oup.essay

Optical Theatre, Epic Technology and Lost horizons

Theatrical Episodes

In Berlin, in 1919, a race was staged between a typewriter and a sewing machine. The race was run by, artists; Walter Mehring at the typewriter and George Grosz at the sewing machine. Grosz and Heartfield had both been soldiers in World War 1 and were resolute in their anti-war sentiments. Grosz paraded through the Berlin streets wearing a death's head and carrying a placard emblazoned "Dada Uber Alles," (Dada Above All, parodying the German National lanthanum) while Heartfield continued to wear a dirty uniform and shaved only one cheek, becoming thus a living counterpart of the grotesque caricatures in Grosz's antimilitarist drawings.1

Coinciding with German experiments in the use of theatre as an instrument of political instruction was the beginning of 'epic theatre'; defined by an objectivity that maintains an intellectual dialogue with the viewer; the author stands back from the story as they tell it, and may add their own comment on events.

It was the objectivity and the simultaneous scope for comment in epic writing that attracted the playwrite Bertolt Brecht. From the beginning of his career Brecht had been against conventional theatre, the traditional, or dramatic theatre was a place where the audience was engrossed by comfortable illusionary spectacle. He would use anti illusionary devices to eliminate any form of suspense in an attempt to deny the viewer the security of complacency. He believed that;

the illusion created by the theatre must be a partial one, so that it can always be recognised as illusion. Reality, however completely represented, must be changed by art, in order that it may be seen to be subject to change and treated as such.2

According to Roland Barthes in his essay entitled Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein, Brecht indicated clearly that in epic theatre all the burden of meaning and pleasure bears on each scene, not on the whole. With the work of Brecht there is no development, there is an ideal meaning, but there is no final meaning, nothing but a series of significant fragments. Brechts theatre, like Eisensteins cinema, relied on the 'pulling to pieces of the 'composition', in short the holding in check of the metaphysical meaning of the work - but then also of its political meaning; or, at least, the carrying over of this meaning towards another politics.3

Galileo and technologically advanced viewing.

Brecht's Galilao, was partly influenced by the experimental theatre of the twenties in Berlin. Galileo -(the bible kicker) was said to reflect much of Brechts own views about the world and was re-written several times. In 1945 during one rewriting of the play the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

If you wont learn from Galileo's experience

The bomb will put in a personal appearance 4

Michel Foucault asserts the real scandal of Galileos work lay not so much in his discovery, or rediscovery, that the earth revolved around the sun, but in his constitution of infinite, and infinitely open space. In such a space the place of the Middle Ages turned out to be dissolved, as it were; a thing's place was no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down.5 Galileo recognised that the eye is not an immediate source of information about nature, but that one's conception of the physical world is dependent on the instruments used to study it.

Descartes 'method of doubt' and the beginning of systematic scepticism.

Descartes argued that we cannot know something if we are unable to distinguish the case of where it is true from the case where, though false, it seems to be true. In 1633 after hearing about Galileo and the condemnation of his research, Descartes withdrew a piece called Le Monde 'World' or 'The Universe', from publication. This work contained views regarding the earth as merely one part of a like universe obeying uniform physical laws.6 Together their work presented the world as a mathematically describable place with no room for distortion, they understood that relying on the senses was ambiguous and open to manipulation thus potentially misleading and deceptive. The answer to the problem was the development of instrument technology- the evidence/data to resolve doubt.

Projecting a new world/progress and the 'Futurelandman'

The work of Russian artists El Lissitzky and Kasmir Malevich, (who died before the atomic bomb was dropped) dismissed art of the social, political and psychological kind as documentative. Yet their work/ideas has links to seventeenth century thought especially in regard to the notion of infinity developed by Galileo and Descartes.

In 1913 Malevich initiated 'Suprematism' a period in Art history based on a vision of pure feeling, a revolution of another kind. Malevich had faith in the world of modern technology, if, for no other reason but to make art production easier. His suprematist constructions, 1920, were to be seen as three dimensional constructions moving in cosmic space (the fourth dimension) made with the use of projective geometry. Both projective geometry and architectural projection have as their common source the work of Monge (mathematician), Descartes and Desargues. Lissitzky, in his 1924 lecture at the Moscow lnkhuk, "PROUN Towards the Defeat of Art" (and probably written at UNOVIS in 1920/21), refers to projective geometry specifically, saying,

After Descartes the 'New' geometry (which is no longer geometry) is a synthetic process"

The opera Victory Over The Sun (A scientific romance) was directed by Malevich in 1913 was written about the Futurelandman who was no longer dominated by 'limited dimensionality', for whom there is no end. The story begins with the three dimensional consciousness in act 1, then transformed into a four dimensional consciousness. It finishes with "the world will die but for us there is no end" unlike Lissitzkys 2 squares, where the world is revitalised by four dimensional energy.7 Malevich declared that his backdrop for the second act, fifth scene of "Victory Over the Sun" was the first public display of Suprematism. Certainly, the large square divided diagonally recalls his painting "Black Square." Still it is possible, in the context of the play, to see this design as symbolic of the split between night and day, and therefore as, at least in principle, representational rather than purely abstract.-(internet).

Lost horizons

Paul Virilio (founder of a new science of speed-"dromology") talks about the overlapping of technology history, military strategy, town planning aesthetics, physics and metaphysics. In "The Overexposed City" (1986), he makes clear the tendency in cities today towards hyperreality: the replacement of geographical space with the screen interface, the transformation of distance and depth into pure surface, the reduction of space to time, of the face-to-face encounter to the terminal screen. The end of the external world. He has also spoken of the Western world as losing its 'depth of field' and this has harmed our relationship with the environment.

the last horizon of visibility, the trans-apparent horizon, a product of the optical amplification (generated by electro- optics and acoustics) of mans natural milieu 8

This 'trans-apparent' horizon is seen as a product of telecommunications. A society of live coverage. This is seen clearly in the popularity of reality television. This, in turn, creates a society intensely present, with no future and no present. The sentiment of 'no future' was expressed in music in the late 1970s by the Sex Pistols, with huge success.

It is an unfortunate realisation that reason based on the enlightenment was ultimately going to lead to mass destruction and used as an instrument of oppression. Watching robots disarm suicide bombers on television today seems to surmise where we are at - a utopic procedure- for some, maybe not for others. Maybe what we get to keep from the enlightenment is doubt, the reason to question, the maintenance of dialogue.

Sean Loughrey Winter 2002