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Performance and Pubic Intervention after 1973 Carlis Clark, Paul Pontrelli, Katherine Grant-Suttie, Shayna Schlosberg, Regina Gibson

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pub·lic

adj.1. Of, concerning, or affecting the community or the people; Connected with or acting on behalf of the people, community, or government: public office

.n.1. The community or the people as a whole.2. A group of people sharing a common interest

+What makes the public? What can the theater tell us about the public and vice versa?

?

+Emphasizing the historicity and significance of art“The critical value of any work emerges in the way that it relays local and specific effects of signification within its own sphere of social and historical application” (Richard 20).

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Chile after 1973.

Who is the public now? Because audience members weren't familiar with Western theatrical codes, measures had to be taken to bring art that the audiences wanted to see.     

+The Formation of New Theatrical Groups:

 Mostly geared towards a "socially marginal audience"        

--"El Tajo del Alacran" (The Scorpion's Slash) -- formed by Lydia Milagros Gonzalo               the plays produced by this company broke out of the traditional theatrical space and went to the streets in order to get the attention of the  average people to whom the plays were directed.

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-"El Nuevo Teatro Pobre e America" (The New Popular Theatre of America)  -- formed by Pedro Santaliz               formed to address the "slum population".

The groups goal was to configure a new Puerto Rican cultural identity, which is always in a continuous process of self-definition, deconstruction and reconstruction.

examples of the plays produced:  "La historia del hombre que dijo que no (The story of the

man who said no) "El drama de la A.M.A o como es que el pueblo se vuelve contra el pueblo (The

drama of the AMA or   how it is that the people rebel against

the people)      

+Public Enemy Number One

How do you balance the issues of giving the audience what they want and saying what you, the artist, wants?

The audience – the public- is what makes theater successful or not. If they don’t like what is given, how will you make them listen?

The public will not always be on your side.

+Geared towards “the public”?

In Chile specifically, after 1973, most of the plays produced were continuing to be geared towards the middle class.  But after 1984 the expectations of this audience changed.  -- theatre was only successful if it dealt with the degradation of someone else.  So most theatrical groups did not attempt to reach the traditional audience.      There needed to be an effort of reaching new audiences and attracting the attention of a diverse number of groups.           

+ The Avanzada- artistic movement that acted as an internal public intervention to the Chilean regime

took art to the very limit of its meaning and conditions of production

Forged relationship between art and politics

Aesthetic sphere and repressive social sphere, linked the two of them

+Providing a search rather than an answer.

The coup brought about a semiotic crisis in itself, history and the codes of Chilean society were suddenly repressed with a new history, the avanzada then sought to find new ways of thinking beyond the official and the nostalgic.

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The Avanzada…

Came during the breakdown of cultural and social reality of Chileans

Was a call for a reinvention

Also an attempt to recover the meaning of what had happened to them, because language and symbolism were broken apart by the regime

Had to deconstruct and revise everything

Necessary to do all this so art could once again be a form to oppose the regime

+The Avanzada came from

Works of art from the avanzada came not from an ideology, but from the placeless nomadic environment from which they emerged

Used the body as a material for performance art

Used the city and its human movements in street art

Prohibitions shifted from the public sphere to the personal sphere

Could not have outright public displays of intervention, so the rebellion began in the fabric of the social sphere

+Activating the public with non-traditional expression

“Transference of critical values to all zones of experience in everyday social practice, or to the need to intervene in these zones encompassing the body and its landscape as scenarios of self-censorship or micro-repression” (Richard 18).

These sights were not seen as apolitical, but actually as vital spaces where politics were being contested.

+Censorship

Artwork was marked by censorship and self-censorship

Had to be ambiguous and use metaphor

Assault on meaning from outside the part structures

Tried to gain public visibility- used every exhibition space they could

They wanted their work to be seen in places sanctified by the authority, made it very public

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Leppe- Reconstruction of the Scene

Castillo

Rosenfeld

Works strive to avoid any finality of a reading, to avoid punishment

Happened after the 1973 coup

Apparatus for the visual manipulation of objective reality

Eugenio Dittborn

Artists on the Scene Photography

+Art’s Intervention in Everyday Life

“The city becomes its own museum, but only in the sense that its repressive structure is revealed by altering the landscape through art actions” (Richard 57)

“artists’ appropriation of urban spaces and attempts to involve popular audiences in their idea-based proposals” (Ramírez 427).

+Put the public into action

The audience “is no longer a passive spectator of images but actively involved in the creative process: he becomes part of the living material of the work through his own interaction with it, by being urged to intervene in the whole network of social conditioning in which he is ensnared” (Richard 54).

One way of activating the spectator was through incompleteness “to solicit the viewer’s intervention to complement its meaning” (Richard 54) and the use of mass media, including pamphlets, magazines and newspapers.

+The Public and….the artist.Diamela Eltit

+ Diamela Eltit, a prominent artist of the avanzada movement, created works that were intended to disrupt public conventions aggressively imposed upon Chilean society by Pinochets regime. Rather than follow the traditional mode of representation that art was

expected to perform, Eltit and the avanzada artists tried to

reformulate the conditions of artistic production through a

mechanism, not of the representation of reality, but of

its intervention, in order to transform the figurative and

symbolic web of institutional order in which the Chilean subject was

ensnared.(Nelly Richard)

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Eltits artwork was not concerned with displaying a talent for capturing the world as she sees it, but instead wanted to challenge that world for the sake of her audience. This was achieved by performing fragmentation and chaos-- something that Eltit both felt as an individual living in Chile, and a tool for deconstructing Pinochets performance of structure and order.

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. Eltits gregarious work Lumperica is a piece which emulates chaos in its fragmented structure. The text about a young woman, L. Illuminada, who breaks curfew and spends the night bathed in the projections of a neon sign called El Luminoso is a quest for identity and meaning in which L.Illuminada struggles to retorritorize the labels that El luminoso projects onto her body. L. Illuminda takes the reader through a series of hallucinated and hellish metamorphoses and reconquests first of self, then of writing, in which autoeroticism and masochism remain key routes to the power of the word, to a hell of writing.

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This way of working influenced social sciences and ignited a political quest for finding something new. The points of intersection between the representational strategies of the Campaign of the No and those of neo-avant-guarde writers like Eltit constitute a unique and fascinating conjunction of literary, intellectual, and political history. Though Eltit and the avanzada remained at the margins until the very end of the movement, they were instrumental in beginning a new public way of thinking, and served as the initial sparks to a political movement that would eventually lead to the end of Pinochet.

In line with the traditions of the avanzada movement,

Lumperica is fragmented to the point of being unintelligible,

and utilizes the pain and sensuality of the body to

counter the structured rhetoric of Pinochet. Though the text is chaotic the story is simple,

and grapples with the struggles for identity that Chileans experience as a part of

everyday life. Lumperica is emblematic of Eltits work and

her intervention into the everyday psyche of Chileans

living under extreme censorship.

+Performance and Public Intervention

Essentially, the public will define the theater, but if the art of Chile is any indication, there are always ways to please an audience without necessarily giving them what they want.