Overview

At the extreme limit of distress, there is in fact nothing left but the conditions of time and space'. (Friedrich Hoelderlin)…I think a waste land of bare conditions is the acute Formalism of this piece... I think we should concentrate on this Formalism... over determined... absolute hegemony of the concept... to the point where the concept becomes abstract like a picture... floats... desolate alienation of the performer as pure colour... orange suit… cube of brilliant theatrical light in an otherwise undistinguished space... pure colour, pure colour/pain… flash of the erupting face and then gone again... massively receding into nothingness… like an hallucination… audience wonder about the instrumentality of their role… of Being, of subjecthood like a thought [we're showing up notions of empathy as useless, constructed Humanism]... everything about this breaking of the meniscus of Formalism is perceived as inadvertent... therefore momentary, ungraspable ontological expansion... essential incoherence of torture... like an exhalation of Being... this sense of Being as fission, splitting... the idea that torture splits the subject so that the subject becomes unknowable even to him/herself... the thingness of the hidden as though it is inside the audience like a kind of malevolent inadvertence… in this performance there is no linearity of time because time has become a concept... Video image intrudes massively... immediate memory as a profound disorientation of the audience... In this instance [in this instant] sensation is a bolt from the blue [the after-image of orange... equal and opposite]... All this stringing together of associative thoughts... of the set-up [the Conceptual hegemony of Performance art] rendering it schismatic, epileptic...torture as a kind of sublimity of the subject as an image... no graspable re-presentation... only the truth of torture as the unpredictable distortion of the audience. Again... and I apologise for my repetition but this raster of repetition is a kind of essence... the serial murder of Being...