What is ABACUS? A great performance of course; in it Paul Abacus conveys his problems with the modern world. He see nations and borders (walls) as an obsolete hindrance to our development as a species. He cites facts, and indeed the whole piece is quite logical, and the message is clearly something to the extent of "this world is sick"; but sadly I don't share his optimism that we even can avoid the next dark age, because without another dark age humanity will never understand that the Earth has limits in all facets of our existence. This is all really irrelevant though clearly there's no accurate way of predicting the future so it is still in the realm of opinion. His facts are completely impeccable; I went through the trouble of looking them up myself and he's a dead on realist. However, the reaction I got from the piece came only slightly from the actual piece with most of it coming from the audience.
What I truly got out the piece was how the message could not possibly mesh with the audience. He's giving this message of a broken system keeping poverty and those less off behind walls, but the people hes speaking to don't care (or even worse pretend to care), because to get in that audience you've got to be pretty well connected to the establishment. No minimum wage slave is going to see this performance, because they can't go (not enough time/money) and don't want to (being shoulder-to-shoulder with the PoMos (post-modern elitists) yuck!). Conversely, no one with a high paying job or elitist college degree is going to make decisions that hurt their dominance over those less off. Paul Abacus actually makes a point similar to this in his talk about altruism, where he notes that altruistic behavior is inherently selfish on a subconscious level (because it increases your mating success). But I didn't even feel this piece's message was new or revolutionary anyway.
The message of "this world is sick" is not new at all nor is the message that "nations are bad" these notions have been around for at least 200 years (Malthus is the first to come to mind, but the UN's founding had similar motivations). What really struck me was the feeling of the whole festival as this prepackaged art 'fit' for human consumption. Like art has become just another commodity to be bought/sold/traded/consumed/produced. I feel like 500 years ago or more when someone saw a holy piece of art, they had an actual spiritual moment or felt some sense of enlightenment. The piece derides the resource driven economy, but it feels like just another resource to be consumed sans enlightenment (nothing new) or spirituality (knocks the very notion of religion). But maybe I just don't "get" the piece (although we do agree), but probably its just another form of consumption for those that want it (sports fans buy sports tickets, performing arts fans buy performing arts tickets). In that sense it's just more consumption to fuel our growth based economic absurdity without accomplishing anything, but making those who attend acknowledge their superior position in life (subconsciously) and pay lip service to the plight of others.
yeah, I agree with you in that I'm kind of getting sick of everyone telling us how terrible the world is. If art is going to go down this path, I think it needs to offer solutions.
ReplyDeleteAbacus began to do that, but stopped short and left me unfulfilled in that regard. It was an inspiring little ditty, but after the show, I imagine that everyone went home and went about their daily lives, perhaps feeling uplifted... but were we really?
For a piece like this which was clearly not "art for art's sake," it seems like we should have been offered concrete steps: What you can do tonight to reach this goal, etc etc..
But, gee, did we really want any more shoved in our faces at this performance?