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In talking about artists who turn their life into art, one has to mention Richard Foreman’s new mixed media play WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD! purports to be a response to a world in which visionary sages and poets are replaced by specialists who make platitudes out of the immediately observable. Supposedly here, the unconscious fights back to life in a shape resembling "the stone that rolls up the hill backwards" (the evil one) and, from such "evil,” life renews itself. |
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WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD! – Joseph Nechvatal
Richard Foreman’s new mixed media play WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD! purports to be a response to a world in which visionary sages and poets are replaced by specialists who make platitudes out of the immediately observable. Supposedly here, the unconscious fights back to life in a shape resembling "the stone that rolls up the hill backwards" (the evil one) and, from such "evil,” life renews itself.
Like all of his Ontological-Hysteric Theater work, Richard Foreman’s narrative notes tell us little of the experience of the work. So, I have been mulling over Foreman’s WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! for days before writing a word. Finally, I realized that, in many ways, the play touches on some realizations about the current international art scene that I have been experiencing and reading about, and most prominently in Julian Stallabrass’ small book Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction. In this publication, Stallabrass describes a theory of the art market which explains the current art world’s fucked-up situation along some of the same lines that Foreman’s WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! does: specifically arguing that, behind contemporary multiplicity and apparent capriciousness, lies a bleak uniformity and that this amounts to making culture uncurious, timid and stupid for the service of unquestioning consumer conformity; a pop ethos apparently enforced by some dim-witted and unsaid social-climbing consensus. Ostensibly, WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! suggests that the invention of the airplane (controlled by a horde of baby-doll pilots) is the death knell of the unconscious mind—and this suggested to me how the unregulated, insular contemporary art world seems, recently, to be attempting to dupe newbie rubes into becoming enthusiastic participants in the dumbed-down values useful to big business; values that address all communications to the lowest common denominator of the masses.
This consensus impulse is evidenced in the Ontological-Hysteric Theater as a repeating yearly concept, and it seems to seek out an impossibly contradictory paradigm shift that looks like the things we already know from it. Yep, that sounds pretty damn sleep-inducing—but it also sounds like a true reflection of the deceptive and self-deceptive Cheney-Bush neo-con epoch that we’re enduring. So, the obvious question for the Ontological-Hysteric Theater is: what about art’s responsibility of resistance? Perhaps surprisingly, for me the answer is to be found within the challenge of style.
Richard Foreman comes from a generation stimulated by the open-field of confrontations and agitations typical of post-minimalism/post-conceptualism that turned towards the absurd for political reasons. But, what strikes me today about Foreman’s play is that, even in the midst of our fervent political angst—based on our current conditions of great distrust and deception, coupled with feelings of helplessness—WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! mostly devolves into a lame, if lampooning, form of easy fun—almost a neo-abstraction that seems to me no more than decorative eye-candy. Thus, I wonder what about Richard Foreman’s commitment to the core of his art transcending the banal world and portraying a wider vision of political awareness—one inclusive of the private, the spiritual, the ecstatic and the numinous themes accessible through the subjective realm of each individual—is legitimate? Is this truly a self-perception, which reveals in minute particulars the full spectrum of the extensive social-political dimensions of the mind? The question is: how does WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! itself wake people up? I am sorry to say that it does not.
My deep feeling is that today art must indict, or at the very least, play the role of the jester who unmasks the unspeakable lies of the powerful. Americans have been deceived and victimized by our government’s propaganda, and if art cannot rebuff and contest this grave situation by fueling the political will and imagination of resistance, I wonder why we need it at all. In the post 9/11 political world we require investigation to heal our souls and so an art that demands a mental mood of investigation would support such this need. Thus, a complex and ambiguous Ontological-Hysteric Theater play of resistance and investigation would be increasingly valuable to an analytical social movement based on skepticism while undermining market predictabilities as it strengthens unique personal powers of imagination and critical thinking. At his best, Foreman can counter the effects of our age of simplification—effects which have resulted from the glut of consumer-oriented entertainment messages and political propaganda which the mass media feeds us daily in the interests of corporate profit and governmental psychological manipulations.
Though, for me, WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! was not Foreman’s best work (I still consider that to be Fuck Hotel and, secondly, Maria Del Bosco (Sex and Racing Cars: A Sound Opera)) it still knocked lightly on my inner world and so sparked the life of my imagination with its intense but sublimated drives, suspicions, fears and loves. At least it acknowledges that our inner world is the only true source of meaning and, thus, purposes a form of a-political visionary art of investigation. So, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater is still a way to discover for ourselves an inner life. With WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! we see that, in contrast to our market-frenzied materialist culture, which trains us to develop the eyes of outer perception, even an a-politically visionary style of art can encourage the development of our inner sight based on our individual intuitive inner eye. Thus I recommend it, if only mildly.
