9. Nuuk’s Education.
The Cabaret wishes Nuuk well in his new position as a tax consultant. But it is formally recorded that Cabaret Members would be happier if he stopped saying ‘up yours for the rent’ and ‘bugger that for a game of soldiers’.
10. Nuuk’s Flenching Demonstration.
The Royal Agricultural Society has agreed that in the interests of multi-culturalism the flenching exhibit will go ahead this year. The Cabaret would appreciate any member who could donate ten seal pups for use in the demonstration. If the member could contact me or Nuuk we will arrange it with our connections on Baffin Island.
11. Towards the Nature of the Future.
The Cabaret has taken to recording and celebrating ‘unbidden Nature’, or what is called straggly growth. Those weeds and patches of growth which appear on vacant allotments, in pavements, along fence and building alignments, on median strips, along railway tracks and in cracks. The Cabaret sees unbidden urban growth as the true nature of the future and the rightful heirs to the forests of the world. UUG is the true wilderness, our authentic National Parks. School children must be made aware of this before it is too late. School visits to unbidden growth should be organised. Its true beauty is that it is uncared for and without the protection of law or human agency, yet it returns and flourishes, unbidden. A day of appreciation of unbidden growth will be inaugurated.
12. Next Year’s Festival.
I am honoured to announce that I have received an invitation from the Council to take my rightful place as a chairperson of a panel discussion at next year’s festival. I fully accept the stipulations of the Council regarding the role of chairperson, namely,
a) I will not wear my chairperson cloak if that is what worries the Council
b) I will not interrupt guest speakers with whistles or bells or electronic devices
c) I will not introduce any stage scenery or live animals.
In my acceptance speech to the Council I made one suggestion and it is a suggestion only. It was this: do we need to use a festival hall or enclosed space? The reason I made the suggestion is that using a hall for these activities is, to the Cabaret Voltaire, ‘ideas in a cage’. I informed them that I intended to hold my panel in the street and select the panel members from passers-by so that there can be an intersection of random panellists, random ideas and random audience. A panel of strangers talking to strangers at random. I can’t see that this would be unacceptable, conforming as it does to the egalitarian ethos. The Council are considering this and will get back to me.
Interjacence, an Exposition; the National
Geographic as Blind/fold; evils of Repertoire;
a Plea; Waiting, a Plea; the World Crisis in
Panel Discussion.
Chairperson’s Address
The Cabaret Voltaire argues, as a primary position, that contemporary audience expectations of the panel discussion are seriously degraded by childhood experiences of the doctor’s waiting room. Nuuk, formerly of Baffin Island, now a member of the Cabaret Voltaire, was, with the acuity of the outsider, the first to argue this connection and to have the Cabaret adopt it as a precept.
I took Nuuk to a doctor because he had caught a hot. While not wishing to denigrate the medical profession, and recognising it as one of the great performances of the oral tradition, we fear that the drabness of contemporary panel discussion at conferences and festivals worldwide can be traced to the absence of imaginative management of the first and subsequent visits to the doctor – to the absence of thaumaturgy.
Not only are doctors’ waiting rooms the first true theatre that we experience as children, the visit to the doctor remains a visit to a temple of special mystery. The visit is the first laying-on of hands by a stranger. The doctor is the only stranger, nay, only human we permit to intrude through our skin and orifices to our inner selves. More, much more, the visit to the doctor introduces us to that existential drama, the performance of our anatomy. If we don’t face up to this we are lost as a civilisation. This is the only drama, the drama of the working of our body, the source of all art – the drama of ageing, of sexual pleasure and pain, of pro creation, of heroic exertion, of mutilation, of death. If children are to meet the drama of anatomy through the portal of the doctor’s waiting room then attention must be paid to the way those first and subsequent meetings with ‘the doctor’ are ritualised.
The World Health Organisation was impatient with my submission ‘Waiting Rooms – Basilica of the Corporeal’. When is ‘waiting’ going to be given its proper rank as a state of mind in our culture? It is one of the preponderant activities of life but sadly, most people are conditioned to see it as an inactivity. Waiting has to be renamed and re-evaluated, approached with imaginative enthusiasm.
Dr Bogsch of the World Intellectual Property Organisation, whom I approached to intervene in my dispute with WHO but who ruled it as not within his jurisdiction, said to me that waiting for taxis and waiting for lifts were two instances of truly ‘wasted time’. I disputed this hotly. ‘Why, not so, sir!’ I exclaimed to the learned doctor. ‘Properly approached, waiting for taxis and lifts can be an experience of wonder.’ The lift came and I could not continue the discussion.
To call them ‘waiting rooms’ is a cultural disaster. They are the ante-chambers, and as I prefer it, the ‘preparatory-chambers’ of the greatest dramatic experience. They should be places of architectural grandeur and should contain the most sumptuous of exhibits and decorations. At the doctor’s preparatory-chamber one should proceed through arches, gardens, tunnels and grottos, each representing to us the entry into the body – a journey through the parts of the body to the hip podrome of the soul.
During my submission two members of the WHO commission made reference to my training with Bauhaus in Berlin in 1932 and my participation in the historic Triadic Ballet. One member of the WHO commission kept saying, ‘Triadic Ballet?! Triadic Ballet?!’ I heard a snigger disguised as a cough. My membership of the Viennese Surrealist Guild was also mentioned. As though these were somehow shadowy connections which ‘helped annotate’, as one member said, my preoccupation with the panel discussion. It is true that I owe much of my training to Bauhaus. I am honoured to have been part of that grand arts and crafts experiment. It was there that Paul Klee taught me that drawing is a ‘line going for a walk’ and it is where I conceived that a panel discussion was an ‘idea going for a walk’. I progressed from that to seeing the panel discussion as an ‘idea doing a jig’.
Again, there was some smirking from the WHO com mission when they saw from my curriculum vitae that I had been employed by Bauhaus as a muleteer. It may amuse them to know that half the transport used by the German army in the Second World War was horse-drawn. At Bauhaus I also learned-that a galloping horse doesn’t have four feet, it has twenty, and its motion is triangular. Why can’t we, as a culture, face up to this? With the younger WHO officials scarcely able to disguise their sniggers as coughs, I was asked what a muleteer was doing at Bauhaus. I patiently explained to them that, at the time, mules were seen as a design quandary: having function while infringing conventional ideas of aesthetic grace, that is, function which does not create its own beauty – as such, mules were of great interest to young designers.
While at WHO, Nuuk and I also tried to argue against the idea of ‘repertoire’ not only in music but also in life. Nuuk pointed out that there was no orchestral repertoire in the modern sense before Johann Peter Salomon. He showed that Salomon, the German concert entrepreneur, started it all in the eighteenth century. If he hadn’t begun replaying old music we would never have found ourselves in the mess we are now with old music, old buildings and old books. All these old things forcing out the new. The reprinting of old books simply makes it harder, with the passing of each century, for young writers and not so young writers to get onto the shelves. The mania for preservation has degraded our conversation by encouraging the idea of ‘quotation’, which is especially crippling to spontaneity. I will not pe
rmit ‘quotation’ at my panel discussions. Quotation is simply old conversation rehashed. ‘Say afresh!’ I tell my panellists after stopping them mid-quote. Until this wretched German organised his concert series of old music, audiences expected, quite rightly, to hear only new music at concerts. On this matter WHO referred me to the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, in Rome, where I propounded the Cabaret Voltaire’s proposition that nothing should be saved, that art requires a strong vacuum to suck its creativity from the culture. Dead authors should be struck from the publishing lists. As you will have realised I am part of the Vortexist faction of the Cabaret Voltaire. Our aim, simply, is to create a vortex into which art can be sucked.
I hurry to state that we are not opposed to rehearsal. For an actor, rehearsal is a use of life in real time. Rehearsal is not ‘time out’ from life. But all rehearsal should be publicly viewed. There is no rehearsal for life, as I am fond of saying. To return, doctors have sensibly remained in the oral culture because of its magic but they have lost the thaumaturgy which should be there with it. Quite correctly they never write a diagnosis or prognosis or a treatment. They speak the treatment. The spoken word creates a communal unity. I object to the handing-out of printed material at panel discussions because the reading of that printed material returns each member of the audience to their interior isolation and to the strait jacket of print. It dispels the dark, formless unity of the panel discussion audience. People who participate in panel discussions don’t give enough; audiences of the panel discussion don’t expect enough. Hence: to achieve a heightened expectation we need a revolutionary change in doctors’ waiting rooms.
Following the uproar in Rome about Vortexism, I wish to apologise to the Vorticists who have been wrongly confused with the Vortexists. There was no intention to confuse or to injure the good name of the Vorticists, as deluded as they may be. Over the years in Moruya, New South Wales, Australia, we have had bitter dispute with them, sometimes ending in street-fighting. Vortexists believe that a reverence for the past is slowly asphyxiating the present and endangering the future.
In Rome we argued for the setting of fixed proportions for the past:present:future. We argued that they should be in the proportion of 10:80:10 until the year 2010, when the slate should be wiped clean and we should have only present and future for fifty years to allow the future room to breathe. If the great works of past are so important they will be historically ‘re-invited’. People will unconsciously rewrite the great books and repaint the masterpieces.
We also argued against the preservation of ‘old nature’. Nature, as the conservationists see it, is only ‘old’ nature or past nature – they stress its antiquity; these rain forests which have stood for 30,000 years and so on. We are being strangled with these facades of antiquity, the absurdity of preserved facades of old buildings, an attempt to make the past contemporary.
The Cabaret Voltaire is also opposed to photography, another hopeless attempt to itemise the past. All photography can do is to create photographs. When are we going to realise this? We have begun a project of taking photographs of people taking photographs. The project is intended to demonstrate that the photographer deter mines the photograph by first suggesting that a photograph be ‘taken’ at a point in time. Then, by direction, gesture and facial expression, the photographer not only determines the circumjacent arrangement but also the circumfluence. We think we can show that the photo graph is really a photograph of the photographer’s visual needs at the time. The ‘in-turned eye’ masquerading as the out-turned eye. To finally demolish photography, the Cabaret Voltaire is arranging an exhibition in Geneva of the Photographs Not Taken. We are taking photo graphs ‘behind’ and ‘at the side’ of famous photographs. We believe very much in interjacence, that forgotten world which exists ‘atwixt and betwixt’. The intervening and the intermediate. And that even more hidden world which exists between the intervening and the intermediate. We ask, of course, the question, what is ‘wrong’ with the photograph which could have been taken either side of the one which was taken? I digress.
At the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property we argued that the world needs more space for the growth of new species and mutations. More importantly new configurations of planetary spaces have to be permitted through the rearrangement of nature. What the conservationists see as damage to the environment and claim as ‘loss’ we Vortexists see as the creative vacuum into which unforeseeable gains can be sucked. We argue that the elimination of nature, as the conservationists use the term, will be the inevitable next step for the planet and will invoke inspiring spaces. Holes in the ozone layer excite us for the potential they create. Excavating the future. We are believers in temporary spaces. Construction sites. Isn’t the great hole in the ground as breath taking, as existentially moving, as that which was there before the hole? Holes in the ozone layer are the construction sites of the planet. Am I wrong? We prefer ruins and all temporary spaces because they are metaphorically more truthful because they assert their temporariness: the campsite, the circus tent, the conference, and the igloo, the home which melts and is remade every year. All so-called permanent structures are a built-lie. We know that all spaces are temporary.
All the forests of the world are relatively new and are passing on. What wonders will fill the new spaces? We owe it to our children to allow for the nature of the future. At the Cabaret Voltaire we watch with awe the mysterious, inchoate upheaval of the greenhouse effect as it resculpts the planet. Every time we save something we exclude a possibility. However we rush to say that we are not Futurists. And by the way, the Futurist movement didn’t die in 1915, as everyone thinks. The Budapest Circle of Futurists meets bi-annually in Toronto, Canada, and we attend meetings with interjectionist status. The Futurists do not believe there can be ‘observers’. For them, even the glance of a mouse changes the universe. I wish to stress that the Vortexists are not so sure about that proposition and it is often argued.
The point I have been trying to make is this: the ‘tree’ is nature of the past – what replaces it is nature of the future. When are people going to realise this? National Parks are to nature what historic facades are to architecture. Facades. The human race is to nature what rust, rot and entropy are to life. All happy parts of nature. The greens, as humans, are rust pretending to be paint. Space no longer exists as the conservationists conceive it, philosophically, that error died a century ago. If space exists it does so only as an atmosphere within which bodies move and interpenetrate. If that isn’t understood soon we are truly lost. Colour, too, is iridescent. To have a political movement named after a colour makes no sense to us because colour is a chimera. Power is in the movement of shadows. By that we mean that motion and the insubstantiality of light destroys the materiality of things. At the Cabaret Voltaire we laugh when people complain about living in the flight path. Thoreau was right, we cannot hear the music of our times. People praise the so-called singing of the birds and yet cannot hear the singing of the aircraft.
To return to the point. People become annoyed because they have been ‘kept’ waiting. I thank people for ‘keeping’ me waiting. But here’s a tip: if when waiting you feel impatience spoiling your mood, take from your travelling desk, or portmanteau, a newly-sharpened Faber-Castell pencil, hold it to your nose and breathe deeply. It will bring a hush to your mind. There are many mistakes made about the nature of waiting. It is not time given to us for anticipation of the forthcoming and contemplation of that which has gone before. It is an activity in its own right. It must not be ‘used’, say, for reading a book. That is not ‘waiting’, that is ‘reading a book’. Holding a magazine and not reading it, looking at it ‘unseeingly’, may be an illustration of waiting.
At the Cabaret Voltaire we are also concerned about the growing tumult against people who behave by ‘fits and starts’. The Cabaret Voltaire lives by fits and starts. A fit is a frenzy of
activity and a start is an enthusiastic beginning which is not carried through to completion. ‘Completion’: what a miserable, pedestrian goal. It is enough to suggest the eventual completed form, to hint at outcome. Only the conscientiously mediocre go on to so-called completion. The condition of ‘completedness’ doesn’t logically exist. When the illusory state of completion is reached the process of continual disintegration has altered it. It is a marred state. Whereas incompleteness is a state of logical perfection. Is that taught in our schools? No.
Which brings me to the next stage of my argument: the National Geographic. Over the last twenty years of interdisciplinary academic research has anyone ever bothered to ask why it is that the National Geographic is in every doctor’s waiting room? The National Geo graphic is in every doctor’s waiting room because it deliberately deflects attention from the Body to the Planet. From the anatomical to the geographical. Why would we want to read geography when we are in a doctor’s surgery? We don’t. It is a blindfold. It is a blind ‘fold’ in the sense of being a place where sheep are kept in captivity. It is a ‘blind’ in the sense of being a place where the hunter hides. Need I say more? The placing of the blind/fold desensitises us to the presentation of our body for examination by a stranger and closes us to the drama of anatomy. This in turn has degraded the presentation of all serious ideas in the Western world, but especially the panel discussion at conferences and festivals.
Which brings me back to the anti-photography exhibition in Geneva. We hope to invite doctors worldwide to this exhibition. By demonstrating the question of interjacence to doctors we hope to bring home to them that they alone are not interjacent. They pretend to be interjacent with the strange nonchalance and the drab casualness of their waiting rooms, while the photographic gaze pretends to be the place of focus but is not. Isn’t it all amazingly obvious! It is the blindfolded eye pre tending to be the seeing eye. The doctor is the seeing eye which pretends to be the non-seeing eye which pre tends that you can sit in the doctor’s waiting room and read about geography when you are probably going to hear shortly that you are dying. The seeing eye which pretends to examine your body but not to see your nakedness. We hope to bring home to doctors the need for thaumaturgical cognisance, which in turn will give to patients, to the culture, a sense of thaumaturgical awareness. Which will in turn revitalise the panel discussion, which is, afterall, the surgery, the consulting room of the intellect.
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