What happened in THE YELLOW

A dance performance
Choreography, concept, dance: Inka Juslin
Concept, dramaturgy, visual: Svitlana Matviyenko
Dance: Ronja Verkasalo
Music: 3 Songs without Words,
Part III: There is a solitude of space (2001)
and Kolomyika, a dance (1981) by Virko Baley
Sound: www.freesound.com
Sound collage and technical assistance:
Mick Lexington
Paintings by
David Burliuk and Vasyl Bazhaj. In the performance we use Inka Juslin’s reflections on Vasyli Kandinsky’s writing on art.

The Ukrainian Institute of America, Inc. presents THE YELLOW, Inka Juslin’s collaborative multimedia performance, featuring two dancers and a visual artist. By telling the story of an imaginary woman, dwelling in this building, Juslin’s choreography accentuates the architectural features of the Gothic mansion. The work asks how a strict division between public and private within one’s home affects the way life is lived there.

Special Thanks to
~ Virko Baley, Olena Jennings, jj higgins, Virlana Tkacz, and The Academy of Finland.
August 16, 2008 @ 8 p.m.
2 East 79th Street, New York, NY, 10075



Inka Juslin is a Finnish dancer and choreographer currently based in New York City, where she collaborates across artistic disciplines and genres. She choreographs her own works as well as performs for other choreographers. Juslin is a visiting scholar at the Performance Studies Department at New York University. Her scholarly interest is related to new technologies and media, and to their use in conjunction with the human body, dance and movement. Juslin has choreographed dance and video works in Finland, and also in Asia, North America and Europe. Her doctoral choreography Redress was presented at the Kiasma Theatre in the Museum for Contemporary Art in Helsinki in October 2002. She collaborates with companies, such as Melinda Ring Special Projects in New York, and continues a work-in-progress dance and new technologies project with Susan Kozel/Mesh Performance Practices, a company based both in US and Europe. She is currently working on a new research project on Dance in the Nordic spaces, which also includes elements of Yiddish film and theater.

Svitlana Matviyenko’s experimental video and photography addresses the medium as an essential part of an art work. She is a film, media and literary critic, she edited Literatura Plus, a newspaper of the Ukrainian Writers Association; she was a founder and an editor-in-chief of Komentar, a Ukrainian political and cultural monthly. Svitlana is a co-founder (with Virlana Tkacz) of ‘ROUND US poetry & performance series that has been on since 2002 in Kiev and New York. She is a Fulbright fellow, pursuing her PhD in new media art, visual theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Svitlana Matviyenko curates a new series of experimental performance, launched at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York.

Ronja Verkasalo is a dancer and an artist, with a strong focus on research in both performance work and teaching. She comes from a small island in the Gulf of Finland, surrounded by the sea. The sea and the weather conditions in the Finnish archipelago, while being the main source of her aesthetic, also teach perspective for her work as an artist in this time and age. Her work consists of choreographing and dancing, as well as writing, performance and conceptual art. She is currently a freelance artist, with previous posts e.g. at the National Theatre of Finland and the Riitta Vainio Dance Company. She began dancing after studying and writing much theory about the body and the politics of the body in the University environment. She still works with these same issues, but through the physical approach has come to a wider understanding of the work. She is continually in awe of how the body learns and teaches the mover.

Space : Inka Juslin

How can architecture be embodied in dance? Our intention is to not merely reinvent characters that lived in the mansion, but to animate and choreograph the different flows of movement reflecting desire, pain, hesitation, struggle and excitement.

Each room of the building has its private and public dimension, which means, it has a couple of different stories to tell. Our choreography presents the duality of each room, their real and virtual realms, fused in our experience of space.

Two other “folds” of space—exterior and interior—are not easy to distinguish. First of all, they exist only in relation to each other. Second, each of them carries its own exteriority and interiority. Our choreography grows from the intersection of these two dimensions of space—the inside and the outside. It shows how we simultaneously exist in both. In other words, this performance reminds us of what our body knows, even though we are not entirely aware of it…

Time : Svitlana Matviyenko

…And now we are in the dimension of time.

It was Eadweard Muybridge whose experiments on capturing the images of running, flying and walking animal and human bodies “folded” the movement into one tiny spot of a frame. This was where space shrank into time.

It could be a minute or two that we devote to viewing a short loop of animation during the performance. It has been a hundred and thirty years since Muybridge accomplished his experiment. Our short animation bridges the present and the past: a contemporary dancer meets a 130 year old moving image.

This performance involves the movement embodied by the dancers, and the movement recomposed from the traces of digital recording.

How different is the time of different media? What are the old media and the new media, when, with computer animation, as strange as it sounds, we are back to the moving image of Muybridge’s flip-books, a simple result of a quick change of layers?..

The mansion was built on the corner of 79th Street and Fifth Avenue a hundred and ten years ago. It was Isaac Fletcher, a banker and railroad investor, who commissioned the famous architect C.P.H. Gilbert to build a house using William K. Vanderbilt's neo-Loire Valley chateau as its model, on the property which was originally the Lenox farm. Since then, known as the Isaac Fletcher House, it became one of the most spectacular landmarks of Upper East Side Manhattan. Mr. Fletcher himself was so pleased with his new home that he hired Jean Francois Raffaelli to paint a portrait of it; the painting, the mansion and the Fletcher's extensive art collection were all eventually bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1917. However, as Christopher Gray points out in his book on New York streetscapes, anonymous critics saw the mansion as ecclesiastical rather than domestic in origin. One of them, Gray reads in the Real Estate Record and Guide of 1899, observes that the Fletcher mansion had “too much the air of an archeological reproduction to be accepted as an appropriate New York City house of 1898.”Later, in 1920, the “inappropriate” building was purchased by Harry F. Sinclair, the founder of the Sinclair Oil Company, and then sold in 1930 to Augustus Van Horne Stuyvesant, Jr., a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant. A bachelor and recluse, Augustus Stuyvesant occupied the mansion with his unmarried sister until her death in 1938, then lived out the remaining years of his life until 1953 with just his butler and footman to serve him.And finally, in 1948, William Dzus, inventor and owner of the Dzus Fastener Company in West Islip, Long Island, New York founded the Ukrainian Institute of America, Inc. for the purpose of promoting Ukrainian art, culture, music, and literature. In 1955, the mansion was purchased by the Ukrainian Institute of America Corporation with the charitable generosity and support of Mr. Dzus. In June of 1962 the mortgage was paid off and subsequently the Ukrainian Institute of America attained landmark status. This year the Ukrainian Institute of America celebrates its 60th anniversary and is happy to open the doors of its 110 year-old home to admirers of experimental dance by which Finnish choreographer Inka Juslin choreographs a story of an imaginary woman, dwelling in this mansion. Ms. Juslin’s performance will lead the viewer to imagine this woman slipping through the crowds at receptions and dinner parties. She belongs to this Gothic space: she performs what it asks her to, lives the life it offers her. This is the time when a strict division between public and private is maintained within one’s own home. Her being there is architectured: she is a different person on the different floors of the house.

I recall

1

I recall my mom’s hips, toes, and breasts

step out come forward take off

the silver mirror no longer reflecting my goose skin but hers

what do you know about me in relation to how you care

what do you remember in relation to how you forget

the time in relation to when

I am in relation to where your voice

wires in relation to wireless telecommunication

your warmth in relation to the kilometers

where in relation to when

and always

in relation to the time you woke me up in the mornings

your gestures in reflection of

my mirror in relation to

your mirror

I am

in relation to where

and to you

2

I recall my grandma listening to the radio

I dial the number

to order her favorite song

but it does not ring a bell

Conversation with Keith Sanborn (Spring - Autumn 2006)

Keith Sanborn:

“…You had
to be there
at the time
to be truly seduced by them.”


Svitlana Matviyenko: The effect produced by film depends on how its image and sound get layered with my private: my memory, my desires, my fears, and my fantasy. To some extent, it depends on the social codes as well. The private and social distort one another.

You said your films are about filmmaking. But would you agree that they are even more about perception of films, about your experience as a viewer? For instance, I think of Joan’s face while she is burning at the stake -- the fragment from Karl Dreyer’s film you used. In your film, her face looks so erotic. That's how you saw her in Dreyer’s film. In your piece, you are working with a sudden effect of your perception. And it is very personal. It makes your film be not “about” Dreyer’s filmmaking, not “about” Joan of Arc [cannot believe, but I’ve just twice misspelled her name -- “Joan of Art” -- where is my Lacan?], but “about” Keith Sanborn.

How much do you depend on the material you work with? In other words, what is your starting point: your experience of film or an idea, thought, concept?

Keith Sanborn: My starting point is always a moment, an experience of a film. Sometimes that means a particular shot, sometimes it might be an image which repeats in a film, or just something which strikes me. The image of Joan of Arc which I took from the Dreyer film, in the original had actually been cut up into several pieces. I discovered this when I put them back together to try to extend the length of the shot. I also slowed it down of course. So, in this case, oddly, I reconstituted a part of the shooting of the film, which does not exist in the prints we have of Joan of Arc, even the best one. My experience, in short, my private experience of a film is always primary. Sometimes I try to work in terms of a theme, but this seldom pans out. As soon as I start to talk about it I lose sight of the language of images from which a film must come into being. So, in a sense these do come out of a personal experience of watching the particular films I include, but images always come trailing their historical baggage behind them. The problem is that the context of the original becomes invisible. Histoire du soldat inconnu by Henri Storck is a prime example. While we appreciate something about its form, as someone born in 1952, rather than 1900, the work simply does not have the immediate historical impact for me that it would have for one of Storck’s contemporaries. He was playing with the references, the meanings, the immediacy of the images he used. I have also show A Movie by Conner to a number of generations of students. It seems to come in and out of visibility: to some it’s merely a kitschy collection of images, or less. The concept of kitsch itself is almost completely outmoded as audiences loose consciousness of a sense of history, let alone admit the possibility of historically bounded modes of consciousness. Others have more sensitivity to the strangeness of the images he employs and to the nuances of his efforts at montage.


SM: In my next question, I want to bring up the issue of copyright that having been discussed widely. What does the copyright own? Do you see any contradictions of this low?

KS: Your mention of Lacan and Joan of Art calls attention here to low and law. There’s a slight deflection here; maybe just a typo, but it’s a starting point: how we enunciate words and how they exist beyond us; yup: parole and langue. We speak from the intersection of the personal and the social. We are plural beings in that sense, especially when we step across linguistic boundaries. When we move from one language to another, we always drag along with us, our experience of language, including and especially our “first” language, our regional dialects, etc.

Copyright is structured as a kind of mediation between the author of a work and his/her/its public. I include “its” because corporations, who can conceivably live forever, also “own” works, though they are only remotely the authors of them: they finance them—with the possible exceptions of works of collective authorship like Q and the Reena Spallings novel. Though in the latter case the authors are more properly called “collectives” than “corporations.” To return to where I started, it’s the “mediation” which is important and problematic. One starting point in my work would be “The Artwork in the Age…” I point to this problem: what is copyrighted: the message which interdicts reproduction or the work which follows? The injunction NOT to copy normally is understood as pointing to the work which follows it; if so, can it also point to itself, if it does not explicityly do so? I would argue not. How can something which points beyond it also point at itself. Artworks do this all the time, but in law such a point, I believe, must be made explicit.

This comes to bear as images proliferate and determine our worldview to the same extent as and in competition with language. We might say that “images have a language of their own” but we should never forget the medium of this observation: it is linguistic, and that is to say it is a metaphor, a transference of meaning. This is not just a relativist banality. We communicate through our structuring of images and through our structuring of language, but normally we only think of language as having critical status. My work attempts to argue otherwise. It is a kind of critical discourse via images and what makes explicitly critical is precisely the reuse of pre-existing images. Public images have more the status of “langue” than parole; they come dragging something of their public meaning, their public identify as signifiers, as part of a vast network of signifiers, along with them whenever they appear. I’m not sure if “aura” is translatable into “langue”; I like to think of “aura” has having more to do with what we might think of as the phenomenological, or less problematically, the perceptual existence of the work.

SM: Does an image or fragment you use get entirely uprooted and detached from its initial context and source?

KS: To answer your question about an image being uprooted, I would have to appeal to Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland: “A word means whatever I choose it to mean… It’s a question of who’s to be master, that’s all.” That is, there is an absurdity in the claim that we can use language in an utterly personal way. That’s a contradiction in terms: language has an inherently public aspect, an Impersonal one and at the same time we know that those who govern try to manipulate the use of language: War is Peace, Saddam Hussein caused 9/11, Iran is a Nuclear threat. And those who put images into the “public sphere”—mostly only corporations or governments—seek to control us through their images and through the use that is made of them, including the interdiction to reproduction them. In short, we can either master the language of images or be mastered by it.

These insights can be expanded somewhat prismatically: one can easily argue that any film participates in an entire history of representation, whether its explicitly acknowledges that debt in a legal sense. Scorsese speaks of “Dreyer shots” he’s included in various films, and yet he never copies them photographically or digitally at a literal level. His reproduction of Dreyer is see as licit, mine probably as illicit.

SM: I’ve been thinking about two different ideas -- Walter Benjamin’s “aura” and Marshall McLuhan’s “medium is the message” –- they both suggest that the medium is what brings a viewer “closer” to a piece of art, although they see the way the medium functions differently.

SK: I’m not sure these two ideas are equivalent, though they may be related. Aura for Benjamin is first of all a function of scarcity: it derives from the hiddenness of the work, its not being available. A condition which is altered by technical reproduction and as he actually says reproducibility (Reproducierbarkeit). But the aura returns with the “star.” The star lends his or her numinous presence to the work; the star carries legends and myth which exist outside the film in the press above all. In a sense aura is reborn precisely within repetition: one sees a film repeatedly, the star becomes the object of personal fantasy (for millions), dreams, masturbatory reveries. Baseball trading cards are like Saints cards. Interestingly, there has recently been an extraordinary rise in touring by “big name” music groups. People want the “live” “real” experience to supplement their experience of the recorded work, which is how most people now experience music. Correlative to this is the lack of respect for musicians. No one wants to devote themselves to learning music (at least in the US) when they can turn it on like a faucet and more or less for free. I suppose the related phenomenon would be people vacating movie theatres in favor of DVDs AND in favor of seeing their favorite starts on Broadway. A lot of Hollywood movie actors, for one reason or another, have been doing Broadway shows in recent years, whether to shore up sagging careers, bring a change in their daily routines, or to make more money.

In a way McLuhan is a lot closer to the structuralist point of view than you might acknowledge. The structuralists were in any case interested in McLuhan and more or less read him as a kind of formalist. Thus, they felt he supported their investigation of cinematic form, as opposed to dramatic form in narrative film.

SM: In one interview you said: “I’m interested in how do you actually perceive things that are at the edge of your visual horizon, the horizon of your consciousness? I think that is really what motivates religious or mystical thinking. Actually, I wouldn’t even call it thinking, because it’s at once that and something more than that. Not to view it in a hierarchical way, but it’s about an investigation into the possibility for meaning.” It’s interesting to me in terms of Deleuze’s concept of a non-thinking-body: he refers to the body in its sleep or in its drunkenness (I would add the body having sex and the body watching, for instance, film and so on and on).

KS: I like the idea of the unthinking body; I think that many filmmakers have an experience parallel to this one: when I am working on a film, especially at the editing stage—which is most of the work, most of the time for me, though I do actually shoot film from time to time—that I can no longer impose my will on it. I am forced to listen to it; it tells me how it wants to be edited. This kind of experience of the unthinking body is a kind of dialogue with the unconscious, though often not a verbal dialogue—we must never forget this is a metaphor. Even to say “it tells me” is a verbal metaphor: I don’t hear voices, but the images or sounds just seem to want to go a certain way. This is a somewhat idealistic metaphor, because then we think about whether editing is more like solving a puzzle, or recreating the insights of an analytic session. My work is NOT therapy for me or anyone else, though it might investigate issues related to psychoanalysis. After this dialogue, finally one does step back, to frame the experience, to put it in perspective, to make certain that the unconscious elements have not betrayed the conscious project to the extent of subverting it completely. The unconscious always subverts the conscious to some degree, but it’s that “dialogue” between the two which is of interest precisely because of its complexity and because it is a struggle for power, for mastery in some odd Hegelian sense, this was what I was trying to get at in Semi-private sub-Hegelian Panty fantasy (with sound).


SM: How do you explain the “consensual hallucination” in the subtitle for your Zapruder Footage?

KS: "Consensual hallucination" is a kind of way of saying that those who see this and especially Americans, and perhaps especially American of my age who were alive for the JFK assassination, see it as a kind of religious myth. A document which is at once transparent and utterly opaque. The basis of a kind of mystery religion (see Frazer's Hanged God). A beautiful young man (Dionysos, Christ, JFK) is immolated as a public spectacle. A culture hero whose demise is ultimately an absurdity, a crime and a mystery. This 8mm home movie was the basis of the Warren [Commission] Report, the official US Government inquiry into the assassination which most people see as a white wash and a fraud. Governments are the same everywhere, no?

I don't know if I said this before but an Iraqui guy brought up in Morocco who I met in Holland asked me if there wasn't some kind of anti-arab sentiment involved. I explained that it was a kind of celebration instead. And he said, "Oh, yes, it's the kind of music we play at weddings and funerals." And so this is a recollection of the life together of JFK and Jackie Kennedy and a kind of funeral celebration, north african style. Or if you like, you might recall Dylan Thomas's poem entitled "The refusal to mourn the death by fire of a child." Similar sentiment in many ways.

SM: Working on my own videos in The Final Cut Pro, I try to figure out the combination of decisions – and this combination is art itself, it also may be understood as my medium. And I can only guess what effect might happen, when someone experiences this piece. I envision the effect, of course, but I can never be sure as to what kind of “aura” this piece may have (or produce?). This is what structural film is about, I think. It is so direct and open: everything that “big screen" film hides, structural film exposes for a viewer’s appreciation.

KS: I studied with Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, Tony Conrad, and Paul Sharits. One of the ways by which I consciously sought to distinguish my own work from their was by choosing images that were at one public and highly charged. For the most part—with the interesting exception of the use of pornography—the structuralists were explicitly concerned with using everyday content, banal content, or even emptying the work of content. There were exceptions in the pop world and in the committed filmmakers, such as Al Raziutis and to to some extent LeGrice. Odd to think of them as engage, no? But along with Conner, they used images that were popular and deliberately charged at least in some of their work. The use of “public” images in my case at least was an attempt to historically ground the work. I wanted my work to examine history rather than simply the modalities of the passage of time. To this extent my work is not formalist, though I am not anti-form; it’s just not the holy grail for me. In terms of the choices of the era: big budget narratives, or avant-garde, I agree: they show what the big films hide. But even then there were other choices, if bad ones: the films of Mulvey and Wollen, for example: 3rd rate Godard and Godard is not a filmmaker I esteem very highly, though he did make a couple of good pictures. Mulvey and Wollen and their ilk made none worth watching, though I may have missed some by other people since the genre became so predictable I didn’t find it necessary to repeat the experience that often. It was Debord who was following the more interesting path, though his work was not seeable in the US and had only limited accessibility in France. I first learned of his work through his Oeuvres Cinématographiques complètes, a book presenting his films as scripts in a rather unique form. But I didn’t actually see the work until it was broadcast on Canal+after his death in the 1990s. I was also very interested by Warhol, whose work was also out of circulation by the late 1970s. I was interested in his mixture of materialism with an exploration of the spectacular: creating his own stars, but in the context of the art world, creating an odd sort of bathos: you had to be there at the time to be truly seduced by them, to understand their auratic presence.


* Keith Sanborn, a media artist and a theorist, has taught Video Production and Special Topics theory course "From Montage to Game Hacks: Strategies of Cultural Critique" in the Program in Visual Arts at Princeton. His long term interests is in media critique through his theoretical writings and as well through the application of critical strategies of cultural critique in his media work. He has continued to pursue both his artistic and theoretical interests over the past two years.

Links: Sanborn's film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArzS7EX9Uwg
Sanborn & Marcus on Guy Debord http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=10275&pagenum=0

[this interview was translated into Ukrainian and published in KINOKOLO #30, Summer 2006]

[...]

Posted a quote from Michael Parsons on my Ukrainian LJ:
"All new technologies seem to be initially used for sex, but then they settle down, the accountants get involved and we find other uses for them apart from love and smut." [article]

Received a comment: "All new technologies initially are used discreetly for war, then seem to be used for sex, but then they settle down..."

Conversation with Hayden White (Spring 2006)

HAYDEN WHITE: PERFORMING IRONY

I don’t even believe in interviews. What are you getting from me? You are not getting any definitive statement. You’re getting another version. I would say that what I do stems from the fact that, as with most historians, the past has always been a problem for me.

Young people now come and read Metahistory and they think it is something helpful to them. They sometimes act as if it had been written yesterday. And then they write me letters and say, “You say so and so. What did you mean?” I say, “I don’t know. I was writing in a different milieu at that time and, by the way, for different purposes, than I would write for today and for a different audience.” I mean, I certainly wouldn’t write this book again.
Hayden White. Interviews

Svitlana Matviyenko: The last lines of 1973 Metahistory reveal your expectation that the ironic attitude “will free historians to conceptualize history, to perceive its contents, and to construct narrative accounts of its processes in whatever modality of consciousness is most consistent with their moral and aesthetic aspirations”. What would your response to the author of these lines be today?

Hayden White: I have no idea. Over the last few decades, since the publication of Metahistory, I have not studied, re-read, or even taught it. I believe books of this nature—metahermeneutical works—are sent out into the world and if someone finds them useful or in some way liberating, then they find their own audience. Recently, I have been at conferences where two or maybe three people said publicly, Metahistory was liberating for me; it allowed me to do what I had wanted to do. As far as I am concerned, that is the best I could hope for: not that someone might adopt my views but that my views help someone to articulate his or her own.

SM: Among the tropes of your topology in 1973 Metahistory, irony seems to be the most problematic. Unlike other tropes, irony is not always an author’s choice. It may function or it may happen as an effect of language.

HW: Again, I am not sure. First of all, being tired of ontological insecurity and epistemological chaos can either be depressing or liberating. Or both. As for irony, it is built into language itself—in any distinction between literal and figurative, proper and improper speech, or, in metaphor itself, in the distinction within metaphor of tenor and vehicle. Irony is what anyone who uses language creatively, poetically, comes to in (or near) the end. When it becomes a dominant trope in a given discourse, it shows that skepticism is nearby—and that, for me, is a good thing. We have enough of myth.

SM: I remember you saying that your notion of tropic as a “continuum of logic, dialectic, and poetic” was influenced by Jakobson’s idea of the impossibility to distinguish between poetic language and non-poetic language.

HW: Did I say that? Well, obviously, Jakobson meant something like this: there are various functions present in the communication act. These might be called referential, metalinguistic, affective, expressive, phatic and poetic. In given discourses, one or more of these functions may be dominant and the other recessive or subdominant. But all of the functions are present in any given speech event, more or less latent, more or less manifest. This amounts to saying, among other things, that the notion that we can have a perfectly “literalist” speech is a delusion. Freud said: there is a little madness in the most rational of minds and a little rationality in the most insane mind. So too with language: there is figure in every utterance. The poetic function is present in prose. All you have to do is look for it.

SM: I am not sure it is an entirely adequate comparison, but I think of Jacques Lacan’s theory of four discourses, with a place of truth in each of them, occupied by different agents. Similarly, in your 1973 Metahistory, you claim that there are four master plots (Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, and Satire) and tropes (Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, and Irony).

HW: This is a complex question. Let me address each element seriatim. Language occupies the place of truth insofar, I would say, that “truth” is an attribute or quality only of utterances (statements, propositions, assertions), not of things. It makes no sense to ask if a thing is true or false. Statements made about things can be assessed as to their truth or falsity according to stipulated criteria. Things simply are what they are. And it is the universe of things that is evoked or called up or presented in discourse. Lacan’s four discourses, as I recall, are those of the Master, the University, the Psychoanalyst, and the Patient. I do not take this as being a serious assertion but as only suggestive. These four discourses do not line up with the four tropes and the four master plots of Metahistory. I did not invent the four tropes or the four plots but found both in the tradition of rhetoric and narratology. There is nothing magical about four. But dual-binaries are the basis of complex systems of classification. For example, a dual binary system admits of the generation of something like 264 items in a system of classification. That is better than the kind of thing that a ternary system (with three variables, a la Hegel) provides. Actually, Lacan’s four discourses are a function of his application of the Greimasian (semiotic) square to the kinds of possible discourses. I might mention that this semiotic square is to be found in Aristotle’s work on interpretation. There is nothing modern about it at all.

SM: You were, probably, asked a lot whether one can move beyond irony, metalanguage, beyond the “prison house of language.”

HW: First, I do not consider language a “prison-house” but as setting limits on what can be said in a given community. But also language provides a model of how to break through limits. This is what I take to be the function of tropes. Irony is an instrument, like any other trope. There is a time to use it to liberate and a time to use it to confine and destroy. Perhaps we should be asked to take a license to use language, in the same way that we are asked to take out a license to use a gun.

SM: And, by the way, if 1973 Metahistory is passé, is metahistory passé as well?

HW: “Metahistory” was coined on the analogy of “Metaphysics.” Just as metaphysics is what comes “after” physics (in Aristotle’s corpus), so too metahistory is what comes after history. What does this mean? Is it the supplement? Is it “the last things after the things in history”? I have no idea. The term was not coined by me. It was coined, as near as I can tell, by a Canadian scholar named Underhill—or so Northrop Frye, who borrowed the term from him, says. Then, Collingwood used the term in a derogatory sense in his work. I wanted to use the term as the title of my work, which was meant to study metahistory from a structuralist perspective. I did not think that I was doing metahistory, only studying it.

SM: Do you distinguish between the author’s intention and the unintentional?

HW: In any event, do I distinguish between what the said (or enunciated) in uttering a certain phrase and what he or she might have “meant” to say? I do not think that it is possible to find what the author meant to say as different from what he actually said. What I think is that any utterance comes with so much connotation built into it that we are justified in distinguishing between denotative significance and connotative significance of an utterance. In other words, quite apart from intention, any author in uttering any sentence generates a distinction between what the sentence literally (or denotatively) says and what the sentence connotes. I study texts, not psyches. I am interested in what was said or written, not what an author intended to say. I leave that to biographers. It is the text circulating within a culture that interests me.

SM: What if the latter and the former don’t match?

HW: You mean, what if the utterance and the intention don’t match? They never do.

SM: In your view, is it fair to say that the language of history due to the “formalizations of poetic insights” is not transparent?

HW: Nothing is transparent, not even a lens. Especially not a lens.

SM: Do you believe in interviews?

HW: Do you mean, do I believe in interviews in the way I might believe in miracles or God? In that sense, I would have to say that I believe in them because I have seen and experienced them. But do I have faith in the interview as a means of finding out the truth about something? Not particularly. Interviews tell more about the interviewer than about the interviewee. I have been studying you asking me questions rather than pondering what I ought to say to you in answering them. I have found out quite a lot about you in the process.

*Hayden White (1928-) is an historian in the tradition of literary criticism , perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973). He is currently professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and professor of comparative literature at Stanford University.

[This interview was translated into Ukrainian by Zoriana Rybchynska and published in a collection of essays on irony: Іронія. Збірник статей. Соло триває... Нові голоси. Лекція на пошану Соломії Павличко. Львів: Літопис, 2006. ]

Blue Angel 6/24

AN ANGEL IN THE ROOM
Svitlana Matviyenko

On Sunday June 24th, at the Ukrainian Institute of America the Yara Arts Group presented a special art and poetry event. For the first time Yara’s ‘ROUND US (KOLO NAS), which usually takes place in Kyiv, took place in New York. Kolo Nas #15 – Blue Angel 6/24 featured the poetry of Marjana Savka from Lviv, translated by Askold Melnyczuk and interpreted by Swiss conceptual artist Andrea Loux.

We started the ‘ROUND US series of art events five years ago in Kyiv, when Virlana Tkacz was there in the fall of 2002 as a Fulbright Scholar teaching at the Karpenko-Karyi Theatre Institute. Every time Virlana came to Ukraine, she would always gather people together for unusual events, inviting her Ukrainian friends, poets, writers, actors, scholars and the Harvard Summer School students who took part in her workshops. Often, poets were asked to read their poems. The evening in the early September 2002 was special. Virlana had invited seven poets to read their works to an audience composed entirely of people who wrote about poetry or performed it. I recall the room was just large enough for the crowd: people were sitting and standing everywhere, sipping wine, talking… Seven poets – Natalka Bilotserkivets, Liudmyla Taran, Oksana Zabuzhko, Neda Nezhdana, Anatoli Dnistrovyj, Ivan Andrusiak and Mykola Miroshnychenko read their poems and then Virlana read a new translation she was just working on of a poem by Serhiy Zhadan. Professor George Grabowicz was there and commented on the works read, Tamara Hundrova, Rostyslav Semkiv and I rounded out the litcrit section. There were also two wonderful actors who participated in Virlana’s very first project in Ukraine: Oleksi Bohdanovich and Mykola Shkaraban, who often performed Ukrainian poetry.

The intense experience of the rhythm of the poetry punctuated our breath. We were together in the room, inhabiting the space of poetry. As Virlana recalls, “the reactions to each poem were immediate and visceral.” Sharing such a close space with poets, allowed us to be completely immersed in the rhythm of the poems. This was the beginning. Afterwards, Virlana convinced me to help her organize another poetry event at a gallery, where the audience could experience that intensity of presence we felt that first night. We decided that we could emphasize the intensity of the poetry by intentionally “installing” the reading in an intimate space occupied simultaneously by other art. We wrote a flyer that announced the concept of the ‘ROUND US series: “What is presence? Can you hear it? See it? Experience it? Capture it? Imagine it? Presence is communion. Communion is interaction.”

Our next event took place at the Dim Art Gallery in the Sofia Museum of Literature. For ‘ROUND US # 2, we invited Serhiy Zhadan and Andriy Bondar, two young poets, whose poems were “cutting-edge, determined, critical” as Natalia Feduschak of Kyiv Post wrote afterwards. Virlana had already translated several more poems by Zhadan. I remember how she first became interested in them. We were sitting in her kitchen and she was making dinner, preparing rice and vegetables. I had brought Serhiy Zhadan’s latest book Ballads of War and Reconstruction and several issues of Literatura Plus, the All-Ukrainian Writers Association’s newspaper, which I edited at that time. The latest issue contained Zhadan’s newest poems, written in Vienna. Virlana asked me to read them out loud while she cooked. I read “The End of Ukrainian Syllabotonic Verse,” the first poem she would translate.

Over the next five years Virlana and I organized eleven more events in galleries. We eventually found a home in the RA Gallery – where we also did play readings, featured songs by Mariana Sadovska, and most recently screened a film – The Whisperer by Andrea Odezynska.For our first event in New York, ‘ROUND US #15, we chose the poetry of Marjana Savka, from Lviv, who came to Boston to participate in the International Poets’ Exchange Program this spring. Ms. Savka is a well-known poet in Ukraine. She published her first collection of poems when she was twenty-one. Since then she has published eight other books, for which she has received numerous awards. A former actress and journalist, she has written over a hundred articles on various subjects, and edited We and She, an anthology of poems by women writers from Lviv. She is also a co-founder of the Old Lion Publishers that specializes in children books and poetry. For our event we used the Ms Savka’s most recent poems written in Boston both in the original and in translations by Askold Melnyczuk. The translations are included in the chapbook, Eight Notes from the Blue Angel, that was published by Arrowsmith Press only two weeks before our poetry performance. The book is composed of eight poems and all eight poems were staged during our event. The Blue Angel in the title refers to Marlene Dietrich the subject of one of Ms. Savka’s poems: “Who, Marlene, Who?” which follows the traces of presence of this woman, admired by many, but known by few. Ms. Savka performed her poetry in Ukrainian while American actor Ezra Knight performed them in English. Choreography for the performance was created by Swiss artist Andrea Loux. We met Ms Loux in 2002 in Kyiv, where she participated in the group art exhibit at the Center for Contemporary Art. Ms. Loux’s work moves between the areas of performance, installation, video and photography, connecting them one to the other. She brings into focus the thematic complex of establishing and transforming spaces and situations. For our poetry event with Marjana Savka, she created a visual vocabulary and choreography for the texts, playing with the aspects of interaction between performer, audience and space.

The space of the Ukrainian Institute is stunning. We wanted to install the performance in this space of the mansion, allowing it to envelope both the performers and the audience. When the audience arrived, they gathered in the Board Room on the first floor. They sat in chairs and expected the readers to appear. Instead, after a short introduction by Virlana Tkacz, they were asked to follow the sound in the space. Soon we heard Marjana singing a traditional Ukrainian song about a young man being recruited into the army. As they came up the stairs they saw Marjana and Ezra standing back to back one at one end of the Chandelier Room and the other at the other end of the Concert Room. They were connected by a long piece of fabric, a tail, linking one jacket to another with one piece of cloth: the costumes were a “second skin” the performers shared. Through it they were in touch. The audience gathered around the singing poet. Marjana finished her song and began one of her poems. Ezra responded with the translation, which the audience heard over the sound system, which “brought” his presence into the space, although he remained at a distance in the Concert Room to which the doors were half closed.

The interplay between various degrees of presence was important for us: the presence of the performer’s voice in the space and the presence of the voice at a distance, the presence of the performer in the same space as the audience and a performer in a different room. The performers were “connected” in several ways. Apart from the fabric tail, there was the “technical” connection, through the sound system. At the moment when we were standing around Marjana, listening to her dialogue with Ezra, the space seemed to be “folded up.” We did not experience it fully unless Ezra’s voice was heard clearly from the opposite room. His mediated appearance in our room made us aware of the other space and allowed us to fantasize, unfolding the space in our mind. In this sense, we perceived the space of the mansion as a participant. Marjana then moved to the Concert Room and the audience followed her. As they came through the half-closed doors they found the chairs arranged not in rows, but scattered in the space back to back with no sign of where the performance would take place. When everybody was seated, the performers approached each other, eventually circling back to back, mirroring the way their audience was seated. The performers played with the fabric tail and their jackets, taking them off in attempt to free themselves of this connection and, at the same time, revealing their fear of losing the second skin they shared. This drama of hesitation was finally resolved when they tore off their tail and ran out of the room leaving it on the floor…

I believe that the performance of poetry in two languages, where the original is interwoven with the translation, exhibits a similar drama of approach. The translation tries to precisely express the original poem, at the same time it must express the essence of the original poem through another language and culture. The two languages spoken out loud create a new rhythm, they touch each other and then the meanings these words have appear and disappear. At the moment of this intersection, the strangest thing happens – a blue angel enters the room.

Also read about BA: http://brama.com/yara/kolonas15.html