ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE: Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation a Manifesto of the OmniCircus
I. THE AUTOPSY
For thousands of years new human codes of language, creativity, behavior and emotion have been created in the ritualized laboratory of myth, art and theater. The effort to invent tools, assimilate and master the environment, and transform it into a human society, has coincided with another more mysterious evolution: the ongoing attempt to improve the human condition by reproducing ourselves technologically, and thus struggle symbolically and actually with iniquity and physical mortality. It is in this context that our 'drama' - the epic story of the advent and implications of robotic and synthetic theater - begins. In the course of this journey, the reader will forgive me if I am forced to attempt explanations of certain more generalized and basic phenomena - such as the role of the art as the material trigger for the evolutionary processes of human culture.
Around 2000 B.C. in ancient Egypt's Middle Kingdom, the lower classes fought for and gained the right to have their corpses mummified. They believed this would allow passage to the same afterlife that aristocrats and pharaohs enjoyed. In our times many artists have developed similar ambitions. Bidding for post-modernist immortality, they struggle to have their works displayed 'in state' in Elysian galleries where mourners reverentially file by, staring at the duly prepared corpse... "it looks just like it did in life"... before being ripped from its cultural context in the local art slum, embalmed by a somber-faced curator and eulogized by madly posturing "critics". Then the undertaker/collector arrives, measures the body for its frame, and eventually transfers it (for a not immeasurable profit) to its final resting place - the Modern Art Museum.
The ceremonies are carried out with voodoo pomp and deadpan circumstance, fanfares from Art Forum, hosannas from Art in America and a chorus of approving nom-yoho-renge-kyo's from the bureaucratic army of art professors, dealers, collectors and experts. But wait! The dubious circumstances surrounding these events demand a forensic examination of the body - just what is this decaying thing, this decomposition, this artwork so carefully prepared for immortality? Often, all we find upon exhumation of the remains is a dab, a blob of empty formalism or a smuch, a sodden squeech-a-goo of pop-art trivia.
A veritable ocean of blissfully decadent work is supported by the official "art world" to the exclusion of more important and progressive art. People outside this so-called art world have a tendency to give it the benefit of the doubt, despite occasional bouts of derision and dismissal. In general, the public shrugs its shoulders and assumes that modern art institutions are filled with benign well-meaning cranks engaged in obscure, overblown but ultimately genuine intellectual labor. It's natural and reassuring to assume the art world to be the place you'd go to find those people interested in the development of progressive culture. The ultra-rich 'liberals' who dominate the art world present it as a more-or-less democratic forum for the expression of various artistic points of view. And there is in fact great freedom, as long as you agree with the party line, or you express yourself in so primitive a fashion that your work becomes decorative and safe. The myth of the avant-garde assumes that the art world includes 'opposition' tendencies that provide fertile ground for innovation and discovery.
We at OmniCircus believe the bourgeois art world to be the headquarters for those engaged in repressing progressive culture; it is monolithic, censorious and utterly corrupt. The 'freedom' which does exist is a smoke-screen; it is mostly the freedom to excel at idiocy, to drown out progressive voices of genius with an avalanche of ego-driven mediocrity; freedom to put on a bozo suit and entertain the collectors, curators and courtiers; freedom to flatter the privileged and promote the cult of celebrity; freedom to enter into every form of superstition, hogwash, mindlessness and buncombe...but no comparable freedom for proletarian artists with a serious message and the talent to put it across! The same corporate, political and social forces that engaged in recent genocidal warfare in Vietnam, Central America, and the Middle East ultimately control the art world in America, and other 'developed' countries. It is unrealistic to expect this reactionary ruling class to be more open or progressive culturally than they are politically.
In the 20th century there have been many incidents of mindless physical attacks by deranged persons upon art masterpieces residing in churches, museums and other places of worship. There seems to be a symbolic substitution, perhaps animistic, of the artwork for the hated political, religious, or economic ideal that, in the mind of the madman, has been perceived as the cause of his personal misery. Two specific cases of this interesting transfer come to mind: one in 1934 and the other in 1972. The first was the destruction, by a madman, of progressive Mexican muralist Diego Rivera's masterpiece in Rockefeller Center, New York City. This MURAL included a portrait of Lenin amidst depictions of the degradations produced by capitalism. The second case that I wish to bring to your attention was the smashing of the face and hand of the Virgin in Michelangelo's PIETA in St. Peters Cathedral, Rome. Some interesting conclusions about our society can be reached if we examine the fate of the two vandals. In the second case, the hammer attack on The Pieta, the perpetrator, whose name was Laszlo Toth, was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Toth is a Maryonist, a bizarre religious sect that opposes all images in art of the Virgin Mary. He is now resting comfortably in a sanitarium. Society put him there for his own good, though there appears to be little hope of his ever recovering.
In the first case, the destruction of the Rivera painting, the perpetrator's name was Nelson Rockefeller. His father, John D. Rockefeller, put him in charge of the decoration of Rockefeller Center. Nelson Rockefeller is a follower of a bizarre economic system called capitalism, which opposes all images of Lenin. He was appointed vice-president of the United States. He was put there for the good of his class, the billionaire class that rules the art and political world of America, and continues its imperialistic efforts to expand the empire internationally. Of course it should be pointed out that, before he became vice-president, Nelson Rockefeller was already widely known as one of the 20th century's "greatest" collectors of modern art. On lecture tours, he would often tell the story of the destruction of the Rivera mural as an amusing anecdote, noting ironically that the artist refused to speak to him for years afterwards.
The writer of this essay traveled to New York to see the actual wall where the Rivera mural once resided. The information desk clerk was visibly uncomfortable when asked if the area behind him was "the wall". He had obviously been schooled to deflect this question. He finally told me the mural never existed because it had never been "accepted by Mr. Rockefeller." I realized that by that definition, I didn't exist either.
In 1994 I sent one of my robots, Goboy the mechanical beggar, to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to see an exhibit of BLANK WHITE CANVASES by Robert Ryman. His paintings do exist, they even sell to elite collectors lucky enough to acquire one for $300,000 or more apiece. Goboy was kicked out of the museum. A guard explained that he wasn't a work of art.
Just what is it that makes certain art so powerful and dangerous? There is a veritable renaissance of mechanical performance in San Francisco and elsewhere, echoing the efforts of untold generations of engineers, theater people and artists stretching back almost as long as theater itself. What is the historical impulse behind this age-old and continuing journey? I will present a new theory of the mechanism of cultural evolution and the role of art in history - the Design Language theory - and suggest a methodology for a comprehensive scientific/analytic approach to understanding art, theater, and ultimately robotic and synthetic performance.
We seldom question why there's little or nothing in the galleries and modern art museums that relates to our life, our struggle, our vision of beauty, because our framework of underlying assumptions about art is given to us by the business class, which runs these museums in its own interests. Our ignorance of our own working-class culture eventually induces a kind of paralysis. Why should we care what "they" do with "their" museums? It is our notion that art plays a key role in the power relationships between social classes, and the "aesthetic" languages that amplify and empower cultural movements act as triggers in this context.
The bourgeoisie, during their struggle for social supremacy in the 19th century, supported progressive ideologies including the notion of "social evolution", a basic premise of which is that ceaseless technological change and its accompanying class conflict lead to the possibility of progress and a higher, more sophisticated and rational level of cultural development, and that this process can be understood scientifically. Having achieved power, they now attack the evolutionary (and revolutionary) rationales that accompanied their rise, because the notion of continuous evolution suggests that no social form, not even capitalism, represents a perfect or final stage of social organization. It is difficult for the capitalists to attack their own revolutionary heritage directly, so instead they call into question the basic notion of whether social forces can be understood rationally at all.
When Charles Darwin set out to prove the theory of evolution of biological organisms, he used various kinds of evidence specimens of living forms: fossils, bones, etc. Obviously if a scientist can present a series of skulls progressing from the Eohippus to the modern horse, it is an easy matter to convince anyone but the most pinheaded Bible-thumper of the truth of biological evolution. Scientists can use these skulls as proof of their theory because the relationship of the skull to the organism is known; it keeps the brains in and the weather out.
Social evolutionists, who believe civilization has moved through many complex interpolations from lower forms to higher, have a similar fount of material evidence on which to draw for proof of their theories; the things produced by a society are an accurate material record of many aspects of that society. But the relationship of these 'socially designed' forms to the social organism is not universally understood or taken for granted as is the skull to the horse. Works of art especially are shrouded in a heavy-handed mysticism. We believe that art plays a special role as a trigger in cultural development - a role that has never yet been defined. Most aesthetic frameworks, whether bourgeois or "Marxist," fail to successfully address a key underlying issue - why do societies make art? It is in the interest of culturally disenfranchised peoples to answer this question for ourselves rather than relying on the explanations of the "official experts."
The feminist and Black nationalist movements of recent times were compelled to sponsor a reassessment of history to include a more accurate description of the role of women and Blacks. They had to rewrite the past before they could write the future, because their past had been ripped from them and along with it their sense of identity as a people. The world proletariat, perennially excluded from the cultural landscape, must do the same. No class ever made a progressive social revolution without having a heroic conception of its own past, a shared identity for the present and a vision of epic cultural transformation. Our class has recently accomplished something entirely unique in history: in my lifetime the world's peoples have created the first international language... a language I call poly-fusion music, the amalgam of jazz, progressive rock, various classical forms and the vast panoply of the 'roots' music of the world's cultures. In the past three decades this new language with its vast armada of variants has become the most important cultural expression in the world of music. Poly-fusion music is 'unhorsing' classical (bourgeois) music as the dominant musical language and is becoming the most impressive, powerful and complex intellectual achievement in musical history. And now we're spreading our wings and attempting something even more portentous: the advent of Robotic and Synthetic (Musical) Theater, which includes these revolutionary music forms and adds dance, theater and technologically enhanced performance in an effort to supercede classical theater with a superior arsenal of expressivity and a multi-dimensional new language.
When an oppressed people have the courage and energy to understand and create new forms, and the militancy to challenge and defeat the ruling cultural ideas on the field of aesthetic battle, it's a short step to rebellion and then freedom. In order to develop our sense of this historic mission, it is important to know the history and context of the age-old and repeated efforts to make mechanical automata and theatrical performance.
