Blog A place to connect my thoughts on practice and theory.
This is an example of a rare form of art. You don’t come across it that often, so when I encounter it, I go ecstatic. It’s the feeling of not being told what the meaning is. Far too few artists do this, hold back and allow the audience to fill the space. Not enough artists give the audience credit to design a piece that makes room for their own thoughts and interpretations. This is my kind of film. Ambitious in thought and made with a truly postmodern lens that enables the audience to enjoy and move around the layers of the film. To those who felt the film would need a second viewing, why wouldn’t you make a film that people can see more than once? They cost a huge amount, so much time and effort goes in to making a film, maybe it’s just good sense to create something that is re-watchable, that is multiple and includes that rarest of techniques; perspectival shifts. Tenet reminds me of my other great love; the theatre of Robert Wilson. For the very same reason. Wilson is a master at creating work that allows each individual audience member to take from it a unique interpretation. Wilson’s work is open, fluid, changes, delays signification and avoids closure. The works are created acknowledging the uncontrollable nature of meaning. This does not mean that the work is not tightly executed. In a sense both Wilson and Nolan have to work very hard to ensure that they are not closing down avenues of interpretation for audiences. Acknowledging multiple truths and angles on a story requires painstaking preparation. To conceive these stories is ambitions. To craft something that so considers the audience experience is unusual. Most artists want to convey their ideas, their thoughts, and prescribe their meaning, their truth. I think Nolan sets Tenet up for us, and then disrupts our reading of it. So many people complained about the sound in Tenet. I loved that I was not able to be cognate of everything, there were so many moving parts that I let it wash over me, absorb the ride, take from it what I got but I knew I would be seeing it again. It’s like a puzzle or a game. You are so excited to see if you can work it out, to match the pieces together, and search for the clues. The muffled sound is clearly a technique to disrupt our reading of the story, deliberately so. The structure of the narrative is a joy. It is truly palindromic if you lay it all out – you just see it from the perspective of the protagonist. When you plot all the character arcs on a timeline you realise that all the moments happen both forward and in reverse. The concept is ingenious. To use a scientific framework and device to explore concepts of ecology, planetary crisis and AI is a masterstroke. It will only work on a deep level for people who are capable of conceiving the metanarrative that Nolan is describing. It’s an incredibly prescient story. I took so much joy in working it out. I believe it is a new form of film, it’s like puzzle theatre, there is a performativity to the work because it so implicates the audience. It prompts conversation and discussion, it creates loops and leaves things unanswered. It acknowledges that there are no truths – each character has a very separate route through the story. An individual path. It allows multiple readings of itself. Also a big plus for me in any film is that it has a hint of time travel and a dash of future. The future in Tenet is alluded to. The film serves as a warning. When people said ‘what is it about?’ you can’t get a film about anything bigger that the future of the planet. It’s about ecological crisis at the hands of humanity. And Nolan provides a glimpse of hope that there are protagonists willing to save the Earth. Nolan has always included philosophical questions in his films, in my opinion we need more of this, more philosophy, more thinking, more activation in the usually passive role of cinema goer. I want to be active in the art that I experience. Major hats off to Nolan for making something that went so far towards involving the audience. It was never about ‘keeping up’ or ‘getting it’. Nolan was asking us to sit back, enjoy and allow the work to reveal itself, in phases. And so it makes me wonder if perhaps Tenet has that quality of a Hyperobject. It phases. It is such a huge thought undertaking that audiences cannot occupy it in their mind as a whole in one go – it occupies multiple phases in our minds. We can only hold pieces of it at a time in our minds. That Nolan achieves some qualities of hyperobjects in a film that is itself dealing with the potential of the ecological crisis is unnervingly paradoxical. This I find, are the extreme qualities of postmodern techniques and the acknowledgment of the fallacy of our structures of truth. Especially when utilised in performance. Is there something in this? Are artworks created in this way, a way that escapes structures of truth, that do not prescribe their meaning, always going to lean on the side of hyperobjectivity, hyperawareness and meta in some way? Therefore always being a paradox, both the thing itself and the thing it is about. Is this the way to think about everything and maybe escape capitalism? It is ironic that in the film the cast grapple with the grandfather paradox. Or perhaps this is very much on purpose. So apart from the detail of the story and the very fine performances from the cast – the main pleasure of Tenet is in the quality of the work to vacillate so much that it never quite reveals itself in whole to us in one go. That and the badass backwards fighting!
During lockdown I read Timothy Morton’s book ‘Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World’. My belief has always been that performance is THE best mode to create presence. It requires a viewer to make meaning. ‘Art’ at its most reducible, is minimalism, reduced to concentrate one truth as if the art object held its truth and meaning within it. What we realised in that moment, was that the meaning was NOT inherent in the object but that the meaning was ascribed by the viewer and without the viewer there is no meaning. In the book, Timothy Morton refers to OOO, object-oriented ontology. The structures of meaning that encapsulate us in a sphere of existence that we can describe and philosophise about; language, politics, ethics, trade, economy, culture. However, Hyperobjects illustrate a realisation about the fallacy of existence that these structures perpetuate. Hyperobjects require us to conceptualise beyond ascribed meaning. That we are within an inescapable conundrum. Each time I go to create something outside of these structures I will fail. I cannot get to the other side successfully, nor will I ever. I’ve always subscribed to performance, theatre and art that adopts a postmodern lens. I prefer work that allows space for my interpretation and treats me as a participant. Work that allows the audience to fill what is presented to them with their own imaginations and allow time and space for contemplation about meaning and interpretation. I think part of why I like this type of work is that it acknowledges meta-narratives of truth as arbitrary and so postmodernism acts as a resistance to continuing to accept the truths propagated by meta-narratives and serves to disrupt the stability of current hegemonic values. This seems to coincide with Morton’s view ‘…what has happened so far during the epoch of the Anthropocene has been the gradual realisation by humans that they are not running the show, at the very moment of their most powerful technical mastery on a planetary scale. Humans are not the conductors of meaning...’ (Morton, 2013, p. 164) At the moment this awareness seems particularly useful with regards to ecological crisis and effects of persuasive technology design. Having read about Hyperobjects and realising that we’ve moved a step forward from postmodernism I wonder how I will now create performance that is honest and acknowledges this state. Perhaps I have to adopt a more ‘mindful’ approach? A slower, more communal relationship with the planet. And align art and art experiences to a state in which to appreciate that we are in ‘it’. It being The Hyperobject, The Climate. To be present might be the key. To be slow, present and evolve naturally. If the overall speed of development (society, culture, technology, things that destroy the planet) is part if the inherent issue then my work has to be more than just art about the future, art that shares the larger issues and the bigger picture. Can we get to that new state through a sort of paradoxical experience design? Through actualising and aligning experiences in an experiential way can we show the multiplicity of the situation? If I tried to perform hyperobjectivity would that work? Timothy Morton outlines the qualities of Hyperobjects: viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation, phasing, interobjectivity. I think there are some similar states if we examine liveness; in being live you are present in a frame by frame moment of making meaning. I guess this is how we all operate daily. Existence is experiential therefore performance is too. But it is different to a painting. The painting is trying to assert something. Or again is this a narrative structure because that is how we construct the experience based on art history? In actual fact the painting asserts nothing until we ascribe a meaning and if I come at it from a postmodern view the painting could be about anything I like. The Mona Lisa is about ‘insert anything’. I like this, it is like that game of ‘can I borrow your …’, where an object transforms into anything the individual suggests and performs with it as such. Objects are just objects but humans have an ability to ascribe fluid meanings on to anything. Do non-humans have the same ability? Does this help us with climate crisis? If I ascribe to climate crisis a poisonous malevolent force does that make me do something about it with more seriousness? I’m forgetting the point that Hyperobjects are us. That is the viscous nature of Hyperobjects. We are climate change – we are in climate change – we cannot extricate ourselves from it. Hyperobjects stick to us. If I am climate change then I could ascribe to myself a different direction or choice. I am heading for my own extinction therefore I would quite like to put on the brakes. The problem is the collective, we all must put on the brakes. How do we get people to feel that they are a Hyperobject? Not just responsible for the collective issues that contribute. Is part of it that we must start to reduce down our existence? Fewer objects. Capitalism certainly keep us in a perpetual cycle of needing stuff that we definitely actually don’t need. In the pandemic people realised how much less stuff they needed. Some people struggled to know what was absolutely essential. Society reduced its operations; our worlds became quite small all of a sudden. What mattered immediately was our safety. We managed on a sort of shoe-string society. We realised that all roads lead to money and income. Wouldn’t it be better if it didn’t? We basically need food, water and homes. Could we start there and rebuild? Our monstrosity of a society means we cannot get off the merry-go-round. Turn off the electricity! But how would hospitals work? I keep thinking that the earth provides everything we need so why can’t we align our existence to live like that? Back to basics. I wonder if it’s because current society is constructed to keep us living longer. Because we fear death? Existential crisis – ironic! But if we create a better narrative around death and evolution and connectedness to earth then we would not need hospitals, we’d just die naturally. There would be better natural population control and we would live at a more appropriate ratio of consumption. It is a case of now we have it, who’s going to give it up. It is a strange privilege that we have over-engineered. But we have, so is this sort of our purpose? To live as long as possible to utilise all resources to the extent that we bring about our own extinction. We are basically the Borg from Star Trek. If I could turn my consciousness towards the Earth, without question, without examination, without creativity, with the purpose to commune and be part of the earth and attune. Can I survive like this? Because we evolved creativity is that part of the problem? Our consciousness advanced our ability beyond natural selection. Has our society evolved to ‘know’ things, and so the development of science, through our curiosity, has led to a sense of separation, that we are examining the planet rather than being part of it. And in the eternal examination of everything, we learn more about the subtle networks and ultimately how everything that preceded this moment has been destructive to the bigger picture, the planet. Morton offers some ideas for how art and performance can play a part at awakening people from this insular existence. ‘Reasoning on and on is a symptom of how people are still not ready to go through an affective experience that would existentially and politically bind them to hyperobjects, to care for them. We need art that …walks them through an inner space that is hard to traverse.’ (Morton, 2013, p. 184) Progressive International is a movement connecting, supporting, and mobilising activists around the world. At their summit this weekend called Internationalism or Extinction , key note speaker Yanis Varoufakis spoke about what comes after Capitalism and called for a move towards Post-Capitalism and Internationalism. He rallied ‘…we have to imagine what we want.’ So step forward artists and philosophers, we need to imagine our way out of this.