Theater : Tesselations

In the progression from Aristotelian dramaturgy to 1970s formalism one can see a progression from deep, almost unconscious ordering to a fascination with structure for its own sake, a progression which began with symmetries, opposites and melodrama and finds itself now dealing increasingly with repeating patterns, or tesselations. But what are tesselations but repeated symmetries? A tesselation can be formed by an object placed between two parallel mirrors. It seems then, that in the late 20th century, the aesthetics of symmetry are being compressed into tesselations. With the dictatorship of film and television and the sudden rise of the Internet, our minds have come to process information at incredible rates. In silent films, a single shot might last ten minutes; in a modern film shots are measured in seconds. It is not so strange then that artists are using tesselations more than ever: art is trying to keep up with minds conditioned into hyperactivity.

Futurism and Dada

The first impulses toward this kind of rapid-fire art was manifest in the work of the Futurists and the Dada movement. The Futurists were obsessed with war, speed and violence and thus cultivated an aesthetic centered around the machine. Their standard tools were repetitions, nonsense words and the like, but they still tried to embed meaning in their works and continued to rely on the tactics of traditional forms (symbols, dialogue, actors, canvas, etc.). The Dadas, however, completely fractured the concept of art. They called for "strong, straightforward, precise works which will be forever misunderstood" and argued against logic by saying that "the contradiction and unity of opposing poles at the same time may be true." To a Dada, art was everything and art was nothing. Anyone could make art. Tristan Tzara instructions on how to make a Dadaist poem were simply to cut up a newspaper and pull words randomly from a hat. Other poems, called Lautgedichte, were simply concatenated nonsense syllables repeated at length. Tzara's "Roar," for example, consisted of the word "roar" repeated 176 times, with the concluding line, "Who still considers himself quite charming?" The Dadas, if nothing else, broke artistic forms open to experiment and acknowledge the speed and vertigo of the post-industrial age.

Montage

A filmic corollary to the Dada poems was the montage, formulated by the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. Montage is so common today that we hardly recognize how revolutionary it must have been, but early 20th century Russia did not grow up on MTV. They were raised on plays that followed a rigidly discursive and logical structure, a view of dramatic action proponed by the stage director and acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavski. Montage, however, provided a non-discursive way of telling a story. The image of a ballon floating away juxtaposed with the face of a sad little boy might lead one to believe that the boy lost his balloon, but it does not "tell" the exact story. The story becomes a construction in the mind of a spectator based on a collage of individual images.

Happenings

Happenings are such a sprawling subject that is difficult to give a brief of even coherent analysis without overlooking its importance as a movement. To most people, Happenings are just that: weird things that happen. They are not plays, they are not dance, they are not poetry. A happening can be a simple as watching the rain for 30 minutes or a complicated set of abstract physical movements. They are, however, relevant to the topic of tesselations in that they are defined as "non-matrixed performing" or, as Happenings guru Allan Kaprow describes them, an "allogical collage." Non-matrixed means that they lack the matrix of meaning available in traditional "plays" via the costumes, knowledge of the period, audience and character demographics, etc. They are simply events happening in a state of what Gertrude Stein calls "the continuous present." They are a performative version of a Penrose tiling. The events on their own are simply curious; what is important is the set of rules that allows them to be put together into a pattern. Not all Happenings follow patterns, but often they exhibit a mathematical, repeating, even fractal structure (e.g. people performing three actions each composed of three sub-actions, etc.) They are structured simplicity, structured life.

Mixing and Sampling

The rise of electronic music and rap have ushered in a whole new era of tesselated art. Besides the plastic arts, music is probably the best suited to the use of tesselations because it relies on rhythmic structures which are themselves tesselations. Electronic sampling has allowed extremely precise aural collages that can be laid over the top of a predetermined rhythm. Rap artists can add a new dimension to older songs by the way they integrate them into the overall structure, as in Naughty By Nature's "O.P.P." which samples the Jackson Five's "ABC". ABC. O.P.P. Love. Sex. The differences between what is said and what is sampled create the overall effect, an audio montage. Repetition is another frequently used technique, especially in electronic music and techno. Laurie Anderson pioneered the technique with "O Superman," in which she alternates between robotic singing and robotic speaking over the top of an eight-minute loop of her speaking the single syllable "ah." The effect is haunting and the patterns are mechanically clear. Similar effects can be found in modern orchestral works, particularly the work of Philip Glass.

The aesthetics of tesselation seem far removed from the simple binary aesthetics of symmetry, but really they are one and the same. The difference lies in our perception. Our mind processes much faster than it once did. We no longer need to see the whole picture, hear the whole song, or read the whole story, but perhaps we have lost in depth of thought what we have gained in speed.

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Page author: Max Dana