Lures, Limits, Desire, and Agency

Last night I had an informal brainstorming session with the actors. In my estimation, it was quite a success. We viewed two short stop-motion puppet animation films by the Quay Brothers: "This Unnameable Little Broom (Epic of Gilgamesh)" and "Street of Crocodiles." Both films are deliberate and sustained representations of the bachelor machine concept. By far, the latter of these provoked the most discussion. I include a copy of this short film here--in two parts because presumably it is too large to post in its entirety on Youtube. The picture and sound quality are somewhat poor and the color in particular seems to have lost its richness in the transfer, but close enough:

Part 1:



Part 2:



I asked the actors to think about what common motifs they saw in both short films and how these related to the research I asked them to do. Though it necessarily does some violence to the rich discussion that ensued, for the sake of simplicity I think the conversation can be summarized in three main points: 1) the relation of desire as one of lure and limit, 2) problems of agency and control, and 3) voyeurism and the gaze. I will reserve a more sustained engagement with the third for a separate entry, since it elicits larger questions about set design and how I plan to cast the audience in the production, both of which should be examined in much more detail. For the others, however, I will offer my all-too-brief summations of the discussion.

1) Lures and Limits: the Relation of Desire

The bachelor machine functions as an amplification of desire that ultimately refuses satisfaction. Some very intense moments of personal sharing emerged more-or-less organically among the actors. I was encouraged to see that this concept has relevance to their own lives, as it does to mine. I will not enumerate their related personal experiences or my own here, but I will say that all of us shared a similar understanding of desire. Despite minor differences among us, we all seemed to agree that desire functions as a lure that ultimately brings the subject to the threshold of a certain limit and refutes attempts to trangress that limit. This has various manifestations: the etiquette of communication in the early stages of an amorous relationship, the place of morality, ethics, and love in relation to sexual drive, the contradictory forces at play in the performance and construction of gender, etc.

2) Agency and Control in the Bachelor Machine

There's a certain theological impulse in most of us to understand who is the primary causal agent of desire. Who built the bachelor machine? Do we build it and rebuild it constantly? Are we ourselves parts of it? Might one be a bachelor machine in oneself? Or does it take at least two to make a bachelor machine? To what extent do individual actions shape the processes of the bachelor machine? To what extent, conversely, does the bachelor machine structure human agency? Is the bachelor machine social or individual? All questions left more or less unanswered, most likely because they are unanswerable unless one has achieved that impossible Archimedian point outside the structure and function of desire.

Brainstorming Session Invitation to Actors

I have asked my actors to contribute ideas for the script which I am in the process of writing, because the highly conceptual nature of this piece masks a deeply personal and extremely traumatic experience which played a major role in its original inception. In order to defeat the tendency to reproduce some myth of the tortured artist who creates from the darkest recesses of his or her own psyche (which I find to be a fundamentally flawed model of artistic production for reasons which I will not enumerate here) in the process, I have opted to invite the actors to contribute their ideas as raw material from which to work. I think this collaborative approach will produce a more compelling script and performance. Also, it will better ensure the actors' investment in the project. Below are the contents of two electronic messages that I sent to them--cut and pasted together--inviting them to a brainstorming session. I include them here because they reconfigure some of my earlier ideas about the performance and include web links to sites I have been using as "secondary sources." Notes from the meeting will be posted as well after it has taken place. Here is the invitation:


The meeting will be rather informal. Just want to throw around a few ideas and get to know one another. I want you all to be as involved in shaping this as possible, so I welcome your contributions. My source texts on this are Marcel Duchamp's artwork "Large Glass" and his papers for the project entitled "The Green Box," Alfred Jarry's novel _The Supermale_, Diller and Scofidio's "Delay in Glass" (a performance based on Duchamp's artwork), and Michel Carrouges' essay "The Bachelor Machines." I have also been thinking of using synthpop group OMD's "Of All the Things We've Made" from the album Dazzle Ships as a musical theme for the piece. Please look into these source texts as much as possible in advance of our meeting. You certainly don't have to read them all, but try to familiarize yourselves with their themes and basic ideas.

You might also google the terms "bachelor machine" and "narcissism" and see what comes up. For the latter, keep in mind the Narcissus myth from which the psychological condition takes its name--this brings into focus the first part of the title of this piece. Basically, I want to bring this unresolved concept of the bachelor machine from the first half of the twentieth century to bear on contemporary problems of the construction and performance of masculine sexuality in our culture. What I have in mind here is the post-feminist idea that liberation for women means treating men as pleasure machines. We see this best expressed in television shows like Sex and the City wherein men are understood as productive and useful for at least one of the female protagonists only insofar as they can supply two things: shoes and orgasms. Here and elsewhere, men are constructed as machines that supply pleasure in the form of sexual gratification and material goods. I also want to tackle the problem from the opposite angle as well: men who understand themselves as sex machines (we might recall James Brown's song of the same name here) and providers of material satisfaction. Basically, I am interested in the way that technology mediates human sexuality.

Just to get you started, here are a few things I've found.

A jpeg of Duchamp's "Large Glass":

http://www.beatmuseum.org/duchamp/images/bride.jpg

Some context for/an interpretation of the "Large Glass":

http://www.dada-companion.com/duchamp/largeglass.php

A publisher's blurb for Jarry's Supermale:

http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100735880

Photo documentation of the performance of Diller and Scofidio's "Delay in Glass" (login with your UMN ID, click on entry 2, "Delay in Glass"):

http://www.jstor.org.floyd.lib.umn.edu/action/doBasicSearch?Query=delay+in+glass+diller+scofidio&gw=jtx&prq=delay+in+glass&Search=Search&hp=25&wc=on

Download a copy of OMD's "Of All the Things We've Made" from iTunes. It may be listed under artist Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark. Or, buy a copy of the album. It's a good one: challenging, largely panned by critics and shunned by audiences in its day, quite conceptual and cerebral for OMD, steeped in Cold War paranoia, and has been referred to by critics upon its recent reissue as the OMD equivalent of Radiohead's Kid A.

Finally, a link to project blog "How to build a Bachelor Machine" (pretty bare-bones at the moment, but it should give you a basic idea of what I'm after):

http://bachelormachine.blogspot.com/

I'd like each of you to come up with one or more sketches of scenarios that might somehow evoke the above. So give this some thought and we'll brainstorm. Let me know if you have any questions. Very much looking forward to working with you all, and looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with!

Musical Theme: OMD's "Of All the Things We've Made"

The song fades in with a synth drone, which is overlayed with a repetitive, jangly, dissonant, atonal guitar riff. A metronomic drum beat enters, followed by a hauntingly beautiful electric piano line, and finally by McClusky's icy baritone that does not soar here like it will on later OMD tracks like "If You Leave," but rather blends in with the stillness of the instrumentation. As the song comes to a close, these elements all drop out quickly but one at a time, leaving only the jangled dissonance of guitar, which abruptly ends. No instrumental solos or bridges, no chord changes or crescendos, just a delicately sparing and minimalist song that is elegant, beautiful, and somehow simultaneously cold and sad. It has a sound of ending, winding down, and entropic stillness that will work well with the themes of the piece. Both the music and the lyrics go nowhere, but simply repeat with very little change. In keeping with the concept of the Bachelor Machine, the song does not come to climax. Instead, it plods on with a driving pulse until it comes to a sudden halt. Below are the lyrics:


Of All the Things We've Made

To want this.
Of everything we've made.
The times it's worked before.

Of all the things we've said.
Times that worked before today.

To want this.
Of everything we've made.
The times it's worked before.

Of all the things we've said.
It always worked before today.