The Battle for Truth continues

Post Visual Criticulous

Mr Criticulous is back.

The dramaturgy of the post-visual is a wilful act of vandalism. It rejects the boundaries of space and time, and privileges the atemporal existence of 'the performance' in a digital drive. It dispenses with the need for actors - a prerecording will do fine - the necessity of a director and the public venue. The post-visual happens in the mind, although it is ready to command a theatrical space.

Since the collision is at the centre of the post-visual aesthetic, it is appropriate that its very name comes from an unfortunate juxtaposition. The post-dramatic, being mainly a form for academic appreciation and boring audiences in the name of intelligence, has been whipped by the culture of the DJ, of the sound artist. Visual theatre, which repeatedly failed the most basic tests of meaningful definition, is consigned to the dustbin of performance studies.

Post-visual theatre begins with a text. Not a script - who really has time to read Uncle Vanya? The text is stolen, of course... a series of recordings by amateurs, bad acting and all, downloaded and fed into a programme. Then cut and pasted and drowned in sound. 

Post-visual theatre begins with Auslander. Like most academics, his knowledge of Marxist theory trumps his aesthetic taste (anyone who can talk about Eric Clapton as a signifier of the real (without noting that he is one of the most musicians who destroyed their 1960s' reputation (by making dad rock into his dotage)) needs to update their i-pod). He points out that the idea of liveness in art is a fiction, and that live performances often hark back to a (recorded) perfection... he knows that rock might talk of authenticity but this is all facade... he realises that the dominant cultural form (he wrote this when it was TV, just before the internet took over (making his book instantly out-of-date (although his Clapton chapter helped to do that))) dictates the form of the defeated cultural forms (in his era, that was theatre, which was going through another period of trying to dig the Gesamtkunstwerk by having loads of video projections).

Post-visual begins with the magic of the DJ, who hacks up and recombines sound and thereby has a visceral impact on the audience. 

Post-visual theatre is the application of William Burroughs' cut-up technique to performance (and about time too (Burroughs adopted it in response to the timidity of literature (which was looking antique next to visual art (which had already taken on board the ideas of bricolage) and claimed that it could predict the future)).

Uncle Vanya Act One (in Dub) by Gareth K Vile on Mixcloud

Change/Live/Reflect

Towards the end of Auslander's book on Liveness, he describes how the dominant medium (at the time of publication, it was TV) impacts on the remains of the previous dominant culture (that was theatre, more or less). The minority medium imitates the style of the dominant - in the case of performance, it tried to incorporate bits of video and whatever into the live performance.

A good example of this is that time that Scottish Opera tried to turn An Italian Girl in Algiers into a soap opera. Auslander gets into how MTV was shaping rock culture's obsession with authenticity. Sadly, less than a decade after its publication, Liveness has become a relic: the Internet is now dominant, and TV is trying to copy it (i-player, anyone?). Auslander also missed a trick, citing Eric Clapton as an example of how MTV tried to rescue itself after Milli Vanilli made everyone look stupid.  

Clapton was not a serious artist after about 1977, and MTV's attempt to rebrand by giving him a load of awards was another mistake, part of its descent to abandoning music videos for an endless stream of publicity pieces for artists with more cash than taste, or bad reality shows.

Still, the idea holds: the dominant medium dictates the pace, and sets up plenty of tropes for the minor arts to borrow. In the case of theatre, this has led to a bunch of poor plays about social media, or the occasional invitation by artists that the audience 'leave their phones on, please.'

In criticism, it gets worse. The professional critic worries about the tweets and status updates that challenge their authority - either joining in or churning out press releases to up their numbers (I am talking about myself, yes). Opinion is mistaken for criticism - a situation not helped by criticism's failure to decide decisively on its actual function.

It is generally assumed that criticism is parasitic. The host is the event, the critic feeds on the art and passes the waste onto the public. A symbiotic relationship is just as valid a reading, but lacks the possibility of making a joke about faeces. But allowing the performance to be dominant poses a question: in what ways can criticism ape its form? Is there time for a change in speak?