‘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