Farnsworth, “Memoir,” unpublished ms. in three notebooks, Farnsworth ­Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, unpag. 35 Edith Farnsworth, “Memoir,” unpublished ms. in three notebooks, Farnsworth ­Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, unpag. 36 Edith Farnsworth, “Memoir,” unpublished ms. in three notebooks, Farnsworth ­Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, unpag. 37 Edith Farnsworth, “Memoir,” unpublished ms. In three notebooks, Farnsworth ­Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, unpag. 38 Paul B. Preciado, “Mi(E)S Conception: The Farnsworth House and the Mystery of the Transparent Closet,” trans. Keith Harris, Society + Space, November 4, 2019, https://www.societyandspace.org /articles/mies-conception-the-farnsworth-houseand-the-mystery-of-the-transparent-closet. 39 Elizabeth Gordon, “The Threat to the Next America,” House Beautiful 95 (April 1953), 126–130, 250–251. 40 Elizabeth Gordon, “The Threat to the Next America,” House Beautiful 95 (April 1953), 126–130, 250–251. 41 Edith Farnsworth, letter to Marion Carpenter, May 8, 1975, Farnsworth Collection, ­Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.

I Remember  171 42 Edith Farnsworth, letter to Marion Carpenter, May 8, 1975, Farnsworth Collection, ­Newberry Library, Chicago, IL. 43 Edith Farnsworth, letter to Marion Carpenter, December 17, 1969, Farnsworth ­Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL. 4 4 Edith Farnsworth, “Preface,” in Eugenio Montale, Eugenio Montale: Provisional ­C onclusions, trans. Edith Farnsworth (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1970), n.p. 45 Edith Farnsworth, “Memoir,” unpublished ms. in three notebooks, Farnsworth ­Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, unpag. 46 Edith Farnsworth, “Memoir,” unpublished ms. in three notebooks, Farnsworth ­­Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, unpag. 47 Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 100. 48 Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 101. 49 Alex Beam, Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight over a Modern Masterpiece (New York: Random House, 2020), 226 and 38. 50 Sherry B. Ortner, “Too Soon for Post-Feminism: The Ongoing Life of Patriarchy in ­Neoliberal America,” History and Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2014): 535. 51 Sherry B. Ortner, “Too Soon for Post-Feminism: The Ongoing Life of Patriarchy in ­Neoliberal America,” History and Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2014): 535. 52 Sherry B. Ortner, “Too Soon for Post-Feminism: The Ongoing Life of Patriarchy in ­Neoliberal America,” History and Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2014): 535. 53 Edith Farnsworth, “Res Naturae,” Farnsworth Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, unpag. 54 Hayden White, The Practical Past (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 9. 55 Hayden White, The Practical Past, 9. Described by philosopher Michael Oakeshott, this is the practical past, the notion of the past which we each carry, that we draw from to solve the practical problems of our lives. 56 Hayden White, The Practical Past, 9.

References Arey, Leslie B. A History of the Feinberg School of Medicine, 234–283. Chicago: DigitalHub. Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center, Northwestern University, 1979. Beam, Alex. Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight over a Modern Masterpiece. New York: Random House, 2020. Carson, Juli. “Aesthetics of an Untethered Past.” In Kelly, Mary, et al. Mary Kelly: The Voice Remains (Works in Compressed Lint 1999–2017), 162–170. New York: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 2017. Farnsworth, Edith. Letter to Marion Carpenter, May 8, 1975. Collection of the Newberry Library, Roger and Julie Baskes Department of Special Collections, Midwest MS Farnsworth, Chicago, IL. Farnsworth, Edith. Letter to Marion Carpenter, December 17, 1969. Collection of the Newberry Library, Roger and Julie Baskes Department of Special Collections, Midwest MS Farnsworth, Chicago, IL. Farnsworth, Edith. Memoir, unpublished manuscript in three notebooks. Collection of the Newberry Library, Roger and Julie Baskes Department of Special Collections, Midwest MS Farnsworth, Chicago, IL. Farnsworth, Edith. “Preface.” In Eugenio Montale, Eugenio Montale: Provisional Conclusions, trans. Edith Farnsworth. n.p. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1970. Farnsworth, Edith. “Res Naturae.” Collection of the Newberry Library, Roger and Julie Baskes Department of Special Collections, Midwest MS Farnsworth, Chicago, IL. Friedman, Alice T. Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998.

172  Nora Wendl Gerard, Brennan and Ryan Kelly. “Artists at Work: Gerard & Kelly.” Interview by Natilee Harren. East of Borneo: Contemporary Art and Its History as Considered from Los Angeles, September 2, 2014. https://eastofborneo.org/articles/artists-at-work-gerard-kelly/. Gerard, Brennan and Ryan Kelly. “Clockwork: Julia.” Unpublished script, 2017. Gerard & Kelly. “Modern Living.” Projects. http://gerardandkelly.com/projects/modern-living/. Gordon, Elizabeth. “The Threat to the Next America.” House Beautiful 95 (April 1953): 126–130, 250–251. “Houses: Architect & Client.” Architectural Forum: The Magazine of Building (October 1951): 160. Lavin, Sylvia. “Theory into History; Or, the Will to Anthology.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58, no. 3, Architectural History 1999/2000 (September 1999): 498. “Letters to the Editor.” Architectural Forum: The Magazine of Building (March 1952): 86. Ortner, Sherry B. “Too Soon for Post-Feminism: The Ongoing Life of Patriarchy in Neoliberal America.” History and Anthropology 25, no. 4: Rethinking Resistance in the 21st Century (2014): 535. Preciado, Paul B. “Mi(E)S Conception: The Farnsworth House and the Mystery of the Transparent Closet.” Translated by Keith Harris. Society + Space. November 4, 2019. https:// www.societyandspace.org /articles/mies-conception-the-farnsworth-house-and-themystery-of-the-transparent-closet. Schulze, Franz. Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985. “Society Section.” Chicago Tribune, February 1, 1942. Stewart, Susan. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. White, Hayden. The Practical Past. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014.

9 Embolalia Anna Deavere Smith Throwing Her Voice Jane Blocker

Marx images the commodity as soundless and the theory of value he puts forward depends upon that reduction—or, more precisely, impossibility—of phonic substance. He calls upon us to imagine the commodity speaking, ventriloquizing, because he knows it cannot, knows that if it said something the understanding given its valuation as a function of its silence would be inadequate. —Fred Moten, Black and Blur 1

Carmel Cato has a Caribbean accent, or, at least, that’s how Anna Deavere Smith makes him sound in her performance Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, B ­ rooklyn and Other Identities (Figure 9.1). Like the other plays in this series—including ­Twilight Los Angeles (1992) and Let Me Down Easy (2009)—which deployed ethnographic interviews, Deavere Smith composed Fires from audiotaped conversations she had with a hundred or more people whose lives, unexpectedly and traumatically, became entangled with Carmel Cato’s. She recounts his attempt to make sense of the fact that a car, in which a prominent Jewish rabbi was riding, drove up onto a sidewalk in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn on August 19th of that year and killed his seven-year-old boy. The event escalated longstanding conflicts between African Americans and Orthodox Jews and sparked three days of riots in the neighborhood as well as the murders of Jewish rabbinical student Yankel Rosenbaum, who was stabbed to death, and Anthony Graziosi, who was mistaken for a Hasidic Jew and dragged from his car, beaten, and fatally stabbed. When Deavere Smith performs the transcript of the taped interview (which she conducted with Cato in 1991), his dead son’s name, Gavin, comes out Ga-veen. The actress-and-playwright performs his tearful monologue in dialect: I never thought it was Ga-veen. I thought it was maybe one of da bigger boys…uh uh…uh uh uh…or the girl, because she won’t et and she worry me—but Ga-veen… uh uh uh…but Ga-veen, ’ee was ’ealtee, and he never cause me no trouble.2 Here and in preceding sections of the transcript, Cato describes the auguries of his child’s death—his own lack of appetite and hypersensitivity, his daughter’s refusal to eat—and wonders at his failure to recognize the catastrophe that some of those signs portended because he was misdirected by others. “Ga-veen, ’ee was ’ealtee.” Dialect is a way of speaking, a way of sounding, which, as Fred Moten explains, transports “all the history of diaspora.” “The dialect,” he remarks, “carries breaking

DOI: 10.4324/9781003303978-13

174  Jane Blocker

Figure 9.1  A nna Deavere Smith as Carmel Cato, Fires in the Mirror, George C. Wolfe, director, PBS, 1993, 97 minutes.

sound as well as broken grammar.”3 In listening for that sound and that breaking, for the traces of colonial patois (African, Spanish, English, and indigenous voices), we put our ear to the lips of history. To the extent that those lips speak in the voices of a violent and migratory past, they participate in a cross-temporal form of ventriloquism, or what Joe Roach has called surrogation, a performance practice in which the stand in, who speaks and acts in the present, occupies the place of those who have spoken and acted in the past.4 Imagine Carmel Cato’s voice dropping both of the Hs from “healthy” as though his ancestors had slipped them (their phonic substance) quietly over the side of the ship in an act of resistance to the language their captors imposed in their forced voyage to the Caribbean. But surrogation is tricky, and ventriloquism is a trick, the entertainment value of which is dependent on the dummy’s not being able to talk on its own. Were that object to be innately endowed with speech, with subjectivity, there would be little wonder at its speaking, its sounding. But the value of the commodity, Moten reminds us, is secured by its soundlessness. To the extent that Carmel Cato is the inheritor of his slave ancestors’ silence, and to the degree that his status as historical witness is in doubt (because of his foreignness, broken grammar, accent, skin color, and seemingly superstitious beliefs), how can we understand the significance of his effort to transport history with his voice? What does it mean for him to offer his account of his son’s death? And how are we to interpret Anna Deavere Smith’s role (her ancestors’ silence, her Black body, her femaleness) in this act of speaking and historicizing? I should say from the start that I often have a difficult time distinguishing between the ventriloquist and the dummy when that metaphor appears. Is Carmel Cato, as the surrogate (the one performing now), simply a mute doll through which the dead

Embolalia: Anna Deavere Smith Throwing Her Voice  175 find voice (his African progenitors as well as his child), or is he throwing his voice to the dead, their jawbones clacking together gruesomely? That question becomes vastly more complicated when we consider that it is Anna Deavere Smith who is speaking (in the play script, in her performance of the play, and in the film version of that performance), and not Cato himself. I, too, am speaking (or being spoken through) when I quote Cato’s words and the playwright’s transcription of them. It is Deavere Smith’s Panasonic tape recorder that enables such bewildering surrogation, the invention of sound reproduction through which, as Jonathan Sterne explains, “The voice became unmoored from the body and people’s ears could take them into the past.”5 I am keen to understand the relation between the voice, a contemporaneous phenomenon that Sterne describes as “a little piece of the vibrating world,” and the ear of history.6 By this, I mean to do more than simply repeat Samuel Beckett’s oft quoted question, “What matter who’s speaking?”7 Scholars of philosophy, trauma studies, semiotics, the history of technology, sound and media studies, and theorists of witness have examined and re-examined that question (there are many famous names that could be dropped along our path). Who speaks from or for the past, so the question goes, in what dialects and with what authority, and how do we hear that voice (linguistically, technologically, phenomenologically, ethically)? These are, of course, crucial questions and ones that scholars such as Elin Diamond, Jill Dolan, Christopher Giroux, Gregory Jay, and Rosemary Weatherston have asked with respect to Deavere Smith’s work, but they tend too neatly to assume that silence is inert and valueless, that whoever is speaking is a self-identical subject, and that the speaker’s testimony comes forward unidirectionally from the past into the vibrating world of the present. What returns me to the issue of history and memory, speaking and being spoken for, is a neurotic cluster of contemporary worries about the ontology of history in an era of unrelenting and eerily repetitious anti-Black violence and of utter disorientation from reality. Thus, I find myself returning to Deavere Smith’s much-discussed one-woman performances from the early nineties, performances of what has been called documentary or verbatim theater that examine racial conflict and the vulnerability of Black bodies, performances to which the real purportedly clings and through which the playwright claimed to seek truth. The critical and scholarly literature on these works, including Fires in the Mirror and Twilight Los Angeles, almost universally comments on Deavere Smith’s technique of tape recording her conversations with those who witnessed or directly experienced racial trauma, such as the violence between Jews and African Americans in Crown Heights after Gavin Cato was killed in 1991 or the riots that occurred in Los Angeles in 1992 in response to the police beating of Rodney King and the acquittal of his attackers. The artist transcribed those recordings and performed them, it was said, word-for-word. Charles and James Lyons, professors of literature and theater, respectively, state succinctly that, “Smith provides no words of the text.”8 Scholars and critics wrestle extensively with these works’ truth claims and their reactions range widely from credulity regarding their stunning realism and skepticism about their manufactured reality effects. These plays were inspired by racial intolerance and Black death and, as I have argued elsewhere, still echo loudly in the present moment; yet, 30 years on, I still struggle to understand them.9 I examine them again now with Fred Moten’s voice in my ear, his extensive discussion of the problem of being and Blackness, his critique of the category of the subject, and his musing on Karl Marx’s stunning claim that

176  Jane Blocker the commodity (or, for my purposes, the dummy) cannot speak. I consider Deavere Smith’s performances to constitute acts of ventriloquism, of throwing the voice and speaking for and through an Other-made-object, a commodity that is not supposed to talk. At the same time, as I said, I’m rarely sure who is doing the speaking in her work. Therefore, I seek to complicate the neat distinctions by which the subject is understood so that I can insist on the oscillations of historical truth and its resistance to ontological singularity and to argue for the reverberating effects of silence and the non-linearity of historical time. In what follows, I want to think a bit about what I consider to be Deavere Smith’s sonic signature, the embolalia or stammering that remains in her plays as traces of real people talking about real things. Her characters throw in such sounds when they are distracted (they drop something on the floor or a phone rings), when they are searching their memory for a word or piece of information from the past, and when they struggle to find the right language to convey their meaning to give phonic substance to the emotion they feel. However, because all of her plays examine historical events, embolalia might be understood more specifically as a phenomenon, not so much of truth but of self-awareness about the need for truth, particularly in the space of temporal transition. My interests lie not in the precise verity of her informants’ claims and less in the content than in the form of their speech. I argue that, to the degree that embolalia is a symptom of self-awareness and of split subjectivity, it can serve as an index of the perceived need for historicity in a moment of crisis or cultural import and thus as an expression of conscious recognition that the present is becoming (but perhaps never fully becomes) past. My attention is drawn to that phenomenon because, first of all, it is notoriously difficult to pinpoint, and second, because it allows us to glimpse the minute processes by which historical accounts take on (or fail to take on) the quality of truth. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the demand to speak truth and the ability to answer that demand, to have what Randy Martin calls the “capacity to render life as history,” is denied, in Fred Moten’s words, from “those who are naught but nothing other than objects themselves.” Put another way, it is not simply that the transition from the present to the past is fleeting or that historical truth is elusive, but that the object, the dummy, the commodity, cannot speak it, or, at least, cannot be heard to speak it except as a trick. “(Black) performances,” Moten writes, “are resistances of the object and the object is in that it resists, is in that it is always the practice of resistance.”10 More specifically, I want to suggest that by reading, watching, and listening across Deavere Smith’s stage play, book adaptation, and subsequent PBS film of Fires, we can witness the ventriloquist’s art, an art in which the object is at the center of speech, in which life as history darts back and forth between fakery and truth, both splits subjectivity and seals it up tight. Let us proceed, then, by looking, or rather listening for, what Moten calls “sonic irruption” in the “uh uh uh” of Carmel Cato’s tears.11 As I watch the film of the performance, I am drawn to and affected by the grief that I hear in Cato’s voice. Grief and anger break into his account with stammers and sobs. “And then it happen,” he says, reliving the moment when he watched as his son was struck down by the speeding car. “Um, um…My child, these are things I never dream about.”12 The “it” to which Cato refers, in the vagueness of that pronoun, points to the broad totality of historical events, including Gavin’s death, the three days of riots and protests in which African Americans clashed with their Jewish neighbors, and the murders of Yankel

Embolalia: Anna Deavere Smith Throwing Her Voice  177 Rosenbaum and Anthony Graziosi. Somewhat more narrowly, though, “it” describes the crucial minutes during which Yosef Lifsh anxiously tried to keep pace with the motorcade, led by unmarked police cars and transporting Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Lifsh went through an intersection, struck another car, and went up onto the sidewalk, pinning Gavin Cato and his cousin Angela, both seven years old, against a wall. The phonic substance of Cato’s accent, though, carrying his sobs and the ungrammatical “it happen” lays paternal claim to an even more finite historical temporality: the split-second between Angela’s being whole and her being severely injured, Gavin’s moving and his being still. It is, in fact, the phonic substance in Deavere Smith’s performances, her reenactments of what her interviewees “said as they said it” that leads scholars and critics to assert that they “are replete with real people whose stories, words, gestures refer back to a particular, historical body in time and space.”13 If one reads the script of the play Fires in the Mirror, of which Carmel Cato’s monologue is one of many, one can see evidence of Deavere Smith’s acts of transcription. For example, a respondent-cum-­ character named Michael Miller hesitates and repeats when he describes the three days of riots that followed the incident, riots which began when African ­A mericans protested the injustice they saw as Lifsh, the Jewish driver, was not charged in Gavin Cato’s death (Figure 9.2). Miller, then Executive Director of the Jewish Community Relations Council, recalls the shocking displays of anti-Semitism he witnessed at Gavin’s funeral. There is no boundary to anti-Judaism. The anti-Judaism—if people don’t want me to use, hear me use the word anti-Semitism. And I’ll be damned if, if preferential treatment is gonna be the excuse for a single bottle, rock, or pellet that’s, uh, directed towards a Jew or the window of a Jewish home or a Jewish store.14 As I read the play script, my eyes are halted by the incomplete sentence in Miller’s story (the “if” which is left hanging without a “then”), by the way that anger, with its urgent profanation, truncates linear thought, crowds it out. And thus, I am moved to pity by the reality effect of the embolalia, the ums, the “uhs,” and the “if [pause] if” in these narratives. Embolalia is a beautiful word, the etymology of which contains “embolus” meaning something thrown in, and “lalia,” meaning speech. It refers to the throwing of words or verbal sounds into a gaping silence, the space where language fails us. A strange form of ventriloquism, I argue, embolalia can be thought of as an instance in which the speaker throws his voice, not to a mannequin or other person, but to himself. His subjectivity split, he both speaks and hears himself speaking, utters words while assessing their efficacy, makes claims while eyeing the plumb and square of his own thought. When Carmel Cato and Michael Miller say “um um” or “uh” they are trying to find words to express overwhelming sorrow or anger, but each man is also aware of himself being interviewed and recorded, sees himself both as the victim of a tragic experience and the one asked to narrate it, to make it into history. It is the painstaking work of recording, transcription, memorization and recitation, for which these embolalia stand as signs, that earned Deavere Smith’s reputation in the 1990s as the creator of a unique form of documentary theater. In her preface to the book adaptation of Fires in the Mirror, she describes her scrupulous attention to the moments where her interlocutors throw language as part of a larger

178  Jane Blocker

Figure 9.2  A  nna Deavere Smith as Michael Miller, Fires in the Mirror, George C. Wolfe, director, PBS, 1993, 97 minutes.

effort to pursue character—both in the theatrical sense and in the sense of an elusive ­A mericanness. “The pursuit is frequently filled with ‘uhs’ and ‘ums’ and, in fact, the wrong words, if any words at all, and almost always what would be considered ‘bad grammar.’”15 The enshrinement of embolalia and bad grammar (not to mention dialect) in Deavere Smith’s work led performance scholar Richard Schechner, in an early review of the Crown Heights play, to call her a shaman. “[Smith] does not ‘act’ the people you see and listen to in Fires in the Mirror. She ‘incorporates’ them.” “To incorporate,” he continues, “means to be possessed by, to open oneself up thoroughly and deeply to another being.”16 While Schechner seems sincerely to believe in the notion of the shaman (a concept at which I bristle for a variety of reasons including the seeming ease with which the term has been appropriated by white people), claiming that Deavere Smith performs extreme empathy for her subjects and helps her audience “attain understanding,” his use of the term also opens on to the performance of ventriloquism, as I’m thinking of it here. He comments, for example, on Deavere Smith’s “ability to bring into existence the wondrous ‘doubling’ that marks her performances.” “This doubling,” he says, as though picturing the actress emerging from a suitcase full of dolls to be seated on the knee of her interlocutor, “is the simultaneous presence of performer and performed.”17 “Meeting people face-to-face,” he suggests, “made it possible for Smith to move like them, sound like them, and allow what they were to enter her body.”18 Schechner casts the actress as a dummy, a vessel to be entered and animated by other people. In this instance, however, we have a Black female subject whose body is marked— genetically, culturally, and historically—by slavery and therefore carries with it

Embolalia: Anna Deavere Smith Throwing Her Voice  179 the unconscionable system that turned bodies such as hers into mute commodities. Thus, to say that there is a “simultaneous presence of performer and performed” is to assume too easily a consubstantiation—two distinct and self-identical subjects in one—rather than to acknowledge the inherent and complex differences between such presences. We might read Deavere Smith’s decision to open Fires in the Mirror with a monologue on the nature of identity, which she developed from a phone interview with Black feminist playwright and poet Ntozake Shange, not simply as a means to introduce a concept that will be the play’s central focus, but also as an author’s note about how to listen for thrown voices: Identity—it, is, uh … in a way it’s, um …it’s sort of, it’s uh … it’s a psychic sense of place it’s a way of knowing I’m not a rock or that tree? I’m this other living creature over here? And it’s a way of knowing that no matter where I put myself that I am not necessarily what’s around me. For Shange, identity is a complex idea that sends her stammering and searching about for words. When she finds them, she asserts that it begins with the task of spatial and ontological discernment. “It’s being able to make these differentiations clearly that lets us have an identity,” she continues and later adds, by way of conclusion, “It’s an important differentiation to make because you don’t know what you’re giving if you don’t know what you have, and you don’t know what you’re taking if you don’t know what’s yours and what’s somebody else’s.”19 These remarks apply, of course, to the various characters in the play who are Haitian, Guyanese, white, Jewish, Australian, and African American, but also to Deavere Smith as a ventriloquist who speaks in these characters’ diverse voices. Ventriloquism is the art of confusing, by the insertion of casual markers of authentic speech, who is taking and giving; who is speaking and who is being spoken for; who is a subject and what is “naught but nothing other than” an object. For Anna Deavere Smith, working in the 1990s, moments of linguistic betrayal, of embolalia, revealed truth.20 With respect to her practice of tape recording interviews with Americans (some of whom are the participants in crises such as took place in Crown Heights) and then performing her subjects’ testimony word-for-word in works of archival theater, Deavere Smith explains that in her portrayals she is less concerned with looking like her informants than with sounding like them. In performance works such as Fires, Deavere Smith does endeavor to retell her respondents’ stories, but more important for her than the stories’ content is the need to capture what she calls her interlocutors’ “authentic voice” and the “rhythmic architecture” of their speech. 21 Deavere Smith’s tenacious, career-long pursuit of what she calls “the music of speech” emerged from one of her early day jobs working for a woman who coached newscasters and politicians to sound authentic in front of a camera. The profession of speech coach emerged, Deavere Smith recounts in her memoir, from a millennial political climate in which, “This idea of performing ‘realness’ […] seem[ed] to permeate political and public life.”22 “The public,” she declares, “does not trust words” and thus requires visual, photographic, or videographic evidence. 23 One well-known example of the evidentiary uses of embolalia is the media attention that Hillary Clinton garnered during the 2008 presidential campaign in which, during a town hall

180  Jane Blocker meeting in New Hampshire, voter Marianne Pernold asked the candidate how she bore up against the sexist attacks against her. That Clinton’s voice broke during her answer, as though she might cry, caused the media to declare that she had finally shown that she was human. More recently, the media and the American public have listened to hesitation, mispronunciation, and slurred speech in Donald Trump’s oratory to find proof of dishonesty, drunkenness, stupidity, or dementia. In the era of “fake news” and “alternate facts” in which everything—sincerity, authenticity, truth, data, words, images, documents, artifacts—are routinely faked or assumed to be faked, we need an advanced form of lie detection, or rather, truth detection. Through the practice of careful listening, Deavere Smith thinks she has found it. She describes two tests. The first is the trochee, a word that emerges from the Greek trokhaios, which refers to the running foot, the rhythm of running, of setting off on the right foot. The trochee is a two-syllable meter, the opposite of iambic meter, in which the stress is on the first syllable rather than the second. In theater, the most famous example of this linguistic stride is found in Shakespeare’s King Lear, where the king says in despair, “Never, never, never, never, never!” Deavere Smith hears such moments in everyday language as scenes of betrayal, where we trip (so the trope goes) over our tongues. The trochee, like the Freudian slip, is an unguarded moment in speech, the emergence of truth (error as truth) into the plain of careful ­self-fashioning, the auto-tuned communication by which contemporary life is characterized. “We are betrayed by language,” she says, “if not in the words themselves, in the rhythm with which we deliver our words.”24 The second test is embolalia, the condition of throwing words. Sometimes when her informants speak, she says, “their syntax starts to fall apart, their grammar starts to fumble, they lose words, sometimes they go off words, sometimes they make sounds that have nothing to do with words.” “I think we can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them,” she continues: In the very moment that they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in order to communicate. It’s the very moment that they have to dig deeper than the surface to find words, and at the same time, it’s a moment when they want to communicate very badly. They’re digging deep and projecting out at the same time. 25 The moment of language’s failure is precisely timed. It arises when the speaking subject recognizes the historical importance of what she is saying, as she is saying it, and feels the obligation to be accurate. Testimony digs deep and projects out. It is heavy with experience trying to take on the force of evidence. Here silence rings loudly as an indictment, an accusation of false witness at a time when the speaker wants nothing more than to be believed. It would be easy, however, to inspect critically the assertion that some unbidden truth emerges in such instances of verbal flailing. We might question Deavere Smith’s belief in the sonic trace of the authentic self as a binary logic wherein content and form, inner self and outer appearance, latent and manifest, real and representation, authentic and inauthentic demand an auditory hermeneutic. Indeed, historian and literary critic Hayden White (a former colleague of Deavere Smith’s at Stanford) seems to have beaten us to the punch. “When I told Hayden White that I believed in authentic voice,” Deavere Smith remarks, “it was as if I told him I still believed in Santa

Embolalia: Anna Deavere Smith Throwing Her Voice  181 Claus. He laughed, and looked at me with both a sparkle, and pity, in his eyes.”26 While I share White’s nervousness around the subject of authenticity, I want to suggest that she has, in fact, isolated a very interesting performative moment in which self-consciousness is on display; a “self-consciousness” and a hesitancy symbolized by the hyphen that simultaneously draws together and drives a wedge into that word. These performances of ventriloquism are especially intriguing to me because they involve scenes of historicity of the contemporary—a topic with which I have wrestled and taken up at length elsewhere.27 Think of Carmel Cato telling his story to Anna Deavere Smith, trying to explain how he failed to read the signs that would have warned him of his son’s impending death, lingering in the disorienting temporality between what could happen, what would happen, and what did happen. Deavere Smith claims to have chosen to end Fires in the Mirror with Cato’s monologue not only because of its emotional power and vulnerability but also because it stands symbolically for our collective inability or refusal to see the signs of racial violence and trauma.28 It is a theatrical moment in which we learn that the future (to which we imagine certain signs are pointing) is merely a device through which we organize and make sense of the past. The speaker is distracted by seeing himself in the mirror of history, surprised by the longue durée of the instant in which the present becomes past. We can see how the seemingly naive binarism of Deavere Smith’s claims is made infinitely more complex by the fact that in her performances there are multiple ears listening, multiple voices speaking and being thrown, simultaneously. First there are the voices of her informants, who talk to her as eyewitnesses, as people who directly experienced the events in question. As witnesses, tripping over their words and throwing their voices, they are typically (but of course not always) presumed to recount their stories, their memories, from an authentic subject position. Subjectivity is unequally distributed across the perceived race, class, and gender of different speakers, and, even when understood to be “authentic,” there is no guarantee that their account will be believed. At the same time, these informants are aware of themselves, hear their own voices as speech, and occupy the objective position of the historian, he who dispassionately tells of events involving others. The ventriloquist is a charlatan if we see him pretending to be a puppet, his hands and voice animating an inanimate object. Then he is only a performer, acting a part, a professional liar. But if we see him as speaking in two voices at once—his own, and his own hearing his own, appraising his own—then we have a sense of what it means to be a witness, a truth teller. The witness is always a split subject, aware that she is meant to speak truth, that she is making history as she speaks, simultaneously evaluating her own veracity. The incommensurability of memory and history, witness and historian, has been the subject of strenuous debate among scholars, particularly in relation to Holocaust testimony. I don’t have the time here to summarize, let alone engage with, those debates, so I’ll gesture briefly to one example. James Young holds up Saul F ­ riedlander’s history cum memoir, Nazi Germany and the Jews, as an example of what we might call a Clintonian narrative: one that speaks authoritatively, masterfully, while also allowing its voice to break. “What seems to be missing,” he remarks about historical narratives in general, “is history-telling that includes both the voice of the historian and the memory of survivors.” “Friedlander,” he continues, “proposes an historiography whose narrative skein is disrupted by the sound of the historian’s own, ­self-conscious voice, the introduction of what he calls ‘commentary’ into the narrative.”29 ­Friedlander is an emblem of the historian of the contemporary, the scholar who is at one and the

182  Jane Blocker same moment of his own time and somewhere outside it. His self-consciousness splits him, like a vaudevillian, into the one who speaks and the one who watches himself speaking. Like him, Carmel Cato and Michael Miller speak in the voices of the historian and the witness at once and jump between being the ventriloquist and the puppet, with one foot in the past and one in the present. To complicate matters further, it is neither the witness nor the historian who actually does the talking in Deavere Smith’s work, but rather she herself. And her selfhood, too, is divided between the twin organs of mouth and ear, the role of interviewer and interviewee, actress and character, the one who is speaking (present tense) and the one who is repeating what was spoken (past tense). We can see all of these roles come to dramatic climax in Deavere Smith’s portrayal of Carmel Cato. Fires in the Mirror concludes with Cato’s explanation that his having been born breech makes him invincible: I’m a man born by my foot. I born by my foot. Anytime a baby comin’ by the foot they either cut the mother or the baby dies. But I was born with my foot. I’m one of the spe-cial people. There’s no way they can overpower me. No there’s nothing to hide, you can repeat every word I say.30 Here the actress performs an important moment that took place in her original interview with Cato. Although it is edited out of the script, she must have asked him whether she could use his story in her performance. Deavere Smith as Cato pauses and looks quizzically at herself asking the question and then offers permission: “You can repeat everything I say.” We watch her and listen to her perform Cato, repeating his invitation for her to repeat. She is Cato negotiating the terms under which he will be both the witness who testifies and the historian who looks at the witness distantly, objectively. She is also herself, performing the pause where she asked a question in the past, repeating the answer in the present. So complexly entwined and intimate is their relationship, so contingent is their shared experience of the conversation, that it seems almost impossible to imagine any other performer staging Fires in the Mirror (although, of course, the play has been staged dozens of times since its premiere in 1991). In an interview with Deavere Smith in 1994, prior to the publication of the play script, Kay Ellen Capo asked if other people would be allowed to perform the play because, “It struck me that if that were to happen, people who don’t know these individuals as a kind of body-text, the way you do, would then possibly be performing them from the literary text.” In a rather dizzying mis en abyme, the playwright, known for the embolalia-filled authenticity of her interviews, is quoted in the interview as saying, “That’s right—that’s interesting. That’s right. That’s real interesting.”31 In the same year, the Pulitzer Prize committee eliminated Deavere Smith’s play Twilight: Los Angeles from consideration for best play because it was determined that, as the interviewer, only she could perform it.32 Notice that, as her project shifts from a series of tape-recorded interviews to the transcription of those interviews to the editing of the transcript into the text of her play to her repeated performances of that play to the filming of one performance for PBS, the authentic starts to take on a different shape, as we can see if we compare the script text to her filmed performance and the transcript of that performance. Michael Miller’s monologue comes in the middle of the play in a section titled “Heil Hitler” where he describes his experience of attending Gavin Cato’s funeral, which he

Embolalia: Anna Deavere Smith Throwing Her Voice  183 calls a “political rally.” He complains bitterly that none of the speakers at the event ­mentioned or expressed outrage at Yankel Rosenbaum’s murder and is incredulous that the event was punctuated with hateful epithets including “Heil Hitler” and “Kill the Jew.” You may recall something of that speech, which I quoted earlier: The anti-Judaism—if people don’t want me to use, hear me use the word anti-­ Semitism. And I’ll be damned if, if preferential treatment is gonna be the excuse for a single bottle, rock, or pellet that’s, uh, directed towards a Jew or the window of a Jewish home or a Jewish store.33 Although the embolalia suggest an immediacy (the authenticity of Miller’s anger and of his experience of discrimination), in her performance for public television Deavere Smith wanders from the script and in some places tidies up the words and sounds that Miller presumably threw about when she originally tape recorded their conversation. We might say, using Capo’s words, that she moves the monologue from a body-text to a literary text. Here is that speech again with the changes in bold: The anti-Judaism, the anti-Judaism—if people don’t want to hear me use the word anti-Semitism—knows no boundaries. So, I’ll be damned if preferential treatment is gonna be the excuse for a single rock, bottle, or pellet thrown at a Jewish person or the window of a Jewish home.34 In the PBS film, she repeats “anti-Judaism” twice, her voice rising with outrage in the second iteration, and she completes the sentence that remains so confusedly unfinished in the play script. She mixes the order of the bottle, rock and pellet, and elides the reference to the Jewish store. I point out these discrepancies not to indicate some failing on the actress’s part because of course a compelling feature of live theater is precisely its “liveness,” its irreproducibility. But such differences do complicate the idea of the authentic voice and the rhythmic architecture of speech and cast some doubt on claims regarding the playwright’s intimate familiarity with her informants. What does it mean for Deavere Smith to put syntax back together, to recover grammar, to find words when she is performing the testimony of others for whom linguistic disassembly, fumbling, and loss indicate the emotional core of actuality? Across the whole of the performance, in which the actress assumes 26 different roles, we as viewers and listeners toggle between periods of sonic eruption and closure. Her subjectivity is at some moments expertly hidden behind the dialects, accents, and ways of speaking that she places in others’ mouths, whereas at other moments it is more prominent, such as where the traces of her own Baltimore accent and feminine voice can be heard to cut across the testimony of very different speakers all of whom become versions of herself. As Charles and James Lyons explain, Anna Deavere Smith is both the original audience for these speeches and the physical instrument through whom these statements are re-presented to the audience. The phenomenon is, of course paradoxical. Smith presents herself inhabiting these discourses, adapting her voice and body to them, articulating statements that she did not author, and she presents herself, as both the interviewer and the person interviewed, as the vehicle through which these relatively private statements become public.…While the performance is verbally polyphonic, it is acoustically and materially unified

184  Jane Blocker in the presence of Anna Deavere Smith whose voice assumes the characters of the other figures but retains her own unmistakable individuality and blends, curiously, the idiosyncrasies of her own voice and speech with that of the person interviewed.35 Perhaps this paradox is why I have always had an uneasy relationship with these works, by turns being taken in by and marveling at the virtuosity of the trick and being disillusioned by it. But I remind myself that the value of the trick is always a function of the dummy’s, the object’s, the commodity’s silence and thus that the experience of paradox is endemic to the ventriloquist’s art. Put differently, Deavere Smith achieves the illusion that her informants are actually speaking (however fleetingly) only by virtue of our understanding of them as silent and of our expectation that in the space of that silence we hear her (and only her) voice. If we thought that they were speaking, or could speak, there would be no trick and nothing to marvel at. Whether she is speaking or being spoken through, the ventriloquist or the dummy, the difficulty of throwing the voice means that sounds are bound to become muffled and enunciation flattened. In this sense, her work is a form of historical thesis that emulates the supposed objectivity of the dispassionate scholar, who amasses primary sources and first-person accounts but strives to remain mum about her personal opinions or investments in the topic. In a review of Fires for The New York Times, David Richards described Deavere Smith as, “vitally concerned with giving us the truth of each of her subjects,” and said that her decision to portray so many diverse characters, “strips the work of any partisanship.”36 But of course there were some audience members who claimed to see a crack in that stolid academic demeanor and criticized Fires because, by giving Gavin Cato the last word, she seemed to make her real intentions and her presumed allegiance with the Black characters known. From a more sympathetic perspective, one that celebrates rather than questions Deavere Smith’s decision, Gregory Jay nonetheless adopts a similar premise when he writes that: Smith presumably saves the father for last not only out of respect for his loss, and out of admiration for his dignity, but because she needs every ounce of the empathy we feel toward his grief to undercut the contentions of the Jewish speakers preceding him.37 While I am sympathetic to Jay’s argument and agree with him about the emotional effect produced by the final monologue in Fires, his assertions are based on the same assumption about the allegiances born of Deavere Smith’s Blackness. Such approaches make me uneasy in that they hold Black subjects to an impossible standard such that the simple act of pointing to the obvious fact of racism becomes inherently partisan. The requirement of impartiality or equal time is a bludgeon deployed in more contemporary debates around the Black Lives Matter Movement wherein whites, threatened by demands to dismantle institutionalized racism, counter with the patronizing slogan “All lives matter,” as though the mere mention of the value of Black lives constitutes an unreasonable and one-sided valuation that must be corrected and silenced. It is little wonder that I have been haunted by and have wrestled with Anna D ­ eavere Smith’s work for a number of years, with its bewildering voices, subjectivities, temporalities, and objects. My own embolalia, the words and sounds I have thrown out here, express an awareness of the need for truth, and that need has become more

Embolalia: Anna Deavere Smith Throwing Her Voice  185 intense in the course of my attempts to complete this essay since the city where I live has witnessed yet another killing of an African American at the hands of the police, and the fires that were set in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, have been rekindled in ­M inneapolis and in cities around the world. While I am loathe to exploit the murder of George Floyd to score an easy rhetorical point or to steal some of the emotional power of his death for my own ends, I feel honor-bound at the same time to say his name and to contemplate the way in which his final moments followed so violently the scene of ventriloquism with which I have been trying to come to terms. When white police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck, as Floyd lay handcuffed and prone on a Minneapolis street on May 25, 2020, he heard a Black man say repeatedly that he could not breathe but replied dismissively, “Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk.”38 Seeing Floyd as an object whose claims not to be able to breathe seemed to contradict his act of speaking, the officer construed the situation as a grotesque form of ventriloquism in which speaking itself must have been some kind of a trick. In this sense, George Floyd resists ontological singularity. He was a subject, the one who speaks, and, in the eyes of a white supremacist society, an object, a lifeless and voiceless thing to be tossed to the ground. But he is also a real reminder, as I said at the outset, that silence—whether it is the silence perceived by deaf ears or the silence wrought by murder—is not inert or valueless, that it can reverberate powerfully across multidirectional temporalities.

Notes 1 Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 26. 2 Anna Deavere Smith as Carmel Cato in Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities, directed by George C. Wolfe, for PBS American Playhouse, 1993. 3 Fred Moten, Black and Blur, 11. 4 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2. 5 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 1. 6 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, 11. 7 Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing, trans. S. Beckett (London: Calder & Boyars, 1974), 85. 8 Charles R. Lyons and James C. Lyons, “Anna Deavere Smith: Perspectives on her ­Performance within the Context of Critical Theory,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 9, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 45. 9 Jane Blocker, “Echo: Sound Recording and Racial Violence in Contemporary Art ­H istory,” Lecture University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 5, 2018. 10 Randy Martin, quoted in Fred Moten, Black and Blur, 35; Moten, 35. 11 Fred Moten, Black and Blur, 11. 12 Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights and Other Identities (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1993), 136. 13 Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror (New York: Random House, 1993), xxvi; Jill Dolan, “‘Finding Our Feet in the Shoe of (One An) Other’: Multiple Character Solo ­Performers and Utopian Performatives,” Modern Drama 45, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 514. 14 Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights and Other Identities, 96. 15 Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror (New York: Random House, 1993), xxxi–xxxii. 16 Richard Schechner, “Anna Deavere Smith: Acting as Incorporation,” The Drama Review 37, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 63. 17 Richard Schechner, “Anna Deavere Smith: Acting as Incorporation,” 64. 18 Richard Schechner, “Anna Deavere Smith: Acting as Incorporation,” 64. 19 Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror, 11–12.

186  Jane Blocker 20 Anna Deavere Smith, Talk to Me: Listening between the Lines (New York: Random House, 2000), 50. 21 Anna Deavere Smith, Talk to Me: Listening between the Lines, 41 and 36. 22 Anna Deavere Smith, Talk to Me: Listening between the Lines, 47. 23 Anna Deavere Smith, Talk to Me: Listening between the Lines, 39. 24 Anna Deavere Smith, Talk to Me: Listening between the Lines, 36. 25 Anna Deavere Smith, Talk to Me: Listening between the Lines, 51 and 53. 26 Anna Deavere Smith, Talk to Me: Listening between the Lines, 41. 27 Jane Blocker, Becoming Past: History in Contemporary Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 28 Barbara Lewis, “A Circle of Confusion: A Conversation with Anna Deavere Smith,” The Kenyon Review, New Series 15, no. 4 (Autumn, 1993): 63. 29 James Young, “Between History and Memory: The Voice of the Eyewitness,” in Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma, eds. Ana Douglass and Thomas Vogler (New York: Routledge, 2003), 277–278. 30 Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights and Other Identities, 138. 31 Kay Ellen Capo with Kristin M. Langellier, “Interview: Anna Deavere Smith on Fires in the Mirror,” Text and Performance Quarterly 14, no. 1 (January 1994): 67. 32 Christopher Giroux, “The Traumatized/Traumatizing Subject in Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan Lori Parks, and August Wilson,” Doctoral Dissertation, Wayne State University, 2014. 33 Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities, 93. 34 Anna Deavere Smith as Michael Miller in Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities, directed by George C. Wolfe, for PBS American Playhouse, 1993. 35 Charles R. Lyons and James C. Lyons, “Anna Deavere Smith: Perspectives on her ­Performance within the Context of Critical Theory,” 45, 46. 36 David Richards, “And Now a Word from Off Broadway,” The New York Times 141 (May 17, 1992): H5. 37 Gregory Jay, “Other People’s Holocausts: Trauma, Empathy, and Justice in Anna Deavere Smith’s ‘Fires in the Mirror,’” Contemporary Literature 48, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 144. 38 Richard A. Oppel, Jr. and Kim Barker, “New Transcripts Detail Last Moments for George Floyd,” New York Times, July 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/us/georgefloyd-body-camera-transcripts.html.

References Anna Deavere Smith. Fires in the Mirror. New York: Random House, 1993. Anna Deavere Smith. Talk to Me: Listening between the Lines. New York: Random House, 2000. Beckett, Samuel. Texts for Nothing, trans. Samuel Beckett. London: Calder & Boyars, 1974. Blocker, Jane. Becoming Past: History in Contemporary Art. Minneapolis: University of ­M innesota Press, 2015. Blocker, Jane. “Echo: Sound Recording and Racial Violence in Contemporary Art History.” Lecture University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 5, 2018. Capo, Kay Ellen with Kristin M. Langellier. “Interview: Anna Deavere Smith on Fires in the Mirror.” Text and Performance Quarterly 14, no. 1 (January 1994): 62–76. Dolan, Jill. “‘Finding Our Feet in the Shoe of (One An) Other’: Multiple Character Solo ­Performers and Utopian Performatives.” Modern Drama 45, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 495–518. Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities, directed by George C. Wolfe, for PBS American Playhouse, 1993. Giroux, Christopher. “The Traumatized/Traumatizing Subject in Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan Lori Parks, and August Wilson.” Doctoral Dissertation, Wayne State University, 2014. Jay, Gregory. “Other People’s Holocausts: Trauma, Empathy, and Justice in Anna Deavere Smith’s ‘Fires in the Mirror.’” Contemporary Literature 48, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 119–149.

Embolalia: Anna Deavere Smith Throwing Her Voice  187 Lewis, Barbara and Anna Deavere Smith. “A Circle of Confusion: A Conversation with Anna Deavere Smith.” The Kenyon Review, New Series 15, no. 4 (Autumn, 1993): 54–64. Lyons, Charles R. and James C. Lyons, “Anna Deavere Smith: Perspectives on her Performance within the Context of Critical Theory.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 9, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 43–66. Moten, Fred. Black and Blur. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Oppel, Richard A., Jr. and Kim Barker. “New Transcripts Detail Last Moments for George Floyd.” New York Times, July 8, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/us/georgefloyd-body-camera-transcripts.html. Richards, David. “And Now a Word from Off Broadway.” The New York Times 141 (May 17, 1992): H5. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia ­University Press, 1996. Schechner, Richard. “Anna Deavere Smith: Acting as Incorporation.” The Drama Review 37, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 63–64. Smith, Anna Deavere. Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights and Other Identities. New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1993. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Young, James. “Between History and Memory: The Voice of the Eyewitness.” In Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma, eds. Ana Douglass and Thomas Vogler, 275–283. New York: Routledge, 2003.

10 Re-siting Marx Okwui Enwezor, Ventriloquism, and the Das Kapital Oratorio Kerr Houston

In his writings and in conversation, curator, critic, and author Okwui Enwezor repeatedly referred to ventriloquism, usually as a means of critiquing what he saw as lamentable attempts by white critics or curators to speak for Black artists or to efface positions of Black subjectivity. As early as 1996, for instance, Hazel Friedman of the South African Mail & Guardian observed, following a conversation with Enwezor, that he “seems to understand the frustration of the artist as (critic’s) ventriloquist dummy and the imperatives of self-enunciation, free from the interventionist powers of others.”1 A year later, in a review composed for Frieze, Enwezor castigated Julian Schnabel’s filmic portrait of Basquiat, complaining that the artist was drawn “as an empty signifier, a ventriloquist’s dummy encased in the amniotic sac of whiteness.”2 In 2003, he pressured an installation in the recently redesigned Tate Modern, alleging that a vitrine displaying a series of European accounts of African art (but no actual instances of African art) constituted “the most astonishing form of ethnographic ventriloquism.”3 And in a bitter 2008 letter to Artforum, he vigorously objected to Robert Storr’s claim that Enwezor had willfully ignored, in a review of Storr’s 2007 Biennale, the African pavilion. “Well,” responded Enwezor (noting that he had in fact spent much of his career promoting the work of the artists whose work was featured in the pavilion), “I wonder what he thinks of his ventriloquist’s act with respect to the selfsame artists.”4 Evidently, ventriloquism appealed to Enwezor as a pointed metaphor that could form part of a larger postcolonial critique. Given that interest, it is striking to realize that the physical and thematic centerpiece of the 2015 Venice Biennale, which Enwezor oversaw, involved a ventriloquistic aspect.5 The Das Kapital Oratorio, which was conceived by Enwezor and directed by filmmaker and video artist Isaac Julien, consisted of daily readings of Karl Marx’s seminal Das Kapital (Figure 10.1).6 Over the course of seven months, pairs of performers (drawn from a team of ten) alternately read portions of an English translation of the text, which were also projected behind them. Described in Biennale materials as a live reading, the Oratorio was thus admittedly not ventriloquistic in the strictly traditional sense, as there was no attempt to create a compelling illusion of a thrown voice.7 Nevertheless, the collective reading of Marx was centrally predicated upon what D.S. Mayfield has called “ventriloquistic tendencies—words being put into someone’s mouth.”8 The readers, after all, were vehicles by which Marx’s voice was brought to life. “We were tools,” as Ivan Matijasic, one of the readers, has put it, “that were supposed to deliver a message, Marx’s message, to the audience.”9 Consequently, if we are willing to conceive of ventriloquism in a metaphorical

DOI: 10.4324/9781003303978-14

Re-siting Marx  189

Figure 10.1  Isaac Julien, Das Kapital Oratorio, 2015. Installation shot of performance at La Biennale di Venezia.

sense—as Enwezor did, indeed, throughout his career—then the Oratorio appears as a ­creatively ventriloquistic exercise, in which Marx’s voice was manifested posthumously through the bodies of others. But what, exactly, should we make of that observation? And how might we read Enwezor’s decision to pass Marx’s words through the bodies of live performers? In this essay, I consider that question from a variety of angles, ultimately arguing that the Oratorio constituted a complex and pointed response to the contorted history of ethnographic ventriloquism. Motivated by the desire to create a work with general and contemporary relevance, Enwezor chose to engage with Das Kapital. Through a series of religious allusions, his Oratorio acknowledged that text’s vast historical reputation and influence, even as it also drew on the ideas of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault in offering a new version of the seminal work. At the same time, however, the Oratorio also constituted, as I will argue, a response to a ventriloquistic tendency implicit in Marx’s work and to the history of ethnographic ventriloquism. A close reading of the piece, supplemented by interviews with several of the readers, shows that Enwezor and Julien were intent on challenging and revising the longstanding pattern by which Black creatives had effectively been converted, against their will, into the rhetorical equivalent of ventriloquistic dummies. In embracing a consensual model of participation that expressly allowed for dramatic inflection, they thus created a work that obviated simplistic notions of authorship and voice and that refused to accept the effacement of Black creative voices.

190  Kerr Houston

I “I wanted to do something,” Enwezor said, in explaining the project to Charlotte Higgins, “that has contemporary relevance and speaks to the situation we are in. And so I thought of Das Kapital, a book that nobody has read and yet everyone hates or quotes from.”10 Certainly, the text’s status as a near universal point of reference is beyond question; indeed, Das Kapital is allegedly the most frequently cited social sciences text published before 1950.11 But, as Enwezor suggested, the text’s unwieldy scale and theoretical orientation have also limited its readership. Ambitious and ultimately unfinished—the first volume, based upon a manuscript more than 1,200 pages long, was published in 1867, while the second and third volumes were compiled from Marx’s notes and issued posthumously, in 1885 and 1894, and a planned fourth volume was eventually issued as a separate text—the text is by no means an easy read. Moreover, its prose style is remarkably varied. Marx was deeply enamored, as a young man, of the lively experimentalism central to Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-­century text Tristam Shandy, and modern critics have noted, in turn, the fractured aspect and radical discontinuities of Das Kapital.12 Nevertheless, the text’s broad relevance and applicability have always been apparent and presumably motivated Friedrich Engels’ claim that the text was the “Bible of the working class.”13 Interestingly, the structure and the title of Enwezor’s project imply that he, like Engels, was interested in religious analogies. Indeed, Enwezor openly cited the Akhand Path (the Sikh practice of continuous recitation of sacred texts by a team of readers) as a central inspiration.14 But the piece also drew openly on Christian precedents and examples. For example, the physical arrangement of the readings, in which two performers read portions of Das Kapital from separate lecterns, recalled the Catholic Mass, in which a lector and a priest typically read passages from the Old Testament and the Gospels. Moreover, the title of the project—Das Kapital O ­ ratorio—suggested a religious aspect, as an oratory is traditionally a large-scale work organized around a sacred or semi-sacred theme, and often performed in a church. And, finally, the readers were directed to emulate the example of a p ­ reacher—a preacher, recalls Matijasic, “reading an important passage in the Bible, some kind of powerful, chanted reading.”15 Admittedly, Enwezor’s oratorio took place in a secular environment (the so-called Arena, which was designed by the architect David Adjaye and located in the Biennale’s central pavilion) and featured no explicit religious content. Nevertheless, the title and the structure of the piece fostered a religious overtone, subtly implying that Marx’s resolutely materialist work might be read as a sort of holy text: renowned, authoritative, and quotable, but also deserving of a revisitation and perhaps a new relevance. Of course, the idea of reframing Marx, or seeing him anew, was hardly unprecedented. For, after all, the same principle had motivated two celebrated instances of intellectual inquiry in the late 1960s. In 1965, Louis Althusser authored the opening essay in Reading Capital, a collection of papers that approached Marx’s text from a philosophical perspective. “Of course,” began Althusser, we have all read, and all do read Capital. For almost a century, we have been able to read it every day, transparently, in the dramas and dreams of our history, in its disputes and conflicts […] But some day it is essential to read Capital to the letter. To read the text itself, complete, all four volumes, line by line, to return ten times

Re-siting Marx  191 to the first chapters, or to the schemas of simple reproduction and reproduction on an expanded scale, before coming down from the arid table-lands and plateaus of Volume Two into the promised land of profit, interest and rent.16 Through such a close (and religiously inflected) reading, Althusser and his colleagues thus sought to shed new light on the relationship between the text and the context in which it was written. Four years later, in his essay “What is an Author?” (which was originally given as a lecture), Michel Foucault also emphasized the potential value of such an exercise. At one point, in what is a challenging meditation on literary traditions and functions, Foucault claimed that practitioners of discursive practices must “return to the origin”—and that in so doing they will necessarily introduce modifications and transform the discourse. Or, as Foucault put it: A study of Galileo’s works could alter our knowledge of the history, but not the science, of mechanics; whereas, a re-examination of the books of Freud or Marx can transform our understanding of psychoanalysis or Marxism.17 Again, the implication is clear and clearly relevant: re-reading Das Kapital should lead to new insights involving a textual tradition that might otherwise seem overly inert or merely received.18 Enwezor, in turn, knew of these examples. Indeed, he explicitly mentioned Althusser’s essay as a factor in his conception of the Das Kapital Oratorio.19 And yet, he apparently did not feel bound by either of the two precedents. For one thing, Althusser had ultimately advised (in “How to Read Marx’s ‘Capital’,” a 1969 publication) against reading Das Kapital from beginning to end.20 Moreover, he also stressed the value of engaging with Marx’s text in the original German. “[I]t is essential,” he had written, in the opening paragraphs of Reading Capital, “to read Capital not only in its French translation […] but also in the German original, at least for the fundamental theoretical chapters and all the passages where Marx’s key concepts come to the surface.”21 Built around a linear reading and an English translation, then, Das Kapital Oratorio declared a form of independence from Althusser’s earlier project. But it also embodied, in the process, Foucault’s notion of a transformed discourse, as it evoked the emergence of English as a lingua franca in the era of neoliberalism and globalization. It thus constituted a return to the origin and yet also recast that origin in an idiom entirely emblematic of its own time. And, in the process, it thus yielded something that, as Enwezor told Higgins, both “has contemporary relevance and speaks to the situation we are in.”22

II If the Oratorio embodied Enwezor’s aspirations, though, it also depended upon words that were spoken by others: by Marx, originally, and then by the team of readers who read Das Kapital aloud. Or, to word things slightly differently, the readers who performed the Oratorio were at once delivering Marx’s text and performing Enwezor’s concept (Figure 10.2). Viewed in this way, the project offered a rather fascinating illustration of what the art critic and philosopher David Goldblatt has called the “ventriloqual metaphor,” as it was a staged speech act that constituted meaning through a medium. 23 And that meaning was complex and manifold. Aware, at once, of both

192  Kerr Houston ventriloquistic tendencies in Marx’s writings and the fraught history of ethnographic ventriloquism, Enwezor sought to design a performance that avoided mere reiteration and instead constituted a productive critique of the tradition of speaking through others. Before turning to that aspect of the Oratorio, however, we first need to attend to its ventriloquistic aspects and to the histories thereby invoked. It is worth noting, to begin with, that Marx was also interested in broadly ventriloquistic strategies and in their expressive potential. As Claire Reddleman has shown, in a close analysis of the first volume of Capital, Marx’s text features a number of “instances of writerly ventriloquism”: of moments, that is, in which Marx speaks for or as another entity (including several other economists and even, at one point, a commodity). 24 In Reddleman’s view, though, these moments are not merely examples of writerly creativity. Rather, they form a vital part of Marx’s project, as they contribute to a more general characterization of capital as a form and relation that functions, like a ventriloquized voice, by means of transformations, displacements, and reversals. 25 Marx’s occasional ventriloquistic exercises thus constitute an attempt to emulate and, in the process, lay bare an allegedly basic feature of capital itself: namely, its protean and unnatural character. So the Oratorio’s source text involved an associatively ventriloquistic aspect. But so, too, did its performance, in its construal of the readers as a medium through which a disembodied voice was animated. As Marx filtered his own voice through other individuals, Enwezor filtered Marx’s voice through the readers, who thus broadly recalled ventriloquist’s dummies (which, as Goldblatt has observed, are typically embodied with a meaningful voice.).26 And, once we begin to think in such a

Figure 10.2  I saac Julien, Das Kapital Oratorio, 2015. Installation shot of performance at La Biennale di Venezia.

Re-siting Marx  193 manner, certain other rough parallels also suggest themselves. Consider, for example, Zoe Beloff’s experimental film A Model Family in a Model Home (which dates, like Enwezor’s Biennale, to 2015). Inspired by notes for a movie made by Bertolt Brecht after he had come across an article in Life magazine, Beloff’s film features several shots of a ventriloquistic puppet, accompanied by voiced passages from Brecht’s notes (Figure 10.3).27 Here again, convincing illusionism is not the goal: we are never meant to think that the puppet is actually speaking original words. And yet the puppet nevertheless functions as a compelling visual vehicle by means of which Brecht’s typeset text acquires a new complexity. Both Beloff’s film and Enwezor’s Oratorio, then, involve the recital of pre-existing texts (translated, in each case, from German into English). But they both also rely upon a ventriloquistic aspect, in which those texts are paired with and performed by otherwise inactive speakers. We understand that Marx (or Brecht) is the ultimate speaker, even if the reader (or puppet) is the apparent, or nominal, speaker. It is at this point, though, that Enwezor might have recognized a theoretical pitfall. For he was demonstrably aware of longstanding concerns that ventriloquistic performances involved a potentially violent objectification or denial of individuality. Such concerns are ultimately traceable to the Romantic era, as Steven Connor has shown:

Figure 10.3  Zoe Beloff, Still from A Model Family in a Model Home, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

194  Kerr Houston It is at this period that the words ‘ventriloquism’ and ‘ventriloquise’ first begin to be represented not as a dangerous or malicious act, but as a violence towards the one that is ventriloquized, or reduced to the condition of a dummy. The danger of ventriloquism was now no longer that it could allow the unscrupulous to exploit and delude the credulous, but that it might involve reducing others to the condition of objects, by stealing or annihilating their voices. 28 Eventually, however, such concerns expanded beyond a focus upon conventional ventriloquism and began to encompass broadly analogous situations, as well. Perhaps the best-known instance of such an admonition appeared in a 1988 book by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, in which he warned against what he called “ethnographic ventriloquism”—the common claim, that is, “to speak not just about another form of life but to speak from within it.”29 Geertz’s term became a common one, and soon scholars began to explore its implications and to deploy it in new contexts; in a widely cited 1996 analysis of ethnographic films, for instance, Fatimah Tobing Rony asserted that “ethnographic ventriloquism assumes the inarticulateness of the Native.”30 Ventriloquism, by the end of the 1990s, was thus widely associated in certain academic circles with a tacit violence that silenced, or even effaced, its subject, which was often assumed to be subaltern. Enwezor may or not have known of these specific precedents. But he was certainly familiar with one especially pointed analysis of ventriloquism and the effacement of marginalized subjects in discussions of contemporary art. In a 1995 essay published in Nka (the journal of contemporary African art founded in 1994 by Enwezor, Salah Hassan, and Chika Okeke-Ogulu a year earlier), Olu Oguibe took as his primary focus a series of conversations between the art critic Thomas McEvilley and five African artists who had exhibited work at the 1993 Venice Biennale.31 In particular, Oguibe concentrated on McEvilley’s conversation with Outtara Watts, reading it as a discursive struggle in which the white critic insisted upon a particular series of biographical questions which the Black artist initially resisted (proposing, instead, that they concentrate on his work) before relenting and retreating into a frustrated series of largely conventional answers. To Oguibe, the interview thus embodied a basic rhetorical violence that ultimately derived from colonialist attitudes and practices. As in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the African subject was effectively reduced to a significant silence: not a literal silence, of course, but an assigned position that reflects the hegemonic quality of the master’s voice, rather than individual subjectivity. “On this stage of simulacral dialogue,” contended Oguibe, “there is only one voice that counts.”32 And that voice is the voice of Western authority; Outtara and other African artists, meanwhile, can play only a supporting role. Or, argued Oguibe, something even more demeaning. “In vetoing Outtara’s right to self-articulation,” he wrote, McEvilley and similar critics effected “a paradigmatic reiteration of ventriloquy as a structure of reference for Western attitudes towards African artists.”33 Outtara, that is, was something like a ventriloquist’s dummy, forced to speak in terms that were not his own.

III Enwezor knew Oguibe’s piece well; again, it first appeared in Nka and was subsequently included in a 1999 collection of essays co-edited by Enwezor and Oguibe. And so Enwezor was intimately familiar with the potential complexities or inherently violent

Re-siting Marx  195 aspects that could attend any attempt to speak through another individual. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the design of Das Kapital Oratorio thoughtfully invokes but also disarms such problems: not only acknowledging, that is, the fraught history of ventriloquism but also creating a more fluid and equitable discursive field. In filtering the ideas of a canonical white theorist through the bodies of directed readers, the Oratorio superficially recalls the very sort of ventriloquy decried by Oguibe. But a closer consideration of its arrangement and of the instructions given to the readers suggests that the Oratorio sought to thwart the racial logic of ethnographic ventriloquism by complicating notions of authorship and authority. In this sense, it was at once ventriloquistic and something more: a creative response to an idiom widely perceived as violent. Perhaps most obviously, the Oratorio involved a consensual, rather than imposed, form of channeled speech. In his discussion of McEvilley, Oguibe had emphasized the way in which Outtara was forced to speak in a certain idiom: “Clearly against his will, Outtara finds himself repositioned in the frame as the object.”34 By contrast, the organizers of the Oratorio contacted a number of potential readers, announcing their general intention—and compensated those readers who were selected. As Philip Gwynne Jones, one of the readers, recalls: From the outset, we knew that it would involve a reading of Marx’s Capital over the period of the Biennale—almost 6 months. Frankly, reading Marx for money during the Biennale sounded like the best job ever, and so I volunteered.35 Clearly, this is far from a forceful and nonconsensual repositioning of the subject. Rather, the process reads almost as an inverse of Oguibe’s, an aspect that was presumably not unintentional. Importantly, too, the organizers of the Oratorio explicitly encouraged their readers to gesture and to perform dramatically, and to retain, in the process, a sense of individual agency and identity. “My initial thought,” recalls Jones, “was that Capital should be delivered as a lecture, but Isaac made it clear immediately that that was not what they were looking for. The text had to be interpreted, and had to be acted.”36 Matijasic, in turn, offers a similar account: I recall they were very clear on the kind of performance they wanted: it was supposed to be powerful, dramatic and rhetorical, with the pauses in the right place, highlighting some keywords. The main word was, I think, dramatic. We were encouraged to gesture as well, but not too much.37 Again, then, the project feels like a deliberate refutation of the patterns described by Oguibe, who had observed a troubling tendency to expect African artists “to produce to specification, to affect anonymity, to concede the ability to enunciate within the sites of normativity.”38 Certainly, Julien (and curator Mark Nash, who assisted in the process) gave the readers direction. But he actively avoided a mere recital and left room open for interpretation. Moreover, accompanying printed materials repeatedly listed the names of the readers. Presented, then, as individual performers, and given space in which to interpret a text dramatically, the readers in the Oratorio project offered an implicit corrective to the faceless, anonymous figures seen by Oguibe as the flattened subjects of a reductive Eurocentric critical discourse. 39

196  Kerr Houston In the process, the Oratorio complicated any simplistic notions of voice and a­ uthorship or of textual authority. Of course, as David Goldblatt has observed, in a different context, the simple act of reading aloud inevitably “gives the page a voice that is and isn’t the writer’s.”40 As the author of Das Kapital, Marx may have been the author of the source text, but when his words were rendered into English and pronounced by the various readers, they were also no longer quite his. And the emphasis upon a dramatic performance only intensified this ambiguity; as words were converted into gestures, the text was effectively performed and interpreted. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argued that To be a dramatist all one needs is the urge to transform oneself and speak out of strange bodies and souls […] projecting oneself outside the self and then acting as though one had really entered another body, another character […]41 In effect, the structure of the Oratorio encouraged a similar confusion of roles: a confusion also central to traditional ventriloquistic performances, in which the dummy seems (but only seems) to speak for itself. But whereas classical ventriloquism allows the ventriloquist to step outside the self and to nominally speak out of the strange body of the dummy, the Oratorio allowed the nominal dummy—the reader, that is— to inhabit the character of Marx.42 Thus the work posits the question: who, exactly, was speaking through whom? The Oratorio eschewed any easy answer to the question, avoiding the sort of exploitative situations described by Oguibe and fostering, instead, a diffuse and collaborative authorship. In this sense, the race of the performers was also notable. Enwezor and Julien (and Adjaye, who designed the Arena) were Black, and every one of the performers was white. This may have been due to a variety of factors, but it is nevertheless striking, especially given Enwezor’s recurrent allusions to ethnographic ventriloquism and strict racial binarism.43 In criticizing Schnabel’s Basquiat as “a ventriloquist’s dummy encased in the amniotic sac of whiteness,” or positioning the (white) Storr as a ventriloquist controlling the expressions of (Black) African artists, Enwezor had equated whiteness with privilege and communicative power, and Blackness with a passivity and effacement: whites spoke and Blacks were spoken for. In the Oratorio, however, he meaningfully complicated that simple dichotomy. Black creatives now designed and directed the performance, while white performers spoke words that were not entirely their own. And yet, critically, this was not a mere inversion of the familiar binary for, again, in encouraging dramatic interpretation and clouding the very idea of authorship, Enwezor dismantled a traditionally inequitable scheme and sought a more generally participatory arrangement. In other words, the casting of white readers in the position of the ventriloquistic dummy constituted an initial corrective to a longstanding injustice. But in allowing those readers to transcend a merely passive role and to perform in an expressive manner, Enwezor also challenged the very idea of difference. This was not a mere appropriation, then, of a traditionally white privilege; rather, it was an active abrogation of that privilege, which sketched a possible means of circumventing simple oppositions. Or, to put the matter slightly differently, the Oratorio signified. In his celebrated 1988 book The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates explored the connections between Yoruba mythology, Black oral traditions, and African-American literature, accenting the tradition of signifying, a form of verbal play that uses puns, references,

Re-siting Marx  197 44

and changes to forge new expressive possibilities. Signifying, argued Gates, is g­ enerally intertextual in that it involves a response to precedents, but, in its more motivated form, also involves intentional modifications or reversals, which in turn facilitate the development of a critique.45 And this tradition, he emphasized, was centuries old and ongoing: the concern to depict the quest of the [B]lack speaking subject to find his or her voice has been a repeated topos of the [B]lack tradition, and perhaps has been its most central trope. As theme, as revised trope, as a double-voiced narrative strategy, the representation of characters and texts finding a voice has functioned as a sign both of the formal unity of the Afro-American literary tradition and of the integrity of the [B]lack subjects depicted in this literature.46 Revised trope; a double-voiced narrative strategy, finding a voice: strikingly, the Oratorio, with its two readers voicing a translated version of Marx, relied upon these same strategies and thus took its place in a long history of sly adaptation and critique. Or, to put it more bluntly still: in acknowledging but also revising the problematic tradition of ethnographic ventriloquism, the Oratorio effectively signified that tradition, building on it as a precedent but refusing to accept the effacement of Black creativity.

IV “When we read Marx,” Louis Althusser once wrote, “we immediately find a reader who reads to us, and out loud.”47 Althusser was alluding, figuratively, to Marx’s creative invocations of the ideas of earlier economists, such as Smith and Ricardo: invocations that Claire Reddleman, as we have seen, has called ventriloquistic. But in the Das Kapital Oratorio, Okwui Enwezor and his creative team explored a literal interpretation of the same idea, designing a months-long, live reading of Marx. Subtly but insistently built around a number of religious references, the Oratorio suggested the almost sacred aspect of Das Kapital—even as it also subtly undermined the authority of the text in using an English translation that pointed to the transformative forces of globalization. Just as importantly, though, the Oratorio can also be seen as a response to a long history of ethnographic ventriloquism: a tendency often decried by Enwezor. In filtering Marx’s words through otherwise silent performers, the Oratorio employed an associatively ventriloquistic strategy. But at the same time, it also offered a sort of deconstruction of classical ventriloquism by granting the readers a marked degree of dramatic latitude, by complicating notions of voice and authorship, and by refusing to repeat a simplistic and inequitable racial binarism. In short, it signified, acknowledging but also creatively revising a historical precedent—and offering a memorable response to an injustice that had too often, as Enwezor often pointed out, robbed Black subjects of a voice.48

Notes 1 Hazel Friedman, “Head first into the goo,” Mail & Guardian, September 13, 1996, https:// mg.co.za/article/1996-09-13-head-first-into-the-goo. 2 Okwui Enwezor, “Basquiat,” Frieze, January 2, 1997, https://frieze.com/article/basquiat. Enwezor went on to write that “Schnabel, as the ring master of this fantasy of d ­ isplacement, performs the perfect pantomime in which Basquiat is not only deontologised, but equally desubjectivised.”

198  Kerr Houston 3 Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of P ­ ermanent Transition,” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (Winter 2003), 57–82: 67. 4 Okwui Enwezor, “Letter to the Editor,” Artforum 46, no. 6 (February 2008), 53–56: 53–54. Enwezor was alluding, cryptically, to the development of the African pavilion, which was originally conceived by Storr but was nominally curated by a jury of diasporic curators, and which eventually featured works from the private collection of Hans Bogatzke. 5 The Biennale website described the Oratorio, which took place in the largest gallery of the Central Pavilion, as “the linchpin of the ARENA program.” See https://www.­labiennale. org/en/art/2015/biennale-arte-2015-arena. Importantly, too, a number of other works included in the sections of the Biennale overseen by Enwezor evinced a related concern with economic analysis, labor rights, and working conditions. Most obviously, perhaps, Isaac Julien’s Kapital offered a dual-screen projection of a conversation between the artist and the Marxist author and geographer David Harvey, and the Gulf Labor Coalition exhibited materials related to efforts to protect the rights of workers involved in precarious labor. But the Biennale also commissioned several musical scores that were also performed in the ARENA and that foregrounded the songs of exploited laborers: for instance, Jason Moran’s STAGED included samples from songs sung by inmates working in the L ­ ouisiana State Penitentiary, and Jeremy Deller exhibited the sheet music to early factory songs, some of which addressed working conditions in industrial Britain. Stretching the point, one might also say that works like these, as well as several others, raised the theme of peoples spoken for. The photographs of Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, for instance, focused on inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary; an entry in the exhibition catalogue claimed that the photographs offered a “testimony” that “restores visibility and humanity to a population often forgotten by the public at large.” See La Biennale di Venezia (exhibition catalogue), ed. Luz Gyalui, trans. Lemuel Caution (Venice: Marsilio, 2015), 563. 6 According to the Biennale’s website, the project was “conceived by Okwui Enwezor with Isaac Julien in collaboration with Mark Nash,” and was “directed by Isaac Julien.” See https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2015/biennale-arte-2015-arena. 7 For useful discussions of ventriloquism in the standard sense, see Frederick Maccabe, The Art of Ventriloquism (New York: Frederick Warne and Co., 1875), 15; Kolby King, Ventriloquism Made Easy (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997), 3; and Yiren Zheng, “Ventriloquism,” The Chicago School of Media Theory, https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/­ keywords/ventriloquism/. For the description of the piece as a live reading, see https:// www.labiennale.org/en/art/2015/biennale-arte-2015-arena. 8 D.S. Mayfield, “Variants of Rhetorical Ventriloquism,” online supplement to History and Drama, eds. Joachim Küpper, Jan Mosch, and Elena Penskaya (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110604276/html?lang=en, 7. 9 Ivan Matijasic, e-mail to the author, July 26, 2019. 10 Charlotte Higgins, “Das Kapital at the Arsenale: how Okwui Enwezor invited Marx to the Biennale,” The Guardian, May 7, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/ may/07/das-kapital-at-venice-biennale-okwui-enwezor-karl-marx. 11 Elliott Green, “What Are the Most-Cited Publications in the Social Sciences (according to Google Scholar)?,” LSE Impact Blog, May 12, 2016, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/­impacto fsocialsciences/2016/05/12/what-are-the-most-cited-publications-in-the-social-sciences-­ according-to-google-scholar/. 12 See, for example, Francis Wheen, Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 5. 13 John Hoffman and Paul Graham, Introduction to Political Theory (New York: Routledge, 2015), 218. 14 All the World’s Futures, exhibition catalogue, La Biennale di Venezia: 56th International Art Exhibition (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2015), 210. 15 Ivan Matijasic, e-mail to the author, July 26, 2019. 16 Louis Althusser, Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, trans. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach (New York: Verso, 2015), 11. 17 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and intro. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 137.

Re-siting Marx  199 18 This is a point also made, incidentally, by Francis Wheen, who has claimed that “Anyone willing to grapple with Beethoven, Goya or Tolstoy should be able to ‘learn something new’ from a reading of Das Kapital.” See Wheen, Marx’s Das Kapital, 5–6. 19 All the World’s Futures, 95, and Marcia E. Vetrocq, “Days of Futures Past: Okwui ­Enwezor’s Eurocentric Venice Biennale,” The Brooklyn Rail, September 8, 2015, https:// brooklynrail.org/2015/09/art/days-of-futures-past. 20 For an English translation of Althusser’s text (in which he recommends reading Volume 1 last), see http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpalthusser11.htm. 21 Louis Althusser, Reading Capital, 11. 22 Charlotte Higgins, “Das Kapital at the Arsenale.” Incidentally, this idea was extended in the exhibition catalogue, which featured 16 pages of photographs of Das Kapital translated into various languages. See All the World’s Futures, 74–89. 23 David Goldblatt, Art and Ventriloquism (New York: Routledge, 2006), ix–xi. 24 Claire Reddleman, “Vampires, Foetuses and Ventriloquism: Metaphor as a Representative Strategy in Capital Volume 1,” Socialism and Democracy 29, no. 2 (2015), 25–40: 38. Also relevant here is Althusser, Reading Capital, 11, who notes that Marx’s text includes close readings of economists such as Quesnay, Smith and Ricardo. 25 Claire Reddleman, “Vampires, Foetuses and Ventriloquism,” 25. 26 David Goldblatt, Art and Ventriloquism, x. 27 Zoe Beloff, ed., A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood (New York: Christine Burgin, 2016), 113–131 and esp. 115 and 126. For the film itself, see http:// aworldredrawn.com/model.html. Notably, Beloff has explored the theme of the body as a medium in a number of other projects, as well. In a 2008 essay, for instance, she described her fascination with a series of early photographs and 16 mm films that purported to “make the body speak” by recording the gestures and expressions of individuals diagnosed as clinically insane; to Beloff, however, the images “are ‘confessions’ of the doctors and the analysts as much as they are of the patients.” See Zoe Beloff, “Mental Images: The Dramatization of Psychological Disturbance,” in Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, eds. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (Durham: Duke University Press: 2008), 226–252: 226 and 251. Also relevant is her claim, made about her 2002 film Claire and Don in Slumberland, that There’s also the idea that the characters don’t speak; they’re spoken through. A voice from somewhere else comes through you and forces you to speak, which again goes back to mediumship. So there’s an idea of the medium as an uncanny microphone… being spoken through. Consequently, as Karen Beckman has pointed out, Beloff’s work frequently plays on the dual meaning of the term medium, as it simultaneously investigates the nature of film and the history of bodies as communicative tools. See Karen Beckman, “Impossible Spaces and Philosophical Toys: An Interview with Zoe Beloff,” Grey Room 22 (Winter 2006), 68–85: 69 and 78. 28 Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 297. 29 Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford ­University Press, 1988), 145. 30 Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 155. 31 Olu Oguibe, “Art, Identity, Boundaries: The Rome Lecture,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary Art 3 (Fall/Winter 1995), 26–33; subsequently republished as “Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art,” in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 17–29. 32 Olu Oguibe, “Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art,” 18. 33 Olu Oguibe, “Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art,” 20. 34 Olu Oguibe, “Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art,” 19. 35 Philip Gwynne Jones, e-mail to the author, July 24, 2019. 36 Philip Gwynne Jones, e-mail to the author, July 24, 2019.

200  Kerr Houston 37 Ivan Matijasic, e-mail to the author, July 26, 2019. 38 Olu Oguibe, “Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art,” 28. 39 Olu Oguibe, “Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art,” 23. 40 David Goldblatt, Art and Ventriloquism, 104. 41 Quoted in David Goldblatt, Art and Ventriloquism, 34. 42 Relevant here is Goldblatt’s discussion of “ecstasis, a stepping outside the self, a being beside itself, of which ventriloquism is a special case.” See David Goldblatt, Art and Ventriloquism, 33. 43 As Matijasic suggested to me, the racial composition of the readers may have been a product of economic, cultural, and linguistic circumstance. “I think that the fact that we were all white,” he noted, was simply due to the kind of people you can find in Venice that are familiar enough with English to be able to perform on a stage: I think there was no [B]lack person at the audition, only white, (mostly) young guys and girls (under 30). Matijasic, e-mail to the author, July 26, 2019. 4 4 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). In his text, Gates uses the capitalized term Signifying when discussing African-American expression. 45 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey, 63. 46 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey, 239. 47 Louis Althusser, Reading Capital, 16. 48 Of course, it would be naïve to pretend that Enwezor’s work, however effective, brought about an end to the phenomenon of exploitative ventriloquism. The problem persists— allowing Jörg Heiser to observe, in a 2019 essay on a recent spate of fictionalized real-life narratives, that These white men, like many generations before them, grew up with a sense of entitlement that allowed them to define what story is to be told and how. They’re like ghostly ventriloquists who pretend to speak in dissenting voices, when the real ones are either silenced or ignored. See “Ghostly Ventriloquists,” https://frieze.com/article/ghostly-ventriloquists.

References Althusser, Louis. Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, trans. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach. New York: Verso, 2015. Beckman, Karen. “Impossible Spaces and Philosophical Toys: An Interview with Zoe Beloff.” Grey Room 22 (Winter 2006): 68–85. Beloff, Zoe, ed. A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood. New York: Christine Burgin, 2016. Beloff, Zoe. “Mental Images: The Dramatization of Psychological Disturbance.” In Still ­Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, eds. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, 226–252. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. New York: Oxford ­University Press, 2000. Enwezor, Okwui. “Basquiat.” Frieze. January 2, 1997. https://frieze.com/article/basquiat. Enwezor, Okwui. “Letter to the Editor.” Artforum 46, no. 6 (February 2008): 53–56. Enwezor, Okwui. “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition.” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 57–82. Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and intro. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Friedman, Hazel. “Head First into the Goo.” Mail & Guardian. September 13, 1996. https:// mg.co.za/article/1996-09-13-head-first-into-the-goo.

Re-siting Marx  201 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary ­C riticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Geertz, Clifford. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Goldblatt, David. Art and Ventriloquism. New York: Routledge, 2006. Green, Elliott. “What Are the Most-Cited Publications in the Social Sciences (according to Google Scholar)?.” LSE Impact Blog. May 12, 2016. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/05/12/what-are-the-most-cited-publications-in-the-social-sciences-­ according-to-google-scholar/. Heiser, Jörg. “Ghostly Ventriloquists.” https://frieze.com/article/ghostly-ventriloquists. Higgins, Charlotte. “Das Kapital at the Arsenale: How Okwui Enwezor Invited Marx to the Biennale.” The Guardian. May 7, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/ may/07/das-kapital-at-venice-biennale-okwui-enwezor-karl-marx. Hoffman, John and Paul Graham. Introduction to Political Theory. New York: Routledge, 2015. http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpalthusser11.htm. https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2015/biennale-arte-2015-arena. Jones, Philip Gwynne. e-mail to the author, July 24, 2019. King, Kolby. Ventriloquism Made Easy. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997. La Biennale di Venezia (exhibition catalogue), ed. Luz Gyalui, trans. Lemuel Caution. Venice: Marsilio, 2015. Maccabe, Frederick. The Art of Ventriloquism. New York: Frederick Warne and Co., 1875. Matijasic, Ivan. e-mail to the author, July 26, 2019. Mayfield, D.S. “Variants of Rhetorical Ventriloquism.” Online supplement to History and Drama, eds. Joachim Küpper, Jan Mosch and Elena Penskaya. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110604276/html?lang=en, 7. Oguibe, Olu. “Art, Identity, Boundaries: The Rome Lecture.” Nka: Journal of Contemporary Art 3 (Fall/Winter 1995): 26–33; subsequently republished as “Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art.” In Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, 17–29. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Reddleman, Claire. “Vampires, Foetuses and Ventriloquism: Metaphor as a Representative Strategy in Capital Volume 1.” Socialism and Democracy 29, no. 2 (2015): 25–40. Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Vetrocq, Marcia E. “Days of Futures Past: Okwui Enwezor’s Eurocentric Venice ­Biennale.” The Brooklyn Rail. September 8, 2015. https://brooklynrail.org/2015/09/art/ days-of-futures-past. Wheen, Francis. Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography. New York: Grove Press, 2006. Zheng, Yiren. “Ventriloquism.” The Chicago School of Media Theory. https://lucian.­uchicago. edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/ventriloquism/.

Part IV

Echoes

11 In a Manner of Speaking Catherine Clover

In a Manner of Speaking (2018) As part of My Monster: The Human Animal Hybrid curated by Evelyn Tsitas RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, Australia Stereo field recording, vinyl lettering, participatory performance

As visitors approach the gallery, street sounds ring in their ears. This is Swanston Street, central Melbourne, a busy place. The dominant foreground sounds are urban: pedestrian footsteps, trams, cyclists, conversations, pigeons, seagulls, and drilling from the construction of the Metro Tunnel. At the entrance to the gallery, a field recording of the same street plays ambiently, echoing the place itself. The street sounds bleed into the entrance, and the recording seeps out onto the street. The field recording is recognizable as the same place but its content varies in the details and its echo is asynchronous, repeating sounds then overlaying and obscuring sounds, highlighting some while cancelling others out. In the recording, a seagull calls as it flies north up the street, but the day the visitor enters the gallery the same bird is pecking on the ground eating the crumbs of a halfeaten snack. This seagull is always there but never in the same place at the same time. rup

rup

rup

up

up

up

Silver Gull There is a second sonic response to the site in the form of lettering on the glass doors, the internal entrance to the gallery. The words are English phonetic interpretations transcribed from the sounds of the site as well as the field recording. The lettering also includes words from common text in cities such as instructions (road signs), information (public transport info, road names, businesses), advertising, graffiti. The phonetic words look like a language other than English until they are spoken aloud. Only with voice, with articulation and the breath, do they make sense for English speakers. sykelist sittywyde yair sye lent … how inculcated in human language we are, to the expense of more non-verbal, sonorous vocalisations Sophie Knezic DOI: 10.4324/9781003303978-16

206  Catherine Clover When the birds’ calls are sounded the birds become visible. peep chip chip chp chp chp chp chp chp chp chp

tsz tsz tsz

rup rup up rup ts  ts  ts ss  ss  ss  ss  ss  ss uhh uhh Silver Gull and Common Myna Like a déjà entendu, the transcription on the glass doors is offered to the reader as a script, a score, for performance. ss   ss    ss    ss Common Myna Imitating bird sounds without truly listening to those bird calls in advance to carefully study their acoustic properties gave the performance an enjoyable lack of seriousness; a sense of play. Sophie Knezic If readers accept the invitation, their voices blend with and become part of the live sounds of the street, where the sounds are similar but are never the same each day, like an echo that is distorted. rup     rup Silver Gull Readers might improvise and add their own sounds – from memory, from sonic association, from mimicry of the live street sounds. hm     hm hm Common Pigeon

mm  mm  mm

When readers climb the steps to the entrance, one of the glass doors slides open, and the lettering on the moving door obscures the lettering on the other (Figure 11.1). As I listened to myself listening, there were fleeting moments of recognition and insight into the sound of the word; in stutters and resonance, in the vibration felt in the throat and mouth, in the rhythmical energy between sound and the ear that connected the material of the text and its acoustic shapes to memory. Annalea Beattie

In a Manner of Speaking  207

Figure 11.1  Catherine Clover, In a Manner of Speaking (2018) as part of My Monster: The Human Animal Hybrid curated by Evelyn Tsitas RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, Australia. Stereo field recording, vinyl lettering, participatory ­performance. Courtesy of the artist.

The lettering converges as the door moves, it morphs and changes from lettering to abstracted horizontal and vertical marks: the vertical of a “t” overlays an “e,” an “n” and a “b” merge. The letters become separate marks that are visual, abstract, non-figurative, unfamiliar, underlining their concrete and material nature. In the brief moment of the pause when the doors are open, the marks form another version of the score. When the door moves to close, toward the left, lettering re-appears and forms new words as the marks intersect in a different formation. The words on the door are both phonetic versions of English words and the transliterations of bird calls and the motion causes a visual flux. Letters, then words, form and break apart and form again. tse raoe t8r recknnnt soriee ovinge yayair oededoe sstssstsssts rupoher fifaffteeto mup turpm Another language seems to emerge, a language that is unknown, through a misreading perhaps, or a mishearing, familiar yet incomprehensible; a hidden language that emerges only in the flux and which is only visible momentarily, briefly echoing

208  Catherine Clover perhaps the many lost and dying languages across this continent. I am reminded that this is the International Year of Indigenous Languages (2019), and the reconstruction of many Aboriginal Australian languages is taking place, a huge undertaking that uses guesswork, estimation, and improvization. The door opens and closes with each visitor who arrives and departs. Open ovinge close yayair open oededoe close sstssstsssts words form merge and re-form rupoher fifaffteeto and disappear mup turpm When the visitor leaves the gallery, the lettering is reversed, further abstracting one’s sense of written language. The lettering is superimposed on the view of the street, and indecipherable squiggles and marks overlay the street activity. When one door slides over the other, the squiggles converge forming a thicker layer of marks and shapes While voicing the words I remember looking at the printed words on the glass wall, which overlaid the moving city behind. Jordan Lacey About 25 people gather at the entrance of the gallery for an informal group voicing of the score. I select component parts of the score on which we can spend some time to warm up our voices and get to know each other. … giving voice to bird words took place for me in connection to other listeners. Stacking up with the voices of others, there was an overall feeling of sound that ran around and over profiles and surfaces. Leaning in to the sounds passing by, there was a wordless self-tuning amongst us as something that felt active and compositional—a readiness to hear, a sensing out of pitch and tone, a making sense of sound inserted, extracted, bent, looped, adapted, blended. It was surprisingly joyful. Annalea Beattie We listen to the space, to the street sounds percolating in. In addition to a printed version of the score on the glass doors, I hand out individual scores for the voice of a blackbird, a seagull and a pigeon. Awkward and self-conscious at first, we begin by listening. This is followed by breathing exercises, and then some warm-up ­exercises using the vocal impressions of other animals: dogs, cows, cats, and horses. This loosens our vocal chords and initiates a sense of sonic connection within the group. An absurdity associated with sounding animal voices together, as a group of adults, strangers in a public place, reminds us of childhood frolic when we readily played at sounding (as) other animals. Any awkwardness falls away, and no one is left behind. There was an implicit awareness that we couldn’t really go wrong, but that we could go “silly” - which was freeing and fun. The whole experience resembled the kind of playtime that we engage in as children but so rarely indulge in as adults, especially on the level of language where social convention encourages us to be semantically clear and precise. Sophie Knezic

In a Manner of Speaking  209 chp chp chp chp chp chp chp chp rup rup up rup Silver Gull … synchronised with the spoken words of the audience whose voices overlaid the sounds of the city coming through the door. This seemed to animate the words insofar as I could hear them sounded rather than them being fixed read text. In a sense, it brought them to life. Singing the sounds in unison with the others made me feel part of a flock, and at one sense I could imagine being roosted on top of a building watching the city move before me as I communicated with other birds. Having a mixture of human, industrial, and avian sounds brought the mixture of the city to life: giving a sense of what the unseen listener - human or otherwise - might be experiencing. Jordan Lacey hm hm Common Pigeon

hm

mm mm mm

The collective vocalizing did not really bring us closer to animal becoming, but allowed us to step away from strict communicative functions - and to “play” at being birds. Sophie Knezic rup  rup  rup      up  up   up Silver Gull peep chip chip       tsz tsz tsz Common Myna

Speaking in Tongues (2019) As part of Assembling Animal Communication curated by Kevin Chua for the conference Animal/Language Texas Tech University, Lubbock Texas, US (Figure 11.2). Stereo audio recording—a reading of Bat by Tessa Laird (Reaktion Books, 2018). ­Digital prints on paper

Central Melbourne, Yarra Bend Park. This is the unceded land of the Wurundjeri Tribe, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Melbourne. The air is warm and soft and the eucalypts are pungent and heady. Traffic is quiet even though the eight-lane Eastern Freeway crosses the park on an elevated section not far from here. The land is a combination of alluvial plain, volcanic plain, and wetland. Despite being severely degraded due to industry, housing and road building during and prior to the twentieth century, the last 20 years have seen the benefits of a rigorous conservation plan. Rare and threatened species of vegetation can be found here. Trees include

210  Catherine Clover

Figure 11.2  C  atherine Clover, In a Manner of Speaking (2018) as part of My ­Monster: The Human Animal Hybrid curated by Evelyn Tsitas RMIT Gallery, ­Melbourne, Australia. Stereo field recording, vinyl lettering, participatory performance. Courtesy of the artist.

River Red Gum, Yellow Box, Yellow Gum, Golden Wattle, Woolly Tea-tree, Silver Wattle, Black Wattle, Blackwood, Hedge Wattle, Golden Wattle, Gold-dust Wattle. Grasses and flowering plants include Hollow Sedge, Creeping Knotweed, Common Reed, Native Flax, Grey Mistletoe, Course Dodder-Laurel, River Mint, Forest Germander, Creeping Raspwort, Running Postman, Common Flat-Pea, Common Heath, Scented Sundew, Climbing Sundew, Pink Bindweed, Grey Roly-Poly, Nodding Saltbush, Clammy Goosefoot, Prickly Starwort, Yellowish Bluebell, Shrubby Fireweed, Dogwood, Grey Everlasting, Yam Daisy, Billy-Buttons, Common Sneezeweed, Plump Spear-Grass and Salmon Sun-Orchid. The ancient River Yarra (Birrarung in Woi wurrung, the language of the Wurundjeri Tribe) slowly winds its way south through the park and on its banks at the Bellbird picnic area is the roost of the native GreyHeaded Flying Fox, Melbourne’s largest, most visible, and numerous bat. Known colloquially as fruit bats, these creatures are common features of the suburban skies from dusk till dawn during the summer months, when trees are fruiting in gardens and parks. As mega-bats, they are the size of crows or small ravens, and they are easily visible as they stream out of their roost along the winding river and fan out into the suburbs in the fading light of a summer’s evening. Their wing beats are audible as they flap through the air. Highly social animals, when they select a tree for a feed, their voices are loud with continual exchange.

In a Manner of Speaking  211 There’s something unmistakable about the exuberance of flying foxes as they chatter and shriek during the day while they are supposedly at rest, hanging, scratching, stretching, prodding, and generally haranguing each other. They are both good natured and irascible, like characters in a Martin Scorsese film. Tessa Laird Returning to their roost as dawn breaks, they take time to settle as they hang from the branches over the water. Fidgeting and chattering, they adjust their wings around their fur-covered bodies, snug in the soft, black pliable membrane. Mammalian in their features, small round golden-brown ears are visible when they wrap themselves up. In the heat of the day and for what seems like temperature control, one wing opens and flaps to provide a draft, and then a second wing opens, like cormorants or darters that stand static with both wings outstretched for minutes at a time. They then fold their wings back into place. chra chra chra chra tt tt tt tt tt ii ii ii ii tra tra tra tra rah rah rah rah    ee ee ee ree ree ree trr trr trr    trp trp ch ch ch chra ra ra ch ch ch t t t t chra chra chra    trp trp trp trp ch ch trp Grey-Headed Flying Foxes This is the time of day that I arrive, later in the morning but still early, when the bats have returned from their night’s foraging but are still audible as they settle in the trees. It is the start of autumn now, with cooler temperatures. I choose a spot underneath a eucalypt where one of the larger groups of bats is roosting. Noting my presence but mostly ignoring me when I look up and listen, they witness me sitting down amongst the grassy undergrowth pulling out Tessa’s book. They are a little disturbed when I start to read. Superimposition is a key part of Cath’s work… I’m supremely flattered that here, she has chosen to read my book Bat to the thousands of grey-headed flying foxes that roost at the Yarra Bend Park in Melbourne, and I know that this artwork is destined for Texas, where caves of freetail bats live in their millions. Tessa Laird I start to read. ch-chruh chrr chrrr     ch-chruh chrr chrrr chreeee chreee tsru     eee tsru cha rra the social and communicative eeeyuh trrr trrr truh truheeya nature of these creatures tree ssra chreeee ch chra chra ch ch ch ch is nowhere better illustrated than in the ssc chra chra chra than in the sculpture Fruit Bats, 1991, by the late Australian Aboriginal artist Lin Onus ch raa ch raa chch ts ts ts chra chraa chrraa chraa life sized rotary clothes line chrra chrra chrra cchrra trra traa is the roost for a hundred upside down fruit bats chrra chrra chrra whose chrra chrrra chrra chrra chrra ch ch chchchch tra tra tra Grey-Headed Flying Foxes, Tessa Laird, Catherine Clover

212  Catherine Clover My voice merges with the bats’ voices as I read. I think of them as my primary listeners but they are not quiet. They are so audible that my voice is drowned out at times, despite their relative distance, high in the branches above. Their voices are far louder than my own and more penetrating despite the difference in our bodily sizes. Their audible sounds are short, high-pitched with multiple variations. Sounds are repeated in various ways and varied volume. The sounds are not melodic; they are sharp, staccato, and quite precise. Flying foxes do not use echolocation, and their sight is keen. painted in the rarrk cross hatch style of bark paintings from central Arnhem Land trr trr trrr trrr Although Onus was a Yorta Yorta man from Victoria tt tt tt tt ii ii ii he collaborated with men from Arnhem Land chra chra chra and was given permission to employ the Ganalbingu design for the flying fox in this work trra trra trra ch ch ch ch kukukukuku kakaka ka ka for those who regard bats ch ch ch ch as kinfolk ch ch ch ch ch chrraa chrraa chrraa ii ii ii ii chra chra chra aar aar aar tr tr tr tr Grey-Headed Flying Foxes, Tessa Laird, Catherine Clover   Cath’s calm English tones contrast strongly with the batty screeching and the kookaburra cackling, and also with her subject matter: an artwork called Fruit Bats by Aboriginal artist Lin Onus. In my mind’s eye I can see Cath’s face, cinematically superimposed with an image of the chattering bats and then an image of Onus’s sculpture. Tessa Laird When I read Tessa’s words, I think of her voice, which I know a little but not very well, not in detail (Figure 11.3). We haven’t had long conversations together, but we

Figure 11.3  C  atherine Clover, Speaking in Tongues (2019) as part of Assembling Animal Communication curated by Kevin Chua for Animal/Language Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, US. Stereo audio recording (a reading of Bat by Tessa Laird to the local fruit bats) and digital prints on paper. Courtesy of the artist.

In a Manner of Speaking  213 have had various exchanges in different settings. I know how she sounds, up to a point. She has a soft melodic New Zealand accent. When I first arrived in Australia I could not distinguish between Australian and New Zealander accents. I recall that her voice is gentle, persuasive, convincing. I remember her presentation on Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue (2013) at a conference in Mexico City, and I also remember her voice in the tourist bus as we traveled to see the Teotihuacan Pyramids on the same trip. With her voice in my mind, remembering, misremembering, approximating, estimating, I read her words on the page. I do not try to sound like her, but I do have her in mind as I sound. The bats above hear my voice as I read her words. This is not my language but Tessa’s written language, language about bats, language for publication. She chooses a writerly voice that is informal and inclusive. This is not her spoken voice, although I imagine her sounds as I read her choice of words. I hear her voice as I read. I don’t know if she wrote these words here in the park with the flying foxes, if she wrote as she looked up at them, listening to their chattering and settling, but she is here in this place as I read: for me she is present, with the bats and myself. I know she has visited these bats, this place, on many occasions but we have not visited together. The bats’ voices dominate my reading voice.    I have been to Bracken Cave and seen the bats stream out at sunset, a spectacle I will never forget, and I superimpose these waves of microbats on the large, doe-eyed flying foxes dangling here in Australia from tall, scraggly eucalyptus trees. Both populations are in trouble: White Nose Syndrome has been discovered in Bracken Cave, and the flying foxes are dying during heat waves. But as Cath reads the foxes cry out to greet their distant American cousins, wishing them strength, resilience, courage, and care. Tessa Laird and for those that insist bats are pests however chra chra chra chra trra trra Onus’s flying foxes become a phalanx of protestors ch ch ch claiming their land rights tra tra tra tra ch ch chchchch in the midst of a white Australian suburban fantasy trreep trreep trip trip tri tri tri tri ii ii ii ii chchchchch tra tra tra trtrtrtr iiiii chchchch Grey-Headed Flying Foxes, Tessa Laird, Catherine Clover

OH! AH AH PREE TRRA TRRA (2019) As part of Café Oto’s Music and Other Living Creatures series London, UK Sound

Walk and Participatory Performance in Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park It’s a hot summer day in London, July. Mile End, the east side of the city on the Central and District lines. Turn right up the steps. Mile End Road. Right on to Southern Grove, then into Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, a woodland cemetery, also known as Bow Cemetery. Wild flowers, tall grasses, flowering shrubs, leafy climbers grow around and over the lopsided gravestones that crack and fall into each other and onto the ground. The undisturbed growth is rich, tall trees are in full leaf, birds cavort along the branches in the lush golden green canopy, trains rattle past on an elevated

214  Catherine Clover section of track, train horns blast, dogs bark as they walk with their owners, insects rustle in the undergrowth. We take a small path through the green. We walk around the western side of the park, heading south. Tiny gravestones emerge from the leaf litter Forecast 1888, Rose 1876, The Family Grave of Thomas Fuller, and Our dear Mother Amelia Wheeler who fell asleep in 1914. Even smaller paths track off to the left and right, into shadow. In some parts, it’s hard to avoid stepping on the graves. As we walk, we listen and are being listened to; as we look, we see and are being seen. We observe and are being observed. Our walking is a rhythm that follows our listening; we connect with our internal rhythm and the external world. We hear ourselves in this place; our footsteps echo our heartbeats. Birds call to each other: Woodpigeon, Crow, Wren, Swift, Herring Gull, Swallow, Skylark, Thrush, Pigeon, Blackbird, Magpie, Jackdaw, Rook, Starling, Cuckoo, Bunting, Pipit, Dove, and Egret. Kids shout to each other in the playground of South Grove School (AD1904). At the south end the park opens on to a meadow of wildflowers close to the railway. We stop in the dappled light, listening, standing still. Benjamin Boyden Sophia John Curlew Thomas Wiggett William Elliott John Salmon Elizabeth Bovey aged 1 year 8 months 1868 I experienced an alternative sense of being in time and place, and an expanded sense of soundscape - in the local and the orbits extending outwards, beyond the walls of the cemetery park, and possibly into my memories and imagination. Helen Frosi OF N MEMOR ILL AM V INN AN AR 9 0 WHO DIE TH WIN ALSO EL ZAB WI E OF T ADOVE THE THE WI E OF T ADOVE THE THE LIFE HE

EARS

LIFE HE

Cowslip, Dandelion, Lady’s Smock Daisy, Marjoram, Daffodil, Crocus. J N MN N THE YEAR OF ELEANOR JOHN WIFE OF THE ABOVE ARTED THIS LIFE 80 YEARS

In a Manner of Speaking  215    SACRED JOHN MASTER MARINER DIED JANE SACRED The stone crumbles in places. O Gallilee, sweet Gallilee Ly ra e r Know my redeemer Niece of the above Daughter of the above Husband of the above

ward

nd el

A R

phr

e-e-e-e-e-e trrr trrr trrr trr trrrr tree-uu tree-uu e-e-e-e-e-e trrr trr trrrr tree-uu tree-uu Wren Susannah Elliott Of the above 10th July 1910 In her 53rd year Herring Gull, Swallow, Skylark, Thrush, Pigeon, Blackbird. I hope to meet you all again On a peaceful happy shore We walk as a group, not as individuals. We are here for the living but the ghosts of the dead are all around us. Oak, Elm, Plane, Lime, Wren, Robin, Crow, Blackbird. …willingness to experiment, try and embrace the unknown, specifically in terms of sonic interactions with other species. I felt throughout the workshop/performance you reminded us that there is “no wrong way” and gave us agency to how we wanted to respond to the work and the scores… Robbie Judkins We listen. We read the scores as we listen. Reading and listening and reading and listening. It is difficult to silently read the phonetic words as the sounds in the words and the birds calling above trigger our tongues to move in our mouths, our lips to shape vowels and consonants silently. I was particularly moved to hear the group voice the birds together - as an interpretation of an event, a transcription and an imaginative gesture to the other; a becoming both “othered” and “entangled” through sound. Helen Frosi

216  Catherine Clover It was really enjoyable interacting with other participants’ calls as well as the birds we were attempting to mimic and gave me a real sense of interconnectedness with the landscape we were exploring. The workshop also enabled me to be a lot more playful with using my voice in a group setting, something which I often struggle with. Stephan Barrett Using pen and paper to write the scores, it’s hard to keep up with the birds’ voices and many sounds are missed, so we are voicing scores that are full of gaps and cracks. They are rushed estimates, skimmed guesswork, and full of doubt. The birds sing with speed, there are no pauses, and there is no uncertainty. What word fits that sound? And that sound? And that sound? Indecision and fluster create long gaps in my transcriptions as the bird continues to sing. Accuracy is impossible. I was fascinated to know that Cathy had been to the park prior to the workshop and had spent time absorbed in the soundscapes of the cemetery park. I imagined Cathy noting the sounds around her in idiosyncratic ways, and I imagined reenacting a moment where a gull, wren, or a crow voiced its presence. Helen Frosi The scores are inaccurate representations of sound (in general) and bird voices (in particular). They are rough, raw, inexpert, awkward, and inefficient. We use them to attempt to connect, and now they serve as a record of desire. mmm mmm mmm mmm         mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm oom oom oom oom      oom oom oom oom mm mm Pigeon I felt the focus of my listening changing whilst participating, between the non-human and human, the self, the group, and the other. Mia Kukathasan As we voice, we sense that a connection could be made because we are here in the domain of the wild birds and the potential is palpable (Figure 11.4). We know we are observed by the birds, watched by the birds because we can see them watching us. Silent, two robins come close and hop around us, watching, listening, and flitting back up to the branches then down again. Robins don’t sing at this time of year. At one point three of us voice a crow, and a crow flies over, calling three times. We stop, and we look up. Our thrill is palpable, we hope the bird responded to our voices. We look for the bird in the tree tops, it is high above, not visible among the green leaves. Are we communicating? Do we sound like crows? Are we crow-like? Are we like crows? crrar crrar crrar crrar crrar crrar crrar crrar crrar crrar Carrion Crow

In a Manner of Speaking  217

Figure 11.4  Catherine Clover, OH! AH AH PREE TRRA TRRA (2019) as part of Music and Other Living Creatures Series for Café Oto, London, UK. Sound walk and participatory Performance in Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park. Photo credit Helen Frosi. Courtesy of the artist and Helen Frosi.

Most remarkable was the encounter with crows (at a point when several of us were making crow sounds), where they seemed very clearly to fly over, check what we were and what we were doing (from high in the canopy above us), ‘caw’ a few times, then leave. This seemed to resonate with the Deborah Bird Rose reading: it seemed both obvious that they were checking us out, and slightly mystifying (did we really sound so much like real crows?), and whether they were ‘caw’-ing to each other about us or cawing to us, it seemed that something unusual was going on. Joe Browning The crow is quiet. We look down at the score. People walk past, dogs notice, and some stop and watch. Some stop to listen. A woman talks loudly into her phone yeh yeh     well not really    but       no no Woman passing

218  Catherine Clover She walks past looking our way. We voice the scores. The sounds we make are human. Our attempts are within earshot of the birds we are trying to voice. Walking together sounding the bird of our choosing was the most memorable experience for me. The interactions with other people that weren’t aware of what we were doing added a richness to the experience... The woman talking in her phone about “those wierdos” … Mia Kukathasan yair yair yair yair yair owp eeeee eeeee eee        eeeee eeeee eee         eeeee eeeee eee Herring Gull … genuinely changed the way I listen to birdsong that I hear regularly at home. By trying to sound it, even just in my head not aloud, I listen to the structure of the song and qualities of the sound with a truly fresh perspective. I’m recognizing reappearing characters in the avian soap opera I imagine is playing out in my local trees and roofs. Mia Kukathasan praaa treee trrreee eeek oooo traa trrraa! Stephan Barrett

The Ambassadors (2019) As part of Immerse 2019, Art in Unexpected Places, Public Art in the City of Knox Melbourne, Australia Vinyl lettering on the windows of Ferntree Gully Library Performance

Jan Incoll and I move through Sherbrooke Forest listening for the Superb Lyrebirds. It is early afternoon in late May and the woods are dry in the wintery cool following a hot summer. It’s quiet, little sound can be heard, few birds are calling, it’s still, with a slight breeze in the branches high above. We walk down well-worn tracks through the trees. Mountain ash grows here, one of the tallest of flowering hardwoods. Tree ferns dapple the low autumn light through their huge radiating lacey fronds and their emerald green color contrasts with the flat blue-gray-green of the leaves of the tall straight eucalypts; below, multi-colored lichen, moss, and fungi grow on dark spongey fallen trunks and branches. The tall trees let the light in and characterize cool temperate rainforest like this, shady at ground level but with the light from above forming glades. Even though this is a national park open to the public, we don’t meet other people. There is a tranquility about this place that is hypnotic. Balmy in warmer weather, it would be easy to drift here in a soft warmth, listening and looking. Hearing the soft crack of a twig we see the small dark head of a wallaby watching us to our right.

In a Manner of Speaking  219 We talk quietly as we walk, and I learn about the birds from Jan’s many years of living close, learning about them through watching and being in close proximity to them. She has learned from the birds themselves, from the ground up, as it were, on their terms and in their place. Her knowledge is built from watching the birds and from sharing time and space with them. She knows generations of lyrebirds, as individuals with individual behaviors, and some of them have names. In the woods she identifies old nests and mounds that the birds used in previous years, sites which may be used again for the upcoming season. With my untrained eye, I would never have spotted that a raised, shaped pile of mud emerging from the undergrowth was a mound carefully prepared for dancing and attracting, or that a dense pile of sticks in the fork of a tree trunk just above my head was a well-built nest placed strategically: safe for the eggs and young chicks, and reachable for the female (the largest of the songbirds, lyrebirds are ground living birds and do not fly, but they can jump to a certain height). It’s too early in the season for the nest to be currently in use, and Jan suggests another walk together in late July, when the season will be in full swing. Jan gestures. Stop. We hear something. It is a twanging electronic buzz; it does not sound organic but more like the internal mechanics of electronica. The sound initially reminds me of a group of cicadas I heard once in Cambodia, climbing the steps to a Hindu temple at Angkor, where I had thought some invisible electrical wiring was about to fail all around me. When I looked up there was no wiring yet the sound emanated from above and to my left and right, from the trees, a loud buzzing hum that increased in volume then abated, a very slow pulsing. Stop. I am back in Sherbrooke Forest, and I listen again. The sound is repeated with a loud trrrrrup announcement trrrrrup         trrrrrup followed by the lower pitched zingzingzingzingzingzing or pyingpyingpyingpying trrrrrup     trrrrrup pyingpyingpyingpying pyingpyingpyingpying Then in quick succession kukukukukukukukuku the first part of the Kookaburra’s song ka ka ka-ka ka-ka ka-ka ka-ka before the full laugh

Ak! Ak! Ak! Ak! Ak!

Ak! Ak! Ak! Ak! Ak!

then cracks of the Whipbird’s WHIP pweeeeeeeeeeeee hooWhip! wheeeeee ooWhip! followed by a short snatch of Currawong

  wee-oh wee-oh   wee-oh wee-oh

220  Catherine Clover karoop karoooahh karoop-karoop karooaahh and Yellow Tailed Black Cockatoo rraarrrk rrraaarrrk rrrraaarrrrk rraaarrrrk rrrraaaarrrk rrrrraaaaarrrrrk oooeeeeyowwww eeeyah eeeeyah and finally trrrrrup    trrrrrup pyingpyingpyingpying pyingpyingpyingpying We have come across a group of lyrebirds, singing, scratching, and running through the forest together, gamboling through the late afternoon light, six of them. It is exciting to suddenly hear them, and Jan signals to me to follow into the undergrowth as we try and track their movements. It’s quite easy to follow them as they continue singing as they run, their voices distinctly audible. They pause, and we catch a glimpse of them but they are well camouflaged in the dappled light against the branches and trunks and ground cover, and they disappear taking their songs with them. Some months later Jan and I meet again, in the early morning, low light, at Belgrave Station. She drives us to Grant’s Picnic Ground in Sherbrooke Forest, and we start walking. It’s cold, it’s been raining all night and the clouds hang low. Suddenly lyrebirds are all around us, singing and calling loudly, responding to each other, responding to the birds that they mimic, their voices loud and echoing through the forest. trrrrrup     trrrrrup pyingpyingpyingpying pyingpyingpyingpying ka ka ka-ka ka-ka ka-ka ka-ka Ak! Ak! Ak! Ak! Ak! rraarrrk rrraaarrrk rrrraaarrrrk rraaarrrrk rrrraaaarrrk rrrrraaaaarrrrrk oooeeeeyowwww eeeyah eeeeyah    hooWhip!      wee-oh wee-oh pweeeeeeeeeeeee pyingpyingpyingpying pyingpyingpyingpying Superb Lyrebird as Laughing Kookaburra, Yellow Tailed Black Cockatoo, Eastern Whipbird I recognize the mimicry as Eastern Whipbird, Laughing Kookaburra, Yellow Tailed Black Cockatoo, Common Blackbird, Red Wattlebird. The sounds are loud and close. The lyrebirds we hear are quite visible foraging in the undergrowth, and they sing head down as their long talons dig deeply through the piles of leaves and soil, spraying mud all around. But their voices are not muffled by the foraging, they remain loud and carrying with head down low. They forage, sing, forage, sing, moving through the forest. Lyrebirds are known to move kilos of undergrowth as they scratch through the leaf litter looking for insects.

In a Manner of Speaking  221

Figure 11.5  C  atherine Clover, The Ambassadors (2019) as part of Immerse 2019 curated by Kim de Kretser, Ferntree Gully Public Library, Melbourne, Australia. Vinyl lettering on the library windows, performance. Photo credit Samara Clifford. Courtesy of the artist and Samara Clifford.

Later and further into the forest, we hear the birds that are mimicked, kookaburras and whipbirds in particular, but I cannot distinguish between the songs, between who is singing what, between lyrebird and kookaburra, lyrebird and whipbird, lyrebird and currawong. The only indication is the lyrebird’s shorter phrasing, phrases that follow in quick succession. To my left in the dank green it could be a lyrebird or a whipbird, a lyrebird or a kookaburra, a lyrebird or a yellow-tailed black cockatoo. Are the lyrebirds communicating with the whipbirds, and do the whipbirds respond? If we understand the lyrebirds as ambassadors and as diplomats as the ancient histories in Wurundjeri culture suggest, then the lyrebirds are communicating with all the birds. They are not mimics or deceivers or even ventriloquists, but multi-linguists (Figure 11.5). In readiness for our first performance I/we/us step up a flight of stairs onto a platform. The stage is wooden although in appearance it bears no visible sign of its previous incarnation, as trunk or branch. This is where we gather, a small flock of fellow choristers and I. We settle ourselves, standing at the ready rather than perching. Roseanne Bartley ka ka ka-ka ka-ka ka-ka ka-ka      Ak! Ak! Ak! Ak! Ak! Superb Lyrebird as Laughing Kookaburra

222  Catherine Clover The text is abstract, and we’re complete amateurs, yet in co-operation we convincingly twitter and chime. In communication our efforts feel discordant, crude, and at times unruly. By page two, we manage to convincingly synchronise, harmonically chuckle kukukuku kakkaka. We find some relief in recognising something of ourselves in the comic call of the Kookaburra. Roseanne Bartley Kiri and I make eye-contact with a smile of recognition. We’re calling to each other as currawongs, back and forth. The warbling sound isn’t sharp or jarring but lyrical, softening. Soon I’m echoing Rosey as a wattle bird. I can hear Melanie to my right… a four-part duet of the blackbird… Our voices mix and separate like a mixture of syrup and oil with water, swirling together then darting off separately. Four personalities voiced as birds. Merryn Byrne rraarrrk! oorrk eeeek orrrk rraarrrk! oorrk eeeek orrrk Superb Lyrebird as Red Wattlebird The bird song was very much a conversation between the four of us, we would respond to each other in a timely manner. In order to achieve this, we listened very carefully to each other. Melanie Richard Given the cue, we begin to incantate: phonetically re-sound the mimicking call of the Superb Lyrebird. Roseanne Bartley woh woh oh ee tra eee woh trr tra trra eee prrr eee woh oh ee who tra wooo-ahhh Superb Lyrebird as Common Blackbird We start to sing, four lyrebirds in human form. Our voices echo around the space, touching the foliage and blue-purple water falling, curling up to the metal and glass roof, calling to the birds outside, by now asleep. Merryn Byrne Some of these birds were purely conceptual to me, I didn’t do any further research into each bird individually, rather I read Catherine’s notes and listened to her advice on correct “pronunciation.” Some bird sounds remained difficult for me personally, there was no connection, or maybe the vocalisation didn’t feel natural coming from my very human vocal chords. I felt that the Kookaburra came the easiest, but anyone growing up in Australia knows the beautiful Kookaburra “laugh”. Kiri Wickes

In a Manner of Speaking  223 Through my experience with Cath Clover’s work, I’ve begun to consider how or where it’s possible to cross the bird human-human bird divide. Roseanne Bartley boo-booh boo-booh boo-booh Superb Lyrebird as Southern Boobook

References Austin, Victoria I., Anastasia H. Dalziell, Naomi E. Langmore and Justin A. Welbergen. “Avian Vocalisations: The Female Perspective.” Biological Reviews 96, no. 4 (August 2021). https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12713. Barad, Karen. “No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange Topologies of Spacetimemattering.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, eds. Anne Lowenhaupt Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan and Heather Anne Swanson, 103–120. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Birdlife Australia. n.d. “Superb Lyrebird.” Accessed July 25, 2020. https://www.birdlife.org. au/bird-profile/superb-lyrebird. Bradley, John. “Learning Language, Learning Country.” Lecture as part of Whose Language Are You On, Melbourne Free University. May 2, 2019. Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge. Oxford: Polity Press, 2019. Clover, Catherine. “My Monster: The Human Animal Hybrid.” Artist’s website. 2018. Accessed July 23, 2019. http://www.ciclover.com/monster.html. Clover, Catherine. “OH! AH AH PREE TRRA TRRA.” Artist’s website. 2019. Accessed July 23, 2019. http://www.ciclover.com/ohahah.html. Clover, Catherine. “Speaking in Tongues.” Artist’s website. 2019. Accessed July 23, 2019. http://www.ciclover.com/batstexas.html. Clover, Catherine. “Superb Lyrebird/Buln Buln.” Xeno-Canto. 2019. Accessed August 8, 2019. https://www.xeno-canto.org/492308. Clover, Catherine. “The Ambassadors.” Artist’s website. 2019. Accessed July 23, 2019. http:// www.ciclover.com/immerse.html. Disclaimer Journal. “If Something Is Asleep You Can Always Wake It Up: Mandy Nicholson in Conversation with Danni Zuvela.” 2018. Accessed August 2, 2019. https://disclaimer. org.au/contents/if-something-is-asleep-you-can-always-wake-it-up-mandy-nicholson-in-­ conversation-with-danni-zuvela. Dunolly-Lee, Harley, Jay Kennedy and Julie Saylor-Briggs. “Kinship Ties.” Lecture as part of the Yirramboi Festival, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages (VACL) and State Library of Victoria. May 6, 2019.

224  Catherine Clover Dunolly-Lee, Harley and Tonya Stebbins. “Restoring Language to Community and Country: What’s Happening in Victoria.” Lecture as part of Whose Language Are You On Melbourne Free University. May 9, 2019. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Durham: Duke University Press. Krause, Bernie. 2015 “Biophony.” In Welcome to the Anthropocene. Accessed August 15, 2020. https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2017/08/biophony/. Laird, Tessa. Bat. London: Reaktion Books, 2018. Parks, Victoria. n.d. “Yarra Bend Park.” Accessed May 1, 2019. https://www.parks.vic.gov.au/ places-to-see/parks/yarra-bend-park. Rose, Deborah Bird. “Shimmer: When All You Love Is Being Trashed.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, eds. Anne Lowenhaupt Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan and Heather Anne Swanson, 103–120. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Rose, Deborah Bird. “Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Interactions in the Sentient World.” Environmental Humanities 3, no. 1 (2013). Accessed May 14, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3611248. “Sherbrooke Lyrebird Study Group.” n.d. Accessed August 1, 2019. http://sherbrookelyrebirdstudygroup.blogspot.com/. “The Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park.” n.d. Accessed July 23, 2019. https://fothcp. org/about/. “Vegetation of Yarra Bend Park.” n.d. Accessed May 1, 2019. https://vdocuments.mx/­vegetationof-yarra-bend-park-web-viewdescribe-the-vegetation-communities-and.html. Voegelin, Salomé. The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003303978-17

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Figure 12.1  nicolas b. jacobsen and Nina Elder, Lithic Record, 2020, detail.

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Lithic Record Up until this moment, we had listened to rocks. We looked to piles and pits, mines and dumps, holes in the ground and heaps of overburden. We sought the places where the planet is perforated, scarred, scraped, turned inside out. We imagined echoes within a hollowed out mountain. nicholas b. jacobsen is an eighth generation Utahn of devout Mormon ancestry. They grew up curious about and connected to the Granite Mountain Records Vault, where The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints created the most voluminous genealogical archives in the world. 1.5 billion names of the dead are stored within a sealed, man-made cavern that is 600 feet deep. Nina Elder, the daughter Aerospace Command and Defence (NORAD). Excavated into Cheyenne Mountain, this military installation is intended to detect and deter airborne attacks to the United States. The mountain would also be a primary target in a war. We met through our attempts to engage deep time, to illuminate the impacts of human beings on the land, and to share our empathy for the geologic, more-than-human world. Our separate art practices have asked questions of the places and times that we often are not able to access. While we critiqued both the applicaiton of anthropocentric qualities onto geologies and the extraction of human needs from geologic places, we also applied our individual understandings and imaginings of geologic time and natural wisdom to these places. After years of attention, curiosity, and physical research with some of the largest human interventions into the surface of the Earth, we both have questioned if we can have reciprocity with the places that our art engages. We wanted to learn how to learn from industrialized landscapes, and in this experiment, we became the mouthpieces for those places. In this new practice, the places we had observed throw their voices through ours; we lend our voices to those stories that lay beneath what we had imagined. We vocalize echoes from those hollowed mountains. Where did you come from? What is your purpose? Where are you going after this life, when you are no longer here? These three questions are pivotal to Mormon doctrine. They also can be used to explore ecological networks and systems. As we challenged ourselves to reach beyond an anthropocentric understanding of the world, we saw the value in asking these questions of the world that surrounds us. In answering, the world spoke through us. In a public library, over the course of a month, we recorded several exchanges. We sometimes spoke as a geologic entity to a human interviewer, sometimes as two geologic entities in conversation. At the outset, we imagined this practice as a way to share with one another the knowledge we had gained through our similar yet separate forms of research. Instead, we found ourselves possessed. We entered a trance-like state, speaking in long rambling answers, eyes spilled from our mouths. Those words, when later listened to, often sounded strange. They made us very uncomfortable, and we were startled by what we pronounced.

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Figure 12.2  nicolas b. jacobsen and Nina Elder, Lithic Record, 2020, detail.

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Figure 12.4  nicolas b. jacobsen and Nina Elder, Lithic Record, 2020, detail.

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Figure 12.5  nicolas b. jacobsen and Nina Elder, Lithic Record, 2020, detail.

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Figure 12.6  nicolas b. jacobsen and Nina Elder, Lithic Record, 2020, detail.

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Figure 12.7  nicolas b. jacobsen and Nina Elder, Lithic Record, 2020, detail.

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Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Acconci, Vito 67 acoustic: of deep space 17; dimension 52; ecology 19; field 17; geography 50; possibilities 7; soundtrack 83; technologies 2–3 Acoustic Mirror (Silverman) 6 Acrobat and Mountebank (Hughes Le Roux) 113 acting: as medium/ventriloquist 141; as teacher and conductor 132 Adjaye, David 190 Adorno, Theodor 139 Agamben, Giorgio 42, 48–49, 99 age of reason 1 Aguilar, José Hernán 95, 100 Akhand Path 190 Alexa 1 Alfred Hitchcock Presents 121 alienated voices 81–85 Allen, Roger 152 Allora, Jennifer 17, 19 allusion device 68–70 Alphen, Ernst van 139–140 alternate crusades 73–74 Althusser, Louis 189, 190–191, 197 American flag 27, 30, 37, 38n4, 38n9 Améry, Jean 100 Amoroso, Giovanna 142 Anderson, Laurie 7 André, Carl 110, 119 Ansky, Szymon 135–136 anti-Judaism 177, 183 anti-Semitism 177, 183 Appadurai, Arjun 95 apparatus 12, 42–43, 49, 53–54, 80; Agamben’s notion of 49; archaic-looking 52; tentative 46 “Applause” (Lady Gaga) 10 Arad, Boaz 12, 13, 20n25 Archila, Mauricio 104n1 Architectural Forum 151, 152

architectural history 153, 163 architecture 151–154, 161, 167; modern 154; rhythmic 179, 183 Arendt, Hannah 6 Arianism 118 art(s): graphic 103–104; modern 4; performance 7; of phrenology 34; phrenology of 34; sound 6–8, 20n16; theatrical 1; visual 59 Art and Ventriloquism (Goldblatt) 73, 75, 86n1, 104n16 Artforum 188 artwork-as-dummy 14 Assembling Animal Communication 209 audience 35, 49, 60, 63–67; contemporary 4; foreign 80; international 80–81; live 68; non-Arabic speaking 74, 80–81; and puppet theater 85; talk-show 63; theatrical 4; ventriloquist’s 4–5 audio technology 209 Augustine, St. 6, 117 Australopithecines (Amoroso and Zimmermann) 142 authorship 189, 195–197 automaton 120 Avargal 121 Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (LaBelle) 7 Badovici, Jean 154 Baldwin, Alec 15, 15, 83 Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem 82 Balfour, Ian 80 Balkenhol, Stephan 120 Ballard, J.G. 114 Ballerina on Optical Floor (Muñoz) 117 Barriga, Luis Fernando 101 Barthes, Roland 28, 29, 31 Bat (Laird) 209 Beam, Alex 167 Beckett, Samuel 14, 114, 123–124

268 Index Béhar, Henri 81 Beloff, Zoe 193, 199n27 Bench from “The Dead Class” (Kantor) 131 Berg, Hans 46 Bergen, Candice 115 Bergen, Edgar 1–3, 2, 111, 114–115 Berger, William Shakespeare 7 Berlin Biennale 14, 138 binaural sound 54n3 The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche) 196 Bishop, Claire 64 Black artists 17, 188 Black body 174–175 Black creative voices 189 Blondet, José Luis 8 “Blurred Lines” (Thicke) 10 Boal, Augusto 95–96 the body 113, 118, 159, 168, 175 Boîte-en-valise 50 Boltanski, Christian 139, 141 Borromini, Francesco 114, 116 Botero, Fernando 103 Boy at Desk (Kantor) 139 Brecht, Bertolt 95, 100, 104n17, 193 Breitz, Candice 14, 15, 16 Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modern Masterpiece (Beam) 167 Broodthaers, Marcel 110, 119, 120–121 Bufano, Remo 100 Building for Music 118, 119 Buzatti, Dino 110 Cabaret Crusades I: The Horror Show File (Shawky) 72, 73, 77, 80, 82, 83, 84 Cabaret Crusades trilogy (Shawky) 72–85; alienated voices 81–85; alternate crusades 73–74; dislocated voice 75–77; disparate beginnings 77–79; subtitled history 80–81 cabinet of curiosity 43 The Cabinet of Curiousness (Cardiff and Miller) 43, 44 Cabin Fever 50 Cage, John 63, 126n32 Calder, Alexander 46 call and (mechanized) response 70 Calzadilla, Guillermo 17, 18 camper 45–46 Cardiff, Janet 12, 42–54 Catachresis Sculptures 62 Catala, Antoine 12, 60, 63, 64, 65, 71n1, 71n3 Cato, Carmel 173–175, 176, 182 Cato, Gavin 175 Cattelan, Maurizio 130, 138 Cavarero, Adriana 6, 19n8 Chaplin, Charlie 6

The Chase and Sanborn Hour 114 Chauvin, Derek 185 Chicago Tribune 150 Chion, Michel 6 Chow, Rey 6–7 Chu, Anne 8 Chua, Kevin 209 Chuckie 10 circus 111, 113, 121; iconography 125; spaces 124 civil mobilization 91 Clinton, Hillary 179–180 The Coiling Prankster 84 Collins, Phil 64 Collodi, Max 121 Colombian art 95–96, 103 colonialism 49 Colored sculpture (Wolfson) 10, 11 Columbian art 13 Connor, Steven 1, 5, 19n1, 19n2, 19n3, 117, 193–194 Conrad, Joseph 194 conversational art of ventriloquism 14 Conversations Piece (Muñoz) 110 Cooke, Lynne 117 Cooney, Joan Ganz 100 corpse as venter 96–99 COVID-19 pandemic 167 Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Kelly) 7 Craig, Edward Gordon 96 Cross, John Keir 121 cross-cultural exchange 8 Crown Heights 16, 173, 175, 178–179, 185 Crusades 13, 72–85 Das Kapital (Marx) 188, 190–191, 196 Das Kapital Oratorio (Julien) 17, 188–189, 189, 191, 192, 195, 196; authorship/ textual authority 196; notions of voice 196, 197 Davis, C.B. 7 Dead Class (Kantor) 14 The Dead Class (film) 137 The Dead Class (Kantor) 141; overview 131–135; as silenced art object 141–143, 142, 143 Dead Man (Jarmusch) 47 dead objects 137, 141–142 Dead of Night 121 “The Death of the Author” (Barthes) 29 Deavere Smith, Anna 173, 174, 181; embolalia use in documentary theater 173–185; one-woman performances 175; performances as acts of ventriloquism 176; portrayal of Carmel Cato 182 Del borrar (Muñoz) 116

Index  269 Derrida, Jacques 6, 28 Desire for Freedom: Art in Europe since 1945 139 Dewson, Molly 160 dialect 173 dialectical silence 111; Wasteland as 117 dialogue 12, 19n9, 76–77, 80–82, 96, 98, 116–117, 123, 135; choreographed 60; classical Arabic 74; silent 60 Diamond, Elin 175 dianoetic laughter 124 Die Himmelspaläste (The Heavenly Palaces) (Kiefer) 139 Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6–7 dislocated voices 72–85 Djurberg, Nathalie 20n21, 46 Documenta 55n16 Dolan, Jill 175 Dolar, Mladen 6 Double Bind (Muñoz) 110 Duchamp, Marcel 27, 50, 51, 52, 53 Dumas, Marlene 142–143 Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Connor) 5, 19n1, 19n2, 19n3 dummy 4, 59–60; artwork-as-dummy 14; digital 21n26; entertainment 4, 174; installation of Kantor’s 139; psychological voice of 118; ventriloquist 112–114, 116–117, 121–124, 188, 194, 196; see also ventriloquist dummy The Dummy 121 Durham, Jimmie 142 Dwarf over a Column (Muñoz) 123 dwarfs 110–111, 113–114, 121–124, 125n6 Dwarf with a Box (Muñoz) 113, 122, 123 Dwarf with Parallel Lines (Muñoz) 110, 123 dybbuk 135–136 The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds (Ansky) 135 Eavesdropper 60–61, 63 Edith Farnsworth, Reconsidered 167–168 Egoyan, Atom 80, 81 Eichten, Julia 150, 156, 164 El bufón Calabacillas 113 Eliot, T.S. 14, 118, 124 Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom 33 El niño de Vallecas 113 El Zangarrón 113 embolalia: defined 177; evidentiary uses of 179; as form of ventriloquism 177; and self-consciousness 181; use by Deavere Smith 173–185; use in documentary theater 173–185

Enano con Tres Columnas (Muñoz) 113, 123 engastrimythos 1 entertainment 102, 135; alluding 48; banquets 113; dummy 4, 174; modern 4; safe 100; secular 1 entresort 113 Enwezor, Okwui 17, 189–192; African art 194; on ventriloquism 188 Eraserhead 123–124 Esposito, Roberto 99 ethnographic ventriloquism 17, 188–189, 192, 194–197 exception: and immunitty 99–104; and video 99–104 exhibitions 110–111, 137–143, 167–168 eye 7, 29–30; contact 59, 68; mechanized 67; silent 66–67 FaceTime 3 Face to Face (Hamilton) 66, 66–67 The Family Grave of Thomas Fuller 214 Farnsworth, Edith 16, 150–153, 151; memoir 155–156, 160; sexual orientation 154–155; as tragic figure 165, 165–166; on years of vague expansion 160 Fellini, Federico 103 Female (Dumas) 142 (Female figure) (Wolfson) 9, 10 50 Triangles Forming a Square (André) 119 Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (Deavere Smith) 173, 174, 175, 178; Carmel Cato’s monologue 177; Deavere Smith portrayal of Carmel Cato 182; review of 184; use of embolalia 173–185 Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (Smith) 16 Floyd, George 185 Forecast 1888 214 foreign audience 80 Forty Part Motet 42–43, 45, 54n5 Foucault, Michel 28, 48, 78, 189, 191 Four Laughing at Each Other (Muñoz) 113–114 Frank, Johanna 7 Freud, Sigmund 4, 5 Friedlander, Saul 181–182 Friedman, Alice T. 158–159 Friedman, Hazel 188 Frieze 188 Fritsch, Katharina 120 From Sorcery to Science 100 García, María Consuelo 12, 13, 91–104 Garnier, Jules 113 Gates, Henry Louis 196–197 Geertz, Clifford 194

270 Index gender 181; expressions 14; relations 20n24 genocide 140 The Geographer (Vermeer) 120, 125 geological structures 19 geological time 141 geology 19, 141, 227 Gerard, Brennan 16, 149, 156 Giono, Massimiliano 130 Giroux, Christopher 175 The Glass Eye 121 Glass House 154 Gober, Robert 110, 119 Goldblatt, David 6, 9, 73, 75, 76, 86n1, 104n16, 191, 196 Gordon, Elizabeth 161 Goya, Francisco 110, 113 “Graceland” (Simon) 10 graphic arts 103–104 Gray, Eileen 154 Graziosi, Anthony 173, 177 The Great Gabho 121 The Great Silence (Allora and Calzadilla) 17–19, 18 The Green Box 27, 38n7 Grosse Fatigue (Henrot) 213 Guerrero-Hernández, Juan Carlos 12, 13 Gussow, Mel 134 Gyllenhaal, Maggie 167 Halls of Mistery see entresort Hamilton, Ann 12, 60, 66, 67, 71n7, 71n8 Hassan, Salah 194 Hathaway, Katharine Butler 160 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 194 Hebrew Lesson (Arad) 12, 13 Hedrich, Bill 151, 151 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 75, 76 Heidegger, Martin 75 Henrot, Camille 213 Her Turn: The Campaign for Where Women Made History 167 Hirsh, Jennie 12, 38 history: architectural 153, 163; subtitled 80–81; voice and ear of 175 Hitchcock, Alfred 14, 121–122 Hitler, Adolf 12, 13, 20n25, 139 Holocaust 139, 141 Holocaust effect 140 Howdy Doody 10 Hromack, Sarah 138 Huck Finn 10 Hughes Le Roux 113 I Can See Your Lips Moving: The History and Art of Ventriloquism (Vox) 5 identity 179; queer 152–154 immunity: and exception 99–104; and puppets 91–104; and video 99–104

impersonation 97, 99 Incoll, Jan 218 indigenous peoples 48, 163 Instagram Live 3 Instagram Reels 3 installation: Boltanski’s 141; Dwarf with a Box 122; Juan Munoz’s 112–114; of Kantor’s dummy 139; Monsieur Teste 119; of Tadeusz Kantor 143; Wasteland 114, 123, 124 international audience 80–81 International Year of Indigenous Languages 208 “I Remember: On Modern Living” (Wendl) 16 Jacobsen, Nicholas B. 227 Jankowski, Christian 8, 20n21 Jarmusch, Jim 47 Jarry, Alfred 8 Jasper, William 30 Jay, Gregory 175, 184 Jodorowski, Alejandro 93 Johns, Jasper 12, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 33, 35, 36; Ventriloquist 25–38 Johnson, Philip 154 Jones, Philip Gwynne 195 Judaism 177, 183 Juego No.1 (García) 13, 92, 93, 96–98, 100, 101, 102 Juego No.2 (García) 13, 92, 93, 94, 95, 98 Juegos (García) 13, 91–104 Julien, Isaac 17, 188, 189 Kafka, Franz 6 Kahn, Douglas 6 Kantor, Tadeusz 130, 130, 131; as ambiguously Jewish 144n20; as conductor for The Dead Class 131–135; dummies for production 133; dummies on display 137–141; ventriloquist as medium 135–136 Kaplin, Stephen 101 Kaprow, Allan 134 Kelley, Mike 119 Kelly, Caleb 7, 20n16, 20n17 Kelly, Mary 155 Kelly, Ryan 149, 156 Kessler, Sarah 8 Kiefer, Anselm 139 King, Rodney 175 Kleeblatt, Norman L. 139 Kleist, Heinrich von 137 Knoll, Florence 167 Kraemer, Ross S. 103 Krasiński, Edward 134 kulaks 100 Kuoni, Carin 8, 20n21 Kuśmirowski, Robert 138

Index  271 LaBelle, Brandon 7, 19 Lacan, Jacques 6, 39n14, 95 LACMA (Los Angeles) 8, 20n24 Lady Gaga 10 La Fine del Mondo (The End of the World) 141 Laird, Tessa 209 laughter 113–114, 124; dianoetic 124; funeral 103; hysterical 113 Le Lycée Chases en 1931 (Boltanski) 139 Les croisades vues par les Arabes (The Crusades Through Arab Eyes) (Maalouf) 73, 722 Lester, Harry 2 Let Me Down Easy (Smith) 173 Levenson, Mark 101 L’Express 120 L’Homme et le pantin (Degas) 120, 125 Life magazine 193 Lifsh, Yosef 177 listening 149, 215; material 60–63 Lithic Record 227–254 live audience 68 Live-Taped Video Corridor (Nauman) 60 Lleras, Carlos 91, 105n32 London, Barbara 8 López, Alfonso 91, 92 “loquacious mimicry of the sculptures’ gestures” 113 Love Story 14, 15, 16, 21n27 Lyons, Charles 175, 183 Lyons, James 175, 183 Maalouf, Amin 13, 72, 74 Magic 121 Mail & Guardian 188 A Man in a Room Gambling 118–119 mannequins 142, 177; Kantor’s wax 131–139, 141 Many Drums (Muñoz) 117 Many Times (Muñoz) 114, 117 marginalized arts 104 The Marionette Maker (Cardiff and Miller) 12, 42–54; puppets, performance, and paralysis in 42–54 marionettes 137 Martin, Randy 176 Marx, Karl 17, 175–176, 188, 190–192, 196 Marxism 191 The Master and the Marionette (Kleist) 137 Mathsson, Bruno 167 Maxon, John 161 Mayfield, D.S. 188 Mbembe, Achille 102 McCarthy, Charlie 14, 122, 125 McCarthy, Paul 120 McCarthyism 161 McClellan, Courtney 12, 69, 70

McGurk effect 111, 117 melancholy/melancholia 18, 32, 52 Melville, Herman 12, 33, 34, 37 memory 154, 162, 175–176, 181, 206 Michel-Levy, Henry 120 Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Schulze) 153 Miller, George Bures 12, 42–54 Miller, Michael 177, 182 Minarete para Otto Kurz 120 “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” (Lacan) 95 Moby Dick (Melville) 12, 33, 35, 37, 39n20, 39n21, 40n29 A Model Family in a Model Home 193 modern architecture 154 modern art 4 Modern Living (Gerard & Kelly) 149–150, 150; Eichten’s performance of 161, 166; overview 154; performer’s body and architectural historiography 154–169; and queerness 154 modern ventriloquism 1, 4 Monsieur Teste (Broodthaers) 119, 121 Monsieur Teste (Valéry) 120, 125 Montagut, Muriel 100 Montale, Eugenio 161, 162 Monument (Odessa) (Boltanski) 139 Moore, Julianne 15 Morris, Errol 59 Moser, Barry 33 Moten, Fred 175, 176 mouth 59–70 “Mouvement panique” (Jodorowski) 93 Muñoz, Juan 12, 14, 110; on his ventriloquist’s doll 120; installations 110–111; radiophonic works 119; radio pieces 118–119; use of dummy/dwarf in installations 113–114; ventriloquism 110–111; ventriloquist dummy, elements and influences 112–114 Munqidh, Usama ibn 74, 75 Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid) 44 Museum of Modern Art 8 Naficy, Hamid 80, 87n28 National Defense Doctrine (Colombia) 101 National Geographic magazine 48 National Trust for Historic Places 167 National Trust for Historic Preservation 166 nature 5, 9, 12, 18–19, 137, 139, 153, 155, 179, 207 Nauman, Bruce 60 Nazi Germany and the Jews (Friedlander) 181 necromancy 135–136 Negret, Edgar 95 Neutzel, Eric 98

272 Index Newman, Barnett 27–28, 33, 37, 38n6 Newsweek 153 New York Times 134, 138, 139 Night Walk for Edinburgh (Cardiff and Miller) 53, 53, 54n4 Nka 194 North American Aerospace Command and Defence (NORAD) 227 Northwestern University Medical School 169n9 Not I: Throwing Voices 1500 BCE to 2020CE (exhibition) 8 O’Connor, Katie 12, 13 Oguibe, Olu 194–195 Oneself as Another (Ricoeur) 105n34 On the Precision of Distances (Muñoz) 120 Oracle of Delphi 1 Ordinary Objects in the Artist’s Creative Mind (Peto) 27 “The Origin of the Work of Art” (Heidegger) 75 Orphée 123 Our dear Mother Amelia Wheeler who fell asleep in 1914 214 painting 30–33, 35, 37, 120; bisected 12; modern 4; oil 32 paralysis: in The Marionette Maker 42–54 Parnell, Thomas Frederick 2 The Path to Cairo (Shawky) 72, 74, 75, 82, 85 performance: in The Marionette Maker 42–54 performance art 7 Pernold, Marianne 180 Peto, Johns 27 Petrified Forest (Durham) 142 Philadelphia Museum of Art 50 photography 2, 8, 66, 104 Pica, Amalia 12, 60 Pinocchio 10, 115 Pistoletto, Michelangelo 72 Plutarch 6 Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Stewart) 159 Polanco, Rubén 113 polyphonic performance: ventriloquism as 93–96 polyphony 104 Portelli, Serge 101 Porter, Polly 160 Preciado, Paul B. 153 Predock, Antoine 149 Presumed Innocent (Turrow) 48 Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh 33

The Prompter (Muñoz) 110, 124 protests 135, 176 Provisional Conclusions (Montale) 162 psychoanalysis 5, 191; discipline of 4 Puppet Conference 8 puppets 193; and immunity 91–104; in The Marionette Maker 42–54; and torture 91–104 puppets (antique) 78 The Puppet Show 8 puppet theater 85; and audience 85 queer identity 152–154 queerness 154 race 181 Racing Thoughts paintings 26–27, 38n3 racism 184 radio 114–115, 118–119, 126n18 radio-ventriloquism 2 Rahim, Sameer 78 Ray, Charles 110, 120 Reading Capital 190, 191 ready mouthpiece 63–66 recording 137, 155, 163; field 205; stereo audio 209; tape 175, 179 Reddleman, Claire 192, 197 Red Scare tactics 161 A Registered Patent 118 Reyes, Carlos José 97 Reyes, Cintia Gutiérrez 12, 14 Richards, David 183 Ricoeur, Paul 99 Risom, Jens 167 Riverboat Song (video) 10 R.M. Schindler House 154 Roach, Joe 174 Rock, Chris 68 Rojas Pinilla, Gustavo 91, 93, 105n32 Rony, Fatimah Tobing 194 Rose 1876 214 Rosenbaum, Yankel 173, 176–177 Russell, Fred 2 Sara con espejo (Muñoz) 113 Sara in Front of a Mirror (Muñoz) 110 Schafer, Murray 117 Schaffner, Ingrid 8 Schechner, Richard 178 Schindler, Pauline Gibling 154 Schindler, Rudolph 154 schizophonia 110–125 schizophonic silence 111, 124 schizophony 118–119 Schnabel, Julian 188 Schneerson, Rabbi Menachem Mendel 177 Schulze, Franz 153

Index  273 Schüte, Thomas 120 sculptures 133, 139; devotional 124; Juan Munoz’s 122–123; Kantor’s 133, 142; vs. statues 116; Wasteland installation 114, 116 The Sea Concert (Kantor) 134, 134 Searle, Adrian 118, 138 Second World War 14 The Secrets of Karbala (Shawky) 73, 78, 79 secular entertainment 1 self-consciousness 181 shaman 178 Shange, Ntozake 179 Shawky, Wael 12, 13, 72–85, 86n2, 86n3, 87n7, 87n8, 87n18, 87n19, 87n20, 87n25, 87n26 Shiff, Richard 137 Shütte, Thomas 110 sideshow 56n18 The Signifying Monkey (Gates) 196 silent eye 66–67 Silliphan, Stirling 121 Silverman, Kaja 6 Simmons, Laurie 8 Simon, Paul 10 slavery 10, 178 Sledge, Percy 10 Slonimskaia, Iulia 103 The Smile (Ballard) 114 Smith, Deveare 16 Smith, Kiki 110, 120 Smith, Roberta 138 Snow White 10 sonic irruption 176 Sorzano, Gustavo 93 sound: as art medium 6; binaural 54n3 Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise (Chion) 6–7 Soundings: A Contemporary Score (LaBelle) 8 Soviet Union 100 speaker(s) 63, 180–181, 183; English 205; inactive 193 speaking: bat voices 210–213; bird voices 214–216, 219–223; immitating voices of birds/animals 208; manner of 205–223 statues vs. sculptures 116 Steintrager, James 6, 7 Sterne, Jonathan 175 Sterne, Laurence 190 Stewart, Susan 159, 163 Still Blue Range (André) 119 Storr, Robert 188 street sounds 205, 208 Stuart-Smith, Mark 117 subjectivity 181, 183; Black 188; individual 194; split 176; and vivification 25–38; and voice 25–38 Subotnick, Ali 130

subtitle(s) 13, 17, 74, 80–83, 85, 131 subtitled history 80–81 surrogation 174 tableaux vivants 47 The Tartar Steppe (Buzatti) 110, 125 Taylor, Paul 30 Teatro la Candelaria 100 Teatro la Mama 100 teleprompters 68–69 testimony 175, 179–181, 183, 198n5 theater: embolalia use in documentary 173–185; puppet 85; theatrical arts 1 Theaters of Memory: Art and Holocaust 139, 140 theatrical arts 1 theatrical audience 4 Thicke, Robin 10 Thirteen Laughing at Each Other (Muñoz) 113–114 TikTok 3 Till, Emmet 8 torture and puppets 91–104 Traba, Marta 103 translation 162, 188, 191, 197 trauma 173, 175, 181 Tristam Shandy (Sterne) 190 trokhaios 180 Trump, Donald 180 Tschaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 52 Turrow, Scott 48 Twilight: Los Angeles (Deavere Smith) 182 “Über-Marionettes” 97 Ubu Roi (Jarry) 8 Untitled (Muñoz) 122 Urban II, Pope 77, 82, 84 Valéry, Paul 120, 125 Van der Rohe, Mies 16, 140, 150–153, 159, 167–168 Vargas, Enrique 97, 105n26 vaudeville 2, 83, 116, 124 Velázquez 110–111, 113, 124 Venice Biennale 14, 17 ventriloqual metaphor 191 ventriloquism 4, 7, 31, 32, 37, 38, 48, 63, 81, 93, 94, 95, 102, 174; as art of confusing 179; Christians on 135; embolalia as form of 177; ethnographic 17, 188–189, 192, 194–197; modern 1, 4; as polyphonic performance 93–96; radio- 2 ventriloquist 12, 14, 17, 19, 25, 26, 27, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38n1, 38n4, 49, 60, 67–68, 77, 96, 99, 100, 101; audience 4–5; as medium 135–136 Ventriloquist (Johns) 25–38, 38n1

274 Index ventriloquist dummy 116–117, 121–124, 188, 194, 196; elements and influences behind Muñoz’s 112–114; in Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior 112–113; in Wasteland 112–113 ventriloquistic tendencies 188 Ventriloquist Looking at a Double Interior (Muñoz) 110, 111, 112, 121; schizophonic or dialectical silence 123; space for liberation 121–124; ventriloquist dummy in 112–113 ventriloquy: dialogical nature of 19 Verfremdungseffekt (Brecht) 95 Vermeer, Johannes 120, 125 video: and exception 99–104; and immunity 99–104 visual arts 59 vivification: and subjectivity 25–38; and voice 25–38 vocal language 82 voice 159; alienated 81–85; authentic 179, 180, 183; bird 208–210, 216; Cato’s 176; as departure 1; dislocated 72–85; and ear of history 175; Fred Moten’s 175; psychological 118, 119; self-conscious 181; and subjectivity 25–38; and vivification 25–38 A Voice and Nothing More (Dolar) 6 “voiceless past” 76 voiceovers 1–19; essays 8–19; literature 5–8; premise 1–4; questions 4–5 Vox, Valentine 5, 19n2, 19n6 Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 123 Wajda, Andrzej 132, 137 Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (Nauman) 60

Wall, Jeff 110, 120 Wasteland (Eliot) 124 Wasteland (Muñoz) 110, 111, 111, 114, 124; as dialectical silence 117; overview 114–121; psychological sound 117, 119; psychological voice of dummy 118; space of 116–118; ventriloquist dummy in 112–113 Weatherston, Rosemary 175 Weiss, Peter 100 Wendl, Nora 16 White, Hayden 155, 168, 180–181 Whitehead, Gregory 6 Whitney, David 154 Wielander, Judith 73 Wiesel, Elie 139 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Goethe) 52 Williams, Margaret 96, 98, 105n23, 105n29 Will It Be a Likeness? 118 Winchell, Paul 77 Winokur, Zack 156 Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde 6 witness 174–176, 180–182, 185, 211 Wolfgang, Johann 52 Wolfson, Jordan 10, 11 World War II 14, 136, 152 Wright, Russel 167 Young, James 181 Young, Kevin 68 Young, Neil 47 Zimmermann, Istvan 142 Zoom 3