The show was as cold as this image implies...
Last week in Rebecca Bourgault's class, we took a field trip to the Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to see a revival of Robert Wilson's 1987 play (play? musical? theatre piece?) Quartett. I'm sure that we're going to talk about it in class tonight, and I won't be at all surprised if a lot of my classmates really hated it, for different reasons. I heard one classmate saying a few days later "It was pretty clear that I'm not the intended audience for that show...when you looked at the audience, it was all old white people."
Maybe I'm just prepping myself for my inevitable old-white-guyness, but I really enjoyed it, even as I recognized that its story and aesthetic were, well, oppressive to the audience. The play, written by Heiner Müller, is based on the French novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) and tells the story of two sexual partners in crime (Merteuil, played by Isabelle Huppart, and Valmont, played by Ariel Garcia Valdès) who use sex and seduction for destructive purposes, exacting revenge on each other and, basically, all of humanity and decency. Wives and virginal nuns are seduced, used and abandoned. Merteuil and Valmont are officially the only characters - they rant and rave and paraphrase everyone else's words, rendering their sexual conquests even more powerless.
Fine acting, attractive dancers, lots of talk about sex, absolutely no sexiness.
If you missed the show and aren't familiar with Wilson's aesthetic, imagine watching dancers made of translucent plastic, writhing in slow motion in front of a Robert Morris sculpture while someone bathed in red light yells in pitchshifted French about wanting to sodomize a nun. This makes for a stunning effect, and I mean that in an objective, not a qualitative way - the show stuns. It hurts. It's so lurid and yet its delivery is so cold. It's overwhelmingly sexual and yet it is not at all erotic.
As such, it's definitely an acquired taste. I happen to have acquired the taste in the mid-90s, when I saw Wilson's collaboration with Tom Waits, the musical The Black Rider. My wife is an absolute nut for Wilson, and I've found myself attending nearly everything that he puts on at BAM (including the execrable POEtry, which was a few interesting sets and costumes forced into an embarrassingly childish and bad musical by Lou "Wrong Decade" Reed).
Here's a quick example from Quartett:
Perhaps this doesn't contribute to our class's attempt to move outside of Western art discourse...
Most of the audience seemed to really enjoy the oppression, but that didn't strike me as any different from the people at the Throbbing Gristle show I attended in April, or any other show of art or music (God knows I've seen hundreds) which uses confrontational aesthetics to draw a line in the sand between those who are "down with it" and those who aren't.
You'll find yourself intensely disliking both of these people.
Teaching this show, or others by Wilson and/or Müller (or, for that matter, Berthold Brecht) would be difficult in most high-school art classes, not only because of its content but also because of its length and the logistics of organizing an evening field trip to a theater. However, I think it would be fair to use video clips or still photos from his productions as a way to show how formalism (and modernism and even minimalism) can be applied to modes other than gallery art. The aesthetic may be shocking to a sixteen-year-old who's starting to learn about painting, but it could certainly be used as a way to talk about formal concepts like localized color, scale, and dynamism, as well as how to use those concepts to create specific moods and convey the students' intended meanings.
Who knows? Maybe a minority teenager from Brooklyn or the Bronx would feel empowered to see images from a theatrical piece that is this severe, this angry. If an old white guy can find an audience for his weird, angry art, why can't everyone?
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