Madness and Yearning in Cindy Sherman and Pina Bausch

                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

© Shamoni Sarkar

                                                                                                                                                                    

All you can do is hint at things 

Pina Bausch

           If an artist’s “hint” is powerful enough, the audience, the art and the artist herself are embraced in a common relationship of madness. Speaking of photography in his book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes describes this maddening process: “it bears the effigy to that crazy point where affect (love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being. It then approaches, to all intents, madness” (Barthes, 1981). Barthes says that photography is “mad” because it shows more than it tells. It traps a real moment in time, so in a way it captures a truth, but we can know nothing more of this truth except for the fact that it happened. So if we happened to see, for example, a photograph of a young girl holding an ice cream, but with tears running down her face, we would not be completely satisfied simply by seeing a touching photograph. We would want more to complete our story and answer questions such as “Why is the girl crying when she has what any child would want?” or “Who is this child?” We would want to have a concrete detail to hold on to, to pin down our brief relationship with the picture. Barthes seems to be saying that we want to experience our own “affect” instead of looking from a distance at another’s. So in a way the photograph cheats us by not giving us everything. It is a work of art in limbo, and this is why it is “mad”.   

        The art of Pina Bausch and Cindy Sherman is mad in a Barthesian way because it feeds on affects, especially desire and yearning, to bring out its reality. It is the madness of Bausch’s work that Wim Wenders pays tribute to in his documentary Pina. In an interview, he says that the only way he thought he could do justice to her was by making the film in 3D. He does not explicitly say why, but perhaps he saw the importance of making the audience feel the madness of her choreographies at more than just the visual level. In fact, the effect of madness in both Sherman and Bausch’s works is doubled because not only are the works themselves “mad”, but the subjects represented in the works too seem mad. Madness is a more exclusive state of being than the state of feeling desire or longing. So viewers may feel that they are denied any understanding of what the subjects themselves are going through. They are denied, as Barthes calls it, the guarantee of the subject’s Being. Angered, a viewer may even question Sherman and Bausch’s motives. Do Bausch and Sherman even know what madness is? If not, how can they attempt to depict it to ignorant viewers? Are they taking advantage of their mad mediums?

        But are they consciously depicting madness, or are they just hinting at unnameable things? In Cafe Müller, the madness is all in Pina’s body: her skeletal figure enters wearing a white nightgown, arms stiff and outstretched with palms facing outward, and eyes closed. For the next forty-nine minutes, she flails purposelessly, despairs silently and gets trapped in the circular motion of the revolving door. She strays away, but always comes back to the same position, and always uses the same wall as support. The initial hint is the entry. It is strong enough, and is used repeatedly throughout the piece to tell us that this woman is lost to herself, sad, desperate, and perhaps blind. She should feel lost to us as well, but yet she does not.  

       Igor Stravinsky composed the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps inspired by the story of the Russian pagan ritual of the self-sacrifice of a young girl to the God of Spring. Bausch’s choreography of it takes it beyond the simple plot and fills it with innumerable possibilities of meaning. One may think of coffee plantations, a violent rape or the loss of protection. Again, all that we have are hints: the bare setting strewn with something that resembles mud, the red dress that replaces the white after the girl has been “chosen” by the man, and the desperate, throbbing circle of bodies that the women form when they are threatened. The bodies of both the men and the women convey anger, power, necessity and desire in every collective gesture, whether they lunge forward at each other or contract their arms and fists, resisting. As they dance and move, their faces always look mad, but it is an internal, undirected madness. We do not know where so much feeling comes from, but we can still see it unfolding before us. “Where does all the yearning come from?” Bausch is quoted as having asked one of her dancers. Perhaps she worked only to answer this question, and found that she could only hint at the answer.

                                 

         In Sherman’s Untitled 122 (1983), the body of the woman photographed also hints at her madness in very similar ways: stiff, straight arms, a thin body wearing clothing that is more protective than attractive or comfortable, and clenched fists. Her eyes are open, but mostly covered by her unruly hair— another hint. 
        Bausch and Sherman hint at things we have already learned to associate with madness: desperation, loneliness, gestures, and challenged femininity. But once we separate these qualities from the idea of madness, we realize that we have seen or known them in our own lives. We have known desperation and loneliness, and perhaps sometimes we have even felt as if our identities have disintegrated and we have been left with nothing. We have all been mad before, and we are able to see hints of our own madness in dance or in pictures. Madness is grief and desire, and understanding this much is enough, for the artist as well as the beholder.

                                 

           In Untitled 92 (1981), desire and madness are entwined to the extent that they seem perverse. The information on the wall tells us that the series of photographs in that particular room were modeled on pictures in men’s erotic magazines. Our eyes are drawn to the checked skirt resembling a school uniform, the way the girl poses on her hands and knees, and the ambiguous blue eyes. But her eyes do not look submissive, nor do they have the devouring stare of invitation that one normally sees in models in erotic magazines. In their unknowable blueness there is a hint of fear but an even larger hint of madness. The blueness of the eyes captures the blue lighting of the photograph and the blueness of the skirt, as if the madness of the entire photograph converges in them. The madness is adult and a startling contrast to the girl’s schoolgirl demeanor. Desire is engineered in this photograph: We imagine a man watching and wanting the girl, and the girl looking back at us and at him, conscious of being looked at. But unlike in Bausch’s work, there are no real feelings conjured by the photograph for us to identify with, so we can only be perplexed, and perhaps discomforted, by its madness. What draws us to the kind of madness in this photograph? What guarantees its Being?

         Barthes likens photography to a “science of desirable and detestable bodies” (in reference to the entire body of the photograph and not just the individual bodies portrayed in them). Cafe Müller is filled with darkness but we feel the warmth, or rather the consolation of it because we can somehow identify with what is being hinted at. We desire the body in Cafe Müller more. Sherman’s Untitled 92 is cold but we do not turn away from it. But do we detest it? Perhaps some would object to the suggestion of a child in the photograph, or to the uncomfortable position Sherman puts them in as viewers. But the most detestable thing about the picture is probably that we do not understand the truth contained in the blue eyes. We go back to madness— a madness that we cannot feel. But whether comprehensible or not, Barthes appeals to us to protect Madness and to save Desire to truly experience what a photograph can give us. “You just have to get crazier,” Bausch tells one of her disillusioned dancers. Both she and Sherman invite us to fall deeper into madness and desire instead of distancing ourselves from them. It is an invitation to go beyond incomplete understanding and lose oneself in one’s own mad feelings.                                          

Ungodly Innocence in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung

© Shamoni Sarkar

There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced. Because of this, even wisdom – which otherwise consists more in conduct than in knowledge – still needs science, not in order to learn from it but in order to provide access and durability for its precepts.

Immanuel Kant

          Innocence and wisdom are redefined in the Metropolitan Opera’s performance of Wagner’s four-part Ring of the Nibelung series. In Norse mythology, Wotan, the ruler of the gods, pays the giants Fafner and Fasolt with a golden ring that is the source of supreme power, in return for building him the mansion Valhalla where the gods can reside. However, the wicked gnome Alberich who stole the ring from its rightful owners, the Rheinemaidens, has already cursed it. Wotan realizes that by giving the ring to the giants instead of returning it to its owners, his kingdom has been doomed by the curse. Valhalla must fall, but a hero that is free from any godly influence can save the rest of the world. The opera is devoted to the search for this hero. When one filters the auditory, visual and spatial cues, one realizes that the theme running through all four parts is that of unguided innocence. Wagner presents us with a fearless Nordic hero in Siegfried, and in him we see the splendor of innocence that Kant speaks of, but ultimately it is too splendid. His eventual death suggests that his untamed innocence is not enough, and is in fact harmful, for the collective safety of the realms of the dwarves, the humans and the gods. Perhaps Wagner is telling us that a hero needs something else— something that would guide his savagery in the right way.

                           

         Brünnhilde, Wotan’s favorite child, has inherited her all-knowing wisdom from her mother Erda. So her decision to help the human lovers Sieglinde and Siegmund against the wishes of her father cannot be a spontaneous act of sympathy but must instead be the result of deep foresight. Wotan has already told her that the world needs a hero that is free of godly laws. Maybe she intuits that helping the humans will benefit the world in the future and produce the elusive hero. Maybe she places hope in Sieglinde and Siegmund’s yet unborn son Siegfried, the man she will eventually marry. Ironically, it is the marriage and her subsequent submission to human passions that accelerate the process toward Valhalla’s imminent fall. Brünnhilde perhaps senses this downfall too, because when she agrees to give up her status as a god and live as a free mortal with Siegfried, she cries,

 My senses are reeling,
my reason fails:

            shall all my wisdom vanish?  

                                                      

Are these words of lament and doubt? But why should they be, because isn’t Brünnhilde by now aware that the self-restricting nature of the gods’ wisdom has led to their impending downfall? Siegfried seems to be the potential savior because he is fearless and guided not by rules but by his senses. But Wagner still treats the gods with respect, and a victory of sense over reason seems too easy a resolution for the complexity of his opera. Brünnhilde’s doubts must be well founded. Perhaps there is still a need for some form of wisdom. The music interprets the unstable situation with menacing low notes punctuating spurts of shriller ones that accompany Siegfried and Brünnhilde’s outbursts of passion.

          Siegfried is an orphan who has seen no other world beyond the forest he grew up in. He is the ideal hero because he does not carry the burden of an older way of doing things. But he has never seen a woman in his life, so when he finds Brünnhilde, he is scared and cries out “Mother, mother!” The orchestra plays notes of sympathy. Perhaps Siegfried’s confusion is Wagner’s warning that he may lose himself in this kind of innocence. Soon, his lack of wisdom and his uncontrollable passion cause him to be swayed by humans with corrupt intentions, and he betrays himself, Brünnhilde and Valhalla’s future. So does fearless innocence still need a parent to guide it? Does a hero need something to hold him down?

          As one approaches the twilight of the gods in the fourth opera, one begins to understand that most of the leitmotifs used during the course of the entire series contain contrasting emotions. Magic Fire, one of the most human leitmotifs, is first played in The Valkyrie when Wotan requests Loge to construct a fire around his daughter to protect her from cowards. She has been trapped in a deep sleep by her father as a punishment for disobeying the rules of the gods and the family. Magic Fire is filled with high notes of doubt and premonition before it lapses into assurances of kindness and safety. The leitmotif Valhalla is used to introduce the realm of the gods. Confidently, it moves from lower to higher notes, punctuated by the exalting sounds of the trumpet. As a musical cue, Valhalla on its own contains no uncertainty. But by the time we get to Twilight of the Gods, we do not hear it, because everything takes place in the world of the humans. This absence of Valhalla’s calming influence creates the uncertainty, which reaches its peak with the frenzied images and music of Brünnhilde’s self-immolation.

           As the opera closes, fire gives way to the water of the Rheine, giving the sensation of a world being cleansed. Strangely, when I hear the music of the finale I am reminded of scenes of both rising and setting suns in films. So perhaps it is the darkest as well as the brightest hour for the gods. We hear the creation of a new sound: it is a merging together of Magic Fire, Valhalla and Redemption through Love. Perhaps we can decipher Wagner’s final word in this last piece of music. Valhalla cannot be the single site of power any longer, but must burn to make way for a new order. The trouble had begun when the gnome Alberich had stolen the precious golden ring by rejecting love, but now, going by the leitmotifs used to close the story, it is as if the world is being redeemed by love. Although Brünnhilde is stripped of her godly wisdom when she gives in to human passion and becomes a mortal, it is her love that is redemptive. She recognizes Siegfried as a hero that was led astray and realizes that for the world to start anew, she too must burn along with him and Valhalla. Through Brünnhilde’s difficult choices, her consequent revelations, and Siegfried’s fate, Wagner tells us that no kind of love deserves to be given free reign, but must be treated with caution and reason. At the same time, Wotan’s errors prove that the wisdom and reason of the gods had been bound too tightly in rules of conduct, to the extent that it hindered him from breaking away when needed. Wagner’s music makes a plea for disobedience, destruction and a new order. To return to Kant, neither the innocence of Siegfried nor the wisdom of the gods is enough. The “science” required for the new order must be an ungodly, innocent reason. It is innocent because it does not know of the existence of other systems before it, and it is ungodly because it does not derive any of its power from the gods. This reason is bold and knows how to guide itself based on its own rules. But most importantly, it knows how and when to be bold. It seems that Wagner is appealing to measured passions. Could this be the driving force of the new order?