I. The Bourne Ultimatum
I went to see the action-thriller The Bourne Ultimatum by myself a few months ago. The pleasant perversity of being alone in a crowded movie theater in New York City amplifies the standard cinematic seeing-without-being-seen. In the stadium-seated multiplex, the politically, socially and sexually complicated attention economy of the sidewalk (glances, catcalls and competing advertisements) becomes something else, as I have a fair sense that as long as I behave myself, I’ll go unregistered. Or at least I’ll be so quickly erased that it amounts to the same thing. I get to see without being seen, and (excuse me while I shiver) I get to see without being seen seeing. Scientific certainty about my own tracelessness is beside the point: I experience my presence in the crowd as a simultaneous non-presence, produced by the same crowd. The feeling is produced whether or not a fellow audience member happens to notice and, for some reason, remember me, as long as I never find out.
I have to admit, I like this feeling.
Further, as one of the great minor enjoyments, I caught The Bourne Ultimatum alone and on a whim. Gentle compulsiveness is its own reward, of course, but in the cinematic-voyeur equation, it’s an exponent raising invisibility to the power of an excruciatingly satisfying three. The object of my attention – mostly Matt Damon, who really dominates the film – doesn’t know I’m there; the audience, as shown above, is equally oblivious to me; and I’m dislodged from the wider social imagination, while many friends and family members, at any given time, are doing things I can easily picture with a high degree of accuracy.
When I entered the movie theater, it was already dark and the movie was playing, which struck me as odd, actually, since I’d been under the impression that I was early for the show. The attention I drew annoyed me, but I found an aisle seat and sat down, hoping to get lost. I got a very quick sense that something about the pace of the movie was off. Albert Finney was confronting Matt Damon in a way that betrayed more history than an opening sequence would seem to allow, and the music and editing seemed to be pushing the suspense to a level that would be difficult to sustain. I told myself that this was a third installment and that I’d walked into the middle of a recap. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching a denouement, though, and this was justified, in fact. About ten minutes later, the credits were rolling and I realized that obviously I’d walked into the wrong theater. I found the right theater (I was still early) and watched from the beginning until the point I’d entered initially. Then I got up and left, feeling disoriented and promising myself I would not tell people about this.
II. The World as a Stage
Tate Modern’s World as a Stage is a museum exhibition about theater, in which some of the works use theatrical elements or techniques. At the risk of rehearsing a pedantic attachment to category, I’ve made this categorical pronouncement hoping it will work as a tool to explain (to myself) the difficulty I’ve experienced responding to the exhibition. I’m confused by this difficulty: if I take World as a Stage in discrete units, I can say that I admired and was moved by some of the work, and that I was indifferent to other pieces. Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave Archive (An Injury to One Is an Injury to All) deserves particular attention, but I also found myself sitting in front of Catherine Sullivan’s The Chittendens: The Resuscitation of Uplifting several times through, and appreciating its dramatic aural punctuation throughout. I evaluated the skills manifest in Roman Ondák’s room of commissioned amateur portraits of himself (the second from the left on the wall to the right of the entrance is the best – the artist didn’t try too hard, and displays a certain charming confidence), and I was startled by Markus Schinwald’s uncanny marionette.
I produced my iteration of Tino Sehgal’s This is new by grabbing a program at the entrance before it could be handed to me. It meant the woman there didn’t actually recite the newspaper headline I would have gotten had I been more patient. I overheard a confused exchange behind me, and put the pieces together embarrassingly late, after several hours expecting an unexpected encounter. On leaving, I asked the same woman for confirmation of my interpretation. She obliged, adding pleasantly, if without conviction, that the work she was transmitting was about social interactions between people. I’m acutely interested in Sehgal’s characterization of his rigorously immaterial work as explicitly open to commodification (and I’ve also had a genuinely heightened memory of the social interactions between people at The World as a Stage).
But I’m seized with paralysis when I try to conceive of the exhibition as a whole and I’m interested to articulate why. The problem erupts when I try to pin down how exactly the work relates to theater as such. It’s no good saying there is no theater as such – these boundaries are weak, etc. I want to be able to construct from The World as a Stage a radical meeting/confrontation/disintegration of the gallery and the theater. But I experienced the gallery conventions as inescapably in the foreground, and the theatrical ruptures as negative space. The problem also seems connected to audience. Jeppe Hein’s rotating mirrors and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s sensor-triggered lights make textured use of the performer/viewer relationship, but both assume a visitor who wanders in and out. The Deller and Sullivan pieces wrangle with acting and rehearsal, but in their video/film displays, they don’t assume a co-existent visitor at all. The Sehgal piece asks the visitor to reconfigure experience itself as a thing. And, of course, the institutional weight of the Tate itself is massive. Theater, it seems, never stood a chance.
III. Finale
I’m aware that I’ve burdened this response to an exhibition staged at the intersections of theater and visual art practice and viewership with a hefty introductory section related to neither. This wasn’t a wholly contrary move. To pick up the story, I left the movie theater and promptly told the first person I was with about my fragmented Bourne Ultimatum experience, as though in the face of narrative meltdown I needed to negate my desire for invisibility. I continued to tell people for the next few days until the sheen had worn off and it became what it is – an ok story, though not a great one. I’m retelling it here because it’s helped me reposition my initial response to The World as a Stage. My frustrated perception that gallery conventions had, in effect, won is less interesting to deal with than the anxiety wrapped up in this perception. I want to consider further how anxieties already inscribed in particular modes of seeing are magnified as those modes subtly shift and cross others, and become something else. I hope these two small examples are useful starting points.
