Bablestorm

It’s been quiet in here for a couple of weeks. Hasn’t been out there, though. I sense a connection. Can’t quite establish it. I mean, it hasn’t been that busy out there. Perhaps it was just the whole 9/11 thing that got me. Even though I carefully avoided all the fuss, I knew it was there. Gotta work harder on that solipsism if I’m ever gonna get it right

Well, no matter what the cause of my silence, the levee broke last night. I went with a couple of friends to watch a play called Bablestorm. The interim stage was set in an empty film studio. Sand was strewed on the floor in the shape of a circus ring, and the circle was divided like a cake or a clock with two long black poles radiating from the centre. Props were sparse – mostly musical instruments together with a few suggestive pieces of furniture, and such. In the background a satelitte dish completed the circular theme while showing projections of wavering colors and live footage from the Vietnam war and the Iraq invasion.

The play had been announced as a poetic soap opera concerning the kidnapping of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena in Baghdad in the spring of 2005. Rather a pretentious setup. But I like it that way. At least pretentious people are serious about what they do. Or so they like to believe. And this last thing is usually enough to get my emotions untangled and my brains throbbing.

My first impression was that Bablestorm was a letdown. Bordering somewhere between documentary, office talk, spleen poetry, Mesopotamian mythology, political agitation, and ritualistic hymns it was quite hard to find any kind of leitmotif. Stories were begun but never concluded, songs were sung by a blind guy bumping his way across the stage, and the actors performed as if they were posing for a new world order. And in the centre of it all was the traumatized Italian journalist comfortably slipping into the limbo of madness and ecstasy. Nothing made sense. It was indeed a bablestorm.

When the play finished the audience clapped politely, and quickly left the building. As if everybody knew the actors and were afraid that they might be forced into making a statement about it all. Afterwards a cup of coffee and an attempt at reflection didn’t bring me and my friends much closer to a catharsis. We gave it up, and went home. This wasn’t a night to get drunk and disorderly, and rave about the misfortunes of art.

Sleep, however, didn’t come lightly. I lay on my bed, revolving like the chamber of a gun, a bablestorm slowly rising in my mind. Something bit at my heels, and I didn’t know which way to turn and face it. What was it all about? Why couldn’t I just let it go? The eye of the storm was nowhere to be seen.

A quick analysis stranded me somewhere on the banks of political art. Only, politics kept defying art, and vice versa. It seemed to me that the play was an attempt at reaching behind and beyond both art and politics. All the way back to the phonetics of language that make up both propaganda and poetry. At one point the blind singer had been reciting vowels continually, as if to deprive them of all meaning. Language is sound first and foremost, and everything that follows from there is just post-rationalization. I didn’t buy it, and neither did the rest of the audience whether they saw what I had seen, or not.

Once when I was travelling in Iranian Kurdistan a local painter and sculptor told me that the problem with Western art was that Western artists didn’t believe that there were anymore causes left fighting for. With the problems of their own countries solved in the name of Capitalism with a capital C, they couldn’t bring themselves to truly believe that other people suffered physically in the way that they themselves suffered mentally. As a consequence art became decadent, and the now famous canned shit exhibition the utmost altar of worship. Anyway, that was how he saw things.

I think Bablestorm was an attempt at dismantling the notion of Western art as impotent. The play wanted to fuse political idealism and subversive artistic self-criticism in the hope of creating something that would establish art as a legitimate and influential statement in itself. As noted above, it didn’t succeed very well. In fact, about three-thirty in the morning I ended up considering the failure of the play as the most successful thing about it. Because it had made me wonder. Wonder why art works better in opposition to than in alignment with. And why Danish art has forgotten how to be in opposition. It’s mostly just a big drivelling mess without the ability to even throw a napkin. And then, only to dry the eyes of the artist him- or herself.

To German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen 9/11 was a work of art. To Hitler World War II was as well. At least, that’s what German filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg hints at in his obscure (and hence unacclaimed) masterpiece Hitler, A Film From Germanỵ. To me Bablestorm was as well. A work of art and nothing but. And art in itself doesn’t touch upon the world just because it deals with the world. To think so is both naïve and mysophobic.

I think I’ll call it quits here before I reach a conclusion that the play didn’t, and that I – hopefully only still – don’t know how to reach. Remember, this too has been a bablestorm.