chase
Chase is an installation by Liz Magic Laser on display at Derek Eller Gallery (615 West 27th Street, New York) from May 21 to June 26, 2010. With chase, Liz Magic Laser reinterprets Bertolt Brecht’s 1926 play Man equals Man. The project includes a feature-length video, an installation of ephemera from the production of chase as well as a theatrical set that serves as a backdrop for a live performance.
Working in collaboration with nine actors, Laser staged Brecht’s play in the ATM vestibules of banks throughout New York City. Videotaping each actor’s performance separately, she edited the scenes, creating a complete version of the narrative. The element of estrangement in the original play is heightened through jump cuts and spatiotemporal shifts.
I was fortunate to be part of this project (in a very small way)! Inspired by a paper I wrote on the non-placeness of airports, Spencer Wolff and Liz Magic Laser asked me some questions about non-places. The text of the interview is on display at the Derek Eller Gallery and is reprinted below.
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A Skype discussion between Alberto Pepe Gentile of UCLA, Department of Information Science, and Spencer Wolff of Yale University, Department of Comparative Literature.
Interviewer: Hi? It’s Spencer from Yale. Can you hear me?
Dr. Gentile: Yes?
Interviewer: Is your camera working? I can’t see you.
Dr. Gentile: I can see you.
Interviewer: That’s weird. There’s no video on my screen. Hold on….hmmm….it’s not working. Ok, let’s just get started with the interview.
Dr. Gentile: Fine with me.
Interviewer: So, I’ve rung you on Skype, to interview you about your work on Non-places. Can you define a Non-place? What is it?
Dr. Gentile: Non-place is a term originally coined by the French Anthropologist Marc Augé. Non-places are unlived transient arenas that resist any sort of subjective, emotional attachment: motorways, airports, bank vestibules, elevators…etc.
Interviewer: What’s so special about them?
Dr. Gentile: Well, many things. For one, they do not incite any sense of belonging. They are places of dual spectatorship and spectacle, and, as result, Non-places disrupt our traditional assumptions about comportment, posture, proxemics…
Interviewer: Proxemics?
Dr. Gentile: Proxemics are culturally determined relations of space, what you could call the body-space that people maintain between themselves while they interact. For instance individuals from Nordic cultures prefer greater interpersonal distances than those from Latin cultures.
Interviewer: So it’s about how much space we give each other in the street?
Dr. Gentile: Well, proxemics are universally applicable to all sorts of space. In the U.S., Edward Hall conducted a wonderful study in men’s urinals where he showed that if there are five urinals men will evenly space themselves at urinals 1,3 5, in order to maintain distance. If there are men at urinals 1 and 3 and a tester comes in and situates himself at urinal number 2, both men get visibly upset and sometimes become aggressive.
Interviewer: That’s happened to me before.
Dr. Gentile: Or in an elevator, if you notice, no matter how many people are inside, they will space themselves according to predictable, iterative patterns using verbal and bodily cues: an unspoken elevator etiquette. There’s another experiment that I’ve always been fond of. I think it was done at Stanford, but they placed an experimenter in an elevator facing the back wall and videotaped the results. So the door opens and there’s an empty elevator with this guy in there whose face you cannot see.
Interviewer: What happened?
Dr. Gentile: No one would get into the elevator.
Interviewer: Honestly it sounds kind of spooky.
Dr. Gentile: Well that’s the nature of Non-places. Haunted houses were once “places” that became Non-places. Lived places come with a grammar, a script, if you will, of how to act. But when you enter an abandoned house you’re not quite sure how to behave and that’s frightening. Have you noticed how all haunted houses look alike to some degree?
Interviewer: Sure
Dr. Gentle: This is characteristic of Non-places, flatness, sameness, aseptic uniformity. Most Non-places are supermodern. They are devoted to the anonymous processing of goods, people, services, and money. Also, these processing mechanisms have to be happen fast. The best and most efficient airports, for example, are those in which you spend as little time as possible. Fluidity and speed, in turn, are attained by control and mechanization. This is heightened, in airports or ATM vestibules, by the sense of being surveyed and managed by video cameras. For this reason, in Non-places we rely particularly heavily on verbal or visual cues from others, what you might call embodied instruction. We’re a little out to sea, unsure what play to perform, so in that sense Non-places are ideal sites for revolutionary action.
Interviewer: How so?
Dr. Gentile: The Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu said that all societies wanting to make a ‘new man’ should approach this task through processes of deculturation and reculturation focused on bodily practices. That’s why revolutionaries place such a heavy emphasis on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners. If I remember correctly, Bourdieu said something along the lines of, “revolutionaries entrust to the body in abbreviated and practical, so mnemonic form, the arbitrary content of the culture.” If you want to give birth to a “new man” the best thing to do is to destabilize a person’s given identity, and then endow that person with a new performative.
Interviewer: Maybe you should define a performative for the reader.
Dr. Gentile: Performatives, in J.L. Austin’s and especially Judith Butler’s work, are these pre-scripted identities or roles that I’ve been talking about. Think of Sartre’s waiter in Being and Nothingness who plays at being at waiter instead of just being one. He’s enacting a performative. His waiter is determined by a particular theatrical staging, a “place”: the French café. Places, lived arenas, like a café, as opposed to an elevator, are already outfitted with embodied and discursive grammars. That’s why it’s hard to reprogram someone in a “place.” Imagine walking into a posh restaurant. First you look at all the props and staging, the mise en scene, and then you look at the people who are holding themselves in a certain way and you try to “act on your best behavior.” If you walk into a café there is a different staging and you know you can behave differently. Perhaps when you were a child and you walked into a nice restaurant for the first time, you were unsure how to act, but by the time you’ve become an adult you’ve already memorized your lines.
Interviewer: So the whole world’s a stage?
Dr. Gentile: No. Only parts of it. Though we are gradually developing formulaic props and bodily grammars for some Non-places, like airports—for instance taking off your shoes when you go through the metal detectors –elevators, urinals, etc. aren’t similarly equipped. Imagine walking into a fancy restaurant, le cirque, and a man is standing with his nose pressed against a pillar at the center of the restaurant. That would not be spooky like in the elevator; it would be ridiculous. The man would be challenged immediately and forced to leave. But in the elevator you don’t know how to act, you don’t know your lines, so not a single person challenged the experimenter with his back to the door. People were just frightened and refused to go in. This is why Al Qaeda situates its training camps in remote and unfamiliar locations, and by the same token, when a government wants to reprogram someone, say using torture and brainwashing, they do the same, Guantanamo for example. In Non-places we are vulnerable because our scripts, our habitual performatives are unreliable if not useless.
Interviewer: So if you get someone into a Non-place it’s easier to tell them what to do?
Dr. Gentile: Not, tell them, but show them. When you want to reprogram someone you rely on positive content, which can only be conveyed through bodily staging. Take a soldier for instance, or a child, the verbal instruction they receive tends to be injunctive: “You’re doing it wrong!” But to teach a soldier how to goose-step, you can’t explain it. We do not even have the vocabulary for that. You have to show it, you have to say watch me do this and imitate me. Get someone into a Non-place and then get them to act like you, and you can mold your ‘new man’ after your heart’s desires.
Interviewer: So I should really get this Skype camera working so I can see how you’re positioning yourself.
Dr. Gentile: Be my guest.
Interviewer: Hold on, maybe if I fiddle with this wire….shoot. Can you still see me?
Interviewer: Hello?
Interviewer: Hey are you there? Hello? Dr. Gentile? Are you there?
