Strategies of Exposure

Are all performances really about the audience? Patrick Primavesi discusses in the book Interfaces of Performance (Ashgate Publishing Ltd 2009) the underlying goal of any performance being to, 'de-construct the 'us' and attempt to inscribe oneself in a mythical community.' I have written extensively about the recent development of the re-enactment as an attempt to retrieve the unrecorded past. However, I recently discovered the artist group 'Gob Squad' a German based collective, who play with the notion of re-enactment when they staged a revised version of Andy Warhol's Kitchen in 2007. Primavesi says, 'the audience is moved both emotionally and physically by the possibility of taking a step behind the screen into the film.' It becomes a work about existing on the threshold, in-between sender and receiver, stage and audience, physical and mediated presence. When an emotion becomes a simulation of itself it takes on a different reality, as Andy Warhol once said, 'they're faking it until it becomes real.' In Gob Squad's Kitchen the screen acts as a membrane (not between fact and fiction, for these are no longer diametrically opposed) but as a barrier which is slowly broken down during the course of the performance as actors and audience switch roles. Their work Saving the World comprises of seven screens arranged in a semi-circle to create a panoramic view of a public square. I find the fact that they choose the number seven very interesting for the fact that it was the number that Ray Eames selected for his seminal work Glimpses of the USA in the Moscow World Fair Auditorium in 1959, 'a credible number but not so many that they couldn’t be scanned in an allotted time.' Gob squad locate and expose the interdependence between 'live absence' and 'mediated presence' where voyeur, witness and participant take on a fluidity of meaning. Like Tadek Kantor's stage set, the screen that Gob Squad use is not a blank surface to be layered onto. It is, in itself, a sign to be worked with not over.