Theatre Machines 1 Object

THEATRE MACHINESA PRACTICE-BASED ENQUIRY INTO THE PERFORMANCE OF OBJECTS

THEATRE MACHINESA PRACTICE BASED ENQUIRY INTO THE PERFORMANCE OF OBJECTS

DECLARATION

This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not being concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree.

Signed ...................................................................... (candidate)

Date ........................................................................

STATEMENT 1

This thesis is the result of my own investigations, except where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by footnotes giving explicit references. A bibliography is appended.

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Date ........................................................................

STATEMENT 2

I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organisations.

Signed ..................................................................... (candidate)

Date ........................................................................

For an abstract of the thesis see page VII.

Richard AllenPhD Submission

Aberystwyth UniversityAcademic Year 2013/2014

Department of Theatre, Film and Televsion StudiesParry-Williams Building

AberystwythSY23 3AJ

THEATRE MACHINESA PRACTICE-BASED ENQUIRY INTO THE PERFORMANCE OF OBJECTS

CONTENTS

Illustrations VAbstract VIIPrologue XI

Introduction 3

Chapter 1: Encountering Objects 30Think Through Things 31Find Stuff 65Wait in the Wings 102

Chapter 2: Kantor’s Anthropological Machine 115

Chapter 3: Performing Objects 154Breakdown the Machine 160Follow the Life of the Object 270Establish a Glossary of Applications 288

Chapter 4: Quesne’s Humility Machine 299

Chapter 5: Garage Band 323Test the Applications 329Keep a Workbook 381Build a Repertoire 415

Chapter 6: Meyer-Keller’s Spectator Machine 424

Conclusion: Ghost Machine 446

Bibliography 485Acknowledgments 494

V

ILLUSTRATIONS

Lament of the Noise Makers 2 studio image IIIGarage door film still from Garage Band documentation XIISharks and chairs from Garage Band documentation XVIIStudio and object images (various) 25-26Object pile from House 27Toy car from Object Retrieval the publication 47Process images from Object Retrieval the publication (various) 49Notes from Object Retrieval 50Object pile from House 63Junk shop images (various) 72Junk shop interior, Bristol 85Junk shop interior, Bristol 91-92Hardware store interior, Bristol 95Entrance to self-store, Ynyalas 103SS13 self-store 105SS13 self-store interior 108-111The Dead Class production still, Cricoteka 118Mannequin of ‘Boy on a Bike’ from The Dead Class, Cricoteka 119‘The Rubbish Cart’, Cricoteka 134Mannequins from The Dead Class. Cricoteka 142Sketchbooks (various) 158Machine drawing 160Lament of the Noise Makers 1 rehearsal and performance documentation 173-176Lament of the Noise Makers 2 rehearsal and performance documentation 181-186Lament of the Noise Makers sketchbook images 187-190Stage Fright 1 rehearsal and performance documentation 203-209Stage Fright 2 rehearsal and performance documentation 213-224Stage Fright sketchbook images 225-228House performance documentation. Images: Russ Basford 232-260House sketchbook images 261-264House studio images (various) 265-266Stage Fright dressing table and mouse detail 272-276Lament of the Noise Makers 1 wire detail 280House figurine detail 282

VI

Figurine 301Lament of the Noise Makers 1 eyelet detail 286Applications buttons (various) 287-293La Mélancolie des Dragons, Vivarium Studio. Image: Martin Argyroglo 300Big Bang, Vivarium Studio. Image: Martin Argyroglo 308L’Effet de Serge, Vivarium Studio. Image: Martin Argyroglo 314 Garage Band model box 234Garage Band performance documentation 330 -339Garage Band objects sketchbooks and documentation 354-378Garage Band rehearsal documentation 380 - 414Applications buttons (various) 416-420Pulling Strings performance detail. Image: Eva Meyer-Keller 425Pulling Strings performance detail. Image: Eva Meyer-Keller 430Pulling Strings rehearsal detail. Image: Eva Meyer-Keller 434Pulling Strings performance detail. Image: Eva Meyer-Keller 442Ghost Machine model box 447Ghost Machine shed. Image: Paul Blakemore 454Ghost Machine interior. Image: Paul Blakemore 469Ghost Machine ring flash 471Garage Band auditorium 495

All images are my own unless stated.

VII

ABSTRACT

This thesis is an instruction manual for building a theatre machine. It is an account of a body of

object-orientated theatre practice undertaken between 2008-2013, which investigated how

material objects are performed with and how they might be said to be performing themselves.

The thesis considers how the material stage apparatus animates and generates theatrical

affect and focuses specifically on the role that the object has as actor (or ‘actant’) within it,

asking the question: how do objects function in the stage apparatus and what is the affect of

their inter-animation?

The term ‘theatre machine’ refers to the appearance of various affects through the materiality

of these the stage apparatuses. The machines I draw out are therefore conceptual: a memory

machine; an anthropological machine; a humility machine; a spectator machine and a ghost

machine. The reason for evoking these conceptual machines is to illuminate the role that

the stage apparatus has in constructing and maintaining them and the function that material,

nonhuman objects have in this process. My concern is predominantly with the set-up, the

dispositif that makes the actions of the machines possible. In this respect, theatre is conceived

as an affect-generating machination that is realised through technical means, the immaterial

actions of thought made manifest through material making. The theatre machine is a thinking

machine where the space of imagination and speculation is made possible between the maker,

object and audience.

There is limited critical work on theorising the practice of performing with objects and what

follows is positioned in that gap from the perspective and development of a theatre practice.

VIII

The methodology is practice-based and presented through reflective documentation. The

practice consists of five investigations, one summative performance called Garage Band, and the

setting of another machine into action. The documentation and reflection focuses on process,

in particular strategies of selection, composition and operation (ways of doing). It is practice-

based at every stage, drawing upon contexts and examples that reveal themselves through the

unfolding questions of practice, rather then offering an exhaustive study of objects in theatre,

mechanic conceptions of theatre, or the broad range of cross-disciplinary approaches that have

found their way into the process.

It consists of three parts: Object, Animation and Affect. The parts represent the three stages of

activating the machine and are colour coded for the purpose of reader orientation. Each part

contains two chapters: a chapter of reflective documentation and a contextual chapter on an

exemplary practitioner of object-orientated theatre. The chapters of reflective documentation

are Encountering Objects (Chapter 1), Performing Objects (Chapter 3) and Garage Band

(Chapter 5). The chapters on an exemplary practitioner of object-orientated theatre are Tadeusz

Kantor’s Anthropological Machine (Chapter 2), Philippe Quesne’s Humility Machine (Chapter 4),

and Eva Meyer-Keller’s Spectator Machine (Chapter 6). These practitioners have been chosen as

makers who have a dramaturgy of the object at the centre of their practice and the relation they

have to the context of my thesis and the discoveries made through practice.

The offer of the thesis is to the practitioner and student interested in working with objects in

their practice and how they might form strategies for thinking and making object-orientated

theatre. The intention is not for the practice to be replicated elsewhere, but for the manual

to be utilised as a tool to speculate with. It reveals the processes of an enquiry, with the

intention that the insights found might be taken up in the making of future practice and

therefore the major outcomes of the thesis are presented as a glossary of applications to be

used in the studio. It has been constructed retrospectively to present the folding together of

theoretical and contextual sources that have underpinned practice so the documentation is

laid out to make sense of the logics of production, to reveal the discoveries of how objects

function in the stage apparatus and the affect of their inter-animation.

IX

X

XI

PROLOGUE

MEMORY MACHINE

XII

XIII

A doorRoyal blue

MetalUp and over

Spring mountedWhite chips

Turning handleLock

Lost keyDrilled holes

Security screwsCobwebsA deskFurnitureWire

WD40Mold

A roomA garage

An old pubAn old pub still open

A blossom treeA wheelie bin

Zion DubA mural to John Peel

A parkThe turning off the motorway

A leaning wallA packet of Monster Munch crisps

Bent metal postsA dog called Gabba

Friends on the drivewayThe same phrase repeated

PROLOGUE

XIV

Boxes of MicrochipsEscape to New York

A pair of plaster dogsA self-levitating football

A FlumpA giant bottle of tomato ketchup

A ginger wigA beer hatMexico 86A dartboardAn umbrella

A dreaming cat1000 Party Poppers

It comes and goesIt comes and goes

A packet of frankfurtersA smoke machine

A BBQFive plastic igures

A funnel full of marblesA Ghostbusters Car

EgonAvengers Comics

A box of VHS TapesA square of carpet

An expanding alien headA band

Strange music

The handle turnsI remember this

PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE

XV

In May 2012 I wrote, designed and directed a performance called Garage Band for Mayfest Theatre

Festival in Bristol. It happened in a garage in the St Werburghs area of the city with the audience

sitting in a small temporary auditorium on the driveway. It was, for a week at least, mercilessly sunny.

The music stopsThe handle turns

The door slowly opensInside: smoke

Live music startsThe smoke is coming from a barbeque - a smoke machine

The band is revealed

Adapted from Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder (2007), the narrative follows the attempts of a

singer to reconnect with his memory following a mysterious accident, which involved something

heavy falling from the sky. With the substantial payout from the corporation responsible for the

accident, he sets about reforming his old band and begins a search for a garage that feels like that

from his teenage years. His memory is sketchy, but he recalls tiny details of objects and events

that accompanied that time of his life and sets about reconstructing them. He even employs

two actors to take on the roles of the drummer and the bass player in an attempt to reconnect

with something authentic through the repetition of rehearsal and the materiality of objects.

The story is told through a series of songs and instrumentals. These are accompanied by

animation sequences initialed by various scenographic objects that populate the garage;

a tool bench, a sleeping cat and a box full of toys, amongst others. During the course of

the performance, a barbeque is lit and sausages are cooked. The audience are invited

to join the band to eat with them and drink coke and beers at the end of the show.

PROLOGUE

XVI

The memories of the signer – the teenage band and the objects that populate the work - are

my own. Some were real - I think - others half remembered, glimpsed, forgotten.

In one scene the singer remembers a holiday in Corfu and the inflatable shark bought

by his parents. The song Reflector by Antelope is played. A shark appears, then another,

then another and another – thirty times - the multiple inflatable sharks flooding the

garage and spilling out onto the driveway. It was only after the third performance

that my brother reminded me it that it was, in fact, an inflatable killer whale in Corfu.

I set up the garage as a memory machine – like the theatre – as a place of return; a place for ghosts; a

place in which something appears and something comes back. The garage is a place where we store

objects that are in-between states; our own archives; boxes of photos and trophies; things that are no

longer needed in the house but are awaiting their destiny at the car-boot sale or the rubbish dump.

The garage as theatre boxA neat proscenium

A reverberation machine

Each one has a door as a curtainA mechanism to hide and revealTo close down and start again

MATTER HAS BEEN GIVEN INFINITE FERTILITY, INEXHAUSTABLE VITALITY, AND AT THE SAME TIME, A SEDUCTIVE POWER OF TEMPTATION, WHICH INVITES US TO CREATE AS WELL

BRUNO SCHULZ

(1988, p. 39)

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INTRODUCTION

BIO-OBJECTS

My last desire is, said Kantor, to preserve the memory of theatre in order to pass it onto the next generation… I do not sense the certainty that it would be preserved… For me, the most important are all those so-called “props”, which I call “the objects of art”.

(Halczak in Murawska-Muthesius and Zarzecka, 2011, p. 21)

The route to Garage Band began six years earlier with repeated viewings of Tadeusz Kantor’s

The Dead Class (1977) on a VHS tape during my undergraduate degree:

An old man with a bicycleA row of worn benches

A stack of decaying booksA group of child mannequins

A window frameA rope

The objects that dominated the aesthetic seemed to drive a theatricality – a dramatic imperative

– that did not rely on their representational function. They did not appear to be supporting the

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4

action or the virtuosity of the performers, but they were virtuosic themselves. In Postdramatic

Theatre (2006), Hans-Thies Lehmann contextualises Kantor’s work as a practice that begins with

the abolition of dramatic text and is characterised by a ‘distinct thematic of the object’ (2006,

p. 73). The ideological and philosophical approach towards the material objects (and specifically

the construction of his art-objects) was offered to break down the dynamics of dramatic

representation: “the hierarchy vital for drama vanishes, a hierarchy in which everything (and every

thing) revolves around human action, the things being mere props” (ibid). Kantor considered the

label ‘prop’ as an offensive name for the object as a term associated with notions of ownership,

control and lifelessness. He set about devising an approach to engineer a phenomenon of letting

the object communicate on its own and perpetually fold-back into his reconstituted theatre

set-up. This was achieved, according to Kantor, by letting the objects operate autonomously, so

that they become the carriers of meaning in his theatre, not simply through what they might be

said to represent, but the concrete reality they established through how they problematised the

actor’s and audience’s relationship with them. The objects became the index of the theatrical

apparatus, not the space or the text. It was how this apparatus functioned in operation that

became what we might call the vital organs of the (dead) body of a theatre machine that he had

created. He called this state the ‘bio-object’:

This reality, however, was no longer expressed by PLACE, which imposed its laws on all the elements of the theatre. It was the OBJECT that now became the medium. The OBJECT. Autonomous, concentrated on itself. L’object d’art. It had one characteristic feature: its own living organs: the ACTORS.That is why I called it “BIO-OBJECT.”Bio-objects were not props used by the actors. They were not part of “the scenery” where “acting” takes place. They became inseparable from the actors. They radiated their

INTRODUCTION

own “life” – autonomous, unrelated to the fiction (content) of the play. This kind of “life” and its symptoms constituted a significant part of the performance. The demonstration or manifestation of the bio-objects life did not involve presenting any external structure.

(Tadeusz Kantor, 1990)

The conception of the ‘bio-object’ was a radical departure for the animation of the material

object in performance as it placed the object as the central relational component in establishing

Kantor’s claimed autonomous reality of the stage space. These material constructions in use

became the items that defined the landscape of memory that Kantor offered the audience. This

departure was arguably not a new challenge for what Alain Badiou identifies as the essential

elements of theatre: a ‘public exhibition, with or without a stage, of a desired combination

of bodies and languages’ (2007, p. 22) proposing a theatrical ontology that foregrounds the

material object but uses it to ‘introduce new dimensions of the body (violence, nudity, sex,

imagined deformations etc)’ (ibid). As Kantor proclaims in ‘The Eighth Insegnamento’ (1988)

it is the human that ‘desires to know the object, “touch” it, appropriate it’ (1993, p. 240), the

human is made present through the object, by placing it at the centre of intention – the human

as a co-creator with the object – a form of theatrical inter-animation.

OBJECTS IN THEATRE

Overwhelmingly, academic consideration of theatre-making has concentrated on distinctly

human bodies; the centrality of the text; and the condition and use of space. Physical objects

are generally classified as props, puppets and costumes, items that take on a symbolic or

5

INTRODUCTION

supporting role to the dramatic action, as anthropomorphized characters, or the enhancement

of an actor’s presence. According to Andrew Sofer in The Stage Life of Props (2003), despite being

utilised in almost every work of theatre, the object has remained firmly at the ‘bottom of the

hierarchy of the theatrical elements […] the analysis of plays has focused on the subjects rather

than objects, mimesis rather than the material stuff of the stage’ (2006, p. v). The stage object has

traditionally been read through the text, a textual symbol as opposed to a material thing. The

object on the page appears as a signifier, a command from the playwright to the use of an object

as a pivotal dramatic device or an item to furnish the characters’ habitation. This conception is

limiting. In performance, when the physical objects materialise in the flesh, and ‘do-what-they-

do’ – elusively, surprisingly, disappointingly – the significance beyond a textual sketching is felt.

Objects not only fulfill their role as a dramatic device, but also occupy that ‘peculiarly theatrical

phenomenon […] to take on a life of their own’ (p. 2), which is an allusion to the animistic effects

of some forms of puppetry and the corporal affects that comes from the objects being there.

There is no specific critical discourse that relates to the study of physical objects in performance

and theatre. The phrase of ‘object-orientated theatre’ is my own, defined for the purposes

of talking about theatre practices that utilise a central concern with material objects and

animation. It is intended to orientate my work rather than a claim to a category and can be

read alongside the current discourse around broader forms of ‘object theatre’, which remain

focused on found object forms in puppetry and puppet-orientated anthropomorphic animation.

The research undertaken by an AHRC international network of practitioners and academics, for

example, focused predominantly on these discourses in three key events: ‘Foundations of Object

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INTRODUCTION

Theatre, Nottingham Trent University, December 2011; ‘Object Theatre’, Radar, Loughborough

University 9 – 10th March 2012; and ‘Object Theatre: Methodology and Pedagogy,’ Nottingham

Trent University, 12- 14th September 2012. This thesis might be considered as a contribution

to the ongoing discourse of object theatre by offering a practice-based perspective of object

animation rather than a reappraisal of objects used in puppetry.

OBJECTHOOD AND THEATRICALITY

The lack of critical analysis of the function of objects in theatre is perhaps due to the problematic

nature of objecthood. The construction of the object as an ontological problem, rather than

a concrete definition, is even more difficult to locate when it is placed within a theatrical

frame. Within the mimetic machinery of the stage, ‘objects’ move in and out of sight, shifting

between an assured ‘thingness’ (…it is that) constructed by the representational function, and

an objective presence that originates from bare materiality (…what is that?). The issue of

Performance Research journal On Objects (2007) addresses this problem in the editorial by

asking ‘less “what” than “where” is an object? And more specifically “where are they?” in relation

to both other objects and those other things we call ourselves: selves, and how are those things

and selves staged, performed and made manifest’ (Clarke, Gough and Watt, 2007, p. 1). The

journal issue questions the location and relation of the things in themselves rather than finding

an elusive, ontological definition of what they are, because ‘theatre can always be accused of

misrepresenting the articles before it; they are simply not themselves’ (2007, p. 1). Is it even

possible to locate things, as objects of enquiry, when they are never manifestly present as

themselves and cannot account for themselves?

7

INTRODUCTION

8

Jon Erickson details the problem in The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign

in Performance, Art and Poetry (1995), by considering multiple types of objects from material to

literary. He adopts an analytical position that ‘will not be emphasizing objects as static “things-in-

themselves” so much as the process of objectification itself, which is never entirely completed’

(1995, p. 4). This perception can be adopted to accommodate the effect that the encounter

with an object’s materiality has in the process of objectification. This is with the understanding

that the process of objectification is not a separate procedure, but is in fact an integral part

of the constitution of the object itself. This means that the position of the object as a thing for

consideration is constantly shifting when spectating theatre.

This phenomenon might be called the theatricality of the object. The object’s shifting presence

and subsequent abstracted meaning depends on the complex composition of encounter. This

became a central preoccupation of visual artists and performance makers in the latter part

of the twentieth century. An aspect of the exhibition; A theatre without theatre at the Museu

d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2007), investigated these preoccupations by considering how

subjectivities and the place of the subject stood in relation to the object in contemporary art

practice. The exhibition staged this through the premise of theatricality as an affect of practice

that can operate outside of the theatre space, appearing within hybrid forms of art making,

everyday life, and extra-daily activities. In the exhibition catalogue, Manuel J.Borja-Villel sets out

how these practices have utilised theatricality as a concept of aesthetic relationality and ‘altered

our perception of the nature of the work of art and its position in the division of the visible’

INTRODUCTION

9

(2007, p. 20). This is contextualised through the discourse of theatricality and objecthood

in art that originated in the 1960s around Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried’s decree

for a modernist purity to remain in art practice. Theatre is a form that always offered the

potential of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art) because of its unique possibility of

offering a synthesis of text, bodies and objects through the organisation of space and time.

For modernist idealists, who ‘sought utopia, that imaginary non-place, by imposing an allegedly

universal language on a homogeneous, passive audience’ (Borja-Villel, 2007, p. 21), it disrupted

the notion of purity in the work of art, a necessity to achieving a clarity of thought and

expression in the making of it.

In ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) Fried sets up a polemic between modernist painting and

the literalist nature of minimalist sculpture of the 1960s, which he claims depended on the

activation of the viewer – as subject – looking onto the sculpture over a duration of time. In

this relation, he claims that they cease to be experienced as sculptures and become ‘nothing

more than objects’ (1988, p. 120) as they lose their identity as autonomous works of art. The

effect of these objects is only active at the stage of encounter and therefore can exist outside

what we might call art practice. Fried claims that the literalists are therefore interested in

aligning their practice with the condition of non-art or the objecthood of sculpture, which he

claims is ‘antithetical to art’ (p. 125). Objecthood in art, as Fried defines it, might have negated

the constitution of painting as an autonomous entity, in his view the ideal condition if ‘a work

of modernist painting or sculpture – were in some essential respect not an object’ (ibid). He

then claims that this condition of objecthood, espoused by the literalists ‘amounts to noting

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10

other than a plea for a new genre of theatre; and theatre is now the negation of art’ (ibid). This

is Fried’s conception of theatricality: a condition of encounter with other objects and subjects, in

space, over a set duration of time. As Borja-Villel states, the encounter with the art object ‘was no

longer explained in relation to an external object which it represented, nor did it refer to itself –

instead, it conformed phenomenologically to being experienced by the viewer’ (2007, p. 21). The

sculpture was regarded as framing the stage of encounter that became the event of the work

itself; the presence of objecthood as theatricality; theatricality as an affect through the presence

of objects and not squarely as the representation of something.

This prevalent idea of theatricality positioned the spectator at the centre of the work through

their participation in its construction, mediated through the intentionality of the artist, who made

the work to be ‘activated via its recitation and grasped by a viewer-agent; that is, with a capacity

for agency’ (Borja-Villel, 2007, p. 21). It blurred the disciplinary boundaries of modes of practice

and saw the birth of a multitude of hybrid forms traced through the exhibition around a now

familiar discourse evoking the provocations of Artaud (pp. 94-101); the Dadaist and Surrealist

experiments in performance (pp. 78-92); Grotowski’s Poor Theatre (pp. 102-109); and notably,

Tadeusz Kantor’s early theatre happenings (pp. 20-123), works that reconfigure conventional

structures of dramatic, theatrical and spatial dramaturgy. As Borja-Villel states, ‘the scenic space

ceases to be a “substantial” location and creates its own boundaries through the play of relations

of representation’ (p. 21). It was an attempt by practitioners to shift away from a theatre of

representation, to what Alain Badiou calls ‘a theatre of operation’ (2007, p. 23): a theatre without

theatre because it maintains what we might conceive to be theatre’s essential characteristics ‘of

INTRODUCTION

11

thinking in relation if not to a text to be interpreted at least to instructions or statements to

be performed, that is, complemented or used as rules which can then be revised’ (During in

Badiou, 2007, p. 23). A theatre of operation deliberately draws attention to the making of it –

to its phenomenological reality – rather than the things it might be said to directly represent.

This particular form of aesthetic enquiry can be recognised in Kantor’s conception of the’bio-

object’, through which he was able to employ an operational engagement between material

objects and performers in the pursuit of animation.

THE PURSUIT OF ANIMATION

The notion of the ‘bio-object’ is where my enquiry begins, leading me back to the sharks and back

to the garage of my childhood. Through my practice, I set out to investigate how the animation

of objects might be conceived not only as an additional theatrical texture, or device to carry

dramatic meaning or symbolism, but how they might provide the nexus for the production

of new forms of object-orientated theatre and how these forms might initiate cultural and

political affect by building images of relations between the human and the nonhuman. It seeks

to address a gap in perspectives of object animation, particularly from the position of the

theatre maker, who establishes strategies of making through engagements with material objects

rather than encountering them as a spectator – through observation – or evoking them as a

playwright, abstractly through the writing of text. It will consider how a practitioner might think

with objects as a way of generating and structuring an object-orientated dramaturgy.

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12

Teemu Paavolainen’s Theatre/Ecology/Cognition: Theorizing Performer-Object Interaction in Grotowski,

Kantor and Meyerhold (2012) is the most specific study of object animation in the theatre outside

of the discourses of props, puppets and costumes. It theorizes ecologies of performer and object

in three specific practices through the exposition of performance and cognition. These ecologies

exist beyond the theatrical work and the objects themselves, thinking towards the implications and

affects from the results of their use, utilizing Kantor’s practice in particular to stage ideas around

Polish cultural ecology. It concentrates not on the materiality of practice but its cognitive and

ecological affects. In my enquiry I will concentrate on the speculative effect of specific objects and

set ups in practice rather than the analysis of object-performer interaction, particularly regarding

the discourses of ecologies defined by Paavolainen. I take the perspective of the practitioner

concentrating on the specificity of my practice so not to prescribe the interaction of performer

and object before giving it a chance to establish itself. It is within the practical application, the

finding out through making that I locate this thesis and its offer to the discourses of object-

orientated theatre.

The practice that forms the enquiry is organised into five investigations undertaken between

2008-2011, a summative performance of Garage Band (2012), and a performance called Ghost

Machine (2013) that serves as a concluding operation as a means of returning to the findings of

the thesis.

The investigations are short performance actions undertaken in both workshop and public

contexts. They are called: Lament of the Noise Makers 1 and 2 (2008), Stage Fright 1 and 2 (2009),

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13

and House (2010). The objects I use provide the origin and context of the investigations,

rather than specific practices, genres, sites, or texts. The reason for adopting this approach

comes from the proposition that objects themselves might initiate practice as material to

think with. The specific context of finding and selecting these objects is explicated in Chapter

1, but they are not props – in the institutional sense of the word – they are theatrical objects

in the way that I have started to suggest. They are made that way through their composition,

framing and application within the particular performance actions in which they are found

and through the material conditions of encounter. They are not literary or virtual constructs,

digital interfaces or abstract ideas but material things; objects that have weight and occupy a

physical space, everyday objects like utensils, instruments, tools and furniture or extra-daily

curiosities like souvenirs, theatre props or stuffed animals. Some are adapted and fabricated

for particular effects but they are objects that have a commonality; they are all material things

that communicate through physical presence and the theatricality of the encounter with them.

Other practices and contexts are introduced as the investigations develop and subsequently

this object focused methodology is transformed as relations and connections expand through

the making and meeting with performer and audience. These investigations culminate in a

glossary of applications that is extended and explicated through the summative performance

of Garage Band.

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14

CONSTRUCTING A MANUAL

The machine is an invention, an invented device, and it is an “invention” as an invented story, as a deception, as a machination.

(Raunig, 2010, p. 37)

The work on scenic material, the transformation of the stage into a machine, which helps to develop the work of the actor as broadly and manifoldly as possible, is then socially justified when this machine not only moves its pistons and holds up under a certain work load, but also begins to carry out a certain useful labour.

(Sergei Tretyakov in Raunig, 2010, p. 35)

To articulate this research process and the applications it has produced, I will frame the enquiry

around the notion of the theatre machine and the operational conceit of the manual. This is based

on the premise that evoking the theatre-as-machine allows me to stage it as an apparatus. I use

the term as defined by Michael Foucault as a dispositif, the set-up of a process of inter-animation,

the conditions of a ‘heterogenous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural

forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical,

moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid. […] The apparatus

itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements’ (Foucault, 1988,

p. 194). Theatre, in this instance, is defined as the apparatus made possible through the inter-

relation of material and conceptual processes generated at the moment of operation. As Giorgio

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15

Agamben defines it, the apparatus is ‘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’ (2009, p. 14). It is defined at the point that a living being interfaces

with the material conditions of an encounter. This could be something as simple as the ‘writing

apparatus’ of a human with a pen or as complex as the ‘punishment apparatus’ of a prisoner

and the multiple conditions of a prison. The theatre, by extension, is the apparatus of animation

that connects both object and affect.

Framing the enquiry in this way enables the research to undertake three things. The first is to

consider the operational function of objects in theatre as part of a wider assemblage (object),

the second is to position the theatre as a invented device for making things up (animation),

and the third is to propose how theatre carries out a certain social, cultural and political labour

(affect).

Accordingly, the enquiry sets out to stage the act of theatre-making as a complex apparatus, a

machine of discourses, materials, bodies, architectures and encounters, to enable speculations

to be made about how the objects involved are operating and what might be possible in

terms of enhancements, disruptions and ruptures of these operations within a dramaturgical

structure. These speculations enable the building of the practice-based applications that set-up

the possibility of animation and the transmission of these discoveries through performance and

the documents of this manual.

INTRODUCTION

16

The manual reveals the operation of theatre as a story machine that furthers a narrative

discourse, an apparatus functioning as a ‘means, contrivance, device’, as Gerald Raunig states, that

‘does not further distinguish between material and immaterial means, but instead allows them

to overlap and merge’ (2010, p. 36). The theatre-as-machine operates between a material device

and the idea it contrives to complete, perform or solve. The application of which ‘both holds the

technical meaning of apparatuses, frames, devices as well as the psychosocial meaning of trick,

artifice, deception’ (p. 37). In short, the theatre machine can be the invention of a fiction as well

as the material means through which to tell it. Objects might form part of a deus ex machina, or

deity machine operating as ‘an artistic effect, a trick, a break, a sudden twist capable of resolving

complex entanglements in the plot all at once’ (p. 38), like a god descending from the sky or via

stage machines that artificially present solutions. As part of the material apparatus, objects can

operate as a part of a vehicle for dramatic or theatrical action that might be said to present,

rupture, situate and solve narrative structure themselves.

The operations of the machines in the thesis are drawn as conceptual actions, referring to the

affect of the labour it undertakes. These are a memory machine; an anthropological machine; a

humility machine; a spectator machine and finally a ghost machine. Material objects are animated

as part of the constructing of these machine assemblages, where multiple apparatuses (that

constitute the act of theatre, the idea of theatricality) function simultaneously to create a collective

thinking machine that acts as a social, cultural and political device through the intentionality of the

artist. I have adopted it as a frame that is productive for the theatre maker to enable an image of

the dramaturgical logic, the assemblage of the work that is made: a conceptual blue print that is

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

17

both simultaneously material and immaterial in nature: a theatre of operations and affect.

The discoveries of this process are presented as an instruction manual. The manual is organised

into these three parts: Object, Animation, and Affect. Each part consists of two chapters: a

chapter of reflective documentation and a contextual chapter on an exemplary practitioner of

object-orientated theatre. This structure reflects the investigative nature of the practice, rather

than the chronological execution of it, so it offers the unfolding of the discoveries made in

retrospect.

The reflective documentation chapters are organised as a set of nine instructions. They have

been conceived through the emerging problems and solutions of practice; from the initial

concepts and selection of objects adopted to work with; to the process of seeing what they

do; from the mistakes and failures of performance; to the concluding performance event.

The contextual chapters are exemplary object-orientated theatre case studies. They deal

with how the set-up and animation of objects might be said to evidence the operation of a

particular conceptual machine. Within these chapters, the three sections of object, animation,

INTRODUCTION

PART2 PART3

KANTOR'SANTHROPOLOGICAL

MACHINE

CHAPTER 2

OBJECT

PART1

ANIMATION AFFECT

CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 6

ECOUNTERING OBJECTS

CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 3

PERFORMINGOBJECTS

CHAPTER 5

GARAGEBAND

QUESNE’SHUMILITY MACHINE

PART2 PART3

MEYER-KELLER’S SPECTATOR MACHINE

18

INTRODUCTION

19

and affect, collapse into each other, as they inevitably do, but they are chosen to complement

the part of the instruction manual that they accompany. All practices and resources chosen

have been selected from those that have illuminated my own work in the studio and do not

claim to be an exhaustive interrogation of object-orientated theatre.

Chapter 1 is called Encountering Objects and it considers the ontological problem of objects

and the challenge of subject-object dichotomies. The first instruction, ‘Think Through Things’,

asks the question of how encounters with material objects might set up a phenomenological

approach to practice. This draws on a range of disciplines that favour a fieldwork-friendly

approach to theory, intended to illuminate and advance the theoretical tool kit that can be

taken into the studio/rehearsal room. This range of disciplines is presented in Candlin and

Guin’s (eds.) The Object Reader (2009) which documents writing on the ever developing

interest in the nonhuman with passing reference to what might tentatively be called ‘object

studies’ that sits between visual culture, design, architecture and anthropology as well as

diverse thinking about the role and function of objects in the making and reception of art

practices. Candlin and Guin’s collection does not delineate a cohesive discipline but instead

multiple ‘epistemological vantages for the study of objects’ (2009, p. 2). Therefore, any study of

objects must be selective with the vantage points chosen to adopt and tread carefully through

thinking of things and formulating an approach that allows the development of a practice in

real terms, beyond, or even before, the theoretical perception of it. These ideas move towards

workable definitions of objectification; posing the notion that it is not necessary to rake over

the extensive considerations of trying to define what an object is, but more where it is located

INTRODUCTION

20

in relation to other things. These vantage points are Daniel Miller’s ‘humility of things’ (2005, p.

5); Igor Kopytoff ’s ‘object biography’ (1988. p. 68); Steven Connor’s conception of ‘affordance’

(2011, p. 2); Sherry Turkle’s ‘object speed’ (2009, p. 303), and Bruno Latour’s ‘actants’ (2004, p.

237). These ideas challenge or transform conventionally understood ontological relationships

established between objects and subjects, if indeed they hold that dialectical relationship as a

truism at all. The second instruction, ‘Find Stuff ’, sets out a number of theoretical perspectives and

practical approaches for how to select the material for making and how this selecting might lead

or initiate the process that constitutes the content of the work itself. Finally, the third instruction,

‘Wait in the Wings’, drags the stuff selected to the places that exist between the everyday and

the theatre space: the prop store and the wings.

Chapter 2 is called Kantor’s Anthropological Machine. I set out an argument that reads Kantor’s

objects as being the material devices that construct the apparatus of Kantor’s theatre machine,

and, by extension, make possible the operation of what Giorgio Agamben calls the ‘anthropological

machine’ (2004, p. 37). This also reveals how the idea of the apparatus enables the conception

of theatrical animation by generating an appearance of the inhuman, the creaturely, through the

interface of engagement between the human and the object. Kantor’s use of objects is read as

an approach to the ontological problems they pose, functioning in a double action: at once to

understand and occupy the subject-object dichotomy through the framing of the work and

then to animate the scene by establishing a counter ontology, or order of things, that challenges

the subject – object relationship established in the framing, and interacts with it through the

presentation of an object – object relation. The affect has the possibility of being both familiar

INTRODUCTION

21

and unsettling, a means of animation that plays between the ontological problems of objects

rather than providing an answer to them. Kantor’s reconceived ontology centered upon the

‘bio-object’ as a central component of his set-up. This set-up is inserted into the established

conventions of the theatre frame, in studio theatres, or marked by a rope or sectioned area in

other spaces, a frame of familiarity and a distancing that anchors the audience to the theatrical

nature of the event, in which this new vibrant ontology of objects can be played out. The bio-

object acts as a cipher throughout for a promise of a form of human – object inter-animation.

Chapter 3 is called Performing Objects. It returns to the critical documentation and introduces

the five practical investigations. The fourth instruction ‘breakdown the machine’ plays out

different concerns of operation, revealing sources, sketchbooks, notes and contextual material

to reveal how these practices were achieved and the applications formed from them. The

fifth instruction, ‘Follow the Life of the Object’, traces the appearance of several objects

through the investigations to stimulate further reflection using the theoretical frameworks

introduced in Chapter 1. The chapter concludes with the sixth instruction, ‘Establish a Glossary

of Applications’, as a form of working manifesto - the first set of findings of the thesis - as a

point of reflection that can be cut out and stuck to the wall of the studio.

Chapter 4 is called Quesne’s Humility Machine. It considers the animating role that objects

play in the theatre of Philippe Quesne and Vivarium Studio through an evaluation of the

scenographic strategies of Quesne through the framing concepts of displacement and humility.

Displacement is considered as a compositional strategy in Quesne’s productions Big Bang

INTRODUCTION

22

(2010) and La Melancolie des Dragons (2008) that make us aware of the volume of the stage

space beyond the proscenium frame as a plane of composition. Humility is considered as a

philosophy of objects that constructs and maintains the theatrical figure of the human – Serge –

in L’Effet de Serge (2007). Quesne presents an alternative theatre image from Kantor’s evocation

of the human appearing inhuman. The human is a co-creator in a world of objects and inhuman

processes, not in purgatory, as in Kantor, caught in a world beyond control, but one that enables

us to rethink what it might mean to be an object amongst objects, a figure in a landscape of

figures. Quesne invites us to think again about contentment, boredom and heartache and the joy

in simple acts of performance and materials, where all things are, in a sense, objects. His theatre

reconfigures the idea of the subject through the action of a humility machine that creates an

image of the human in the twenty first century.

Chapter 5 draws together documentation and reflection on the summative performance

of Garage Band. It considers an object-orientated practice as part of a wider dramaturgical

assemblage of actions, music, song, and narrative. The seventh instruction, ‘Test the Applications’, is

the documentation of the performance including the accompanying DVD. The eighth instruction,

‘Keep a Workbook’, presents documentation and reflections on the process of making the

performance, focusing on the function and building of the objects through the findings of the first

five investigations. It suggests how the writing of a performance text can be made through writing

with and alongside the objects. Instruction nine, ‘Build a Repertoire’, adds new applications to

those made through the first five investigations, suggesting techniques and approaches for making

INTRODUCTION

23

object-orientated theatre and design processes that are evidenced through the practice.

Chapter 6 is called Meyer-Keller’s Spectator Machine. It considers how Eva Meyer-Keller’s

performance of Pulling Strings (2013) utilises an object dramaturgy that is not to be looked

onto but creates a looking back, to foreground the subjecthood of the spectator by repeatedly

exposing the theatre as a system of manipulation. The theatre as apparatus is laid open as

the place in which collective ideas and creations are made possible and the participants:

performers, spectators and objects, can play at acting human. This implicates the spectators

to directly carry out the labour of the machine through their exposed subjectivity, becoming

spectator-subjects, however fleetingly, within its operation, rather than looking onto object-

orientated stage images.

The function of this manual is to present the operational mechanics of performance-making

and how this might be reanimated in future practice. The intention not0 replication, but to be

utilised as a manual for the practitioner or student interested in engaging with object-orientated

theatre practices, or through an application in design processes. Therefore, the manual follows

my own wayfinding process through the successes and failures of making, a practice that is

compelled by its ‘own demonstrations and therefore leave room for values like messiness, and

operators like the mistake, the stumble and the stutter’ (Nigel Thrift, 2008, p. 18). The manual

has been constructed retrospectively, that is, through the long view of reflection, and as I have

already suggested, it presents the folding together of theoretical and contextual sources that

have underpinned the making processes. The sources and documentation are laid out in this

INTRODUCTION

manner to make sense of the logics of production, to reveal the argument – the ‘sense making’ of

this particular practitioner’s way through.

24

INTRODUCTION

25

INTRODUCTION

26

INTRODUCTION

OBJECT

PART 1

30

ENCOUNTERINGOBJECTS

A MANUAL OF

INOPERABLE PROCEDURES

HOW TO BUILD

A THEATRE MACHINE

PART 1

1. THINK THROUGH THINGS

2. FIND STUFF

3. WAIT IN THE WINGS

1

THINK

THROUGH

THINGS

THINK THROUGH THINGS

This chapter sets out the theory that underpins the methodology of practice. It takes the

encountering of objects as a starting point, moving from the encounter in the everyday to the

theatrical frame.

Think about the objects around you, what do they tell you about the context from which they

come from and how do they make that context themselves?

Think through things, not about them…

31


THE ONTOLOGICAL PROBLEM OF OBJECTS

1

THINK

THROUGH

THINGS

There is no such thing as a dead object, a hard-edged object, an object with strict limits. Everything flows beyond its boundaries, as if trying to break free of them at the earliest opportunity.

(Bruno Schulz cited in Miklaszewskii, 2005, p. 37)

The problem with the word object is that it is irrevocably joined to the word subject. Objects

are thought of as oppositions; concrete, fixed, and inanimate entities that are transformed or

animated by the subject. This is what Daniel Miller defines as ‘our common-sense opposition

between the person and the thing, the animate and inanimate’ (2010, p. 5). This opposition is

arguably hardwired through cultural and social engagements, which center on the controlling

human subject that views the outside object world as a group of inanimate others, serving only

to define subjectivity by means of perpetual relations of difference and representation. This

reconfigures the question what is an object? to - how does the subject represent the object?

Candlin and Guin defines this reconfiguration within a western rationalist tradition in which

objects are widely considered to be inanimate as, ‘they are perceived instead of perceiving and

acted upon rather than being active themselves’ (2009, p. 11). This separation, as Graham Harman

has outlined, might be defined as ‘the human sphere, composed of transparent freedom and

ruled by arbitrary and incommensurable perspectives’ on one side, and ‘nature or the external

world, made up of hard matters of fact and acting with objective, mechanical precision’ (2009,

p. 57), on the other. This distinction is based on the premise that these realms are somehow

32

33


isolated from each other, that the objective natural world is one entity understood through

the multiple cultural perspectives that define the human sphere. Jane Bennett suggests in her

book Vibrant Matter (2010) that these projects are ultimately bound up in the fantasies of a

‘human uniqueness in the eyes of God, of escape from materiality, or of mastery of nature’

(2010, p. xi). The idea of matter is reduced to ‘passive stuff, as raw, brute, or inert’ (p. vii), that

is maintained by the ‘habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us,

being)’ (p. vi). This presumes that humans possess some form of ‘special transcendent power’,

while the natural realm consists of ‘stupid robotic objects’ (Harman, 2009, p. 59).

This division has been challenged by the thinking of Bruno Latour through his conception of all

objects as ‘actants’ or actors as part of wider networks of exchange. As Latour states in Politics

of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy (2004), an ‘actant’ can be either human or

nonhuman, in fact ‘any entity that modifies another entity in a trail’ (2004, p. 237). According

to Bennett, this describes a more ‘distributive agency’ (2010, p. ix) between the human and

the nonhuman, so that all entities, now reconfigured as ‘actors’ have ‘efficacy, can do things, and

have sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events’

(p. viii). All things can be defined by how they transform, disrupt or modify something else,

reconfiguring the relation of agency in any social arrangement so that, according to Harman,

‘real inanimate objects are responsible for constructing facts no less than are power-hungry

humans’ (2010, p. 11). It rejects the distinction between subjects and objects and thus attempts

to reconfigure the role and nature of agency in respect to how material objects might be

understood, reinstating nonhuman elements as active co-creators in establishing social, cultural

and political affects.

34


A set of ontological systems have appeared around these ideas, centrally that of Graham Harman’s

(2013) ‘object –oriented philosophy’ (OOP), which sets out to liberate the notion of the object

from its combined relation with subject-hood. The crucial claim of Harman’s work is to conceive

of the possibility of objects occupying an autonomous reality in their own right, so ‘not all objects

are equally real, but they are equally objects. It is only in a wider theory that accounts for the real

and unreal alike that pixies, nymphs, and utopias must be treated in the same terms as sailboats

and atoms’ (2011, p. 5). He states that if the object is present only in our conscious perception of

it, then its ‘existence is already threatened, if I shift my attention, fall asleep, or die, all the more so if

all rational beings in the universe were exterminated’ (p. 22). If it is claimed that a form of essence

will continue to persist after the object falls out of conscious view, then they ‘would still have

no autonomous reality apart from being the objects of actual or potential observation, they are

granted no secret life or inherent casual power, but are “real” only insofar as they might now or

someday appear in someone’s consciousness.’ (ibid). Harman sets out an ontology of objects that

reinstates an autonomous reality to account for their intrinsic existence beyond the conscious

encounter (See Harman 2010, 2011, 2012).

Levi Bryant, in his book The Democracy of Objects (2010), claims to move towards a ‘finally

subjectless object’ (2010, p. 1). He challenges the subject-object dichotomy by pointing out the

ontological conundrum of the object always existing as product of subjective representations,

posing the question: ‘Do we…touch the object in its reality in our representations, or rather, do

our representations always ‘distort’ the object such that there is no warrant in the claim that our

representations actually represent a reality that is out there’ (ibid). For Bryant, this model that

35


has been established between; ‘subject/culture’ and ‘nature/object’ (p. 2), forecloses the nature/

object category into being evident only through the resultant representations, which, like

Harman’s suggestion, excludes the human from the object’s autonomous reality. His answer is

to establish an ontological system that ‘attempts to think the being of objects unshackled from

the gaze of humans in their being for-themselves’ by claiming that all objects, ‘equally exist while

they do not exist equally’ (p. 4), contributing to collectives and assemblages but to a greater

and lesser degree. This system is not to exclude the human or the subject/culture category, but

rather to redefine them as ‘particular types of object’ (p. 6). In Bryant’s conception, subjects,

as we understand them, are actually ‘objects among objects’ (p. 7) and not unique object

perceiving machines. Bryant conceives this idea as being a productive reconfiguration of anti-

humanist and post-humanist philosophies, which attempt to conceive of the world as being

governed by impersonal social and cultural forces rather then individual subjects; instead, what

is left is ‘a variety of nonhuman actors unleashed in the world as autonomous actors in their

own right, irreducible to representations and freed from a constant reference to the human’

(ibid). The work proposes a re-conception of the human, rather than an objectified eradication

of it.

There is, however, an alternative to the ‘objects among objects’ ontological proposition

presented by the theorists of OOP. Daniel Miller sets out to dissolve the artificial boundaries

of subject and object whilst recognising them as boundaries. His aim is to reclaim a sense of

co-creation, an active inter-animation between the material world and the substance of the

body as ‘discrete entities that make each other’ (2010, p. 42), forming what he regards the

36


constitution of a combined ‘subject’ that is recognised as the human being albeit through different

epistemological routes from that of OOP. The first part of his manifesto for the discipline of

Material Culture Studies, Stuff (2010), offers a set of methodological approaches to how we

might consider the role that material items have within this interface between people and their

emotional constructions of self, as well as the building of social and cultural assemblages that

are formed from these interactions. It sets out to challenge the assumption that the pursuit of

a constructed material environment somehow ‘drains away our humanity, as we dissolve into a

sticky mess of plastic and other commodities’ (Miller, 2010, p. 5). Through these distinctions, Miller

suggests that humans might be harboring a false separation between the sovereignty of our

subjective self and the material world in order to ‘retain a rather simplistic and false view of pure

and prior unsullied humanity’ (ibid). Therefore, the starting point of his projects is the proposal

that ‘we too are stuff, and our use and identification with material culture provides a capacity for

enhancing, just as much as for submerging, our humanity’ (p. 6). Miller’s multiple projects have

taken this proposition and applied it to the broadest scope of material culture, across various

contexts; from clothing to personal possessions; Facebook to shopping. His work is both rationally

materialist and humanist, placing the human-object relationship at the centre of his enquiry rather

than abstract theorizing about it. His methodology is that of anecdotal fieldwork in which he

observes the relationship of people and things in the contexts in which they meet. From out of

this approach he not only builds a picture and analysis of the function of material things within the

culture they come from but also how they make that culture manifest in the first place.

These re-conceptions of the object/human are enabling new ways of perceiving how to treat

37


and encounter the material world, and in some cases, such as Miller’s ethnographic fieldwork,

they offer concrete applications - but they are not without their practical difficulties. If the

propositions of OOP are accepted, the difficulty is in trying to adopt these theories as a

structural underpinning of a creative practice. There is the fundamental challenge of prising

an audience from out of the ‘commonsense’ oppositions that are held in a western rationalist

context, and ultimately questioning why a theatre maker would want to do this in the first

place. Is it even possible to establish reconfigured ontological relationships outside of an

audience’s context? In a cultural context in which the objects of attention are perceived to

have an autonomy or existence beyond subjective reasoning - such as cultures that contain

narratives of sacred or ritualized objects – there is a clearer route for the application of these

theories. I would argue that these ideas and approaches can function together, much as they

do in reality, as even if one ontological system proves to be right – in argument - it does not

negate the fact that the other exists and influences our concentration and engagement with

objects, day to day. It is my intention to allow the objects I use to most adequately talk from

and to the places and practices where I locate and place them, to utilise and reveal aspects of

their materiality for the productivity of making a theatre practice.

It is my intention to build a set of approaches to theory that are intended to illuminate

and advance a theoretical tool kit that can be taken into the studio/rehearsal room. These

approaches are intended to compliment and intersect with each other to uncover further

questions that exist between objects and the theatrical contexts they are engaged with as a

foundation for making.

38


…a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value – that is, their usefulness – but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage of their fate.

(Walter Benjamin, 1992, p. 62)

I sort of expected, but couldn’t really fully imagine, the sadness of lives and the comfort of things.

(Daniel Miller, 2008, p. 30)

The opening chapters of Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things (2008) are simply called ‘Empty’ (p.

8) and ‘Full’ (p.18). These chapters introduce us to two of the houses on a typical suburban street

in East London that Miller has chosen to conduct a year-long project investigating the relationship

of people and their things. The central thesis that Miller builds is that material possessions have

just as much a role in making us, as we do in making them, and subsequently, a healthy life of

material possessions equates to a happier, more fulfilled emotional life. As he states, ‘usually the

closer our relationships are with objects, the closer our relationships are with people’ (2008, p. 1).

By opening with the chapter ‘Empty’, Miller introduces the reader to George, whose flat contains

nothing at all apart from the most basic furniture and fittings. This was not through a choice of

minimalist style, but a material reflection on his emotional state and the acceptance of a seventy

six year old man who is awaiting his fate. Miller states, ‘there is a violence to such emptiness’

1

THINK

THROUGH

THINGSTHE HUMILITY OF THINGS

39


(ibid), who looks for the life of the man in his own presence for the hope that it might have

‘repopulated the space, turned this room back into a living room’ (p. 9). But it never comes, and

the disconnection that George has made with the material population of his life, reflects his

acceptance of the end of it. Even his shopping habits are dulled, driven only by the necessity to

eat. When his flat was being furnished, he did not get the privilege of any kind of interior design,

not even his support worker came on moving in day, so George was left with the seconds and

leftovers of furniture and carpet that produce an un-gratifying mismatch of styles and materials

that have already lived a life of use.

The example is stark and, much to Miller’s distress, not exaggerated. The impact is felt when he

contrasts it with the following chapter ‘Full’ (p. 18), in which the ‘the curtain opens on a scene

from The Nutcracker; a lounge and drawing-room resplendent with Christmas decorations’

(ibid). This is the scene of the Clarke family Christmas, one of the hundred households used

for Miller’s study, who share the same street with George. The family Christmas is a time

where the family’s ‘series of collections’ (p. 24) that populate the house come into play - the

‘Christmas ornaments’ along with the ‘Meccano sets, clocks and glass’ (p. 24). It is the care and

nurturing with which the family handles, plays with and displays their various collections that is

most striking for Miller as he equates this attention to objects with the moral and social well

being of the family in their relationships with each other and those they come in contact with.

By spending a prolonged period of time with the family, Miller recognises how the multitude of

object collections that populate their lives intersect and inflect the family’s collective memories

and sense of themselves as a unit as he records and reports the ‘ways persons become objects

40


of care and objects become subjects of relationships’ (p. 31). The family’s collections of objects

become the material points of orientation for collective memories and the cohesion of the group

as family in the first place.

These two portraits set the background for the expansion of a central notion of Miller’s work,

the ‘humility of things’ (2005, p. 5). He claims that this is not based on considering objects simply

as material ‘artifacts’ that evidence the existence of particular affects, but in how the material

presence of objects act as a frame or trigger that makes possible the immaterial existence of

thought and emotion, and ultimately contributes to the construction of self. This engages with

the idea that the activity of objects is that they do not just merely account for something that

has happened - in the case of the Clarke family’s accumulated collection of Christmas lights that

has been passed between generations (2008, p. 28) - or empirically evidencing that something is

currently happening - the Christmas tree in the Clarke family living room - but that the objects

also work actively in creating and then transforming the occurrence of thought and emotion.

Miller ascribes a level of ‘humility’ on the part of the objects to this process in that they appear

to operate beyond our conscious viewing of them as inert material things. Miller states that they

‘determine what takes place to the extent that we are unconscious of their capacity to do so’

(2005, p. 5), and therefore, the most intimate level of encounter with the objects occurs most

potently when we do not see them. He states:

They work generally as background, as that which frames behaviors and atmosphere, and they do this job best when they are not noticed. You complement the painting; you are not supposed to notice the frame. You tell a woman she is beautiful, not only that her make-up is brilliant. You comment that the room has atmosphere, but you don’t just

41


discuss the wallpaper. Objects are artful; they hide their power to determine the way you feel.”

(2008, p. 163)

According to Miller, this works because the objects create a setting that ‘make us aware of what

is appropriate and inappropriate’ (2010, p. 50) and thus constructs not only cultural norms

but also social and moral relationships that function within them. This setting is most effective

when we are not directly conscious of it operating, or at least underestimating its ability to do

so, ‘precisely because we do not see them. The less we are aware of them, the more powerfully

they can determine our expectations … without being open to challenge’ (ibid). It is the

capacity of things to function unchallenged that gives them such potency in the construction

and maintenance of individuals and broader cultural clusters. In fact we can argue that, more

than our own accumulated social and cultural memories of how we should behave in certain

circumstances, it is in fact the objects that guide our sense of ‘what is appropriate’ (p. 82) in

any given situation.

Miller draws upon Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1975) and E.M Gombrich’s Sense of Order

(1979) to formulate this theory, in which the impact of the setting can be read in this way of

establishing and maintaining social, cultural and political affects. From Goffman, Miller draws the

idea that much of our behavior is initiated by expectation based on the frames that constitute

the context of social action. Here he recalls the example that we do not charge upon the

stage to rescue the actress playing Desdemona because we understand the conventional

42


frames of enacted theatrical presentation in organizing our behavior. In this respect, it is the

intersecting frames of social conventions that act upon us. We might define these conventions as

learnt behaviors that might apply not only to how humans interact within a particular situation,

but also the properties of objects, like buildings, streets, or rubbish bins, that constitute the frames

in which we interact. It might be said that objects embody behavior at their point of conception

and construction and are then transformed and adapted depending on how their social stock is

measured and understood and how they relate and connect within the world of things in which

they find themselves. The impact of these inherent and transformative behaviors in both humans

and objects, but most importantly, as Miller states, ‘the cues that tell us how to interpret behavior

are usually unconscious’ (2010, p. 49). We might only become aware of the activity of the framing

structures when they are ruptured or transformed - when someone jumps up onto the stage to

rescue Desdemona.

Miller uses Gombrich’s Sense of Order to nuance the notion of the ‘appropriateness’ of the frame

to suggest the particular effect or impact of the thing it contains or the action that it initiates.

Gombrich focuses not on the work of art but on the frame that surrounds it. He argues, as Miller

confirms, ‘when a frame is appropriate we simply don’t see it, because it seamlessly conveys to

us the mode by which we should encounter that which it frames’ (ibid). Therefore it is only when

the frame becomes inappropriate do we even recognise it as a frame. As Miller suggests, in the

case of art, it could be argued that it is in fact the frame itself that constitutes the artwork or that

defines it as such.

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The reach of the ‘humility of things’ is extensive: across all contexts of encountering objects.

How many objects, day-to-day, remain ‘invisible and unremarked upon’ (p. 50), and guide

responses not only as individual things in themselves, but also as part of the wider composition

that constitute the setting of objects in that space? The material context of a theatre building,

for example, consists of multiple intersecting sets of objects. The first set maintains the cultural

normality of the theatre as a place where theatre, as an activity, happens. These include the

seats and lights as well as the tables and chairs of the theatre foyer and the glasses of wine

that are consumed before hand. These objects function invisibly to prime the audience for

what they might expect or how they might behave in an appropriate manner before the event

happens. The second set is the objects that are brought into the space, theatre props that are

utilised to represent the world of the play. These objects often join this first set of objects to

maintain the theatrical context of the event – they look like they belong in the theatre and do

not disrupt the cloak of invisibility that the first set maintains. This is how the ‘humility of things’

might be productive for the theatre maker. In Kantor’s theatre, as I will argue, the second set of

objects did not work by normalizing the theatre event, but appearing as human-object hybrids.

They were not invisible to the audience in this respect and subsequently remarked upon in

reaction to the other materials present around the stage space. The audience was aware of the

humility of the objects when they appeared in inhuman form.

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For a true collector all of an object’s background participates in a magical encyclopaedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object

(Walter Benjamin, 1992, p. 62)

If the ‘humility of things’ is the broader setting in which objects effect action through their

disappearance – ‘object biography’ could be considered as a means of deconstructing how each

individual object operates within the context, composition or assemblage, in which it is found.

This reaches beyond the material conditions from where it is found and extends the setting into

the greater set of associations and connections that the object maintains within the network

in which it operates. As Nigel Thrift claims ‘…objects are mutually referential: behind each tool

are legions of other tightly interlaced tools. Tools do not function as individual objects, but as

distributed networks taking in a range of objects which act as manifold contexts’ (2008, p. 160),

in which he alludes to a Latour’s conception of the ‘actant’. The notion of the ‘object biography’

was proposed by Igor Kopytoff in his article ‘The cultural biography of things: commoditization as

process’ (1986) and published as part of a wider study into the interfaces and interactions of the

social contracts between people and objects in Arjun Appadurai’s The Social life of Things (1988).

Kopytoff ’s idea is to consider the object beyond the material and objective reality of how we

might observe its role and function in a particular culture, but to think of the object as embodying

its own complex set of intersecting biographies that it carries with it, and that humans carry in

the potential to unlock. If it is accepted that humans have multiple biographies, the immaterial

OBJECT BIOGRAPHY

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– ‘psychological, professional, political, familial, economic and so forth’ (Kopytoff, 1988, p. 68)

- and material - evidenced by scars, tattoos, or bodily transformation, for Kopytoff, objects

are ‘similarly partial’ (ibid) to an embodied biographical profile. These profiles are embedded

and entwined, not just with individual human biographies, but also within the vast networks

of manufacture, exchange, movement, destruction, preservation and the telling of historical

narratives of social and cultural configurations.

Kopytoff warns of the complexity of the task that confronts the anthropologist who attempts

to ‘read’ the cultural biography of an object in this manner as the multiple biographies in which

it is implicated may, or may not be ‘culturally informed’ (p. 68). He states, what would make

a biography cultural is not ‘what it deals with, but how, and from what perspective’ (ibid). For

example, an object’s ‘economic biography’ would be manifested differently if it was culturally

or technically informed. The notion of the biography, seen partly as a ‘metaphor’ (Gosden and

Marshall, 1999, p. 169) in archeological theory, rather than a comprehensive study, places the

object as an entity that transforms and adapts as it moves through its life as a thing in the world.

Much like the anthropologist, and archaeologist, the theatre maker must set parameters of

questions and frames through which to write the biography of a specific object or collection.

This role is much like that of a museum curator who places the object in relation to the

theoretical and historical narratives or contexts in which they want to consider it; to the other

objects that have a relation to it within the field of those contexts; to the physical, cultural and

social space in which the object can be found; and finally, in relation to an audience or user that

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makes sense of the objects’ operation or status as a thing. To initiate this curational process a set

of questions can be asked of the object:

What, sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its ‘status’ and in the period and culture, and how are these possibilities realized?Where does the thing come from and who made it?What has been its career so far, and what are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life’, and what are the cultural markers for them?How does the thing’s use change with its age, and what happens to it when it reaches the end of its usefulness?

(Kopytoff, 1988, p 66)

When thinking of an object in terms of its biography these question start to become self-evident,

they emanate from the object itself. On a converted Routemaster bus on the main quadrangle at

UCL (University College London) in October 2009, a single object from UCL’s pathology archive

was explored as part of a mass participation project called Object Retrieval, conceived by Joshua

Sofaer and Simon Gould. The object was a toy car that had once been sucked by a four-year-old

boy to the point that all of its paint had been removed. This was thought to have led to serious

health problems from the ingestion of the lead paint on the car. The car itself had been crudely

mounted in a perspex case and deposited in the pathology archive in 1963 where it has remained

ever since. The aim of the project was to retrieve the object from its obscurity, by inviting - what

became thousands - of people to respond to it in both professional and personal ways. The aim

was to see how far the biography of an object could reach, as there were no set restrictions on

what might be mapped through the project. As a ‘researcher provocateur’ employed by the cura-

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tors of the project, I was tasked with opening up passages of enquiry for others to explore.

The results were substantial, with ‘contributions ranging from the hyper-scientific to child-

hood memories via the Gospels, Jack Kerouac, Psychoanalysis and pretty much everything in-

between’ (Gould, 2010). The lack of a set of research questions leads to the object suggesting

them itself - we started from the object and return to it everyday. The partial biography of the

car that we started to form was, like that of a person, one that shifted and transformed as the

network of connections expanded. The object did not offer certainties, but a retransformation,

a shifting of its identity through context. As Kopytoff states:

The biography of things in complex societies reveals a similar pattern. In the homogenized world of commodities, an eventful biography of a thing becomes the story of various singularizations of it, of classifications and reclassifications in an uncertain world of categories whose importance shifts with every minor change in context. As with persons, the drama here lies in the uncertainties of valuation and of identity.

(Kopytoff, 1988, p. 90)

The exercise of ‘object biography’ is therefore not to try and distill the object into a clear

set of properties or essential definitions, but to play out the ‘singular stories’ as the object

shifts in perception - coming into contact with other objects that formulate the setting of

encounter with it. The toy car became the centre point of a network of singular classifications,

anecdotes and multidisciplinary accounts of how we might locate this single items within the

vast networks in which it is found.

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The questions that emanate from the object might be thought of as a form of object affordance.

In Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things (2011) Steven Connor talks about the magical

animation possibilities that are proposed to us by banal everyday objects. For Connor, these

objects, such as bags, batteries, keys, and rubber bands, become magical through the invitation

towards animation that they present. In contemporary society these types of objects have

become tactile activation devices that make other activities possible - such as turning on a toy or

the opening of a door. They conceal and transport mobile phones and laptops; or keep idle hands

occupied as they fidget whilst thinking. These relationships are not just incidental in the wider

scheme of everyday business, but are critical components in the perpetual self-assurance of what

it is to be human - as triggers for the imagination, and the well being of daydreams.

Connor claims that the invitation of these types of objects, and indeed all objects, comes from

their particular ‘affordances’ (2011, p. 2), a term he borrows from the psychologist J.J.Gibson.

These begin with how the objects ‘hold out certain very specific kinds of physical invitation to

us, often involving an angle of approach or physical address’ (p. 3). Man-made objects may have

intentionality built into their design – providing the user with clues towards how it is to be held

or operated. As Donald Norman states, ‘knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into.

Balls are for throwing or bouncing’ (2002, p. 433). These are clear affordances but with more

AFFORDANCE

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complex or elusive objects, they are not necessarily self-evident. This is because the term refers

simultaneously to the ‘perceived and actual properties of the thing’ (p. 422), which do not always

correlate or appear to the user of the object. Affordances can therefore be false or contradictory;

they can subvert expectations or lead to unexpected outcomes. In these instances, paradoxically,

the false affordance becomes part of the affordance of the object itself. In object design, where

the notion of affordance is most obviously utilised, it is seen as the job of the designer to eradiate

the possibility of false affordance in the operation of the object. The answer, according to Norman,

is to make the right things about an object visible so that the object indicates to the user how it

functions and sets them on a logical path of operation. This ‘visibility indicates the mapping between

intended actions and actual operations’ (p. 410), the gap between the perceived and the actual

is made as close as possible. When this relationship is successful, the object becomes absorbed

into our daily practices, much like Miller’s humility framework. A clearly defined set of affordances

renders the object invisible through framing or operational ease, a notion that Norman refers to

as a ‘psychology of causality’ (p. 433) that attaches itself to well-designed things, like the smooth

opening of an automatic door or the pouring of a teapot.

Connor wishes to reopen the gap between the perceived and the actual, extending the perception

of his ‘magical things’ beyond a causality of use, and think about how they also possess a kind of

indeterminate affordance ‘making them seem in various ways excessive to the ordinary or assigned

uses […] irresistible and yet also so seemingly open’ (2011, p. 3). Bags, batteries, and rubber bands,

according to Connor, ‘invite a kind of practical reverie, a kind of floating out of their implied reach’

(p. 4). This sensation is realised when they are played or fiddled with. It is this challenge, between

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what we might call the affordances as actual action possibilities and affordances as perceived

action possibilities, moving towards what might be defined as the theatrical affordance of objects.

Until the advent of digital culture, working with objects had a tendency to slow things down: with an object passion, you had to make the time to take your time.

(Sherry Turkle, 2009, p. 303)

Objects, like animals, have a rhythm and a time signature all of their own - objects have a speed.

This notion is concurrent with Bryant’s questioning of our tendency to project a representation

of time onto how the object is acting. As Connor points out, ‘we feel ourselves to be the subjects

of time, whereas things seem merely subject to it’ (2011, p. 7). The consequence of this perception

is ‘that we persuade ourselves we are essentially on the side of time, while things, by contrast,

inhabit the domain of space’ (ibid). It can be argued however that it is actually objects that mark

and dictate the passing of time not only through their material condition but also the speed at

which they can be used. In the first instance, this is dictated by the molecular mass of the object

and how it behaves in accordance to the laws of physics. A boulder will move at the speed at

which it is pushed but dependent on its physical surrounds - if it is on an incline etc. In this respect

we can understand that the object is constantly shifting at levels not perceptible to us without

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scientific study, even though this action manifests itself at the level we perceive it.

Although the immediate material reality of the object is clear in examples of ‘simple’ objects

such as boulders and feathers, it is only when we meet objects that have a more complex set

of affordances that we start to encounter a more nuanced notion of an object’s occupation

of time. Sherry Turkle introduces the term ‘object speed’ (2009, p. 303) to discuss how we

encounter technology. She cites the lesson of a young scientist and ‘how analog objects

corrected his digital sensibility’ (ibid) through the speed at which they dictated his working

processes and reflection. She states that, ‘digital photography gives him the fantasy that he

can capture and manage nature’ (ibid), a familiar sensation in the world of iphones and the

instagram, giving instant manipulation and neatly organised folders where images can be sent

to others and grouped together, to get these effects and to see the results, which used to

take time. The Holga plastic camera, used by the young scientist, ‘inspires resourcefulness’, it is

‘humbling’, and ‘slows him down’ (ibid). The result is that instead of instilling an expectancy onto

the technology, analogue objects do what they do at a speed they dictate. The user enters into

a contract with the object understanding that that is what it does. Objects that stop you or

slow you down, also give you time to think.

The affect of these encounters with an object’s inherent time signature is influential on how we

mark and come to terms with mortality and the tricks and comforts of memory. As Connor

suggests:

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Things also provide an indispensable adjunct to our sense of emergence and elapsing, duration and disappearance, forgetting and recall. Precisely because we feel ourselves to be made of time, we need the solidifying supplements of things to mark and grasp its passage. Things provide the relay through which we are able to tick time off, to bring it home to ourselves.

(2011, p. 7)

This notion would explain our need to mark the passing of the dead with sturdy and ‘everlasting’ materials in the form of tombs and gravestones, or the peculiar sense of history that is experienced when walking around an archaeological site or a museum that contain antique objects and the experience of time we have when we occupy these spaces: ‘the degree of resistance put up by things; the longer and more stubbornly things hold out against it, the more sluggishly time will seem to pass’ (ibid). These things, through a combination of their irresistible materiality, marks of age and use, their affordance as historical as well as utilitarian items, and their framing relation to the objects that surround them (museum cabinets, labels or lighting) dictate the experience of time in their presence.

…we cannot philosophize from raw first principles but must follow objects in action and describe what we see.

(Graham Harman, 2010, p. 14)

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According to Latour, the ‘actant’ is the indivisible characteristic of all things, human and

nonhuman, because ‘nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from

anything else, everything may be allied to everything else’ (1988, p. 163). Nonhuman entities –

objects – can be considered differently to how they might be conventionally categorized, not

‘mere images hovering before the human mind, not just crusty aggregates atop an objective

stratum of real microparticles, and not sterile abstractions imposed on a pre-individual flux

or becoming’ (Harman, 2010, p. 6), instead, Latour considers objects, as ‘actants’, as powerful

autonomous entities in their own right and not objective and controllable as it might be

conventionally understood. Every ‘actant’ is only identified by an ability to create effects and

alliances with other ‘actants’. In this respect, every ‘actant’ survives at various levels of success

and failure (winners and losers) within the particular network that they can be found, so

everything operates on the same ontological footing. According to Harman, the result of

Latour’s thinking is that ‘real inanimate objects are responsible for constructing facts no less

than are power-hungry humans’ (p. 11) and subsequently avoiding the ‘tiresome strife between

objective physical matter and subjective social force’ (p.13).

According to Latour the failure to take the nonhuman seriously has resulted in factures in social

organization. In his essay, ‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane

Artifacts’ (1992) he questions the attempts of sociologists to read human interactions and

constructed moralities by trying to identify ‘social links sturdy enough to tie all of us together

or for moral laws that would be inflexible enough to make us behave properly’ (2009, p. 230).

This attention to direct human-to-human social links results in a substantial gap for Latour

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consisting of ‘soft humans and weak moralities’ (ibid) and hence any attempt at a re-composition

of society, based on these anthropocentric readings and understandings of it, results in further

decomposition and morally questionable advancement. Latour likens the sociologists dilemma

to that of cosmologists who are questioned because certain physicists claim that there is not

enough mass in the universe to balance out their own accounts of it. The sociologists’, according

to Latour have a similar quest to discover the ‘missing mass’ (p. 231) at the centre of their

enquiries in the hope of transforming and impacting upon the success of how humans seek to

organize themselves and act towards each other. The answer to this dilemma is, for Latour, self

evident, as he sets out the tasks that lie ahead for a new approach to sociology and the political

and ethical implications that it carries:

To balance our accounts of society, we simply have to turn our exclusive attention away from humans and look also at nonhumans. Here they are, the hidden and despised social masses who make up our morality. They knock at the door of sociology, requesting a place in the accounts of society as stubbornly as the human masses did in the nineteenth century. What our ancestors, the founders of sociology, did a century ago to house the human masses in the fabric of social theory, we should do now to find a place in a new social theory for the nonhuman masses that beg us for understanding.

(ibid)

What follows is a set of enquires that attempt to ‘fill in the gaps’ in the social mass by considering

the agency and activity of various mundane artifacts within the social networks that they operate.

These enquiries, like much of Latour’s writing, are presented as self-contained acts in a grander

narrative. He states, ‘we will speak only in terms of scripts or scenes or scenarios, or set ups’ that

are subsequently ‘played by human or nonhuman ‘actants’ which may be figurative or nonfigurative’

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(p. 251). The performative metaphors that Latour draws upon, not least the role of ‘actors’ in

his work, but his reading of objects as events, or what Harman describes as ‘not a substance,

but a performance’ (2010, p. 44), is deliberately employed to give an anthropomorphism to

inanimate objects with what we might conventionally regard to be exclusively human traits. For

Latour, anthropomorphism is not simply a projection of human characteristics onto something

nonhuman but it can be claimed to be, as the etymology of the word, ‘antropos and morphos

together mean either that which has human shape or that which gives shape to humans’ (2009,

p. 237). This form of anthropomorphism might be claimed for different types of objects. As

Latour describes the argument for an anthropomorphic door spring that closes a door because,

it is ‘made by humans’; it ‘substitutes the actions of people and is a delegate that permanently

occupies the position of a human’; and thirdly ‘it shapes human action by prescribing back

what sort of people should pass through the door’ (ibid). These performative traits that seem

so bound up with notions of representation and pretending that serves to confirm Latour’s

proposition of the agency of all things.

This methodological approach, as a means of talking about specific ‘actants’ in the context

in which they operate is consistent with Harman’s proposal to simply follow the object and

describe what it does. To place the object’s activity and subsequent analysis within the scene or

set up in which it plays a part is perhaps the key to unlocking the particular effects of the wider

social interaction or moment of the network in which it is situated. Follow the life of the object

and you will expose the ‘missing mass’ at the heart of the social context in which it is situated.

It is possible to adopt this as a strategy for encountering objects so that ‘every time you want

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to know what a nonhuman does, simply imagine what other humans or nonhumans would have

to do were the character not present’ (p. 232). Take the hinge of a door again. If it was not present,

or ceased to operate as intended, the door would be jammed shut and either keep the inhabitants

of the building inside, or keep others out. What emerges is ‘a scale where tiny efforts balance out

mighty weights’ (ibid) where the extent of leverage afforded by the nonhuman ‘actants’ within the

network it describes is visible. The level of effect that the hinge has on the network of the building,

or institution in which it operates has considerably more impact than initially appears, and it

works both ways. It solves the problem of access but if it breaks down and keeps the door from

shutting it risks heat escaping or allowing enemies to enter. Locate the impact of the activity of

the hinge within its multiple network connections, the door frame, the lock and key, the wall, etc.

and what emerges is a plane of effects existing as an apparatus (network) in which the individual

‘actants’ come together and move apart in constant movement.

The ‘actant’, like the invisible frame of humility, the biography of things, and the affordance and

speed of objects, focus on the everyday use of objects in the anticipation of drawing them into the

theatrical frame. What these means of encounter suggest is that we can position objects so that

they ‘do not just constitute an extension of bodily capacities; they themselves are a vital element

in distributed ecology of thought’ (Thrift, 2008, p. 59). Objects provide vitality to an encounter as

participants in the activity of human life. They make and break the frame of invisibility that sets

the context for social conventions; they hold within them signals of biographical strands; they have

affordances that speak irresistibly; and they have agency in the contexts in which they are found.

As Thrift continues, ‘…not only do objects make thought do-able (e.g. Latour) but they also very

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often make thought possible. In a sense, then, as parts of networks of effectively, objects think.’

(p. 60).

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This instruction is about devising strategies for locating and selecting objects in three contexts. It

asks the questions: Why do we choose one object above another? What is it about an object that

suggests itself? How do we find stuff?

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A Note on Process

When selecting objects for making, there are two obvious approaches. First, identifying a

structure or idea, from a text for example, as a set of instructions from which to select

the items needed. This is the conventional domain of the prop master and the play text

– the objects as supporting elements to the drama – and is central in understanding

the relation between the immaterial domain of the idea and the material domain of the

object that helps to realise it. The second is the inversion of this, starting with the objects

themselves as the originators of an idea and then used as ways of moving towards

building a structure that will become the work. The reality is often a combination of the

two; the idea/structure initiates a feedback loop in which the objects are incorporated,

a process of transformation between idea and object. The question is how to manage

this exchange, allowing the feedback loop to move the process towards performance.

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All objects are possible agents in the making process, an infinite number of things that can be

chosen. All of these objects hold an equal possibility of being used; there is nothing that is out

of bounds. This approach can be aligned with the OOP or OOO (object-orientated-ontology)

favored by Bryant in The Democracy of Objects (2010). As I have previously outlined; he sets

out a form of ‘flat-ontology’ that Ian Bogost summarises as being one in which ‘all things equally

exist, yet they do not exist equally’ (2012, p. 276). This is what we might call a posthumanist

ontology in which the human is an ‘object amongst objects’, where they ‘no longer monarchs of

being, but are instead among beings, entangled in beings, and implicated in other beings’ (Bryant

in Bogost, 2012, p. 389). The attachments made with objects form hierarchies of separation, as

part of a product of relations between objects - human and nonhuman in form, so that ‘one

object is simultaneously part of another object and an independent object in its own right’ (p.

522), they are independent from their constituent parts while remaining dependent on them.

The implication of this approach can help orientate the search for objects, as Bogost clarifies:

Bryant has suggested that flat-ontology can unite the two worlds, synthesizing the human and the nonhuman into a common collective. An ontology is flat if it makes no distinction between the types of things that exist but treats all equally, the spirit behind the name Bryant gives his OOO theory, ‘The democracy of objects’.

(p. 393)

A flat ontological approach allows the possibility of using everything and anything in the making

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process. Everything holds the possibility to be resonant in the attempt to transform it and it, in

turn, transforms the particular context it is engaged with.

What an object-orientated-ontology proposes in the constant interaction of objects to meet,

entangle, and produce new ones. Bognost talks about this process in terms of the interaction

and destiny of being that is constantly active and ‘promiscuous, always touching everything else,

unconcerned with differentiation. Anything is thing enough to party’ (p. 548). This is comprehensible

as a diagram of the existence of objects but it leaves the task of trying to comprehend the scale

and complexity of the entanglements; is a system of classification possible to navigate this terrain?

Or is the attempt revealing enough to uncover specific meeting points that can enable choice?

Jean Baudrillard’s System of Objects (1968) is one attempt. In the opening remarks of his book,

he lays out the task (with reference to the multiple questions asked of an object) and alludes to

the processes of transformation that all objects are engaged in, prefiguring the OOO position:

There are almost as many criteria of classification as there are objects themselves: the size of the object; its degree of functionality (i.e. the object’s relationship to its own objective function); the gestures associated with it (are they rich or imporverished? traditional or not?); its form; its duration; the time of day at which it appears (more or less intermittent presence, and how conscious one is of it); the material that it transforms (obvious in the case of a coffee grinder, less so in those of a mirror, a radio, or a car – though every object transforms something)…

(Baudrillard, 2005, p. 1)

‘Every object is open to use’ and ‘every object transforms’ can be taken as starting points. Placing

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hierarchies and structures onto the choosing of objects are done knowingly, in the moments

that the perception of entanglements and subsequent transformations are made. These might

include the cultural, social, historical, political and economic attachments and significations that

materialise in moments of exchange. In these moments, when confronted with the multiple

entanglements of objects, as Kopytoff (1988) suggests, drawing them out as singular stories,

rather than trying to conflate the multiple strands, allows the affordance and speed of the

object to suggest itself as it continues its journey of constant transformation with the other

objects it encounters.

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The Economy of Making

I am making my work with limited financial resources, working between a studentship and

the modest commissions from venues and producers that come with work of this nature.

This economy of making dictates the kind of objects and materials that are available and

therefore this context can be read through the materiality, and action, of the work itself.

What follows is a searching through contexts that are dictated by circumstance, an example

of how the objects that are around in a particular place, at a particular time can lead the

ideas, rather than the idea simply suggesting the objects. The choice to search for objects in

the following contexts is not a political choice as it might be in the traditions of art that uses

poor or found objects – readymades – in the works of Dada, Fluxus, and Performance Art.

The use of these kinds of objects has lost the aesthetic impact that it once had: the political

gesture is subdued; there is no intent towards the ‘denunciation of consumerism’ or act of

‘protest and provocation’ (Vergine, 2007, p. 10) in their inclusion. This does not mean that the

objects lose any political viscosity through their familiarity in the art-making context but the

nature of the political impact has changed. It is one of the possible strands of entanglements

that can be explored.

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Since Duchamp’s readymades, the artistic boundaries between the specialized fabricated

object and the everyday thing have dissolved. There is a familiarity with the items seen in art

galleries and on the contemporary stage, and it is for the maker to make them strange or

familiar, to establish the set-up that animates them. There is still potency in the appearance of

familiar or personal objects that are picked up from the house to be used in this way through

the possibility of recognition.

For Richard Wentworth, this relationship is the foundation of his work. Andrea Schlieker

claims that his use of familiar domestic objects and ‘waste’ from our consumer culture has

the uncanny affect of extending ‘our associations to a fund of collective memory’ (1993, p. 7).

There is peculiar matter of fact logic to how the objects are placed and adapted in relation to

each other, forging new alliances in a new frame. The objects are not specialized but archetypal,

they are individually specific but stand for mass categories, like ‘chair’, ‘ball’, and ‘basket’. Their

individual biographies are tied to these categories as simultaneously standing for and being there.

Marina Warner articulates this condition as if the objects appear from a ‘ghost house’ (1993,

p. 9) - they are not conventional ready-mades, but ‘ready-mades of the imagination’ (ibid).

She refers to Wentworth’s phrase of the objects appearing as if drawn from the imagination

of how a child might conceive of a house, pushing the idea of the “phantom trace” (ibid) of

the archetype into our encounter. Almost everything taken from the home or garden comes

loaded with this archetypal status.

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DESK

The toy is the physical embodiment of the fiction: it is a device for fantasy, a point of beginning for narrative.

(Susan Stewart, 2005, p. 56)

Sitting at my desk, plugged into my computer, trying to think; think of ideas for a performance;

to think of how all this connects – my eyes wander to the objects that surround me…

I have set out here to see what the objects on a section of this table … might suggest to me, what they might spontaneously awaken in me in describing them: the way Sherlock Holmes, starting out with a single object, could solve a crime.

(Daniel Spoerri, 1995, p. 23)

Daniel Spoerri’s Anecdoted Topography of Chance (1962 – 1995) considers the specific items

on a section of his table as a means of building a multiple layered ‘topography’ of anecdotal

information - about, or related to, the objects in question. Like a response to the notion of

Kopytoff ’s ‘object biography’, Spoerri and his invited friends think through the object as a

means of recall and extrapolation, not to try and establish some kind of truth or knowing of

the object, but to use it as a pivot from which to reflect and expand upon its relation to the

world: a form of poetic affordance and what is the most instantiations and instinctive forms

of animation. His topography was built and expanded upon over a several decades and the

responses and reconfiguration of the individual, which is testament to the persistence of the

archetype and the clustering of personalized responses that attach themselves to them.

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Of the ninety-seven plus items in Spoerri’s topography, I have twenty-eight identical or equivalent

objects on my desk. I live in a similar flat to that in which Spoerri lived, where my workspace is

in the same room as my living and eating space. This set-up encourages a different array of items

to attract themselves to the top the desk. My roll of tape, number sixty three on Spoerri’s list, is

also used to wrap up ‘surprise packages’ (p. 172) for birthdays, yet it has also accompanied me to

the set up of many of my experimental machines, joining gaffa, masking, and electrical tape in the

solving of instances of sticking strings or a temporary holding of an object up in the air – ready

for release. Many of the objects on my desk hold multiple connections of this manner. I like to

have them here when I write about the practice or conceive of new ideas.

Like Spoerri’s ‘small plastic pyramids’ (p. 117) – three hundred and forty of them - that illustrate

an idea for a ‘mobile architecture’ (ibid) that is specific to a piece of his work, I have a collection

of small objects that have been kept from my machines or have been bought for future ones.

These totemic toys are reassuring. They remind me that the things happened, that I did it or that

by accumulating them, the process of the new work is making progress.

Some things I found there:

A 00 gauge models of a bandA small rubber mouseFalse teethA plastic doll’s eyeA plaster dogA broken figurine

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LOFT/SHED/GARAGE

I am walking through the hallway of a semi-detached house in the suburbs of Bristol. It belongs

to my eighty-five year old grandfather. He has lived here since I was a child. I used to spend

half-term holidays here with my brother and very little has changed in the past twenty or so

years since my grandmother died. The objects and décor have remained exactly the same, or

at least I think so; an ornament of a green rabbit; a longhaired rug; a faded wicker chair. These

were the scenes of great battles between plastic army men and epic races with toy cars, the

eating of marsh mallow flumps and fun-sized Mars bars. Suddenly I am taken off guard by a

new object in the living room: an Apple iMac computer. A large record player that used to sit

on the side has been removed to make way for it.

There is a curious habit of moving belongings into different stages of display and storage within

the home. When they are new, objects are put somewhere that is pride of place, on a mantle-

piece, a shelf, or up on a wall. As Connor has suggested, new things (even if they are old, such

as antiques) help to mark the passage of time and keep a sense of the contemporary, so that

there remains a sensation of moving forward. This sensation is perhaps most immediate when

we visit a relative’s house and find objects that we remember from when we were there a long

time ago; these types of objects have an even greater impact when they still occupy the same

place that they did in memory, or when they are replaced or moved to the side to be replaced

by a newer, starkly different object, such as an iMac computer. When they have served their

purpose, when then start to remind us to readily of the passing of time, they get moved to a

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different space depending on the priorities of the occupier, as Miller found in the The Comfort of

Things. From inside the rooms of the house the next phase is often for objects to be relocated to

the loft. The loft is a place usually reserved for the objects that are deemed to have a degree of

sentimental attachment or objects that are brought out periodically, things that we might want to

keep for posterity such as our childhood toys and boxes of photograph albums. These are things

that no longer hold a place for us out on display, things that we are undecided about, things that

we might regret throwing out.

The next step for these objects is the shed or the garage. They share these spaces with the

tools, bikes and half-used tins of paint. These spaces, like the spare room, are part of the support

systems for the smooth running of the house - larger versions of cupboards and containers to

hide away clutter and are often only visited when we need to retrieve something. These spaces

are like what Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts might call part of the private edgelands

of our suburban lives, ‘not meant to be seen, except …as a backdrop our most routine and

mundane activities’ (Farley and Roberts, 2012, p. 184). They function as reminders, just by being

present, of the recent past and how this has been moved beyond. They function to neatly edit out

the messiness of the everyday, as in-between spaces, ‘a place of coming and going’ (Akiko Busch,

1999, p. 149), that hold possessions in readiness to be reconnected contemporary life - back in

the house or pasted on to the car-boot sale, the junk shop, or the rubbish tip.

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Some things I found there…

A sweeping brushA drum kitA reel-to-reel record playerA box of fake figurinesA desk lampAn electric fireA footballA box of toy figuresA carrier bag of bowling trophiesA broken amplifier

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PLACE 2: THE JUNK SHOP2

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The Demiurge was in love with consummate, superb, and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash. We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness and inferiority of material.

(Bruno Schulz,1988, p. 41)

I was drawn to objects that seemed to emerge into the daylight from dusty attics, moldy sheds, damp garages and, most of all, the junk shops along Cowbridge Road. I liked the patina, the sense of use and purpose, the scars and markings of an object well used, of functionality and distress; objects abandoned, discarded, rejected and forlorn

(Richard Gough, 2006, p. 13)

I now move from the objects that have had some personal attachment – a set of associations or

memories - into the wider world of the junk shop, the reclamation yard and the car-boot sale.

These sites are places where objects sit in-between. These are objects that have had a conscious

decision made about their fate, moving from house - to garage - to junk shop. In these places

objects suggest their histories of use, abuse and love. There is always something uncanny about

the moment at the car-boot sale that a toy on a table is something that you also had when you

were young. The identical toy to your own but always slightly different: a faded section of plastic

or a sticker missing that you remember was there on your own. To stop and pick it up opens up

associations of connections with other toys and places that it was played with. Or perhaps the

encounter is with a toy that was wanted but could never be afforded. It is remembered only in

desire and the longing to have it. Or perhaps it is a toy never seen before, from a different era, or

a different culture, only familiar through its obvious form as a toy on the folding table.

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Specificity and Surprise

Walking into a junk shop there are two broad categories that I keep in mind: specificity

and surprise. Specificity refers to an object or objects that I am looking to fulfill a

particular purpose and surprise refers to those moments of encounter where an object

unexpectedly suggests itself as holding a practical or poetic possibility.

Specific objects might be a clearly defined such as a chair, a record player, a toolbox, or an

object that might be able to work in a mechanism such as ‘something heavy’ or ‘something

with a handle’. These types of objects are not only considered for their practical function in

the set-up but also for the material relation they have to the overall quality, colour, texture,

and form of the other objects already selected for the task. These choices are often

mundane and unsensational. Hundreds of them will be made unintentionally whenever

setting about designing or experimenting with a group of objects. From my notebook:

Browsing the shelves of Steptoes Market in Exeter I come across a number of toolboxes. I know instantly the one I will select. It is simply because of the size, colour and metal material. It looks like a ‘classic’ toolbox. The handles are intact and the size complements the other objects I have chosen for the piece.

The browsing of the shelves or aisles of a junk shop is like scanning the eye across an

intricate composition. Significant objects extend out of the assemblage from amongst the

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other objects around it – the general noise or, again, the invisible ‘humility of things’, secure

in their familiarity or to construct the atmosphere – the indicators that define the social

dynamics of a space. The context is significant. Many junk shops group similar items together:

furniture, ornaments, toys, records, electrical items and so on. These arrangements of objects

require a scanning of the shelves to make decisions about the items quickly, to get to the

ones that will be selected.

In these moments of browsing for something specific there is an interest drawn to a

particular thing. These surprise objects appear in two ways. Firstly, they are objects that

suggest themselves strongly by evoking an idea. These types of objects might initiate a

performance action: when I first saw an old air pump, for example, there was an instinctive

desire to attach things to it. Or an object might trigger an idea as you make a connection

between it and another object, text, sound or space: a coffee grinder, for instance, performs

an action that can be used in relation to other objects that make noise. It offers a relation

that can achieve a certain action. It is in these moments that thinking through objects can be

applied, registering and reordering objects for their potential theatricality.

Secondly, it might happen when an object becomes foregrounded from amongst what

Graham Harman might call the ‘black noise’ of peripheral objects. This quality is ‘not a white

noise of screeching, chaotic qualities demanding to be shaped by the human mind, but

rather a black noise of muffled objects hovering at the fringes of our attention’ (Harman in

Bognost, 2012, p. 743). For Bognost in particular, to move towards a flat ontology requires

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an attempt:

…to make the resonant frequencies of the stuffs inside them hum in credibly satisfying ways. Our job is to write the speculative fictions of their processes […] Our job is to get our hands dirty with grease, juice, gunpowder, and gypsum. Our job is to go where everyone has gone before, but where few have bothered to linger.

(2012, p. 777)

The aim is to ‘write’ the speculative fiction of the object as it gravitates towards the

particular assemblage or apparatus that is being constructed. Peripheral objects can

become theatrical through their animation in this way. Dust, ketchup, crisps, and broken

toy figures all have the capacity to surprise in this way. At the point of finding them, an

openness to spend time researching and playing will allow them to present themselves

and it is in the set-up and activation of these objects in the machine where these things

will find a place in the dramaturgy.

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THE THEATRICAL UNCANNY

The object’s theatricality, in Fried’s sense, as an affect that is generated through our encounter, a co-

creation between object and viewer that sets in motion a particular set of feelings or recognitions

– creates an event. In the domain of objects in art practice, a distinctive form of this is the well-

documented terrain of the uncanny, as Sigmund Freud defined it as a hidden, familiar thing that

has ‘been repressed and now returns’ (2003, p. 147). It is, as Christopher Grunenburg points out,

not defined by Freud as belonging to the domain of the psychological but as ‘a category of the

aesthetic’ (2004, p. 57) above all it is ‘a product of the faculty of the imagination’ (ibid). The uncanny

is a sensation that combines the psychology of the viewer with the material reality of a physical

object or literary text. The uncanny belongs to a curious category of experience of something

that hurts or disturbs us, but also something that we want to keep close, like the collector of a

cabinet of curiosities (the Wunderkammer).

Mike Kelley’s seminal exhibition is perhaps the most comprehensive exploration of this idea

in an art-making context. As Kelley states, the exhibition (The Uncanny, 2004) focused on the

‘juxtaposition between of collections of objects (the Harems) with an investigation of the uncanny

through realist figurative sculpture’ (p. 7), which was organised by Kelley as a means of grouping

together objects that share an ‘uncanny quality’ (p. 26). This quality is a physical, rather than a

cognitive one for Kelley who describes it as a ‘sensation’ tied to ‘the act of remembering’ (ibid). It

is also one that is based in childhood, like the experience of meeting a familiar toy at a car-boot

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sale, it at once provokes ‘disturbing and unrecallable memories […] a confrontation between

“me” and “it” that was highly charged so much so that “me” and “it” becomes confused’ (ibid).

The familiar definition of the uncanny, or the unhomely (unheimlich), as creating a conflict of

emotion is recognised as both comfortable and familiar but also tinged with a sense of horror

or dread, a weirdness that gives you ‘goosebumps’ (ibid) because, according to Kelley, the

experience that the object can ‘not be remembered’ (ibid).

One of Kelley’s categories of selection for The Uncanny is that of the ‘the readymade and the

double’ (p. 33). For Kelley, Duchamp’s readymades are the most significant sculptural objects

of the twentieth century as they present, ‘in the simplest and concrete package, […] reality

as impossible to concretize’ (ibid). Here Duchamp ‘sculpts an object in its true material’ (ibid),

reacting against the preoccupation of art with representation whilst simultaneously reducing

the modernist idea of ‘art as materially self-referential to an absurdity’ (ibid) because once

these objects become art objects they can never return to their ‘real’ status. This, according

to Kelley, is a dematerialisation of the object: ‘they refuse to stay themselves and become

their own doppelgangers’ (ibid), setting up the problematic for all the attempts at sculpture

that follow. They are ‘the father of all time-based work […] the progenitor of everything that

traversed the slippery divide between sculpture and theatre, between what is in time and

what is out of time’ (ibid). ‘Real’ objects present us with the problem of when are they a real,

everyday object in time and when are they an illusion, an art object that exists as a concept?

This problematic is taken on by Kantor in the creation of the art objects, which he claims to

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exist in an autonomous reality of their own, aside from their function in the theatrical frame, in

order to transcend Duchamp’s proposition of the readymade. In the next chapter I contest this

claim by stating that Kantor’s objects (readymades and hybrids) are only active as art objects in

their activation within his theatre; their animation is context specific. Here, like the gallery or the

institutional context that Duchamp is challenging, the object’s vibrancy as an idea is dependent

on its function within the context for which it was conceived. In a theatre context, unlike that

of the gallery, the object is always functioning as part of a larger apparatus – it moves within the

apparatus and is animated constantly by it and so the spectators’ negotiation with the readymade

is constantly shifting. In the context of spectatorial encounter I would claim that the uncanny

could be considered as an aesthetic category that is innately theatrical. It is a sensation initiated

by something half remembered, something personal that is inextricably tied to the general.

Some things I found there…A set of Blue BoxesA Dressing TableA FigurineA Stuffed BirdA Wooden MalletAn OarSeveral Bird Cages – blue/brown/goldA Bowling BallA ToolboxA Glass decanterAn Air pumpA Stained portraitBowling shoesA Bowling BallA Broken Radio

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Missing Objects

Filling the gaps

Part of the process of finding stuff is filling in the gaps of objects that are missing. This refers

to the specificity I mentioned above, the shopping list of objects that constantly evolves

during the making process. Certain things on this list remain elusive. These instances

are where the idea precedes the object itself. The question is how to find objects if the

‘surprise’ technique is not delivering?

Professor Solomon’s How to Find Lost Objects (1993) is a simple pocket sized self-help

booklet that it is intended to help you locate lost keys or a passport. With adaptation,

a number of his principles have proven remarkably useful when you apply them to the

search for such missing objects. There is pragmatism and an openness to finding things

that apply to the techniques of searching.

It’s not lost, you are

There are no missing objects, only unsystematic searchers. (2008, p. 14)

This principle deals with the idea that maybe the object is misdirecting and not needed.

The structure of the dramaturgical idea needs reworking and can be solved this way.

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You’re Looking Right at It

Is it possible to look directly at a missing object and not see it? (p. 22)

This often happens. Being drawn back to an object it is frequently a sign that it is useful, even

if it is held in a collection to be used in the future. Sometimes taking pictures of objects and

thinking on them is particularly useful, particularly when cost and budget is a factor.

Think Back

A memory of past objects might hold the answer. Recalling material environments of the

past and writing them down can be a useful exercise. What will emerge is a list of objects

and assemblages that might help locate the missing object.

The Eureka Zone

The majority of lost objects are right where you figure—once you take a moment to stop and figure […] Others, however, are in the immediate vicinity of that place. They have undergone a displacement—a shift in location that, although minor, has served to render them invisible. (p. 36)

This principle relates to the objects rolling under things or being dropped into drawers.

This idea relates to the notion of shop owners grouping types of objects together, but also

looking inside objects to find others.

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Tail Thyself

If you still haven’t found your object, it may be time to recreate the crime. (p. 38)

This principle requires a little more adaptation; it involves moments of recreation and

reenactment. Play out the sequence or action in which the object would be involved.

Does this action tell you something about the object?

It Wasn’t You

When all else has failed, explore the possibility that your object hasn’t been misplaced. Rather, it’s been misappropriated. (p. 40)

Is the object already with here but used as/with something else? Does that object need

replicating or can it be doubled up in the process? Observe moments of misappropriation

and reflect on what they reveal.

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A good hardware shop is like a museum of object types. It is always interesting to see a shop that is created by the objects in it.

(Jasper Morrison, 2001, p. 62)

The hardware shop is the place that pulls all of the objects together. Everything in the hardware

shop has a particular purpose, a job or a function to perform in order to carry out a task. Each

object in the shop has a direct and discernible action that can be appropriated to perform all

manner of tasks and operations making other things possible. They contain bridging objects that

can form links and relations to other things by gluing, connecting expanding and transforming, like

a rack of different grade metal rods; a wall of handles, hinges and hooks; different sizes of perspex

sheeting for example. This is the place where I return to most over the years of pursuing this

enquiry. Sometimes it will be to find something specific, a missing object to make sense of an idea.

Other times it would just be to wander, to find an object or set of material that might initiate an

idea or action. The mass-produced objects enable new thinking about multiples and scale; they

initiate thoughts about repetitions and the copy. They ground the mass of objects from the home,

the loft, garage and the junk shop in a terrain that smells of fresh wood and plastic; transitional

objects that will support and frame the operation of the objects.

PLACE 3: THE HARDWARE SHOP2

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Some things I found there:

Garage Work-lightsPine Timber and Ply WoodWireHandlesHingesHose-pipeScrewsHooksEyelets

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Towards a Taxonomy of Objects

An exercise that I have developed over the process of making is to form my

own set of classifications for the objects that I collect to create a shorthand in

which to think about and place the objects in any given process.

The domestic: the familiarity of the domestic object as one that is both loaded with associations as archetypes and has a particular anti-theatricality because of its utilitarian function

The curiosity: an unusual object that is unfamiliar or has a significant feature

The anthropomorphic 1: suggestive features of a human

The anthropomorphic 2: objects that make the human – human

The zoomorphic: suggestive features of an animal/creature

The ‘Tim Burton’: battered suitcases, umbrellas fine objects that have a clear and deliberate sense of wear

The performance art cliché : rubber masks, wigs, glitter curtains, animal costumes

The adaptation: an object that suggests a means of transformation, either with another object or with a material function in an assemblage

The material: cloth, wire, chains etc. objects with function over individual form

The museum class: objects with particular cultural or historical significance

The natural: taxidermy, trees, rocks etc.

Knowing

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Getting it right

Getting the object choice right can sometimes be revealed when it functions in performance

and as part of the apparatus. There is usually an instinctive moment when an encounter with

an object is the realisation that it might be useful for a job to be done in the future. In these

instances, it is often because the object completes the idea – the thought – of the action or

gesture that is being constructed. The activity of the object, in the thought process, makes

sense of the projected dramaturgical decision that is being undertaken. The loop between

thought and object is closed. These moments of realisation often happen quickly, instinctively,

and without fanfare.

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A wrong object is an object that suggests itself strongly but actually completes a dramatic or

aesthetic trope before completing the dramaturgical idea, or functioning within the set-up. In this

instance, the object works by itself rather than as part of the composition. Clichéd performance

art objects such as stuffed animals and rubber masks can have this effect. They offer a shorthand

towards a recognisable aesthetic that has resonances with the variety act and seaside kitsch, but

these objects come loaded with associations. This does not mean that they can be defined as

being wrong in themselves but in their activity in the particular dramaturgical composition or set

up in which they are implicated. Recognising these moments is something that can only happen

as the studio practice begins. Objects will drop in and out of the process.

Not Knowing

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Bring the objects to the side of the stage

The prop storeThe loading bay

Offstage

Consider what impact and complications occur when they are drawn towards a theatrical frame

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SS13

…parts of his studio…look like premeditated still lives – quiet, fierce statements about decrepitude and time; in other parts, as if in the prop room of an abandoned film studio, or the back yard of a junk shop, stacks of oddments, of cupboards… bicycle wheels and coal shovels, funnels and folding tables defy all the laws of category and order. But they are waiting to be assigned their roles – sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t…

(Marina Warner on Richard Wentworth’s studio, 1993, p. 13)

SS13 is a small wooden container in the corner of a farm building at Ynyslas on the banks of the

river Dovey in West Wales. It is made of plywood with metal edges and has a large door that

consists of a single piece of wood and is secured by a padlock. It is part of a group of storage

containers in which collections of objects and archives are kept, the contents of each one hidden

from the outside. On entering the building, you are presented with rows of plywood containers,

concrete floors, breezeblock walls and a metal roof.

Between 2007 -2012, SS13 was the place where all of my objects were stored. Bundles of drum

sticks, a doll’s house, a bear on wheels, a giant mallet, birdcages, suitcases, wardrobes, remote

controlled cars, crutches, music scores, a card table, paintings, an electric organ, sound effects

records, mirrors, smashed ornaments, a cookie jar, a drum kit, sheets of ply wood, a bowling ball,

brushes, tennis racquets, plastic sheets, bags of marbles and plastic insects. It was my own rolling

prop store: an autobiography of theatrical things.

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As my work developed, the objects would be taken out and replaced. Some would return,

others would be left or discarded. Over the course of the practice, the container became

muddled and organisation was dictated purely by fit. It was not an archive but a place of

practicality where things were held between use and activation. Alice Rayner addresses the

condition of the object in the prop store in Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of the

Theatre (2006) as occupying a state of ‘readiness’ between presence and representation, ‘bereft

of both text and performance, prop objects can seem suspended between both worldly and

fictional uses’ (2006, p. 75). There is a certain democratisation of the object in this state.

History and use are present in their materiality but without order or hierarchy. They seem to

wait for narrative, to tell a story, to perform the dramatic gesture that their form promises,

they are, as Rayner suggests, like Pirandello’s six characters in search of an author. The store,

like the prop table, as a meta-theatrical (off) stage, that can extend beyond the metaphoric,

and offer a practical state to engage with. Kantor’s entry entitled ‘Post Office’, from his writings

on Emballage offers a parallel position of this state of the object, evoking the image of the

post-office packaging table in which sit objects wrapped in parcels awaiting a destination:

It is a very special placewhere the laws ofu t i l i z a t i o nare suspendedObjects---letters, packagesPackets, bags, envelopesand all their content---exist for some timeindependently,without an addressee,without a place of destination

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without a function,almost as if in a vacuumin between a sender and receiver,where both are powerless,with no meaning,bereft of their authority.It is a rare moment whenan object escapes its destiny

(Kantor, 1993, p. 82)

Marvin Carlson expands this ghosting of the object in The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as

Memory Machine (2003). Citing Herbert Blau, Carlson claims that ghostliness is a universal of

performance, ‘its sense of return, the uncanny but inescapable impression imposed upon its

spectators that ‘we are seeing what we saw before’ (2003, p. 1). This affect is not exclusive to

objects that have such a direct relation to an historical context but might apply to any object

that passes across the stage to varying degrees. Objects not only accumulate a cultural, social,

or personal biography, but also a theatrical biography that they carry with them from past

productions in which they have appeared. These objects tend to become theatrical archetypes

as much as they are archetypal in their everyday lives. As Andrew Sofer states ‘as they move

from play to play and from period to period, objects accrue inter-textual resonance as they

absorb and embody the theatrical past’ (2006, p. 2). Sofer’s own study of the stage life of props

deals directly with these types of objects: the skull, the knife, and the fan. According to Carlson,

it is a phenomenon that originates from the ‘notion of something coming back’ (2003, p. 2).

The ghosted object is reliant on a particular cultural memory that is innate in the participants

in the event, a memory that could be theatrical, quotidian, personal or collective. This notion is

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particularised by Rayner as she writes that the ‘coming back’ of a cultural memory or narrative is

held, loaded within the object, and activated through performance. She states that the ‘prop, like

a souvenir, can hold an entire play as well as a cultural milieu in potential’ (2006, p. 73) and in this

respect “an object may thus become larger than itself as it expands towards multiple associations

and meanings” (2006, p. 74). The object, as a prop for Rayner, foregrounds the relation that

objects have in evoking narratives, the relation between materiality and memory.

This is evident in her allusion to the prop as occupying a similar role to the souvenir, which echoes

Susan Stewart’s work On Longing (1993) where she ties the materiality and form of objects to

personal and collective memories. For Stewart, longing is understood in its most carnal sense as

a “yearning desire,” (2005, p. ix) a desire not always explicit but may appear through an unsettling

feeling of familiarity and remembrance:

The direction of force in the desiring narrative, is always a future-past, a deferment of experience in the direction of origin and thus echelon, the point where narrative begins/ends both engendering and transcending the elation between materiality and meaning.

(p. x)

The paradox of what Stewart defines as the ‘desiring narrative’ is the displacement of the present

moment. The impulse of the tourist to own a physical fragment of a place is driven by a desire ‘to

possess the durability of the past and future’ (Rayner 2006, p. 82), to maintain a trace of authentic

experience effectively ‘defers’ the moment of present encounter. This is the persistent appeal of

the object: to remain and sustain a duration that resists temporality. Through this persistence it

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occupies the space between, offering a bridge to the narratives of fact and fiction that constitute

the making of meaning. This embodiment of the object is clearly identifiable in the specific

case of the souvenir. As a class of object it maintains a continual relation to the individual that

acquired it even if this relation is simply ironic or genuinely nostalgic. It becomes a souvenir by

occupying a simultaneous future-past position through the construction of narrative between

object and owner.

SS13 became a place in which this future-past position of the object might be said to exist. I

would return to the unit periodically, to extract something for an experiment and chance upon

something else that I had forgotten that I had. It became part of the apparatus itself, a support

mechanism for generating chance meetings and discovering unexpected alliances between

objects, which would in turn lead to testing out relationships of animation between them.

The question of an OBJECTAn object in theatre is almost always a prop.

There is something offensive in this name for the OBJECT.A HUMAN and an OBJECT. Two extreme poles.

Almost enemies. If not enemies, they are strangers.A human desires to know the object, “touch” it,

appropriate it.There must be a very close, almost biological symbiosis

between an actor and an object.

They cannot be separated.

Tadeusz Kantor

(1993, p. 40)

No animal can enter into relation with an object as such.

Jakob von Uexkull

(in Agamben, 2004, p. 39)

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KANTOR’S ANTHROPOLOGICAL MACHINE

CHAPTER 2

KANTOR'SANTHROPOLOGICAL

MACHINE

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1. THE OLD MAN AND THE BICYCLE

…for whom the memory of night time bicycle escapades is the only emotion and meaning of life left…

(Kantor in Kobialka, 2009, p. 251)

The enduring presence of (bio) objects in Tadeusz Kantor’s theatre might be accounted for

through their relation with human subjects in initiating a caesura that constructs and maintains

the complex operation of the ‘anthropological machine’.

If the ‘anthropological machine’ functions, as according to Giorgio Agamben, ‘by excluding as not

(yet) human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the

nonhuman within the human’ (2004, p. 37) Kantor’s objects serve to reveal this mechanism by

placing the human figures into a constant state of predicament with how his objects are interacted

with. The figures appear to be aware of the objects as tools made for human use with handles,

wheels and cranks but are then denied an autonomous use of them. The objects ask questions

of the figures as to how they are to be used and they are impelled relentlessly to use them. This

creates a paradox through the performers being able to control the devices with a fluidity and

precision in the exact and direct manner in which they appear to be intended. The objects do

not accompany the performers across the stage, instead, they appear to be inextricably linked

to the figure that they represent. The performers have not selected these items from the props

table, but rather the objects choose them, as an extension of Kantor’s will and control over the

stage space.

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The ‘old man with a bicycle’ (Kantor. 2009, p. 260) from The Dead Class (1977) is one such

example, a human-object hybrid defined by his relation to the action performed and the device

he is operating. Within the opening action of the play, he is the only one on stage to have a

recognisable apparatus (in the form of a bike) on which his child effigy is attached. The contraption

is a neatly conceived mechanism consisting of two spoked wheels and a small guide wheel with a

stabiliser on one side. There is a knee saddle for the performer to rest his leg at the back of the

mechanism and a hand crank pedal on the opposite side that controls the turning mechanism of

the large wheel and also pushes the child’s arm unnaturally upwards when it is turned. Here we

can see all the basic elements of a bicycle fragmented and reassembled, made sense of by the

performer, or more precisely the figure of the old man who is able to ride the bike as he appears

to have a logical understanding of the functioning of this peculiar assemblage.

Kantor prevents the human figure of the old man from entering into an intellectualised relation

with his bike, while simultaneously demanding him to think, as he engages with an act of collective

remembrance caught in a cycle of repeated actions with the other figures on the stage. This places

the old man (or at least the performer who is actually an old man) as thinking being in a state of

temporary suspension, a figure still able to have an awareness of its own ability to use the bike

(and notably, throughout Kantor’s work to speak a fragmented language in relation to this task)

but then seemingly unable to act independently upon it: a being caught in a temporal division

between a recognition of itself intellectually as human and the inescapable corporality of its own

animality that is propelling its base existence as living being, producing what Adrian Kear calls a

‘temporal and spatial barrier within the “human animal” that marks, so to speak, its irremediably


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split condition’ (2013, p. 4) - between human and animal, the human and the inhuman.

If we understand the ‘anthropological machine’ to function by exposing and maintaining this

split condition, acting to create an absolute difference, or as Agamben states, a ‘caesura

between man and animal that on the one hand elevates the human above the animal and its

environment, and on the other places animality essentially outside of what Heidegger described

as the human’s openness to a world’ (2004, p. 38) then we might consider the theatre as a

machine that engineers an appearance of this action through its apparatus. It is therefore in

this appearance that we might witness the caesura, or what Agamben calls the ‘empty interval’

between man and animal: ‘neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated

and excluded from itself ’ (ibid) a state of bare life.

Kantor’s bike, it could be argued, acts as the material device that marks this appearance of the

‘empty interval’, the state of bare life in his particular theatre machine and ones that evidences

the ‘anthropological machine’s’ operation. As Adrian Kear has previously outlined in reference

to Lucky in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot (1953), when commanded by Pozzo to “Think,

pig!”, Lucky becomes ‘a living being-thinking being separated and excluded from the experience

of itself by the epistemic violence and “inhumanity” of the anthropological machine’ (2013, p.

4). Kantor is drawing attention the animalzing structure of the ‘anthropological machine’ as we

could read the old man’s action of ‘riding’ as one that ‘humanizes and animalizes simultaneously,

or at least in a double movement; its performative effect is to produce the non-human or less

than human’ within the intellectual capacity of the human being itself ’ (p. 1).


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It is the intention of this chapter to demonstrate how Kantor’s notional ‘bio-objects’ functioned

in the generation and maintenance of what I argue to be his own ‘anthropological machine’, a

machine in which he presents (or inescapably represents) his particular vision of the state of the

human in the final decades of the twentieth century. An ‘anthropological machine’ that functions

to manufacture an appearance of bare life, where the human itself is in perpetual confrontation

and negotiation with its own animality - languishing in the open.

2. THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL MACHINE

With all its eyes the natural world [die Kreatur] looks out into the Open.

Only our eyes are turnedbackward, and surround plant, animal, childlike traps, as they emerge into their freedom

(Ranier Maria Rilke in Santner, 2006, p. 1)

The conception of the ‘anthropological machine’ is traced by Agamben in The Open: Man and

Animal (2004), in which he expands upon the conception of Openness, after Heidegger and Rilke.

Rilke considered the notion of ‘The Open’ in his eighth ‘Duino Elegy’ as a state of existence that can

be found in the nonhuman world. As Eric Santner has outlined in On Creaturely Life (2006), Rilke

contrasts human life with what he defines as the creaturely (die Kreatur), an existence occupied

by plants and animals as they ‘inhabit a seemingly borderless surround […] the environmental


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correlate or sphere of the creature, das Offene – the Open’ (2006, p. 1). Human life lifts itself

from this borderless and undefined state, through a contestant partitioning, at least temporarily,

from its own creaturely existence. Santner claims that this is because of man’s reflective and

mediated nature, defined by ‘consciousness and self consciousness’ and a relation to the other

things in the world is, “crossed with borders, articulated within a matrix of representations’

(ibid). Agamben states:

[…] man is not a biologically defined species, nor is he a substance given once and for all; he is, rather, a field of dialectical tensions always already cut by internal caesurae that every time separate – at least virtually – “anthropophorous animality” and the humanity which takes bodily form in it. Man exists historically only in this tension; he can be human only to the degree that he transcends and transforms the anthropophorous animal which supports him, and only because, through the action of negation he is capable of mastering and, eventually, destroying his own animality.

(2004, p. 12)

For Agamben, if man is to be understood as a field of dialectical tensions, persistently divided by

internal caesurae, our conception of ‘human life’ must always be considered divided by a series

of caesurae and oppositions that invest it with ‘a decisive strategic function’ (2004, p. 13). He

identifies these strategic functions appearing as ‘domains as apparently distant as philosophy,

theology, politics, and – only later – medicine and biology. That is to say, everything happens as

if, in our culture, life were what cannot be defined, yet, precisely for this reason, must be ceaselessly

articulated and divided’ (ibid).


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The effect of this ceaseless division and re-articulation of how man is defined, or what we might

say - how man conceives himself, leads Agamben to cite Linnaeus’ claim that ‘man has no specific

identity other than the ability to recognize himself ’ that ‘man is the animal that must recognize itself

as human in order to be human’ (p. 26). This process of recognition, or what might be defined as a

process of the production of appearances leads to Agamben’s definition of The Homo Sapien, as

‘neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather a machine or device for producing

the recognition of the human’ (ibid). The machine is described metaphorically by Agamben as an

optical device that is structured around a mirroring of man’s own image back on itself already

‘deformed in the features of an ape’ (p.27). He states:

Homo is a constitutively “anthropomorphous” animal (that is “resembling man” according to the term that Linnaeus constantly uses until the tenth edition of the Systema), who must recognise himself as a non-man in order to human.

(ibid)

The ‘anthropological machine’ functions to make manifest this process of recognition by exposing

the caesura in man between the recognition of man and non-man, the human and inhuman. It is

within this functioning that Agamben argues that the Homo Sapiens, as a species, exists.

He furthers his conception of the ‘anthropological machine’ by defining it in two manifestations:

the ‘ancient’ and the ‘modern’ (p. 37). The machine of the moderns, which is of primary concern

to my thinking on Kantor, functions through the animalizing of the human, that is, by isolating

the nonhuman within the human, identifying, naming, and treating it as such. Agamben defines


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the thinking of this function as the process of Western thought or more specifically that of

twentieth-century humanism and subsequently anti-humanism, as an ‘ironic apparatus that

verifies the absence of a nature proper to Homo, holding him suspended between animal

and human – and thus, his being always less and more that himself ’ (p. 29). This humanist

recognition of man leads to what Agamben claims as the discovery that he lacks himself, ‘the

discovery of his irremediable lack of dignitas’ (p. 30) or a placing of the human without rank. This

is exemplified by Agamben in the figure of the Jew, ‘the non-man produced with the man […]

the animal separated within the human body itself ’ (p. 37). In the case of the Nazi treatment

of the Jew, the human is categorised as a being that can have its humanity denied it by isolating

the nonhuman within it and this, for the benefit of the affirmation of others that claim to be

the inheritors of a future mankind that it wishes to produce.

The pre-modern machine works in exact symmetry to that of the moderns. The non-human is

produced by the humanization of the animal, manifest in figures of the ‘the slave, the barbarian,

and the foreigner, as figures of an animal in human form’ (ibid). Both these models of the

machine function through a complex double-action so defined by Agamben: ‘by means of

an exclusion (which is always already a capturing) and an inclusion (which is always already

an exclusion)’ (ibid). In the machine of the moderns, the outside (the inhuman) is produced

through the exclusion of an inside (the animalizing of the human) as in the case of the Jew

and in the machine of the pre-moderns the opposite occurs but with the same effect where

the inside (the humanizing of the animal) is obtained through an inclusion of an outside (the

inhuman) as in the case of the barbarian et al. Agamben continues:


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[…] precisely because the human is already presupposed every time, the machine actually produces a kind of state of exception, a zone of indeterminacy in which the outside is nothing but the exclusion of an inside and the inside is in turn only the inclusion of an outside […]

(ibid)

This zone of indeterminacy, a state of exception at the heart of the machine is the space in which

the articulation between these oppositions, ‘human and animal, man and non-man, speaking being

and living being’ (ibid) must take place. As Agamben states:

Like every space of exception, this zone is, in truth, perfectly empty, and the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew. What would be obtained however, is neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and excluded from itself – only a bare life.

(p. 38)

Agamben’s model of the ‘anthropological machine’ is a means to articulate this particular condition

of man as being in the animal kingdom. Through this he broadly sets out how the human has been

thought of as an unknowable conjunction of the body and a supernatural or divine element

but argues that it is our contemporary task to think instead of the human as what results from

‘the practical and political separation of humanity and animality’ (ibid). As Alan Read has pointed

out, for Agamben this is ‘not just one question among many but the question, a fundamental

‘metaphysico-political’ operation through which something like ‘man’ can be decided upon and

produced’ (2009, p. 88). There is a political imperative arising from this question that is situated

in the recognition that the ‘anthropological machine’ produces, that is, an innate inhumanity at


its core; trapping and dissolving the human’s sovereign subjectivity in its mechanism. If this is

recognised then the operation might be halted. As Agamben states:

[..] faced with this extreme figure of the human and the inhuman, it is not so much a matter of asking which of the two machines (or the two variants of the same machine) is better or more effective – or rather, less lethal and bloody – as it is of understanding how they work so that we might eventually be able to stop them.

(2004, p. 38)

It is partly this potential for political efficacy within Agamben’s theory that has attracted theatre

theorists to these ideas. Alan Read’s chapter on the ‘anthropological machine’ in Theatre, Intimacy

and Engagement: The Last Human Venue (2009) makes claim to performance itself functioning

as a machine, primarily through exploring the problematic ‘tensions between humans and

other animals’ (2009, p. 82) that certain acts of theatre present. As part of his broader thesis

outlining what he calls a ‘science of appearance’ (ibid) of which theatre as a human venue is

exemplified as a mechanism of appearances, he calls upon Agamben’s theory to demonstrate

how it makes present the predicament of the human (in the modern period) in recognising

its own inhumanity by doing the very thing of ‘affirming and resisting this separation between

humans and other animals’ (ibid). According to Read, the mechanism of appearance that theatre

is particularly accommodated for is that of bare life:

The anthropological machine is so named because it is in the business of manufacturing an appearance of this life. But there is a paradox at the heart of this operation, for life is easier to see when it is not, or at least not quite there. This is what attracts me to the proposition of the anthropological machine; it shares with theatre the incapacity to make the human appear. This shared sense of human recalcitrance owes much to the simple fact of the example from which the idea of ‘a life’, and therefore the anthropological machine, arises in the modern period.

(p. 86)127


I would argue that Kantor recognised the potential of theatre to make manifest an appearance

of human life that is not quite there and manipulate it in material terms, of making the temporal

barrier between the human and animal self represented spatially, within a complex visual and

aural language of tangible stuff. Alan Read furthers this reading when he states:

Neither the human life nor the animal life is ever going to appear there, but only ‘a life’ that is separated and excluded from itself. It is ‘bare life’ that has finally appeared after all this machine’s grinding and whirling, and it is performance that nightly in the human laboratory, that is, the last human venue, has demonstrated the workings of this device.

(p. 96)

The theatre, according to Read, operates as a machine of representation through its governance

by artistic agency, and can therefore be disrupted, hijacked and ultimately stopped. The building

of a representational language of appearances can be de-territorialized if the mechanisms of the

machine, which are understood, are manipulated. The ‘anthropological machine’, which it makes

manifest can also be halted, not just literally, by ending it (stopping the show) but through utilising

the space created by the state of exception and indifference at its centre, a space in which the

articulation and mobilisation of a politics can occur.

If I make the claim that Kantor’s theatre evidences the workings of such an ‘anthropological

machine’ then I must consider how, in material terms he enables it to function in performing the

double action of simultaneous exclusion and inclusion and that of a ‘capturing’ by examining it

as an apparatus or dispositif – a set up. His theatre is not the machine per se but the apparatus

that makes the action of the machine possible; it is a mechanism that generates appearances; the

appearance of both the nearly human and inevitably that of the inhuman.

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Agamben offers us a proposition, if not a definition, of how we might understand the role of the

apparatus in these terms, as the material thing that makes the operation of the ‘anthropological

machine’ possible. In his book, What is an Apparatus? (2009) he states that it is: ‘literally anything

that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control,

or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings’ (2009, p. 14). In

this broadening definition he includes ‘prisons…schools...factories’ but also things such as ‘the

pen …cigarettes …computers’ and even ‘philosophy and language itself ’ (ibid). The defining

feature between these disparate items is that they have a certain strategic function that it

always located within a power relation with an individual, a relation of capture between the

living being and the object it engages with, therefore, ‘the apparatus itself is the network that is

established between these elements’ (p. 3), a capturing device of the living being.

Through this separation Agamben offers a ‘general and massive partitioning of beings’ (p. 13)

between living beings (or substances) and apparatuses in which living beings are captured. He

then adds to his partitioning a third class that he names subjects: ‘I call a subject that which

results from the relation and, so to speak, from the relentless fight between living beings

and apparatuses’ (p. 14). It is within this defining of the subject as existing at the interface of

living being and apparatus that we can contemplate the complexity of the construction of

subjectivites themselves. As Agamben points out: ‘the same individual, the same substance, can

be the place of multiple processes of subjectification’ (ibid) depending on the apparatus they

interface with. So an individual might simultaneously be a ‘user of cellular phones, the web surfer,

the writer of stories’ (ibid), an actor, an audience member and so on. We might consider the

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human itself is the first apparatus and the origin of all apparatuses, as the mirroring device that

recognises itself as human in conjunction with itself as a living substance and the ‘anthropological

machine’ considered in this context.

The theatre, in this respect, can be defined as a complex apparatus, as I have previously suggested,

like a prison or school that contains a multiplicity of minor apparatuses that are constantly

intercepting each other, activated through the participation of living beings (where it paradoxically

becomes the apparatus named theatre) and is subsequently the site of reaction where subjects

are constituted, divided, and discussed.

Agamben himself alludes to this operation in The Open, where he explicates the concentration

and extermination camps of the Second World War as a form of ‘cognitive experiment’ (cognitio

experimentalis) where the thinking of the division of man and animal is actively played out: ‘an

experiment of this sort, an extreme and monstrous attempt to decide between the human and

the inhuman, which has ended up dragging the very possibility of the distinction to its ruin’ (2004,

p. 22). There is a violently stark difference between the bare reality and ruin of the concentration

camp and the representational frame of the theatre, a point not lost on Kantor whose work was

driven by the articulation of the unspeakable predicament of ‘eternally wandering Jews’ (Kantor,

1993, p. 5) and formed, as I have previously stated, an autonomous reality and form of ontology

beyond mimetic representation. Yet to think of theatre, and specially Kantor’s theatre as a form

of cognitio experimentalis or ‘thought experiment’, a term that seems remarkably apt to Kantor’s

performances as self confessed memory machines, enables the potency of the aesthetic affect


of making material the complexity of the act so that, ‘the play of thought is a saturation of

attention around the surface of objects and occurrences’ (Blau, 1982, p. 20), and, in Kantor’s

case, the very torment of this saturation as thinking in action. His work can be seen not only

as a lament for the past joys of childhood and rituals remembered, but a past that has been

dragged through the monstrous events of Twentieth Century Europe and then reappears,

in front of us – manic and shaken. Kobialka refers to Kantor’s theatre as a form of ‘thinking

machine’ in which he materializes thought through action, a Foucauldian ‘thinking history’:

“The movement of Kantor’s thought visualized onstage expressed a mode of intensity that, with the help of the object onstage, thinks its own “history (the past), but [it does so] in order to free itself from what it thinks (the present) and be able finally to think otherwise (the future)”.

(2009, p. xiii)

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3. THE RUBBISH CART

In June 2009, the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich held a major exhibition of Kantor’s work, objects

and archive called An Impossible Journey: The Art and Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor. The objects on

display were split into two groups. The first were presented conventionally alongside drawings

and other paraphernalia in a dedicated gallery space. The second were individual pieces that had

been distributed amongst the many art works and ethnographic objects held in the permanent

collections of the Sainsbury Centre. Paintings by Francis Bacon, ceremonial African masks and

sculptures by Henry Moore sit alongside each other in the great hangar space at the centre of

the building. At the back of the space one of the objects appeared to be moving. On closer

inspection I recognised the ‘rubbish cart’ from the play In a Little Manor House (1981) by Witkacy.

The cart is made of cheap metal, like that of a pig’s feeding trough covered with a fabricated

skin like latex with two mannequins of children poking out from the top. The wheels are old but

immaculately clean and appear to be unused despite the fact that they have evidently come from

a working cart themselves. The arms and heads of the mannequins move awkwardly side to side

at protracted intervals.

The cart is mounted on three wooden boards and has a small brass plate on one side labelling

the object. As Heike Munder has pointed out, Kantor took existing objects like this ‘that he

considered to be especially valuable and upgraded them, giving ancient wooden planks a coat

of varnish and attaching brass plates with the name of the objects’ (2009, p. 76). Munder argues

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that this process halts the process of decay in an attempt to ‘secure memory’ (p. 76) but in

the context of this place, stood next to ancient African artefacts the staging of display of the

cart appears gestural rather than sincere, the gesture as a knowing joke towards the elevation

of his objects to sit in the museum, his poor object, poor in the sense that its construction is

cheap and the effect is realistically un-convincing; it is clearly awkward, being divorced from

the theatrical context from which it comes, violently trapped by being bolted to the wooden

planks below. Perhaps ironically, as Kantor’s legacy grows, his objects are taking their rightful

place in the academy - but for now, for me, here, the contrast and gesture is all to apparent.

The cart’s autonomous movement, made humorous by an unsettling oddness, furthers this

tension. The mechanism is crude and unrealistic and in the quiet of the gallery, a quiet that is

dictated by the presence of the finely lit and carefully displayed objects that surround it, the

squeaking of the mechanism locates the object within a narrative; that of the museum object

coming to life in the quiet of the gallery space. It is as if the object, divorced from its theatrical

context still maintains the tension of Kantor’s strict performative intentionality towards them,

an intentionality that might be read just as much as gesture towards the state of the object that

continues to perform pathetically, long since the performance is over.

In this respect, the cart highlights something problematic about the ‘ephemeral materials’ used

in Kantor’s work as referred to by Munder as his ‘messengers of death’ (p. 79). It seems to be

that the decay of the materials is aesthetically rather than literally present. In the same way that

that the decay of wood is judged by the scale of time, the decay is so slight that our perception

of it is registered only by our own sense of living time, a human time so to speak. This suggests

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why the objects have a dependence on the need of activation in terms of the living time of

the performance, the aesthetic appearance of age being thrust upon the audience through

theatrical context and a compression of time manufactured by Kantor.. In fact, the most striking

thing about the other objects on display, found in the other parts of the exhibition, in the

underground gallery spaces of Sainsbury Centre, is just how pristine they are. The immaculate

condition is not just a result of the incredible care given to their preservation, but also points to

this peculiar tension in their materiality: they appear so tantalizingly worn, possessing the marks

of age and use, and yet on closer inspection, they have been highly aestheticised to appear as

such.

This, my first direct encounter with Kantor’s objects, should perhaps not have come as such a

surprise. Kantor wrote comprehensively on how the treatment, construction and preservation

of his objects was to be carried out. He adopted the act of wrapping, or ‘Emballage’ (Kantor,

1993, pp. 77-83), as a guiding aesthetic practice in its own right, as well as being transparent

in his insistence that everything was to be constructed to his exacting specifications. And yet,

the highly aestheticised, carefully crafted nature of the objects, makes them sit uncomfortably

as independent art objects. They pose the viewer with a question as to how they should be

considered: as fabricated stage objects that stand as artifacts from a theatre practice; or as

sculptural art objects that should be regarded as independent works in their own right – or

simultaneously as both. This is a question that I found I could not answer as the separation of

those dual roles is in itself impossible, at least for me, in the understanding that the objects are

presented as theatre artefacts. This ontological tension, at the heart of their materiality, might

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also account for part of their peculiar presence as art objects when divorced from the theatrical

context in which they were conceived. Kantor was characteristically magnanimous in his answer

to this dilemma, claiming that his objects should be read ‘in their own right’ as autonomous art

objects, especially when divorced from their theatrical context, although nonetheless created

within it:

THE WORKS LISTED AND DESCRIBED HEREARE NOT PROPS.I HAVE EXCLUDED THIS NOTION FROM THE IDEA OF CRICOT 2 THEATREAS AN EXTERNAL ONE.

THESE WORKS WERE NOT CREATED TO MEET THE MOMENTARY AND PASSING NEEDS OF A PARTICULAR PERFORMANCE.THEY ARE CLOSELY CONNECTED WITH THE IDEAS THAT DEFINE MYARTISTIC ACTIVITY.THEY ARE PART OF THE SERIES OF WORKS DEALING WITH A PARTICULAR TOPICWHICH CAN BE FOUND IN MUSEUMS.THEY HAVE A SUFFICIENT AMOUNT OF INNER TENSIONAND AUTONOMOUS SENSETOEXIST AS INDEPENDENT WORKS OF ART (. . .)

(Cricoteka, 2012)

It is impossible to be sure, but inevitably the objects carry with them this intentionality that is

made even more evident when we encounter the current status of the objects as they have

made the shift from active stage objects to archival material, elevated to the status of museum-

class objects and national cultural artefacts even if they appear not to be comfortable in any of

these roles.

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Aside from the cultural and personal memories that are activated by seeing these objects, they

are material hybrids, often made from a combination of found objects and fabricated additions.

The fabricated elements appear to come from found material themselves, or a combination

of raw artist materials such as latex and natural matter. Kantor’s manifesto ‘Annexed Reality’

(1963) titled ‘Object 1944’ is foundational in his approach to object making in this. It is a poetic

statement aimed at theatre artists who desire to imitate or represent the object on stage, to

claim objects as props. For Kantor, this approach is ‘futile and vain’:

It must be “touched” in a different manner. This process/R i t u a l/ is childishly simple:the object must be wrenched from its life’s conditions andfunctions,left alone withouta d e s c r i p t i o nthat would give it meaning;[the object] must be left aloneSuch a procedure is unthinkable in everyday practice.In theatre/1944!/:the objectceased to be a propused by the actor in his actSimply[the object] WAS[it] EXISTEDon an equal footing with the actor.[The object] WAS THE ACTOR!The OBJECT-ACTOR!

(1993, p. 72)

The notion of the ‘OBJECT-ACTOR’ as replacement for the representational prop was to

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form the basis of Kantor’s more advanced theory of the ‘bio-object’. It materialised during his

production of Stanislaw Wyspianski’s The Return of Odysseus (1944) performed in Poland at the

height of the Second World War. He ‘rejected those systems of representation defined by pre-

war ideological and aesthetic authorities and their right to continue moulding and being depicted

in artistic creation’ (Kobialka, 1993, p. 274). All the objects and costumes were found and gathered

from outside the small room defined as a theatre space, ‘chunks of reality were thrown into the

domain of art – decrepit and repugnant chunks’ (Klossowicz, 2003, p. 141). It was a radical act of

displacement, as Kobialka states ‘a real object (a destroyed room, a cart wheel smeared with mud)

would take the place of an artistic object (a theatre building, a prop)’ (1993, p. 274). It was not the

manifestation of any anti- art attitude or experimentation. Distinct from Duchamp’s ready-mades

the function of the objects was not to challenge preconceptions about the nature of art but as

Kantor stated they embodied ‘[t]he anger of a human being trapped by other human beasts. […]

We had the strength only to grab the nearest thing, / THE REAL OBJECT, / and to call it a work

of art’ (ibid). Transcending the treatment of the object, it formed the concept of an autonomous

performance space that he defined as the ‘reality of life’ which became ‘reality of the lowest rank

in 1980’ (p. 4).

In The Return of Odysseus, objects became transformed, not through a process of animation,

but because they no longer represented the function and utilitarian values assigned to them

by everyday life and war. They existed only in relationship to other objects and human figures

that ‘took refuge in the performance space’ (p. 275) from the ensuing turmoil of war persistent

outside. The result of this process was that Kantor was able to uncover a dimension within the

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object that was not realistic, utilitarian or representational. The object was not placed within

the fictional construct of a ‘theatrical’ space. Instead, as Rayner has observed, the object was

presented as an ‘autonomous phenomenon’ that were animistically present, ‘ghosted by use,

history, and abuse’ (2006, p. 94). For the spectator and the actor this heightened the appeal to

the sense of tactility in the object.

Heike Munder introduces a further dimension to Kantor’s choice of materials: ‘oil paint, rags,

old and used objects, decaying books, rubbish and worm-eaten wood [ …] were concrete

expressions of his definition of ‘matter’ (2009, p. 73). This definition, she claims, was driven by

the notion of the formless, or Bataille’s idea of the ‘informe’, the decaying fluidity between the

body and material:

Kantor actually seems to have appropriated the concepts of the ‘formless’ and ‘heterology’. Bataille used the ‘formless’ as a radical attack on reliable ordering systems, thus opposing rigid, firmly attributed patters of meaning, in which many things are denied any attention. For Kantor, this approach served more or less as a set of instructions for locating and bringing to light the repressed collective memory of the experience of war and genocide.

(ibid)

This claim of object materiality embodying, in some way, the collective memory of Europe’s, or

more specifically Poland’s, experience of war offers a suggestion of how Kantor was theorising

his approach to theatre to make present the ‘anthropological machine’, starting with matter itself

performing the the anger of a human being trapped by other human beasts. The literalisation

of the formless is arguably achieved through the appearance of decay and use within their

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materiality. In this respect, the objects are not merely representing a thing of age but are set-up

to perform their instability. In the case of the ‘rubbish cart’, this is done not only through the

materials chosen to make it, but all the creaking mechanism and the absurdity of paradox of its

crude construction - made very carefully – that is brought to our attention in the context of the

objects that surround it.

4.CREATURELY LIFE IN THE DEAD CLASS

…the dimension of undeadness, the space between real and symbolic death… I take to be the ultimate domain of creaturely life.

(Santner, 2006, p. xx).

In The Dead Class, the old man and the bicycle with his dark cloaked classmates appear to us in

a double entrance. First, as singular bodies, appearing through the door at the back of the stage,

dressed in mourning clothes and fidgeting like the school children they once were. Old bodies

that are tight - yet uncannily brimming with energy, real old bodies - performing the daily ritual

of their school days - hands up, heads down, and tongues out. Eventually they leave, shuffling

back through the door to the dark space at the back of the stage from where they came. They

reappear, a second time, creature-like, lumbering as bodies engorged with appendages:

… human CREATURESwith the carcasses of the children grown into them.In the production notes, it was possible to accurately describeThis ANTHROPOLOGICAL SPECIMEN

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which continues to develop and grow,beyond the stage of adolescenceas if against all biological laws,giving birth to new organs,parasitic “tumors”

(Kantor in Kobialka, 2009, p. 242)

These new specimens, ‘ANIMAL BEASTS, with the carcasses of the children’ (p. 243) hanging

from their bodies are Kantor’s familiar stage figures: the human deformed and merged with

mannequins and objects that compromise and distort their natural movement. This double

entrance neatly represents how Kantor realised the ideas set out in his ‘Theatre of Death’

manifesto (1975), treating the actors like test subjects, through a method of cultivation,

encouraging curious new specimens from the meeting between the actor (the human) and

the non-human elements he brings into the room. It would be easy to dismiss this as the direct

metaphor of a surrealist dream image where the components of several recognisable forms

(man – bike – child) are confused in memory and presented as this grotesque manifestation,

or as a metaphoric image of the haunting of childhood. The affect, however, appears to extend

beyond a form of representation and presents us with a distilling of one of Kantor’s central

notions of the ‘bio-object’; the longed for biological symbiosis of human and thing of what

Gerald Raunig might term ‘the unbounded flow between bodies that touch or come into close

to one another, that merge in another neighbouring zone’ (2010, p. 8), a human-inhuman hybrid

of a creaturely life caught in-between as a product of the operation of the ‘anthropological

machine’.


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The first indication of this is through the interplay between the idea of childhood and death.

For Rilke, there are only certain states of human life that might ‘make brief contact with the

dimension of the Open’ (in Santner, 2006, p. 3) childhood being at the brief threshold for this

kind of contact:

A childMay wander there for hours, through the timelessStillness, may get lost in it and beshaken back

(ibid)

In these moments they are perhaps only fleetingly exposed to a state of ‘the Open’ before the

ceaseless mechanisms of representation intervene to mark the child as human, ‘for we take the

very young child and force it around, so that it sees objects’ (ibid). The other threshold is death:

Or someone dies and is itFor, nearing death, one doesn’t see death; but staresbeyond, perhaps with an animal’s vast gaze

(ibid)

Kantor’s skill is to collapse these two creaturely dimensions together, as if in a poem, like Rilke,

so that alongside the actions they perform, the poetic story of his apparatus also plays out such

a confrontation with glimpsing the ‘Open’.

The second indication is arguably how Kantor’s The Dead Class was born out of a collective


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trauma that shared the affect of what Freud called the uncanny – or what Santner calls the

‘creaturely’, through which ‘expressivity was an index of a traumatic kernel around which the

“ego life” of the other has, at some level been (dis)organized’ (Santner, 2006, p. xiii). The figures

of the School Children, acting as the others appear to have been awakened in old age and

reorganised around the trauma of revisited memories and historical events that are an alluded

to. As Santer states, after Benjamin:

…at some level we truly encounter the radical otherness of the ‘natural’ world only where it appears in the guise of historical remnant. The opacity and recalcitrance that we associate with the materiality of nature – the mute ‘thingness’ of nature – is, paradoxically, most palpable where we encounter it as a piece of human history that has become an enigmatic ruin beyond our capacity to endow it with meaning, to integrate it into our symbolic universe.

(p. xv)

Kantor’s theatre apparatus generates human history as ‘enigmatic ruin’, mute, or stuttering, into

the reality of our everyday lives through one of our symbolic systems of communication – the

theatre. The objects engineer and maintain this uncannily split condition with the performer;

between the labouring body that has, for the duration of a prolonged rehearsal period, into

performing the exact actions and sequences of Kantor’s direction - and the figures in his work,

a combination of costume, make-up, and objects with the performers themselves.


5. FORGET KANTOR (AGAIN)

Now after Kantor’s death, faced with his oeuvre defined by the phantoms, the historian, the spectator, and the art critic are confronted with the unstable eclectic historical and intellectual records that are turned by them into nostalgic traces of his presence on stage; nostalgic traces that are now rigidified to establish the contours of that which always wanted to stay ephemeral and intimate. Only such an ephemeral and intimate appearance will not be “forgotten in this world that gets rid of everything very quickly” by imposing an identity upon a memory a trace. As Kantor noted in his diary in 1990: “I want to leave behind a trace/and, then, disappear into my solitude”. And only forgetting will restore his shape.

(Kobialka, 1994, p. 15)

In Further on Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre (2009), Michal Kobialka recalls his 1994 article

‘Forget Kantor’: ‘It became clear to me that forgetting, like Kantor’s Emballage, could only

shelter, protect, and preserve – thus restore – his material and immaterial contours, which

would always escape me and the passage of time’ (2009, p. vii). For Kobialka, his ongoing need

to ‘forget’ through continued dialogue and re-evaluation of Kantor’s work is an attempt to

reclaim the political efficacy of his theatre and to read it as a total ‘theater praxis’ (p. viii). This

is a praxis that offers an alternative representational form to challenge existing cultural and

political regimes in the same way that Piscator’s political theatre (1920), Brecht’s epic theatre

(1930) and Boal’s theatre of the oppressed (1972), for example, attempted to do. For Kobialka

then, his continued engagement with Kantor is driven by an urgency to unravel the radical

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gestures of the work that remain politically oblique, even with the inclusion of historicised figures

of soldiers and Jews that populate some of his productions. The efficacy of Kantor’s practice

contributes, in its own ‘uncanny’ and ‘idiosyncratic’ (ibid) way, to put forward proposals that might

assist us, both directly and indirectly, in the ‘evaluation of the utopian project of modernity’ (ibid),

and subsequently in how this transforms what he defines as ‘chaotic reality’ (ibid) that shapes

the current geopolitical dynamics of the world order, and what we might understand as the

postmodern manifestations of art-making and the consequences that this has for avant-garde

theatre.

This justification for yet further reanimation of Kantor’s work might appear broad and aggrandising

in the context of a self-referential discipline that looks to its major figures again and again for

answers and suggestions of what next. But we might say that it is only through the specific

engagement with art practices that we can make any statement about the grander narratives of

cultural and political affects, how they operate, and what is the consequence and impact of this

operation – from what next? – to - what else is there? and specifically for the formal approaches to

creating practice that has the ability to answer to reality and its horrors rather than representing

it:

No matter how hard we try to gloss this praxis over with words of nostalgia or neoliberal imaginary, even today, almost twenty years after his death, it carries this promise and radical potential for giving shape to the not-yet imagined realm – the promise of a theatre that is an answer to reality rather than a representation of its utopian alternative. His theatre, as I will argue, is in reality, but not of it…

(1994, p. 15)

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Kobialka’s book builds an argument towards how Kantor’s theatre repositions the dominant

modes of representation and his rejection of ‘illusionistic’ practices and conventions as he

attempts to establish an autonomous interior reality through the framing and activation of his

theatrical apparatus. He quotes a statement from the ‘12th Miliano Lesson’ written by Kantor

that establishes the stark political context from which he bases his theatre and which, according

to Kobialka, is an exemplary summary of Kantor’s attitude and foundation of how his theatre

aesthetics were realised:

World War II.Genocide,Concentration Camps,Crematories,Human Beasts,Death,Tortures,Human kind turned into mud, soap, ashes,Debasement,The time of contempt….And this is my (and our) answer:THERE IS NO WORK OF ART …THERE IS NO ‘HOLY’ ILLUSION,THERE IS NO ‘HOLY’ PERFORMANCE.THERE IS ONLY AN OBJECT WHICH IS TORN OUT OF LIFE AND REALITY …THERE IS NO ARTISTIC PLACE …THERE IS ONLY REAL PLACE …ARTISTIC ATTITUDE IS DESCRIBED BY:PROTEST,MUTINY,BLASPHEMY AND SACRILEGE OF SANCTIONED SHRINES.

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(2009, pp. viii – ix)

Kantor denounces the conventional categories of illusion and representation out of what appears

to be an urgent necessity, as if these categories have been obliterated, if not rendered impotent,

by the stark realities of the then still recent and raw atrocities of European history.

This notion of a theatre form that is in reality but not of it is the arguable effect of the operation

of Kantor’s theatre apparatus. Kobialka clearly states his view of Kantor’s achievements as an

Artaudian deterritorialsation of representation or what Herbert Blau defines as ‘the abolition of

representation, the search for the pure unmimetic act outside of what Nietzsche called the prison-

house of language’ (1982, p. xix). What Kantor created was a new affect-generating apparatus that

was self sustaining in its ability not to repeat action but to present it to the audience and actors,

as a new operation each time, driven by Kantor himself who willed the action of the event out of

what was for him a political necessity:

Kantor created his own theatrical space that produced its own commentary and referential body in the process of folding back upon itself. Thus, in the process, which was also aptly described by Artaud in Theatre and Its Double, of destroying the organs without killing the body, Kantor did indeed deterritorialize representation. But repetition is a presence born to itself. Despite his desire to sustain a creative act as dynamic endgame of materializing theatre from whatever it is not, the organs created their own body.

(Blau,1982, p. xii)

In this process, Kantor’s objects are not necessarily part of the machine itself per se, but the

apparatus - the set up - that makes the action of the machine possible. They are the central

part of a mechanism that generates the appearance of what Kantor calls the ‘bio-object’; the

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appearance of both the nearly human through the way the interface between the performer

and object is negotiated. This might be through the question of operation that the Old Man

has with his Bicycle; the creaturely possibility found in the poetic image of the return of un-

dead child; or through the tensions at play in the materiality of the ‘rubbish cart’. The potency

of this resides in the fact that the theatre as ‘anthropological machine’ is an apparatus that

can be controlled – it is an artistic apparatus - it has the possibility of not only exposing a

confrontation with the bestial, but also our collective recognition of ourselves as human beings,

so we do descend there, taking refuge in Read’s ‘last human venue’. There is the possibility to

transform the structure of the apparatus, so that the theatre does not need to be a machine

of representation, but as Artaud and Kantor so desired, to create an autonomous reality of its

own. This is what Kantor can still offer the theatre maker, by preserving the ‘memory of theatre

in order to pass it on to the next generation’ through its objects - to move further on.


Theatre Machines 1 Object

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