Meredith Monk's "Recent Ruins": The Archaeology of Consciousness: Essaying Images

Author(s): Bonnie Marranca

Source: Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1980), pp. 39-49
Published by: Performing Arts Journal, Inc
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3245060
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MEREDITH MONK'S

RECENT RUINS

The Archaeology of Consciousness:

Essaying Images
Bonnie Marranca

beginning again
For the overture the singers sit in a "magic" circle that is the consecrated
space from which their incantation calls up the spirits of the past. Is Recent

Ruins the dream of these people who revisit their primitive past and envi-

sion their future?

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The solo and choral singing (female voices dominate) is of a pre-verbal

order that is a kind of poetry, but it is the body of the voice that attracts at-

tention. In this dance opera (there is no spoken language) it is the landscape of the body that reflects its geography of dreams. The singing is not
the "beautiful" kind that hides all the work and shows only the refined surfaces, but "crude" singing that incorporates the journey theme of the piece
by showing how sound travels in and through the body. Sometimes you can
hear it curling up and over the teeth, in the nose, the back of the throat, and
in the diaphragm.

Certain letters of the alphabet are prominent-"w," "a," "o"-the nonaggressive, soft sounds, and the singing sometimes incorporates talking,

as if language is on the way to becoming. The sounds are birth cries, animal

noises, screams, lullabies-undifferentiated sound in a universe that does

not yet have names for things.

It is primal sound whose dominant quality is the echo: as if these tones

always existed and will always exist in space. Musical motifs of the overture will re-echo in other sections of the work, startino as the acoustic
sound of earliest life and ending as recorded sound after the world moves
from primitive to technological society.

The phenomenology of sound is conceptualized musically to define a world

in which all harsh sounds are excluded and only those (w, o, m, b, a) which
take in and give out the life breath find a space.

CD
CD

writing a performance
Section II. While the twentieth-century couple sits
on the upper stage in front of a projection screen

behind which someone is drawing examples of ancient and modern artifacts, pairs of "archaeologists" write equations and calculations
all over the floor. When this segment concludes, a
film made by Monk at Ellis Island details the

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classification and documentation of immigrants

on a screen directly across the space from the

position of the couple.
This section of Recent Ruins represents the
modern obsession, begun in the Renaissance,
with codifying and documenting everything in the
world: the world is viewed in terms of its Object-

hood. The performance text itself is written in

theatrical time, not only literally, but in narrative
codes that are spatial, acoustic, iconographic,

chromatic, diagrammatic, kinesic, symbolic. The

huge anonymous hand (reminding us that these
objects were first handicrafts, later industrial objects) draws a "lesson": that objects, like people,
have a history. The "language" of the humanistic
perspective is written on the floor, on the screen,
on the film frame (an immigrant's nose is circled
as a hand writes "Serb" across the film strip-no
photograph).
This then is the culmination of the humanist view

Galileo summed up in his dream "to measure

everything measurable and to make what is not
measurable capable of being measured." Monk's

repertory of images exposes a geometry of emotion in which the materialism of humanism is

displaced by the dematerialist world spirit she

proposes.

a change of perspective
Everytime I look at these two "archaeologists" (section II) in Victorian dress
roaming about, measuring, and making calculations in chalk on the floor, I
think of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas who undertook many amateur

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archaeological expeditions in the European countryside. (A generous

theatre experience always allows the spectator some time to dream.)
Stein's intellectual excavation of the visible and invisible in the world led

her to conceive of a work of art as a "landscape"-it would reflect

everything in it in a state of continuous present. "The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends
upon how everybody is doing everything," she once said in another context.

the portrait and the tableau

The portrait is a compositional unit of Recent Ruins.

In this particular instance it ...;

is a play on images that

contrasts the real and the

c inematic images of the immigrants who appear live

(here) at first, then shortly
thereafter in a film.

On the ground in front of them is a jug like the one

in the projected drawings alongside the table of

the couple in the "domestic tableau" (the immigrants and the couple dominate opposite ends

of the space). From left to right, a woman alone,

weary and fearful; a black man, situated slightly
behind the women, withdrawn, skeptical; a wideeyed, hopeful woman bringing a baby to the "new

world."

The portrait represents an attitude toward history,

it puts history in quotes. Unlike the tableau which

is interested in imagery, a portrait is rooted in

social commentary. The tableau is only

understood in the context of the work as a whole;

the portrait lives in its own world.

digression #1
When Susan Sontag published her provocative essay, "Against Interpretation," in 1964 she probably didn't suspect the impact it would have on art
and literary worlds. Nor, I'm sure, would she agree with the ways in which
her articulate, forceful polemic would be pushed to extremes by those seek-

ing to proclaim the objectivity of aesthetic experience.

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One must see that essay in its historical context as Sontag herself emphasized in it more than once, referring to its context "today"-that was
sixteen years ago. Her essay took a position against the kind of criticism
that was devoted to the moral view in a work of art, and the psychology
(Freudian) it reflected, written by critics bent on a search for meaning in
sub-texts of their own creation. The sensuality of a work of art was undermined by the obsession to wring content from form.

Though several significant changes have occurred which invite one to reexamine Sontag's early position, there are two that have special relevance
in the contemporary context: the success of conceptual art which trivializ-

ed the division of form and content; the influence of structuralism which

radicalized the ways it is possible to think about a text.

Sontag, however, had already left the way open for the act of interpretation

in the right circumstances. "It is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling," she said, but also allowed that "in some cultural contexts, interpreta-

tion is a liberating act."

I believe that today provides the cultural context for making interpretation a
liberating act, but I am concerned with the idea of interpretation only in the

context of performance (avant-garde performance, to be specific) which in

the last dozen years has radically extended the variety of theatrical experience. Performance, which by its nature devises an image language, invites criticism that can be sensually involved with the structure of images in
complex ways, while not reducing everything to content. That doesn't mean
that discussion of a performance need begin and end with the point of em-

pathy of the spectator interpreting the psychology of the performer or

author.

The writings of Paul Ricoeur suggest a way to revitalize Sontag's essay visa-vis avant-garde performance which has gone beyond sophisticated formal experimentation while critics lag far behind, lacking the vocabulary to

address performance, and so resorting most often to mere description of

the event.

The subject of interpretation has special relevance with regard to theatrical

presentation because theatre is a shared event (unlike the isolated reading

of a literary text) that takes place publicly, and is always in the state of
becoming. Theatrical performances can never be reinterpreted years or
generations after they occur which means that performance criticism
always begins on the experiential plane, and is always sensually involved.
Ricoeur sees the world as "an ensemble of references opened up by texts."

He moves the emphasis of interpretation away from the study of the author
and toward the understanding of the world of his work. In Ricoeur's view the
meaning of a text is not behind it (the place where Sontag finds mediocre interpreters excavating for meaning) but in front of it, to be disclosed by the
text itself. It is the difference between seeking and finding.
If in pre-structuralist times (in America, that is) Sontag wanted to keep the

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reader from re-writing, so to speak, a work of art, now that structuralism has
re-imagined the relationship of text and reader, Ricoeur can suggest that a

work is written again in the reader who expands his capacity for knowing
himself by understanding in the world of the work new modes of being-inthe-world. Thus, the big leap is moving the act of interpretation away from
the subjective plane on to the ontological one.
It is at this point that we can begin to think of a hermeneutics of perform-

ance which can show us that all the stage is a world.

Ellis Island is a recent ruin where

human beings were once segregated, examined, measured, and

classified like artifacts of history.

The island itself symbolized an:

isolated universe that cut off the im-

migrant from the home land, the

community, ritual experience, and
the mother tongue. It demonstrated
it wasn't true that "no man is an
island." Pre-industrial realities of

experience were displaced by in-

dustrial, then technological fantasies of Progress which is the idea

that made it possible to accept the
transformation of huge sections of
the American landscape into recent
ruins. In most parts of the world
ruins put one in the state of mind to
reflect on history while our ruins
deny the role of history in American
life.

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In the ethnographic collections of any museum one

can always overhear

visitors commenting on the

"modernity" of ancient ar-

tifacts. "Look how modern

those bracelets (bowls,

tools) are." They never

acknowledge that industry

merely continues the structural features and uses of

ancient objects. All objects

in bourgeois consumer
society have to be looked

upon as if they never ex- : f o i

isted before so that people

will always have the feeling

that they own something

brand new.

the theatre of images

Recent Ruins is pure performance text opening up to a field of energies
whose every sound and image is lexicalized into signs that evolve a semantic space. The performance text-in this way it is like a literary text-is
capable of carrying on a sophisticated narrative discourse, but it proposes
a sensual grammar in lieu of a linguistic one: one of movement (kinesics),

one of images (iconology), one of sound (oral poetry).

If imagery in contemporary performance has frequently become seductive,
solipsistic, and empty of extended cultural metaphor, Recent Ruins proves
an exception by affirming the ideational impact of imagery when constituted in radical cultural contexts. We need a kind of performance
criticism that moves beyond the description of imagery to a hermeneutics
of imagery.
Throughout its brief history the American avant-garde has conceived
poetically complex relationships between text and image, but in very few
cases has it discarded language altogether in favor of imagery. Monk has
succeeded, as has Robert Wilson, in creating a pure theatre of images

because she deals with myth, archetypes and consciousness as subject

matter. Her imagery lives in the idea of culture and its psychology reflects,
not the self of autobiographical art, but the soul of mythopoesis. Her structures of images embody a formal integrity that is always on the verge of
becoming allegory.

the pictorial and the imagistic

The pictorial is a representation of an action whose predictability and
shape is never in question; it is illustrative. Imagery is always a surprise

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because it springs from Necessity, not causality. Pictures are merely anecdotal, decorative; images are poetic, mythic. The old theatre is literal, the
new theatre is metaphoric. Now imagery and imagination can begin to
create the morality of form.

the semiotics of space

When I think of affecting theatrical experiences of recent years, besides
Recent Ruins the two that come immediately to mind are Quarry (also
Monk) and the Greek Trilogy of Andrei Serban, all three of them presented,

coincidentally, in the performing space of La Mama Annex. That space is a

horizontal space which is the ideal setting for myth and ritual presentation.
In the Oriental theatre it is the model of the cosmos.

Recent Ruins has its upper and lower regions, corners, center, light and
dark areas where simultaneous action in different settings can represent in
non-linear sequence all time, dramatic time, filmic time, musical time. If the

experience of verticality is modernist, horizontal space is timeless,

spiritual. It is the space where history can confront the audience today.

The ideas of history are conceptualized in the use of space as historical setting: focused, simple space for the primitive scene (section III); stereometric

space as the modern experience (section II); sensual, conceptualized

imagery-as-narration in the new vision that projects itself into the future
(section IV).

an anthropological note: That women choreographers (Monk,

Trisha Brown, Kei Takei come immediately to mind) use the floor as setting

more so than men, suggests an historical link with women at the (h)earth.

Lt_1 , II

Cerier

Leslie

Cerier

Johan

This is part of a sequence in which

two figures move from a simian to a
human state. Monk's interpretation
of the first encounter of man and
woman before the Fall shows them

as equal partners in their relationship. The woman is not shown to be

the corruptor.

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digression #2
How should a feminist critique of Recent Ruins proceed? Should the work
be explained by the fact that Monk is a woman or should it be explained by

her position as choreographer, or does her posthumanist vision dominate

the creation? I resist seeing a work of art in terms of any system other than
the one it creates for itself, yet it would be unfair to deny that certain ways
of thinking about human life have been expanded by the feminist perspective (as they have by Marxism), and that this work is one of them.

Monk's work cannot be totally explained from the point of view of its
woman-centeredness, yet it is important to see in it an alternative to receiv-

ed (i.e., male) perceptions of the historical process, and an acknowledgement of women's contribution to culture and the repository of myth before
making the jump to understanding the non-sexually differentiated model of
consciousness it presents as its unifying idea. If theatre has any function it

has to be to shape new models of consciousness in a living situation. In the

feminist context it simply means shifting the perspective of women from
object to subject.

A_ z

Monk re-visions history by acknowledging the

myth of heroic women in ancient times: the
woman warrior leading the community and the
goddess defending herself from human transgressions.

Section III depicts a matriarchal society (in the

primitive culture segments the performers wear
yellow) whose members dance and sing with joy

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CD

-H

after one of them has subdued the giant goddess. Johan Elbers

They dance in pure ritual pleasure-a dance that

is uninhibited, outward-directed, individualistic,
heavenward-around the magic waters (the circle
of the prologue) wherein the universal eye is
reflected.

The male and female (they dominate) voices, in

typically tribal call and response pattern answer

"oo-oo" to the melody line of "a-we-na" that is

chanted over and over. In the thematic context of f

Recent Ruins Gaston Bachelard's observation has .
special meaning as a poetics of space: "...the

vowel a is the vowel of immensity. It is a sound

that starts with a sigh and extends beyond all --

limits."

the archaeology of consciousness

One recent afternoon I was walking with a director friend who remarked at
the sight of a gray, filmy vapor in the sky above us: "Are they dropping the
bomb before I finish my piece on nuclear power?" Later that evening an un-

prepossessing helicopter hovered overhead, and some passersby looked up

with fear on their faces. What do these incidents suggest?-that the real
threat of nuclear holocaust has entered our consciousness, reconstituting
the myth of the Apocalypse.
II
Once upon a time in the sixties ritual, the ideals of communitas, and the
study of myth influenced the radical narrative strategies of artists who attempted to understand consciousness. Then, myth came to mean personal
mythology. The threat of war will move theatre people away from self-

centered art and toward chronicling the life of the community. The solo
voice will be displaced by the group chant once again.
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III
Recent Ruins opposes the notion of what some critics and scholars call
"schizo-culture"-the history of the individual viewed in relation to his

fragmentation and contradictions (Richard Foreman and Spalding Gray

represent this position)-by affirming instead the wholeness of the individual at home in a world that reflects unity and continuity. In place of the

dialectics between split selves Monk proposes a more holistic view of the
human organism.
The world of Recent Ruins outlines an historical View of human con-

sciousness in three phases:

primitive society: the modern, humanist vision that began in the
Renaissance; the cosmic consciousness that is beginning to be
thought of today as posthumanism.

Reinforcing the archaeological metaphor is the sand and stone

that fall from the ceiling above the performance space at the end of
each historical section as if, phenomenologically speaking, to
force one to temporarily bracket existence.

the future as history

The final image unites
human beings and nature,
myth and technology, earth
and sky in a non-hierarchical vision of a cosmic

whole. Monk's new spiritual

topography doesn't presuppose the creation of a new

human form so much as it

situates the history of

human life in a new equation with the cosmos.

The algebra of the intellectual position is symbolized in the iconography of

the last tableau which shows human figures surrounded by familiar (if
giant) phenomena-turtles which remind them of the possibility of longevi-

ty, a spider (held by the goddess of section III) whose web emphasizes the
cycles of life and bees (not seen in photograph), the industrious, creative
forces of life. In the darkness people in black (the piece opens and closes in
black and white-the shades of infinity) twirl small models of satellites
which expand the possibilities of global communication and bring us closer
to life in space.
The miniaturization of the satellites and the enlargement of animal life
reverse the natural representations of the visible world, and in this act of
the imagination we can glimpse poetically Monk's visionary world which is
not in the future, it's already here.
Bonnie Marranca is co-Publisher/Editor of Performing Arts Journal Publications.
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