Feedback from the
microphone:*
"If I wanted some
feedback, I would have asked for it."
Stare cautiously to the
left, while listening to the microphone buzz. Then say in a concerned tone,
"Whatever it is, it's getting closer."
I don't know where the thing
about more people being afraid of public speaking than of death came from.
Presumably it's apocryphal. But
I find watching people perform uncomfortable for the simple reason that I
can't sufficiently distance
myself from the immediate experience of the performer him/ herself to identify
with the characters he/ she is
trying to portray. Every theatrical experience is, for me, an instance of
Brecht's
alienation or Artaud's cruelty.
I'm sure this is not uncommon.
The microphone goes dead:
"Let me have a show of
hands: How many of you read lips?"
"This is carrying
Silent Night a little far. (Holiday time)"
There's a mess of
extension cord. An opaque projector (state
of the art,1957) sits on a shitty gray plastic table.
The portable
projection screen is crooked and looks rickety, on the verge of collapse. This
takes place in a gallery
in which every
electrical outlet has a chrome cover, the concrete floor is polished to a sheen
that makes it hard not
to look up skirts,
people are asked not to lean on the Venetian plaster walls and there is
sometimes, on weekday
afternoons, (for
real) a guy playing a white grand piano in the lobby.
When the lights go out or
flicker:
"I do my best work in the dark."
"Everyone's a
critic."
The limitations on
the visualization "software" (markers, acetate, tape, gum, spit,
Mariah's quiet serious purr),
combined with the
stress the performance places on the empathetic viewer actually combine to
bring said viewer
into proximity with
the subject of the talk even as he or she is beginning to question the accuracy
or value of the
information being
conveyed. Put another way, the experiment in "Neuroplasticity and the
Perception of Time and
Space" is performed
on rather than presented
to the audience. It
occurs to me later that this might actually be the
best, or even the
only, way to address the absurdly vast subject in a compact timeframe.
Loud noises:
"Mom, can you be a
little more careful?"
"That concludes the
musical portion of the program."
Mary Boone wears a very
professional smile throughout the presentation, while her eyes tell you her
brain
is chewing through God knows
what, the sale of a Francisco Clemente or something. The guys in the expensive
suits who work at the gallery
try to find polite ways to get back to work. Some people leave. Some sit down
on
the polished concrete floor.
The guys in suits glance at Mary, trying to figure out if this is okay:
nobody's ever
tried to sit on the floor in
here before.
Fire alarm or bell:
"Time to take my
pill."
"So that's what
happened to my wake-up call."
People walk into
the gallery and blanch, not expecting this at all. Without a sense of how much
time
is left, the
remaining members of the audience stand awkwardly. The true codependent
empaths, the
ones who probably
know Mariah and want this to "succeed" (and think they know what that
might mean)
laugh at the
slightest provocation, any hint that this might be intentionally funny. But then you cringe for them, too.
Slide is upside
down:
"For those of you
standing on your heads..."
"This is the Australian
part of the presentation."
You're not clear on to what
extent the performance is calculated to be a failure, and you get the sense
that the performer isn't
either. You're left half bored, half engaged, and, if you have even the
slightest
capacity for empathy,
completely uncomfortable. What you're seeing is neither sincere nor ironic,
fact nor fiction, Mariah/ a character, performance/ lecture,
good/ bad. In the end, maybe this is what
is most interesting about the
piece: the total absence of any criteria by which to evaluate what you're
experiencing.
*Italicized passages from Toastmasters
International's "Tips and Tricks to Giving a Speech", section on
"the value of planned spontaneity:
what to do when
something goes wrong"
[http://www.toastmasters.org/MainMenuCategories/FreeResources/NeedHelpGivingaSpeech/FearFactor/WhatYouShouldHaveSaid.aspx]
Johannes VanDerBeek
gallery filled with people
appropriately socializing in groups, the lights were suddenly dimmed, putting
the art on view
seemingly in the distance and
a singular image from a overhead projector in the foreground of everyone's
attention,
As Mariah proceeded with her presentation on something to the effect of how
neurological passage ways are
developed in the human brain
it slowly became apparent that the heart of the performance was not the
conveyance of
content but rather the
awkward and heartbreaking experience of watching someone struggle to do
so. As she
stumbled through her material
it recalled situations like a substitute teacher on their first day at the job
eagerly
searching for ways to engage
with the students. The surfacing of such memories and the feeling of empathy
toward
Mariah began to alter the way
I felt about the room I was standing in. At times I forgot I was at a gallery
in New York
City and was overwhelmed by
the abundant discomfort overtaking the group as Mariah's authenticity became
increasingly indecipherable.
To experience such a sudden psychological shift with an entire room of people
was truly
memorable.
David Brooks
what was actually enacted,
but by what was precisely left out: enactment. However, the air of authenticity
around the
presenter and her subject
matter was dubious, jostling and piercing - while fact and fiction flirted with
all who looked
on. In the context of a gallery
space one is not customarily expecting such deadpan lectures on the morphology
of the
brain, nor with axiomatic
demonstrations of how our relations to the physical world might appear on a
cortical map.
Perhaps the very nature of the
topic is already so nebulous and seemingly hypothetical that the language used
to describe
concepts of neuroplasticity
and perception automatically has the ring of prose, and maybe science fiction,
but not of science.
From a certain perspective,
the performance's lack of a contextual preface from which to begin, already
illustrates certain
precepts of neuroplasticity,
perception and its remote nature in our collective consciousness. Her approach
to lecturing
with such a homemade
assemblage of craft-orientated presentation techniques only further complicates
the reception of
such a convoluted and
seemingly mystical subject to the viewer. In the final analysis, the viewer
questions if what they
are being presented with is
factually true or orchestrated, while simultaneously seduced by her guided
journeys
through such neurological
quandaries.