I'm Trying to Reach You. Barbara Browning
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But at that moment, all I wanted to do was hear this moderate little piano solo, and watch this moderate little chamber dance.
The video had been posted by somebody called “falserebelmoth.” It had only clocked 6 views, and several of those, as you can see, were mine. I scrolled down to the comments. There was only one, from somebody called “GoFreeVassals”: “Kind, icy, slim one… I am raw with lament.” That was odd. And yet accurate – as a description of the dancer, and also the response she was producing in me.
I was staring at this comment when I had the disconcerting sense that someone was looking over my shoulder. By this time, all of the other occupants of the hotel lounge seemed to have made their way back to their rooms, alone or in pairs. Aside from a custodial worker vacuuming near the bar, I thought I was alone. I slowly turned to see who was behind me, and to my surprise, it was Jimmy Stewart. Of course it couldn’t be, really. Jimmy Stewart was dead. But this guy really looked like him – say, around the Vertigo period, or shortly thereafter. He was graying, but still rakish. He didn’t even look at me. He was staring fixedly, almost menacingly, at the flat screen of the computer I was using. He pulled some reading glasses out of his pocket and perched them near the end of his nose, leaning over my shoulder to read that weird comment. He was wearing a short-sleeved white dress shirt, neatly tucked into a pair of twill plaid tennis shorts. His white socks were pulled up, and he was carrying what appeared to be a teeny tiny tennis racquet in a case.
I felt a little self-conscious, and also, frankly, put out by Jimmy Stewart’s evident disregard for my personal space. I turned back around and clicked the browser closed. When I glanced back over my shoulder again, Jimmy Stewart was gone. I glimpsed him heading out into the Zagreb night with his tiny racquet gripped firmly before him. He carried it like a threat.
I went back up to my room, brushed my teeth, and put on my pajamas. I texted Sven (“xoxoxo”), climbed into the big, flat hotel bed, stared for a minute at the dark, and then went out like a light.
There was something of an international incident the next day. PSi, despite its self-abnegating tendencies, appeared to have provoked some local tensions. It had nothing to do with those feuding drama professors, who were ultimately – even the postmodernists – regular “theater people,” not the kind that leaked out into the streets confusing your average Joe about the blurry boundaries between “life” and “art.” No, the incident had to do with another set – a group of conceptual artists whose work was being reenacted by an ensemble of actors for the benefit of conference-goers. Their effort, they explained, was not to rewrite the “official” narrative of performance art in Croatia, which, they explained, didn’t really even exist: the recent period of political instability and competing state ideologies had only allowed for an unreliable trail of “legends, lies, accusations, cli-chés, etc.” So who knows if any of this is true, but they were ostensibly reenacting the work of people like:
* Sandra Sterle, who, in 2008 supposedly performed Nausea, in which she deliberately vomited to the tune of “Dalmatianac nosi lančić oko vrata” (“A Dalmatian Man Wears a Chain around His Neck”).
* Siniša Labrović, who in 2007 reputedly performed Artist Licking the Heels of the Members of the Audience, drawing attention to a Croatian proverb implying subservience, though this act was held to reposition Labrović in a position of “psychological supremacy.”
* Marjian Crtalić, who is said to be, even today, performing a work in progress – 8 years and running – called Living Dead (Globalization of the Subconscious). This piece involves the daily clipping of his hair and scratching of his scalp with his fingernails. “The artist,” we are told, “has amassed a multi-year collection of deposits of hair, water and sebaceous fluid from his scalp that is now approximately the size of a tennis ball.” According to the organizers of the reenactment, Crtalić has developed a “paranoid attitude towards his own thoughts and feelings as ‘products of a globalized identity “colonization.”’ This is further present in the need for purity in the frame of ‘my own demented obsessive-compulsive boosting of my own deficiencies.’ ”
None of these recent works, however, seemed to be causing a problem – it was rather the reenactments of two (ostensible) seminal figures from the 1970s that were wreaking havoc in the streets of Zagreb.
* In 1971, Tomislav Gotovac is said to have performed Streaking, which perhaps needs no explanation. Ten years later, he reportedly performed Lying Naked on the Pavement, Kissing the Pavement (Zagreb, I Love You!) – Homage to Howard Hawks’ ‘Hatari!’ He was basically streaking again, but this time he’d shaved his head and made out with the sidewalk. He was arrested for disturbing the public order.
* Almost exactly twenty years later, Vlasta Delimar, a contemporary of Gotovac who had also been big in the ’70s, reputedly performed Walkthrough as Lady Godiva, which could, I suppose, itself be construed as a kind of historical reenactment. Anyway, Delimar was also arrested. A lot had happened in Croatia since the ’70s, but in the realm of naked performance art, it seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.
So, surprise. The 2009 reenactors of both Gotovac and Delimar, bringing to life a questionable and politically contaminated art history for the benefit of a raggedy assortment of foreign intellectuals housed at the local corporate hotel, were also arrested. I didn’t actually see the arrests taking place, but I heard about them as soon as I arrived at the U. of Z. Faculty of Architecture, which was where most of the academic panels were taking place. It made me feel sad and vaguely responsible, but someone pointed out that maybe getting arrested was also a part of the “reperformance.” I wondered, though, if they thought they might have been protected by their association with visiting international scholars. But maybe that was just a manifestation of my own projection of a paranoid attitude toward Croatians’ thoughts and feelings as “products of a globalized identity ‘colonization.’ ”
Anyway, the incident seemed to get blown over fairly quickly, but it haunted me throughout the day.
I attended a paper on “Peter Sellars: Snake-Oil Salesman or Enfant Terrible?” and another on disruptive audience members. Nobody in our audience was particularly disruptive, though I’m sure a few of us were contemplating the possibility while listening. In the hallway afterwards I ran into Dan Ferguson and a couple of other acquaintances from NYU, and they invited me to lunch, but I just wanted to grab one of the conference box lunches and head back to the hotel to work on my own paper, which I was presenting that afternoon.
It was the same old same old, of course – failures of communication in Forsythe. The ways in which the dancers could appear to be misfiring with each other, but ultimately the dance itself was forcing the viewer to face the absence of meaning.
I know, doesn’t sound so upbeat, does it?
I still wanted to tinker with it a little. I gave Dan my cell number, though. He said they’d located the one gay bar in Zagreb and were planning to head over there in the evening. That sounded interesting. I don’t mean I was looking for action. It seemed more like research. In fact, I pretty much always feel I’m doing research.
I had to wait a few minutes at the Arcotel for one of those computers to open up. I had my paper on a flash drive. Once I got to work, I spent about twenty minutes moving some of those commas around. I looked at this phrase: “brutal propulsion, contorted mouths, buckling limbs” – backspaced, typed: “brutal propulsion, mouths in contortion, limbs in collapse.” Propulsion and contortion sounded too much alike. Tried again: “limbs akimbo.” Silly. “Scattered limbs.” One step over the line: too violent. “Limbs limning…” – uh oh, my addiction to grammatological figures was popping up again. Maybe I had it right the first time. My gaze wandered, vaguely, to the right of the screen, and slowly the hotel bar came into focus. “Oh shit,” I thought. “It’s him”: Jimmy Stewart, wearing that same manicured tennis outfit from yesterday, or at least a similar one. In the light of day, he was wearing shades – mirrored, with aviator frames. He seemed to be sipping an iced tea. As I stared at him, he slowly turned his head to face me directly. I’m pretty sure he was staring back at me, though with the shades it was