Боги и Новые создания - [9]

exhibiting at Islington Green, burned up, with his mate, inside.

In 1832, Gropius was astounding Paris with his Pleorama. The audience was

transformed into the crew aboard a ship engaged in battle. Fire, screaming,

sailors, drowning.

Robert Baker, an Edinburgh artist, while in jail for debt, was struck by the

effect of light shining through the bars of his cell through a letter he was

reading, and out of this perception he invented the first Panorama,

a concave, transparent picture view of the city.

This invention was soon replaced by the Diorama, which added the illusion

of movement by shifting the room. Also sounds and novel lighting effects.

Daguerre's London Diorama still stands in Regent's Park, a rare survival,

since these shows depended always on effects of artificial light, produced

by lamps or gas jets, and nearly always ended in fire.

Phantasmagoria, magic lantern shows, spectacles without substance. They

achieved complete sensory experiences through noise, incense, lightning,

water. There may be a time when we'll attend Weather Theaters to recall the

sensation of rain.

Cinema has evolved in two paths.

One is spectacle. Like the Phantasmagoria, its goal is the creation of a total

substitute sensory world.

The other is peep show, which claims for its realm both the erotic and the

untampered observance of real life, and imitates the keyhole or voyeur's

window without need of color, noise, grandeur.

Cinema discovers its fondest affinities, not with painting, literature, or theater,

but with the popular diversions — comics, chess, French and Tarot decks,

magazines, and tattooing.

Cinema derives not from painting, literature, sculpture, theater, but from

ancient popular wizardry. It is the contemporary manifestation of an evolving

history of shadows, a delight in pictures that move, a belief in magic. Its

lineage is entwined from the earliest beginning with Priests and sorcery, a

summoning of phantoms. With, at first, only slight aid of the mirror and fire,

men called up dark and secret visits from regions in the buried mind. In these

seances, shades are spirits which ward off evil.

The spectator is a dying animal.

Invoke, palliate, drive away the Dead. Nightly.

Through ventriloquism, gestures, play with objects, and all rare variations of

the body in space, the shaman signaled his «trip» to an audience which

shared the journey.

In the seance, the shaman led. A sensuous panic, deliberately evoked through

drugs, chants, dancing, hurls the shaman into trance. Changed voice,

convulsive movement. He acts like a madman. These professional hysterics,

chosen precisely for their psychotic leaning, were once esteemed. They

mediated between man and spirit-world. Their mental travels formed the crux

of the religious life of the tribe.

Principle of seance: to cure illness. A mood might overtake a people burdened

by historical events or dying in a bad landscape. They seek deliverance from

doom, death, dread. Seek possession, the visit of gods and powers,

a rewinning of the life source from demon possessors. The cure is culled

from ecstasy. Cure illness or prevent its visit, revive the sick, and regain

stolen, soul.

It is wrong to assume that art needs the spectator in order to be. The film

runs on without any eyes. The spectator cannot exist without it. It insures

his existence.

The happening/the event in which ether is introduced into a roomful of people

through air vents makes the chemical an actor. Its agent, or injector, is an

artist-showman who creates a performance to witness himself. The people

consider themselves audience, while they perform for each other, and the gas

acts out poems of its own through the medium of the human body. This

approaches the psychology of the orgy while remaining in the realm of the

Game and its infinite permutations.

The aim of the happening is to cure boredom, wash the eyes, make childlike

reconnections with the stream of life. Its lowest, widest aim is for purgation of

perception. The happening attempts to engage all the senses, the total

organism, and achieve total response in the face of traditional arts which

focus on narrower inlets of sensation.

Multimedias are invariably sad comedies. They work as a kind of colorful

group therapy, a woeful mating of actors and viewers, a mutual semimastur-

bation. The performers seem to need their audience and the spectators — the

spectators would find these same mild titillations in a freak show or Fun Fair

and fancier, more complete amusements in a Mexican cathouse.

Novices, we watch the moves of silkworms who

excite their bodies in moist leaves and weave wet

nests of hair and skin.

This is a model of our liquid resting world

dissolving bone and melting marrow

opening pores as wide as windows.

The «stranger» was sensed as greatest menace in ancient communities.

Metamorphose. An object is cut off from its name, habits, associations.

Detached, it becomes only the thing, in and of itself. When this disintegration

into pure existence is at last achieved, the object is free to become endlessly

anything.

The subject says «I see first lots of things which dance… then everything