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reviews-objects-gstraight — Liminal

LIMINAL

H O M E   

A B O U T   

N E W S   

A R C H I V E

OBJECTS  SUBVERTS  EXPECTATIONS
The  Georgia  Straight,  Vancouver,  BC,  November  1,  2001  
By  Colin  Thomas
Objects  for  the  Emancipated  Consumer.  
At  the  Dynamo  Gallery  on  Thursday,  October  25.  
Part  of  the  LIVE  Biennial  of  Performance  Art.
I  can’t  remember  the  last  time  I  was  so  engaged  by  the  dilemma  of  the
postmodern  subject.  DON’T  STOP  READING.  I’m  kidding  with  the  bafflegab—kind
of.  For  good  reason,  many  people  associate  postmodernism  and  its  vocabulary
with  pretentiousness.  But,  in  our  culture,  we  eat,  breathe  and  sleep  the
postmodern  sensibility  every  day.  That’s  why  it’s  so  cool  thatObjects  for  the
Emancipated  Consumer  explores  this  ubiquitous  world-view,  this  misunderstood
philosophy,  in  a  presentation  that’s  seriously  smart  but  also  accessible,  funny,
and  thoroughly  theatrical.
Postmodernists  will  debate  the  definition  of  the  term  postmodern  until  they  die;
some  theorists  even  deny  the  sensibility’s  existence.  But  I’m  going  to  fly  in  the
face  of  academic  nitpicking—and  infighting—to  give  you  my  reductive  notion  about
how  some  of  the  ideas  associated  with  postmodernism  apply  here.
Postmodernism  involves  the  dissolution  of  truth.  Let’s  use  history  as  an  example.
Time  was  when  the  conquerors  wrote  history  and  their  version  of  events  was
generally  accepted,  thereby  creating  a  more  or  less  unified  reality.  So  we  spoke  of
the  “triumph”  of  Christopher  Columbus’s  “discovery”  of  America,  for  instance.
Postmodern  theorists,  on  the  other  hand,  apply  a  critique  of  colonialism;
Columbus’s  arrival  wasn’t  such  a  world-improving  watershed  if  you  were  one  of
the  Native  women  he  raped  or  a  member  of  one  of  the  cultures  that  were  pillaged
and  decimated  post-contact.  Feminism,  queer  theory,  class  and  racial  politics  all
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inform  postmodernism;  in  the  end,  you  get  multiple,  conflicting  views  of  history
and  the  notion  of  a  single,  fixed  truth  becomes  irretrievable.  And  a  sidebar:
advances  in  technology—especially  telecommunications—escalate  the
experiences  of  multiplicity,  overload,  and  rootlessness.  As  relationships  and
communities  become  virtual,  our  identities  become  more  fluid.  This  can  be
liberating;  think  about  the  increasing  choice  we  experience  in  terms  of  gender
self-definition,  for  instance.  But  the  dilemma  of  the  postmodern  subject—that  is,
anybody  who  lives  within  this  kind  of  experience—arises  from  the  difficulty  of
creating  meaning  without  fixed  reference  points.
In  Objects,  the  folks  from  Liminal,  a  performance-art  company  from  Portland,
Oregon,  illuminate  all  of  this  without  stopping  to  publicly  theorize—and  without
pausing  for  breath.  In  a  clever  device,  they  frame  their  performance  as  a  murder
mystery.  A  hard-boiled  detective  tries  to  figure  out  who  killed  whom  and  why.  As
detectives  do,  he  looks  for  “truth”,  but  his  quest  is  hilariously  anachronistic.  The
poor  guy  is  searching  for  clues  in  an  airport,  an  alienating,  culturally  arbitrary
space;  everybody  around  him  lies  and  assumes  different  identities;  and  he  has
no  memory—in  a  metaphor  for  the  fragmentation  of  our  collective  history,  his
personal  history  has  dissolved.
Every  audience  member  becomes  a  detective,  too.  Theatrically  speaking,  the
company  throws  us  all  in  at  the  deep  end  and  leaves  us  to  fend—individually—for
ourselves.  Liminal  performs  Objects  in  open  settings  and  the  audience  is  free  to
roam,  but  the  flood  of  information  is  staggering,  especially  at  first.  Two  or  three
scenes  take  place  at  once—often  out  of  sequence—and  all  of  them  demand  our
attention.  Do  I  want  to  watch  the  detective  interrogate  a  witness  in  a
confrontation  that’s  sometimes  violent,  sometimes  sexual  or  desperately
vulnerable?  Or  do  I  follow  the  slim  woman  who  passes  me  a  note  asking  me  if  I’m
her  contact?  She  seems  to  have  some  relationship  to  espionage  that  involves  the
potential  destruction  of  all  of  the  airplanes  in  the  world.  I  experience  a
recognizable  frustration:  I  get  this  feeling  when  I  try  to  make  sense  of  the  news—
currently,  the  news  about  Afghanistan.  What  sources  are  reliable?  What  agendas
are  at  work?  Will  I  ever  resolve  the  inconsistencies,  or  is  the  situation  too
complex,  too  disparate?  In  Objects  for  the  Emancipated  Consumer,  the  invitation
to  find  a  solution  is  traditionally  theatrical;  the  frustration  of  the  solution  bracingly
subverts  our  narrative  expectations.
In  a  sense,  all  of  the  characters  are  detectives,  too.  In  a  complex  series  of
couplings,  they  try  to  find  other  versions  of  truth:  stable  reference  points  in
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personal  relationships.  That,  too,  proves  tricky  in  a  world  booby-trapped  with
hidden  corporate  and  personally  selfish  motivations.  Asked  by  an  agonized  airline
passenger  what  will  happen  to  the  facts  he  has  provided  in  a  complaint,  a  woman
replies:  “I  give  them  to  men  who  decide  if  you’re  cost-efficient  enough  to  help.”
“This  is  the  last  time  I’ll  lie.  I  promise,”  a  man  tells  his  lover  as  he  holds  a  gun  to
her  head.
Although  Liminal  conceived  and  originally  performed  Objects  before  the  recent
terrorist  attacks,  September  11  is  all  over  this  piece  in  an  eerily  prescient  way.
According  to  the  text,  the  events  we  witness  are  taking  place  in  an  airport  located
on  the  top  of  a  business  tower:  Cascade  International  Airlines,  or  CIA,  runs  the
place.  As  we  wait  because  our  flights  are  delayed,  we  pick  up  whisperings  of  plots
and  hear  phrases  such  as,  “It’s  biological  then,”  and  statements  including,  “She
was  a  good  witness  because  she  didn’t  care  about  the  privacy  of  others.”  Even
before  the  attacks,  isolation  and  the  apparent  arbitrariness  of  meaning  were
busily  breeding  both  paranoia  and  deference  to  authority,  of  course,  but  that  has
all  increased.  One  of  the  characters  insisted  on  searching  my  bag  “for  security
reasons”.  I  refused  to  let  him  do  so  but  another  audience  member  acquiesced.  In
one  of  my  favourite  exchanges,  the  detective  demands,  “You  confess  to  murder?”
and  receives  the  reply:  “I  confess  to  my  leadership  skills.”
Besides  the  complexity  of  its  ideas,  several  factors  keep  this  event  compelling.
The  actors  all  deliver  understated,  emotionally  hungry  performances.  And  the
sometimes  expressionistic  movement  is  surprising;  you  never  know  when  one
character  is  going  to  leap  on  another’s  back  or  bully  their  scene  partner’s  body
into  a  pose  of  tenderness.  I  have  only  three  complaints:  the  title  reeks  of  egghead
exclusiveness;  the  video  elements,  which  are  interesting  but  tangential  riffs  at  the
moment,  could  be  more  integrated;  and  this  show’s  run  in  Vancouver  is  too  damn
short.  Liminal  is  one  of  the  most  engaging  companies  I’ve  encountered.  Let’s
hope  they  bring  Objects  back  for  a  longer  run  so  that  more  Vancouverites  get  a
chance  to  hurl  themselves  into  the  white  noise—to  make  up  their  own,  inevitably
incomplete  stories  by  clicking  their  way  through  the  hypertext.

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Site  by  Wickelfisch  Basel,  CH

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