- key concepts: spectator/spect-actor, censorship/civility, identification
In the year of 2017, a contemporary art piece called Dragonfly Eyes made its debut and led to heated discussion. Dragonfly Eyes is an eighty-minute indie film created by a New York City based Chinese artist Xu Bing and his team. Xu Bing has worked decades with visual art and installations and had developed a rather intriguing approach towards symbols and representations, while this is the first time that he ever makes an attempt to involve human beings and real bodies in his artistic work. The film focuses on the tragic life story of a woman who lived a marginal life. She endured great precarity, from poverty, betrayal of love, to sexual harassment, body shaming and sexism. After several plastic surgeries, she ended up being a cyber star selling her sexuality. However, things went downhill quickly and the story ends where she vanishes suddenly, leaving no trace at all.
Although this is a film, I still consider it a performance — mediated performance might be more precise — due to its content of bodily actions and nature of liveness. Xu Bing’s studio made a straight forward statement at the very beginning of the video, clarifying that “this is a film without actors or camera crews. All the visual materials has been taken from public surveillance videos” (Dragonfly Eyes trailer, 2017). Statistic shows that up until the year of 2017, over 17 million surveillance cameras have been installed and actively working throughout China, and the number may accelerate to 45 million by 2020, making China the country with the highest density of CCTV and least privacy. Xu Bing’s team had no professional photographer but the whole country’s cameras working 24-7 for them. This is a unique film where all 11000 hours long footages come from “live records” of daily human performance captured by CCTV. It is also made through an utterly reversed filmmaking process, as the team first collected the footages of surveillance security cameras all over China, examined closely and categorized them, then developed a script based on what they have seen. Finally the selected recordings were edited into a narrative and also fictional film tinged with absurdity.
Dragonfly Eyes is neither a conventional film made for movie theatres, nor a film that can be approved by Chinese National Radio and Television Administration under current censorship because of its graphic representation of sensitive subjects. However, Xu Bing chose to add a logo of dragon on a grass green background to the beginning himself, which is the symbol that would be given to all films if they are approved by Chinese government for public release. This is a clear irony of censorship with in a cultural context, but it also refers to political civility in universality. Censorship in a way is enforced to make sure that all conversations happen in the social political environment subject to what is considered correct by the established dominion or authority. The surveillance cameras are installed initially to serve a similar purpose, to secure the dominance of a governing system and a common (or greater) good. However, its appliance are not always upright. It is disturbing to see them turning into apparatus of violence that constantly intrude privacy of people, recording images of nudity and intimacy.
In the book 1984, George Orwell warned about the terrifying violence censorship can cause. He depict a world of worst scenario, where every single person’s behaviors are kept under Surveillance “for the benefit of the country”. People spy on other’s daily performance, pry into their privacy, and turn those misbehaved in. There is a clear and absolute subject when it comes to censorship and surveillance, excluding enemies as well as the disqualified. This is an action bonded by so called civility, the hegemonic social settings that limits and rules the public, bonding citizens to its strict contract under penalty. Its initial intention is to sustain the very condition of democratic politics for mutual respect and thus equal conversation. But with time it associates with identification, advocating “an identity totally exclusive of any other, one which imperiously commands its self-realization through the elimination of any trace of otherness in the ‘we’ and in the ‘self’” . Thus civility is turned into a a filter on the path to political privilege. This is also why as soon as these images and videos are taken outside the context, people are instantly aware of its absurdity. All images seem inappropriate and become real matters of delicacy. Looking closer, a power transfer would emerge, as the power hold by authorities took a unwitting but also problematic shift into the hands of artist, leaving behind the question whether it is legit for art to go far beyond the its artistic realm and mold the truth or reality as it wishes. The both political and ethnic question of how shall art interfere the world and people’s life needs to be deliberated. When an artist take advantage of private/personal actions to pose against the authorities, he might also be using his privileges to deprive the inherent power of people. This is probably where identification comes in a draw its line.
Whether a political art work is intruding inherent right of people partially depends on where identification is oriented. Identification possess the power to alienate or align, and it projects through performance through the relationship between actors and spectators. Editing raw materials excerpted from documentary videos into a narrative film is an act that alters the idea of contemporary performance and spectatorship. Boal believed that spectatorship restrict people in a passive position that is at a higher risk to be oppressed. He proposed the idea of spect-actor in stead of spectator to encourage participation from the context of performance to daily political scenes. While Xu Bing took a step further, turning every single person into a complex combination of both actor and spectator. Consciously or not, our bodies are conducting actions throughout life. People live as live performances. On the flip side, people also live as spectators all the time. As Taylor inferred, “the debates about what can and cannot be known through vision, and how spectators evaluate what they experience, continue into the present and are now further complicated by the prevalence of mediated spectacles and interactive digital technologies” (Taylor, 75). Bodies are manipulated into spectacles that appeal to the public eyes and minds, and because of its kinship with feelings and emotions, opinions opposed to truth can be projected and inserted all the way through, making the identification dangerously political.
With the advent of Dragonfly Eyes, the power retained within seeing has never been so amplified. “Dangerous seeing, seeing that which was not meant to be seen, puts people at risk in a society that polices the look. The mutuality and reciprocity of the look, which allows people to connect with others, gives way to unauthorized seeing” . Similar things happened during our workshop of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, where several actors chose to gain more power by positioning themselves in certain distance, as witnesses or commenters. When surveillance cameras are installed across the country, or even all over the world, the slightest trivia can be exposed to certain eyes — eyes of the authorities. Then the inevitable but problematic question of who is allowed to see and who should be seen follows. The ability to see empowers the spect-actors by creating a distance while at the same time offering them the opportunity to deliberate, report, discuss and comment, or even interpret or distort the fact as they wish. It then leads to an ethical aspect of truth and lie.
While Xu Bing took a step further, turning every single person into a complex combination of both actor and spectator. Consciously or not, our bodies are conducting actions throughout life. People live as live performances. On the flip side, people also live as spectators all the time. The power retained within seeing has never been so amplified. “Dangerous seeing, seeing that which was not meant to be seen, puts people at risk in a society that polices the look. The mutuality and reciprocity of the look, which allows people to connect with others, gives way to unauthorized seeing” . Similar things happened during our workshop of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, where several actors chose to gain more power by positioning themselves in certain distance, as witnesses or commenters. When surveillance cameras are installed across the country, or even all over the world, the slightest trivia can be exposed to certain eyes — eyes of the authorities. Xu Bing was the first to try and break down that one-way round routine. His work activated the power of seeing the unseen through a peeking hole that he created. Therefore, empowered and affected by the bodily storytelling, audience naturally align with him. Then the newly born spect-actors would have the opportunity (or capability) to further deliberate, report, discuss and comment, or even interpret the fact as they wish, as in a spiral circle.
Bibliography:
- Balibar, Étienne. 2002. Politics and the Other Scene. New York: Verso.
- Taylor, Diana. 2016. Performance. North Carolina: Duke University Press.
- Boal, Augusto. 2006. The Aesthetics of the Oppressed. Florence: Routledge.
- Xu Bing’s Studio. 2017. Dragonfly Eyes. Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hkzz8TzYjrk.
- Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
- Rebecca Schneider.2001. Performance Remains. Performance Research, 6:2, 100-108, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2001.10871792