Энэхүү бүтээл нь 11 минут 30 секундын өнгөт дуутай дүрс бичлэг болон хадгалагдсан.
Товчхондоо энэхүү бүтээлээрээ Америк болон Мексикийн хооронд амьдралаа сайн сайхан болгох гэсэн хэдэн сая иргэд хилийг нууцаар даван амьдралаа зогоож байгааг илтгэхийг оролджээ.
Энэхүү кинон дээрх арга хэмжээ нь парад болон циркийн үзүүлбэрийн гэсэн 2 хэсгээс бүрдэж байгаа бөгөөд Лас Плаясийн оршин суугчид, Мексикийн хил дагуу амьдрах хорооллуудын иргэдэс бүрдсэн юм.
Парадын хэсэгт сэтгэцийн болон бие бялдарын эмгэг өвчинтэй хүмүүс амьтны баг зүүн оролцсон ба циркийн хэсэгт их бууны тусламжтай хил давжийгааа үзүүлбэр байв.
Доорх нийтлэлээс энэхүү бүтээлийн талаар болон цаад агуулгыг нь илүү мэдэж болно.
http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.18/acting.naturally.face.and.mask
In a 2006 interview, Javier Téllez spoke about his relationship to the participants in his performances and videos: 'In my practice I try to create a flexible space where those represented can intervene in their own representation. According to Levinas, ethics is a devotion to the other: "I have to forget myself to access the other"'.1 Téllez's work is made in collaboration with individuals from marginalised segments of society the mentally or physically ill, and the economically or politically disenfranchised and foregrounds the problem of representation and self-representation within the context of art and medical institutions. He works with these self-selected groups in re-stagings of popular myths, or casts them in rituals and parades that he then films in ways that allow the work to slide easily between the categories of participatory events and documented performance. His practice identifies and makes a move to reverse a number of sociological and formal categories - 'marginalised' and 'dominant', 'being' and 'communicating', and, most importantly, 'representation' and 'performance' - honing its focus on the status of the participants in the pieces and on the shifting relationship between their interiority and external expression.
Téllez's work makes frequent allusions to circuses, carnivals or pagan and religious rituals, both by mimicking such events and by referencing their motifs. In El léon de Caracas (2002) a group of policemen bring a taxidermied lion down a slum-covered hillside, carrying it as if it were a religious icon. Téllez's contribution to this years Whitney Biennial, Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See (2007), looked at an elephant from the position of the visually impaired. Inspired loosely by the parable of the blind men and the elephant in which six blind men each touch a different part of an elephant and obtain different notions of what an elephant is Téllez focuses not on the animal but on the spoken testimonies about the experience of blindness, given by the six sight-impaired who, in an almost ceremonial procedure recorded by the film, feel an elephant for the first time.
His interest in pageantry and circuses recalls the carnivalesque, the space of freedom and anarchy identified by Mikhail Bakhtin in the ribald novels of the Renaissance writer Franois Rabelais. The carnival, according to Bakhtin, 'celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions'.2 In the specific definition given to them by Bakhtin, these often week-long medieval and Renaissance feasts and celebrations ended with the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but persist in the instances of the carnivalesque, a literary and artistic mode that privileges the popular and anarchic over elite and organised forms, and which allows for a momentary dissolution of hierarchy, such as that which exists between the mentally ill and the able.
In the video and performance One Flew over the Void (Bala perdida) (2005), produced for InSite_05, Tllez organised a parade and circus in collaboration with the inhabitants of Las Playas, a Mexican town on the US-Mexico border. Armed with animal masks and signs protesting the marginalisation of the mentally ill, the event - also a parade of those literally excluded by the country to the north - culminated in the spectacle of the first-ever firing of a human cannonball over an international border: from Mexico to the US over a dingy but permanent bit of fence that marks the countries' boundary on the beach.
The film, shown in two parts, begins with the parade. Shaky camerawork suggests the cameraman as part of this event, walking on the ground with the others whilst filming. The lack of subtitling for the Spanish-language signs and the unmixed sound further align the aesthetic with home video rather than authored representation. The second part of the film, on the other hand, is introduced as 'The Circus Performers'. Its title signals from the outset a shift in register, and the subsequent series of fixed-camera frontal shots functions as something akin to movie credits: each of the participants - now billed as 'performers' - lift their mask to reveal their faces. As they do this, their names appear below them on the screen. The parade, and its evocations of the carnivalesque, is retroactively framed as performance.
Crucial to Bakhtin's 'suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions' is the complete immersion in the carnival: it is impervious to representation. Like ecstasy or intoxication two forms of euphoria that also promise the same dissolution of boundaries between subjects, and between subject and object the equality inherent in carnival dissipates once someone stands outside to depict it. This problem of immanent critique is endemic to artistic representation, and Bakhtin uses the metaphor of theatre to address it:
In fact, carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. [] Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside of it. During carnival time life is only subject to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom.3
Many of the reversals in Téllez's work - the reversals it both enacts, as above, or symbolises, for example in his adaptation of the Oedipus myth (Oedipus Marshal, 2006) - are directed at finding a way out of this dilemma between performing in its representation and being in the carnival. The shift allows Téllez to represent a state of utopian community, one in which marginalised groups of society, such as the mentally ill or the economically disenfranchised, are given equal visibility, as well as the affirmation of the difference that distinguishes them.
The circus performers, for example, were patients at the nearby mental hospital - CESAM, in Mexicali - and their animal masks are as much an allusion to carnival as to the perception of the mentally ill as sub-human. The sequence functions as a humanising procedure: the formerly masked and bestialised performers each gain a name, face and identity. As Berta, Graciela, Coco, Carlitos, Fernando, Cristian, etc., they each are shown in separate shots, individuated from the mass. However, the exit from carnival, even via such a positively coded ritual of self-declaration similar to the convention of actors taking off their face paint and becoming themselves (think of the ballerinas pulling off her false eyelashes in Ingmar Bergman's ASummer Interlude, 1951) is not without its drawbacks. As each individual regains the visibility of being other, in 'becoming' themselves, the marks of mental illness inscribed on their faces also become evident.
The immediacy of the face throws a wild card into Téllez's practice; it exceeds representation and speaks of both identities and interiorities that are unassimilable by artistic performance. This problem has been addressed by various forms of theatre that seek to erode any indication of subjectivity, whether by method acting or trained technique, and the mode of theatre closest to Téllez's in style is that of anti-naturalism. The French filmmaker Robert Bresson, for example, used regular people whom he called 'models' - a term he used to distinguish them from actors - and had them rehearse their scenes to such an extent that their performances lacked all affect: 'Models. Mechanical exterior. Intact, virginal interior.'4 Such an emphasis on interiority presents the will towards non-acting in a different light than that given to it by Bertolt Brecht, who, within his definition of epic theatre, provides the dominant theorisation of anti-naturalism. In contrast to Brecht's justification of 'epic theatre' in terms of the relationship between actor and audience, and his desire to awake their consciousness, Bresson configures his choice in terms of a relation (and one that is directly proportional) between the models visible exterior and his or her subjectivity. The mask, for Bresson's purposes, is ideal; an uncontrolled face speaks of an interior that potentially surpasses or conflicts with the total cinematographic vision - a controlled articulation of performance, lighting, camerawork andmise en scène - he aimed for.
This problem is made more acute in Téllez's work, as his performers are more prone to unintentionally expressing their interiority - or indeed to displaying interiorities that do not actually correspond to what they feel. Psychologists use the term inappropriate affect to describe a patients inability to communicate their inner experience in a way that is understandable to others. This difference between being and communicating is often conflated in the assumption of a straightforward identity between physical expression and interior impression: for example a rapidly shifting or, equally, a blank face may speak of a discordant or disturbed interiority. Tllez maps this mismatch between inner experience and outward expression onto the more formal distinction between 'being' and 'performing'.5 How much can we know from someones face?
Interestingly, Téllez frames this also as a question of bodily, not just facial, legibility. InChoreutics (2001) he documents a Venezuelan community that suffers from a high rate of Huntingtons disease, a degenerative illness in which the body is not able to control muscular spasms. Two men sit in lawn chairs, jittering. A man lies in a bed, twitching. Another looks like he is smiling, but it is only his muscles tensing inadvertently. In a film that is part testimony - giving exposure to the town and the inadequate medical care it receives - and part a collectively authored portrait of a community, Téllez frames these involuntary movements as both documentation and performance, letting the convulsing muscles of his subjects communicate nothing about individual identity and rather only something about the disease itself.6
Téllez parodied the reading of illness via one's face or body, a practice known as physiognomy, in a 2005 project for the Sydney Biennial, for which he worked with a group of women from a local mental institution, the Rozelle Hospital. The 16mm film, Twelve and a Marionette(2004), that he and the patients made together features a sequence of identifications similar to that shown inOne Flew over the Void. A series of fixed shots shows each woman writing her name on a blackboard, then turning to face the camera in such a way that the same confluence of facial and nominal revelation occurs: the women identify themselves as individuals. This is followed by an image of a hospital corridor, and then a series of profile, front and back shots of the women that recall the physiognomic illustrations and photographs that were once taken as scientific proof of character traits, and which were put into the service of various discriminatory policies. This status of being the passive subject is counteracted by the interview that follows, in which women discuss their experiences of mental illness, framing it as a condition - something to be treated - rather than an identity. The women's faces as a passive site of information become subordinated to their own understanding of their condition.
The second part of the installation is an altered version of Carl Theodor Dreyer's silent film La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), for which the Rozelle patients created a set of new intertitles.7Written on a blackboard a palimpsest that suggests from the outset the double inscription of the film the intertitles transform the story of the martyr into that of a newly admitted patient, 'J.D.A.', who believes herself to be Joan of Arc. Based on 'clinical records found at the hospital' - information given by an intertitle that is then followed by an image from the film of a hand going over a book - the film incorporates both the historical figure of Joan of Arc and Dreyer's film into the discourse of the hospital: 'J.D.A. 19 years old. Female. Was brought to the hospital by her family showing signs of extreme distress, it was decided to admit her as an involuntary patient. The patient believed herself to be Joan of Arc. She was suffering from grandiose delusions and auditory and visual hallucinations.'8
Replacing Dreyer's masterpiece - a film in a particular style by a director known for a recognisable aesthetic - with a multi-authored assemblage of various subjectivities on the one hand is a succinct example of a currently prevalent type of work that adopts and thematises participatory models (and which subsequently implies a distinct potential for exploitation, which Téllez is well aware of). In the parallels it makes betweendifferent modes of representation that manifest themselves in similar expressions - Dreyer's famous use of the close-up, the physiognomic posturing and the frontal camera shots of the films interview mode - it is also a questioning of both the authors and the performers roles: is there a possibility, as in Bakhtin, of collaboration without representation? How much exceeds the artists control? And what may the viewer read as the subjectivity of the performer versus the performing act? Bresson's use of the term 'models' was a move to empty his actors of any subjectivity, to make them, as it were, virgin territory. Not so different in outward semblance are the affectless performances of Brecht's epic theatre that disallow any identification with the viewer. Téllez's reworking of the Oedipus myth, he said, was inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini's Edipe Re (1967) - a film of Brechtian performance that itself showcases instances of inappropriate affect, where characters burst spontaneously and arbitrarily into coarse laughter. Téllez's film also was performed by patients at a mental hospital, all wearing Japanese Noh masks, set in the Western genre and filmed in a Colorado ghost town. The problem of the uncontrolled face or the inappropriate laugh is here conquered by the use of the mask. In denying any subjectivity, it generalises the performers as well as the quandary they act out, thus reversing the cultural progression of the Oedipus myth. Taken as the template of male sexual fears and desires, what was originally a 'public' myth has now become the script for 'private' psychological processes.
The mask in Rabelais's carnival never comes off. However, in subsequent iterations of the carnivalesque such as the Romantic grotesque and French Romanticism the mask plays part in a narrative that awaits revelation. Téllez's work locates the mask elsewhere: either literally covering the face and not to be removed, or as the face itself, a site of dubious and untrustworthy legibility. He thus suggests a parallel between the mask and the necessarily incommunicative face that functions as a mask not because of the masks fixed features, but instead because of their volatile character.
Téllez extends the conditions usually associated with the mentally ill beyond their margins to all instances of performance. Performance, often considered in terms of artifice (as the not-natural) or in opposition to the spectator (as the on-stage or observed), here can be seen as contaminated expression of interiority never wholly avoided nor purely accomplished.
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