Comfortably Numb Art for Ordinary People

Connected and disconnected. Eccentric, annoying or evil? A clinging emotional dependence? In The Age I’m In, director Kate Champion plays fast and loose with the state of contemporary living,( but its actually timeless obsession with ageing), the tribulations of ageing, the angst of youth, the desire to appear youthful, the perceptions of the old through the eyes of the young and vice versa .The cast represents age from adolescence to veteran, featuring performers each representing a symbol of their age group.

The Age I'm In, Kate Champion

 

”There is nothing more dispiriting than coming out of a performance feeling exhausted, disappointed and sad, only to have to face the clamour of a delighted audience. People giving multiple rounds of applause, praising the same production for being moving, lovely or touching. For making them smile. The Age I’m In, by Force Majeure, at Carriageworks (still going), is an example of physical theatre that would not leave a hole in the world if it disappeared overnight. It is, in one word, unnecessary. It is, just like it could not be. Soundtracked with audio recordings of interviews with Australians of different age groups, it makes a diverse group of performers dance and lip-synch the responses about the joys and difficulties of life. It is a most unfortunate combination of verbatim, pedagogical, feel-good and accessible. It is dance drawn with crayons, Saturday night date theatre, and social commentary ranging from bold (7-year-olds saying cute things) to extremely provocative (vague mythologisation of the struggle against breast cancer). It doesn’t have the power of a documentary on more concrete struggles, nor the centreless, open-ended poignancy of the 7 Up series….”( Misonou )

The Age I'm In

 

 

Cultural critics like Theodor Adorno had foreboding and prescient warning about the value and dangers of middlebrow art, the vanguard of popular culture and its commodification as cultural industry with little residual redeeming value. the art of vicarious experience where pop psychology, seduction and manipulation passes for relevent personal or interpersonal reflections candy coated as ”art” .The value of emptiness presented as ecstacy. Glorious mediocrity that reassures  that it is all very meaningful and worthwhile.The illusion of artistic depth and mystifying nonsense, cultural charlatans with an ultimately repressive and reactionary message. As writer Alice Miller would say, middlebrow art acts to sustain ” the repression of our own suffering destroying our empathy for the suffering of others” In Hannah Arendt’s, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, the root of evil was found fermenting and its bacteria propagating in the ordinary, the conforming and the acceptable; the famous Golden Mean. Eichmann, a nazi was criminal was given a psychological clean bill of health after numerous health care professionals determined him to be completely sane, contradicting the ”monster” theory of a mass murderer.

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Ordinary People, Judd Hirsch & Timothy Hutton

The road to hell in art, a Dante’s inferno is most likely paved with good intentions. The Age I’m In is likely a candidate for this category. The performers amble onto the stage from the audience, then begin to introduce the many personalities they represent, lips synchronised with a multiplicity of voices. The juxtapositioning of childish utterances and voices with older bodies plays for laughs. The statements shift rapidly between performers, counterpointing attitudes shaped by experience and age.The dance becomes ambiguous, suggesting a tension between willing engagement and subtle resistance; contradictory  dynamics of parenting and marriage. In addition to the constant play of recorded voices delivering opinions and philosophies of life – from the naive innocence of youth to the gossipy, class-dictated prejudices of age – there is much use made of interactive screens skimming clothed bodies but displaying nude ones, poignantly revealing the changes wrought by time. It tend to get predictable and boring…. the recorded clips into a collage-like script dealing with a spectrum of issues: drugs, politics, sex, age, loneliness, …plastic surgery.

”It is worth remembering Kundera, who diagnoses precisely the problem in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. If he calls it kitsch, and not middlebrow, the difference is in cultural temperament, I dare suggest, inessential. Middlebrow, often understood as a pursuit of simple artiness, to make us look good, …. On the level of aesthetic experience, says Kundera, Middlebrow causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes middlebrow middlebrow.” The first tear is in empathy, the second in our self-gratulatory recognition of empathy.Middlebrow, he continues, is the absolute denial of shit. Middlebrow is that vision of the world in which nothing unwholesome or indecent is allowed to come into view. It’s the aesthetics of wanting to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Middlebrow excludes shit in order to paint a picture of perfection, a world of purity and moral decency. Middlebrow is Nazi propaganda films of beautiful, blond children skiing down the Bavarian Alps.Middlebrow is also, more tellingly, a categorical agreement with being. Nothing can be private, unpleasant, complex or idiosyncratic. The problem, argues Kundera, is that the world of middlebrow is the world purified of everything troubling, ugly and unwholesome. It is a picture of the world at once illogical, emotional, aggressive and demagogical in its simplicity. Everything purged outside the frame of this picture grows into monsters and returns to haunt. The logical conclusion of the Nazi kitsch is the ghetto and the concentration camp …”

The 1980 film, Ordinary People, showed the ultimately dysfunctional and highly disturbing proportions an adherence to the normal can produce. The plasticity results in emotional isolation as the obsession with maintaining appearance leads to the disintegration of the characters lives as they become fragmented and divided by guilt and fear, an emotional gulag producing a numbing nihilism of the mind from which escape is very painful.