Liveness: On Vanity and In Vain

As you might have noticed, I’ve been thinking a lot about liveness of late. You might also have spotted that I attach a great deal of importance to it as a property, but it’s hard to define quite why. Reading Philip Auslander’s Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, I came round to his view that liveness itself as a property has no inherent, intrinsic, ontological value. That is to say, perhaps, that liveness just is. No more, nothing less. All our reasons for elevating it above the mediatised are historically relative. However, something inside me stills chimes as if to disagree: a feeling that personally – in the here and now – I do choose to place value of liveness over the mediatised. That’s why I spend my evenings in theatres, rather than cinemas or in front of televisions. In general, the live does more for me than the mediatised. (Of course, by that I mean ‘in general’. There’s no point in being absolutist about it.) It resonates more for me. Or, rather, I resonate more when confronted with the live.

Anyway, as I was reading Auslander, I happened also to be reading Calvino, as (regular readers will know) I am want to do. More specifically, I was reading Difficult Loves, a collection of his short stories. More specifically still, I was reading The Adventure of a Photographer and I came across the following:

“The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow. If you take a picture of Pierluca because he’s building a sand-castle, there is no reason not to take his picture while he’s crying because the castle has collapsed, and then while the nurse consoles him by helping him find a sea-shell in the sand. You only have to start saying of something: “Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!” and you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore in order really to live you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second, to madness.”

And also, this:

“For the person who wants to capture everything that passes before his eyes,” Antonio would explain, even if nobody was listening to him any more, “the only coherent way he can act is to snap at least one picture a minute, from the moment he opens his eyes in the morning to when he goes to sleep. This is the only way the rolls of exposed film will represent a faithful diary of our days, with nothing left out. If I were to start taking pictures, I’d see this thing through, even if it meant losing my mind. The rest of you, on the contrary, still insist on making a choice. What sort of choice? A choice in the idyllic sense, apologetic, consolatory, at peace with nature, the fatherland, the family. Your choice isn’t only photographic, it is a choice of life, which leads you to exclude dramatic conflicts, the knots of contradiction, the great tensions of will, passion, aversion. So you thinking you are saving yourselves from madness, but you are falling into mediocrity, into hebetude.”

Then, finally, this:

“What drives you two girls to cut from the mobile continuum of your day these temporal slices, the thickness of a second? Tossing the ball back and forth, you are living in the present, but the moment the scansion of the frames is insinuated between your acts it is no longer the pleasure of the game that motivates you but rather that of seeing yourselves again in the future, of rediscovering yourselves in twenty years’ time, on a piece of yellowed paper (yellowed emotionally, even if modern printing procedures will preserve it unchanged). The taste for the spontaneous, natural lifelike snapshot kills spontaneity, drives away the present. Photographed reality immediately takes on a nostalgic character, of joy fled on the wings of time, a commemorative character, even if the picture was taken [the] day before yesterday. And the life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself.”

I always find it exciting when two very different, altogether distinct texts reverberate with one another. When unexpected parallels appear and causes a new level of clarity that you never saw coming.

Anyway, here I got to wondering about the difference between performance on screen and on stage. For the former, one’s concern must rest with the image. It is always about appearances. On stage, or rather, live, one cannot think so singularly in terms of image. Image multiplies depending on audience perspective – and by that, of course, I mean not only the angle of perspective, but in terms of distractions and attractions. The eye roams and finds its own frame. As such, I have been wondering whether it is this lack (or rather, lesser presence) of vanity that I like about live performance.

The live cannot preen in the same way, since one cannot guard against every possible perspective on the work. It cannot airbrush itself, because it allows the multiplicity of appearance and reality equal weight. Where it does, it does so openly and honestly. Moreover, it cannot perfect itself. Or retrospectively attempt to do so. There is no opportunity to go back and redo, to tweak and change. Once it is in motion, it continues on apace in the same temporal direction. The live marks itself down as history, it testifies to itself and allows us to stand as witnesses. It just is. And once it has been, it cannot be erased.

Live humanity is real humanity. It is a humanity away from the Edward Cullens, the icily frozen foreheads and the size zeros that impact from the screen onto the world, setting up new paradigms for impossible beauty. Live humanity wobbles, stumbles and falls. It is a graceless beast attempting to conjure some dignity and, more often than not, failing. There’s beauty in that; real beauty, living beauty.

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On a slightly related note, I spent a day last week browsing through the synoptic highlights of Gob Squad’s backcatalogue on youtube and came across the following video entitled Why We Make Performance, which really is quite succinct and eloquent.