performance | public - address by steven chodoriwsky
audience format community
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Notes on ‘Exhausted Figure’
I presented Exhausted Figure in the main auditorium space of Cornell University’s recently completed Milstein Hall, on the occasion of the launch of a new issue of the Cornell Journal of Architecture . The date was April 5, 2013. Over the course of the evening, students, professors and other members of the department’s community- at-large gave brief talks on the event’s theme, ‘Figures’, as it pertained to their own ideas, projects and interests. The event was administered within the well-known constraints of the pecha-kucha format, where presentations consist of twenty slides of twenty seconds duration each. This is a notoriously tricky genre, perhaps by design. A preselected sequence of displayed images is automatically timed, and the speaker strains to perform with grace and concision. All this on top of typically less-than-ideal spatio-temporal circumstances and inevitably speech spills from one image to the next, unbidden, or a dead patch of stalled silence hovers in front of an image once there is little left to say. I picture an ellipsis caught behind the presenter’s tongue like three little Beckettian sucking stones. Indeed, this potential for awkward misalignment and a-synchronicity is part of the fun of witnessing a talk like this pull itself together: it is semi-rapid-fire, limp-tight- rope, a bit dirty and mercifully quick. Pecha-kucha is an onomatopoeic Japanese term for prattle, after all, so in this light, certainly there’s no expectation of a Gettysburg Address. Before me was another professor, venerable and wise, who from his first seconds at the microphone wanted nothing to do with it, thank you very much. When one image disappeared mid-sentence against his wishes — an Italian terrazzo tiled floor with an intricate geometric pattern — he tried
to stop everything, incredulously, asking into the darkness of the auditorium for the technicians to rewind the slide. The format was turning against him, twenty-second automated time-pictures were moving forward without him, a merciless clock. He humorously and exasperatedly attempted to fight free from its clutches. He had a real desire to show these wonderful images on his own time, as well as in their own timeless time. Of course, his performance was especially entertaining and the audience loved it. I guess I had been giving a lot of thought to how to appropriate, but also remain faithful to, the constraints for my own talk. How could it relate to the theme, even if obliquely, even to a fault? What sort of figure could complement a pre-ordained structure, and what sort of economical relationship between sender and receiver could be forged? In the foreword to a collection of his writings, John Cage explains his intention when giving lectures or producing texts: ‘to say what I had to say in a way that would exemplify it’. This is a process of in situ model-making: he makes an example out of what he has to say, he changes scale and material but strives for fidelity in the message through a new medium. Spectators are asked to come to dialogical terms with what is going on: the speech, the setting, the manoeuvre, the mechanics, the technique and the delivery are all present and carry with them unique types of relevant information. It is a deceptively simple claim that Cage makes. But it’s one that places equal responsibility on both speaker and listener not only to the content being exchanged, but the terms, conditions and motivations of its transaction. What is the experience
communicated between the two, between presenter and presented, and what, if anything, is being shared? My turn to speak took place near the middle of a lengthy programme, after about ten had gone and ten more were to follow. A hand-drawn clock with twenty intervals began to count down on the screen behind me, I got up from my front row seat and, with the microphone in one hand and a timer in the other, turned around in one motion to face the audience. Perhaps there’s a sort of value in taking an already complicated thing and making it more so. On top of the twenty-twenty structure — complex, fascinating and trivial as it is — I introduced a second, more prescriptive task, closing the thing further around itself, giving it an internal logic, but withholding most clues and cues. The self-assigned task was simple enough: to produce a yawn every twenty seconds. If, on the condition the yawn did not come, the timer I held would tell me that twenty seconds had expired, and I would have to proceed to producing the next timed yawn. The microphone was nearby to record any vocalisations. Yawning several times in rapid succession is physically challenging. It stretches parts of the body above the waist that typically remain unstrained. Its component parts of inhalation and exhalation, if fully played out — jaw extends, diaphragm contracts, eardrum stretches, eyes close and tear up — take on average six seconds, which theoretically left me fourteen seconds to trigger the succeeding yawn. In the days leading up to the event, I had practiced this rather diligently, this yawning on command and at intervals, whether by stopwatch or by rough estimation. I am — and
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