The familiar made new -- that's one of the aims of art, right? Of course, it's also an aim of lectures, tours, panel discussions, therapy, newspaper articles (even reviews) or other expressions of fact and opinion.
So what to make of Peter Reder's modest, mild-mannered, gently subversive "Guided Tour," part of PIFOF 2008? (That's the Pittsburgh International Festival Of Firsts.) When is a guided tour really a performance, or even art?
Maybe always, I'd say just now, fresh from the gently dislocating experience that Reder offers in his wry, self-deprecating, counter-donnish way. If you invoke the right perspective, maybe every behavior becomes a form of performance. Maybe it already is, whether you know it or not.
Actually, there's no maybe about it. What Reder does is make a familiar activity (a guided tour, a strolling lecture) freshly self-conscious: "We're starting now," he says. "I'm starting. . . . I've started. . . . I'm pretending to know everything and you'll be pretending to be interested." His compact performance skitters along in the borderland between the thing itself and its parody, setting off small explosions of fresh awareness as we both accept and question what he says and does.
Reder's site is the Carnegie Museum. We gather in the lobby and then follow him through a couple of galleries, including the Hall of Architecture, where he pleasantly destabilizes our concept of "museum" by pointing out its own performative, theme-park function. It's a small leap to Marie Antoinette, no more an exploiter of the work of others than we, as we consume the treasures of such an imperial museum, heedless of their cost.
Reder makes a pleasant, unremarkable appearance -- wry, owlish and balding. He introduces Walter Benjamin's concept of the Angel of History, looking backward as the debris of the immediate past keeps piling higher. It's comic but also melancholy, reminding me of that Wim Wenders film, "Wings of Desire." Reder points out some melancholy angels in both sculpture and image.
We ascend the grand staircase, hearing about Andrew Carnegie and the banality and power of those World War I-era murals, all sweaty men down below and bare-breasted, inspiring women up above. Reder speculates with apparent diffidence on Carnegie's demons. He brings out some precious photos, supposedly from other museums, but he barely lets us see them, lest our gaze use them up.
We sit down around a table in a conservator's work space and watch slides from Reder's youth, or maybe just versions of that youth, while he insists on turning his memories into story and even archeology. But what's the difference? Some of it's LOL funny; some of it could be, if we were sure what it is; some of it is simply smart commentary, not a bad thing in itself. Maybe we are part of the joke, if we've come for entertainment and get education instead.
We follow Reder onto a freight elevator: being backstage at the Carnegie after hours is a treat in itself, with its own disorienting energy, undermining the authority with which the museum normally presents itself.
Finally, we watch a movie in which Reder's mother says she has become the Angel of History. Or is that just his "mother," whether played by the real thing or an actress? (How could we tell? Yet we want to assume simple transparency rather than ironic distance.) Whatever she is, the debris of the immediate past certainly does pile up, on film as well as all around us in life -- after all, we're in a museum and isn't the world a museum, too?
In just over an hour, we're set free, the doors of our perceptions opened a bit farther than they were to start. No, I don't think it's theater, but it entertains and challenges us as theater should. So I guess it is.
There are just two "Guided Tours" left (note how even the capital letters suggest wry distance), at 7 and 9:30 tonight (Wed.). Doubtless they're already booked to what I was told is the limit of 20, but there were 30 of us on Monday. Maybe you could just lurk in the hallway and slip into Reder's traveling pack.
Posted
Oct 15 2008, 02:21 AM
by
Christopher Rawson