A kind of hypnotic centering took place when a giant balloon, anchored to an outlet in the center of the floor, began inflating slowly with a loud steady hiss. The balloon was illuminated from a spotlight on the floor beneath it and glowed eerily as the houselights were dimmed. Everyone sat in the lotus position and gazed as the luminescent sphere loomed above our heads. Then it was deflated just as slowly. A simple but effective experience.
At Cerebrum one is voyeur, exhibitionist, and participant. One is both male and female. One is a walking sensorium. Surely we can foresee that not-too-distant day when "nightclubs" will be operated by art dealers who commission artist-guides to create ecological-experience places that will resemble Cerebrum in many respects. In other ways, however, the intermedia palaces of the near future will embrace bold new vistas of human experience. "I can envision a world in which people's lives are recorded," says intermedia artist Tom DeWitt, "and a massive amount of material is accumulated, vast libraries, and people who never meet other people but just spend their lives editing audio-visual records of their own existence. When you look at a mixed-media show there's an awful lot of information; it's beyond the comprehension capabilities of most people. But if it were an intermedia show made for an individual whose life was being portrayed, he could relate to it. I can imagine people having traumatic experiences in such an environment and coming to some idea of who they really are." In the pages that follow I hope to demonstrate that intermedia art is but another path in man's ancient search for himself.
Intermedia Theatre
Susan Sontag once defined the "two principal radical positions" in contemporary art as that which recommends the breaking down of distinctions between genres, and that which maintains or upholds those distinctions: on the one hand seeking a "vast behavioral magma or synaesthesis"; on the other hand pursuing "the intensification of what each art distinctively is." She concluded that the two positions are essentially irreconcilable except that "both are invoked to support a perennial modern quest— the quest for the definitive art form."1
Surely the definitive art form is not anti-environmental, as art must be when viewed in terms of genres: to isolate a "subject" from its environs by giving it a "form" that is art denies the natural synaesthetic habitat of that subject, physical or metaphysical, icon or idea. In the progression of art history through Form, Structure, and Place, the idea of art as anti-environment has long been surpassed.
This is not to say that any activity that seeks to discover the essence of a medium is somehow disreputable; on the contrary, the exclusive properties of a given medium are always brought into sharper focus when juxtaposed with those of another.
Thus, in intermedia theatre, the traditional distinctions between what is genuinely "theatrical" as opposed to what is purely "cinematic" are no longer of concern. Although intermedia theatre draws individually from theatre and cinema, in the final analysis it is neither. Whatever divisions may exist between the two media are not necessarily "bridged," but rather are orchestrated as harmonic opposites in an overall synaesthetic experience. Intermedia theatre is not a "play" or a "movie"; and although it contains elements of both, even those elements are not representative of the respective traditional genres: the film experience, for example, is not necessarily a projection of light and shadow on a screen at the end of a room, nor is the theatrical experience contained on a proscenium stage, or even dependent upon "actors" playing to an "audience."
Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Theatre
Pioneer intermedia artist Carolee Schneemann describes Kinetic Theatre as "my particular development of the Happening, which admits literal dimensionality and varied media in radical juxtaposition." She works with untrained personnel and various materials and media to realize images that range from the banal to the fantastic, images which, in her words, "dislocate, disassociate, compound, and engage our senses to allow our senses to expand into primary feelings, as well as the sensitive relatedness among persons and things." Through these methods she seeks "an immediate, sensuous environment on which a shifting scale of tactile, plastic, physical encounters can be realized. The nature of these encounters exposes and frees us from a range of aesthetic and cultural conventions."
Since 1956 Miss Schneemann has continually redefined the meaning of theatre. Though New York is her home, she has staged radical intermedia events throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. Her best-known works include Snows, presented as part of New York's Angry Arts Festival in 1967; Night Crawlers, staged at Expo '67 in Montreal; Illinois Central (1968); and the film Fuses. I
asked what directions she will follow in future intermedia work.
CAROLEE: I'm moving more into technology and electronics. My long-range project is completely activated by the spectators. I'll sensitize the audience through a performance situation in which detailed film images are set off by the audience as they move into the performance environment. They'll activate overlapping timed projectors. If they want a film to be shown again they'll have to figure out what they did to make it start in the first place. These films will show detailed aspects of performance situations: touching, handling, moving. Then as the participants move in other directions the actual materials shown in the films will be introduced. They'll fall from the ceiling or be tossed out of boxes.
GENE: I take it you find film/actuality interactions effective in involving the audience.
Carolee Schneemann: Night C rawlers. Expo '67. Live performers (right) contrasted with film projection.
CAROLEE: Night Crawlers, which I did at Expo '67, was very successful in this manner. I juxtaposed my Vietnam film with a little Volkswagen that drove in front of the film and stopped. It was stuffed with foam rubber. My partner and I performed a complex of physical handling on top of, and inside the VW while another person was pulling all the foam out. It was a very intimate and humorous event in front of this horrifying Vietnam film. Before it began, a girl and I went through the audience and stepped on their shoulders and knees and gave each person candy and cake. We spoke to them. They got very turned on by the whole thing. At the end we brought them into the performance area and played lights and sound around them. They found elements of the environment that they could start to tear down. They began rather hesitantly, but after they ripped a couple of layers of paper there'd be a message greeting them, saying proceed, or directing them to paint cans. The point seems to be to let people work out of impulses that are blocked. If the situation is obvious they tend to be destructive.
They're working in daily life with outmoded kinds of repressions and resistances. They tend to get violent. So we try to open up an empathy between them and what we're doing that they're not consciously anticipating.
GENE: Do you always use film in your theatre pieces?
CAROLEE: Yes, I tend always to use it in some aspect of an environmental performance situation, primarily because of the intensification of information it gives, which may just be sensory information. And I use it to transform the environment. I tend to use film very formally. Every element that goes into the environment I'm working with is very carefully shaped in terms of scale, time duration, what's going on in juxtaposition to a film. In Illinois Central there was a three hundred and sixty-degree visual environment that was changing and shifting all the time, composed of films and slides. And I like using slides against films because I can start and stop, overlap, black out, manipulate. I've been working with portable projectors so that the image can be shifted in space.