peter nesteruk (home page: contents and index)

 

 

 

 

‘Ode’ (A Short Film by Gaobo)

 

 

 

The title suggests a weighty matter, yet the material itself is short: the short repetitive cycle depicted on the level of the signifier also indicates a signified of larger importance. Furthermore, the title suggests a ‘praise-song’ for an individual, community or event; yet we have a muted, truncated coda to apparent incomprehension. Which brings us to the other, more modern, sense of ‘Ode’, that of an elegy, of a memorial… Already the title suggests to us the question (in a visual text that poses many questions…): What has been lost?

 

A pastoral then, with the typical theme of a fallen society; with a return to Nature prescribed as cure. In the history of Western Culture we call this the Myth of Pastoral, the art culture of Romanticism is the climax of this myth. Yet we are not living in the nineteenth century and the inhabitants of this landscape do not appear to be particularly happy. Is the myth being put to some other use?

 

In art history the genre name for a natural paradise where something is still lacking is ‘In Arcadia Ego’ (‘even here, in Arcadia, it can be found’). What is the ‘Ego’, the ‘it’…? In the tradition of painting the spoiler of Arcadia is Death, the memento mori (reminder of death, usually present as a human skull) of Baroque art. So in the most pleasant setting, that is, ideal society, a pastoral society (traditionally a critique of urban culture, from Theocritus to Kiefer - and Gao Bo too, in his previous works), even here, in this ideal place, this idyllic rural scene, there is death. Like the traditional reading of the aesthetics of ruins and follies, where the ruin of a prior civilization signals something above civilization itself… more powerful, more prior, something that comes with the passing of time, more ‘eternal’: the heavens, God…  Traditionally, it comes as no surprise that in 16th and 17th century art it is religion that is the message (as ‘hidden’ in the anamorphosis, the famous floating skull, and the point of view from which it can be clearly seen, together with the scene, the crucifixion, ‘behind the image’ of ‘The Ambassadors’ by Holbein). But we no longer believe in religion… So only the passing of time, entropy, remains (unrepaired, things fall apart, including society, our social bonds). Entropy and its cure, human rituality - a rituality we witness in the repeated actions of the group in their waking hours interacting with the gongs whose presence they never leave (and never straying into the nature that lies beyond these enigmatic artefacts).

 

What then is ‘Ego’, what is ‘it’ …. in this particular version of Arcadia, this fallen pastoral Idyll - this ‘Ode’? (And already the heroic, laudatory connotations of the genre, ‘Ode’, are becoming ironic). The answers may be several: at first sight we note in the group’s activity, the presence of the sexual division of labour (where the women attempt to minimize the noise made by the men). But this division as such (already a part of tribal or hunter-gatherer societies) is not the main point; rather it is the attitude to the gongs, the differing responses to their presence, which signals that it is these hanging, inscribed metal gongs that are the key to the riddle posed by Gao Bo’s enigmatic film.

 

What are they, what do they represent, these gongs which seem to lie as a barrier between them, the group, and an unexplored, so frightening, Nature? Is this why we hear the noise of the gongs, to frighten away what might live in the forest? To frighten away the spirits of the forest, the genius loci, that the group imagines to be there. Or is it the group itself which is the genius loci, the spirits of the place, the haunting presence of this particular location? (Are they the ghosts of a vanished tribe, extinct indigenous people – still serving their ancient totems? Rising from their collective burial place… still smeared by the earth that concealed them). The noise of the gongs; is it fear disguised as bravado that drives the striking of the gongs. And is it another kind of fear, that of the giving away of position (but to what, what is so feared?), that then drives the need to silence the gongs. Either way, no one, male or female, is venturing beyond the protecting, limiting line of gongs… All seem to stay, sleep, exist within their protective aura… Trapped in a repetitive re-enactment, a limited, and limiting, ritual existence. Force of habit, ghostly or allegorical.

 

Read this way the artwork does indeed offer an existential allegory. And all allegories are with today, with us, with our ‘here-and-now’. Something in our culture prevents us from a full appreciation of our environment; is holding us back from further exploration, Whether an environmentalist allegory or an allegory of escape – certainly an allegory of self-limitation (of if in a potential heaven, we find ourselves trapped in a purgatory (a transitory stage with no transit) or a hell made out of a fear of our own making…

 

Repeated actions; ritual: the male hits; the female quietens… A sexual division of labour, division of response; or role play… always present, the expected traditional roles apportioned to male and female.  Pre-given, inherited, attitudes to the world… to the gongs… Whose are they? The trace of their own lost civilization, or another, a prior civilization, or an alien gift? We do not know. But life revolves, cyclically around them, a cycle of sleep and gongs, like a Beckett play or a god’s eye view, an allegory of humanity and its struggle, vain and wasted. No gathering of food, no work cycles, apart from the labour of the gongs, this is all that we see - their whole life. If just a part of their life (cycles) then an important part, whence recorded, filmed; the gongs as barrier to Nature, their justification for existence… The string of gongs, a centre line behind them, framing the group, their background, or ground (living ground or burial ground) they, the ‘figures’… on a ground. So giving them meaning, to them as a culture or its ghostly revenant and to us… the viewers, or witnesess to their ceremony. Gongs between them and the forest (they and the gongs in a clearing in the forest). 

 

The gongs and their language… What is written on them, whose script? They look pre-script, or all-script, or disaster-wise, post-script… after writing… our future perhaps, worshiping, serving, unthinkingly, without understanding, our own post-apocalypse cultural remains… But either-way, then or now, as a barrier, a limit to further realization, to progress…

 

Mise-en-scene. Fore, middle and rear ground. With the people in the fore, the gongs hanging in the middle, the forest behind. The gongs lie like a wall in between… The sounding of the gongs, the gong noise, as bravery or bravado in face of the forest unknown… with female circumspection as fear and/or prudence.

 

Slow movement: suggesting another kind of time or the outside of time; the time of myth. Do we watch a ritual reenactment of a myth, the founding myth of the group? Enacted by a band of survivors who no longer understand the significance of what they perform? Or a band of ghosts; a tableaux, figures from out of the ground, ghost-sonata, ghost play for an audience to understand; memorial as prophecy…

 

The continuously blurred movement adds to this mythic, ghostly effect. More, we cannot help but note the ‘extra-blurring’; the foregrounded moment of blurring, occurring just before the end of each cycle, each performance… an extra-mark of distancing, further denying presence (‘semi-presence’, no longer ‘now’, but the presence of the past… or future). The sense of having watched a ghostly tableau… Otherwise put, a memorial, and again the question of the origin of the group, and of the gongs: whose, from where and from when…? If the gongs are prior to the group, misunderstood, then what we have is much like the relationship of the modern viewer to the ruins of a prior civilization… If the semi-presencing of the event suggests the future; then we have a prediction as to the fall of a civilization…

 

Sounds: bird song and the sound of the gongs… The sounds of Nature and those of a culture, but what culture? Whose? The culture of the ‘playing‘ of the gongs (the ritual we see) seems not to be the culture of the gongs themselves… What relation is there of the inhabitants of this pastoral world to these objects? A relation to something misunderstood, like our relationship to our past (or to our own culture)… a worship (or elision) without understanding… Again we note the male relation, to hit, to make noise, regardless… The female response is more responsible, protective, not wanting to attract attention, the male approach as control (showing-off as control, ‘male display’, ‘challenging behaviour’, etc., the stuff monkeys do…). So the female response is the more intelligent: or more frightened, so more careful…. Respectful? In the background, origins invisible, foregrounded in sound, the birdsong, indicating Nature, indicating somewhere else…

 

No attempt is made to go into the forest…

 

No attempt is made to read the writing on the gongs…

 

And so we witness cycles of repetition, two or three, in a triptych form, the different stages viewed simultaneously, the form of the expression and this means of expression, both another way of asserting mythic, trans-temporal meaning, blind repetition of the unaware, of the unconscious of the un-reasoning? Repetition foregrounded; a dead-end foregrounded… Futility foregrounded… In this, another parable of ‘the endless return’, we intimate the succession of generations and are reminded of the long evolution, of the long, long, near static history of the Paleolithic - the Old Stone Age made up of countless generations, countless repetitions…

 

And what of light, its direction? The typical diagonal (art history’s favourite diagonal, top left to bottom right, from the place of god to the realm of humanity), except that it ‘falls’ from the bottom right, and is present as a line on the ground come from ‘below’ - so ‘up’ towards the top left corner… As if from the bottom right hand corner… The place of hell, in Christian art; so suggesting the hell of a dead-end or (similarly, but less intense) a purgatory of repetition, like Alain Resnais’, ‘Last Year in Marienbad’)? Forgetting to repeat.

 

 

No attempt is made to leave the clearing…

 

No attempt is made to read what is written on the gongs…

 

 

*

 

Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2018