Pacitti Company - audiology

Audiology

by Carl Lavery

In one of his essays, Artaud compares theatre to snake charming. Given Artaud's iconoclastic attack on language, it is not difficult to understand why he was compelled to make such an analogy. Just as the snake is physically hypnotised by the music coming from a flute or pipe, so Artaud wanted the performance event to affect his audience by bodily means, through its senses - what he called in a memorable, yet often misunderstood, phrase, 'metaphysics through the skin'.

If we spend a little time unpacking Artaud's analogy, then it is apparent that the crucial organ, for him, is not, as for most performance theorists, the eye; rather it is the ear. The ear is critical to Artaud's revolutionary project to undermine western logocentrism because 'the ear', as Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead remind us in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde (MIT press, 1992), 'offers not just another hole in the body but a hole in the head' (p.ix).

As hole in the head, the ear is closest to consciousness, the very thing which, according to Artaud, needs to be liberated from thought, language and rationality. The auditory battle, the struggle for the ear, is, Artaud realises, a fight that needs to be won, for the ear is what allows us, like the snake, to be charmed; it is the space from, and through, which new forms of signification, new ways of being, emerge.

I have engaged in this lengthy preamble because it seems to me that this is exactly what Robert Pacitti is doing in his most recent piece, Audiology.

Although Audiology ends and begins with Joan of Arc hearing voices, Pacitti, like Artaud, has no interest in narrative - he does not want to tell stories and invent fictions. His primary aim is to explore an idea - in this case, investigating how sound affects us emotionally and existentially. As befits Pacitti's intention, Audiology is comprised of a series of disparate and painterly tableaux that appear, at least initially, to have little in common with each other. As Max Richter's sublime album Memoryhouse (2002) blares out from cranked-up speakers, image immediately follows image. No explanation or logic is given for the series of living sculptures that pass across the retina in Audiology. A reference to Joan of Arc is followed by a reference to Howard Hughes, then to Elvis, then to the Klu Klux Klan, then to an abandoned lover, then to a lost soul in an asylum. The 5 cast members add to the palpable strangeness of the piece by talking through microphones, speaking in foreign languages, engaging in acts of linguistic and sign translation, undressing on stage, swapping costumes and roles, and performing a number of task-based activities in real time such as drinking tequila and dancing to a 1940s style tune.

As a result of this vertiginous stream of aural and visual stimuli, history, memory and philosophy blur together in a dense nexus, making it difficult to find a calm spot to reflect on the meaning of the piece - at least during the event itself. This is Pacitti's intention. In common with Artaud, Pacitti encourages us to feel, not to think. He wants to affect us and, by doing so, to explore how sound produces representation. As the work progresses, it becomes apparent that what ultimately binds sound to representation is memory. Many, if not most, of the tableaux in Audiology seem deeply rooted in Pacitti's experience of the world: his fear of madness, his sense of loss when abandoned, his feelings of tenderness for a lover. Music or sonicity is the catalyst for the outpouring of such memories, the trigger that produces intense feeling. What stops Pacitti from being overwhelmed by what a psychoanalyst such as Jacques Lacan would call 'the jouissance of the voice' is his ability to create - his capacity to transform sound into a source of art. From this perspective - and with necessary distance - it is tempting to see Audiology as a radically self-conscious piece about performance making, an investigation into the source of creativity itself.

Despite its investigative intentions (into art, memory, madness, oppression), Audiology is never dry or prosaic. Like sound, it resonates, and many of the images continue to haunt. To use an aural metaphor that would surely appeal to Paul Claudel whose book on Dutch painting is called L'Oeil écoute (Listening with the Eye, 1946), the memory trace of Audiology vibrates in consciousness. The tableau that particularly affected me was the one in which a male cast member is forced to wear a balaclava, stripped to the waist, anointed in silver paint, seated on a chair and then given a long panel to hold that looked like a crucifix. After several seconds, and while Richter's music filled the auditorium, a digital message in red letters appeared on the panel saying 'I Miss You, I Miss You, I Miss You'.

The haunting quality of this image, the reason why it still echoes after the event, is, I believe, due to its essential polyphony. The image here is metonymic not metaphoric, and because of that suggestive; it vibrates with layers of sense and establishes a bond between Pacitti, Joan of Arc, and Christ. So what The Pacitti Company have created in Audiology is a profound constellation in which the private, the historical and the mythical all combine and overlap. In this context, the digitally transmitted sentence 'I Miss You, I Miss You, I Miss You', communicates an existential message that, for me, says something profound about human experience. Namely, that to exist is to be haunted by a voice (a lover, a father, a God) whose source can never be recovered and from whose body we are irreparably divorced. All we are left with is the echo, the sound, which explains why, as we are told at the start of the piece, we are still negotiating with Joan of Arc, today.

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This review was written for Live Art Magazine by Carl Lavery after Audiology was shown in Nottingham in March 2004 as part of the Sensitive Skin Festival. This review is reproduced here by kind permission of the author.