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!
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/
Some context for/an interpretation of the "Large Glass":
http://www.dada-companion.
A publisher's blurb for Jarry's Supermale:
http://www.citylights.com/
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
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.blo
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!
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