'Reality Ain't What It Used To Be'
There's a review [link will go out of business too soon] today in the Times of “House/Lights,” a play (if that's an adequate word for it) being put on now at St. Ann's Warehouse by the Wooster Group. It's a play on Gertrude Stein's play on the Faust legend, fused with with Joseph Mawra's B-film classic “Olga's House of Shame.”
But it's really a review of life in the 21st century:
The world according to the Wooster Group is the world that most of us live in now - any of us, that is, who spend time with some kind of computer, cellphone, television and/or recording device. Heck, just take a stroll through that open-air sound-and-light show called Times Square, land of giant television screens and walking telephone conversations, and you'll be in the terrain mapped by the Wooster Group.
The company has become the American theater's most inspired and articulate interpreter of an age in which machines mediate between the perceiver and the perceived, between subject and object. In its productions of the last 15 years in particular, it has increasingly specialized in ravishing, meticulous marriages of live and recorded performance that make it shatteringly clear reality ain't what it used to be.
What is real? What's a reproduction? Does it matter? In The Recognitions, by William Gaddis, there's an enormous scene with a very skilled forger of paintings. The forger says that all of the reproductions of his works in magazines are calumnies. Someone else says, coldly, “Every piece you do is calumny on the artist you forge.” And then the forger says this:
It's not. It's not, damn it, I . . . when I'm working, I . . . do you think I do these the way all other forging has been done? Pulling the fragments of ten paintings together and making one, or taking a . . . a Durer and reversing the composition so that the man looks to the right instead of left, putting a beard on him from another portrait, and a hat, a different hat from another, so that they look at it and recognize Durer there? No, it's . . . the recognitions go much deeper, much further back. [The experts can test all they want, but] they don't just look for a hat or a beard, or a style they can recognize, they look with memories that . . . go beyond themselves, that go back to . . . where mine goes.
All the pastiche and collage and reproduction we see online is just as real as any “original.” It's real enough.