Peter Greenaway's Writing on Water
The Wizard at Odds
by James Desrosier
To download the entire essay as Adobe PDF format |
| right click the link “Peter Greenaway's Writing on Water.” Select “save target as” to save to your PC.
Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, May 2010. Copyright © 2010 James Desrosier and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
Page I
The video of Peter Greenaway’s 2005 multimedia performance piece Writing on Water is a perplexing little work. On a first run through, it appears to be artfully contrived and involving. Brimming with signature Greenaway touches. Like frame-in-frame images, superimposed typography, minimalist music, operatic song, dynamically integrated text, and beautifully layered, intertwining elements rendered via the latest image-capture and post-production technologies. Seen on a screen the dimensions of a good-sized HD television with the audio cranked up on a superior sound system, it is energetic, bordering on visceral and verging with immediacy.
Oddly, what seems so clear-eyed a reaction turns out to be provisional. Giving way under the weight of repeated exposure. Which in itself is peculiar because with few exceptions Greenaway’s work stands up to multiple viewings—blossoms, even. Also curious is the fact that Writing on Water represents an unexpected crossover into the performance realm—a point that should not be overlooked and hence begs for amplification: Writing on Water is a Greenaway performance and not simply another notch on the handle of his prodigious production credits. Here for the first time as his own subject he is in front of the lens as well as behind it. Both performer and director. A duality that not only alters his typical position vis-à-vis the work but also signals a fundamental difference in the work itself. Deviations that suggest other issues lurk beneath the surface of Writing on Water. But before wading too far in to isolate them, some background is needed.
Greenaway’s Writing on Water was commissioned by Lloyd's, the London-based insurance syndicate, to mark the bicentenary of Admiral Lord Nelson's death and (more or less) the 400th anniversary of the firm’s founding, originally as a maritime insurer based in an eponymous coffee house. There were three initial performances: the September 2005 private world premiere at Lloyd’s headquarters in the City of London and a pair of subsequent public dates at the Queen Elizabeth Hall some weeks later. There have been subsequent performances elsewhere, as well.
For this, our star collaborated with American composer David Lang on the kind of minimalist score for small orchestra and voice that Greenaway has favored since his 1982 collaboration with Michael Nyman on The Draughtsman’s Contract. The music for Writing on Water was inspired by a maritime-themed libretto “written” by Greenaway by appropriating lines from Moby Dick, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and The Tempest, which was the basis for his 1991 film Prospero’s Books. Familiar fodder for Greenaway and, as we’ll see, a potentially misleading thematic and executional touchstone for those knowledgeable of this earlier work. Writing on Water’s debut was staged in and beneath the 275-foot-high atrium of Richard Roger's critically acclaimed inside-out Lloyd's building (architecturally speaking, a conceptual knockoff of Centre Pompidou in Paris). There Greenaway suspended three huge screens over the floor of the insurance market—one panel towering 45 meters up into the cathedral-void. Onto these floating surfaces he VJ’ed (i.e., video-jockeyed—à la disc-jockey) moving images from a bank of some 400 he’d filmed for the project: lots and lots of water—one of Greenaway’s favorite tropes.
Meanwhile the London Sinfonietta delivered the music with a combination of acoustic and electric instruments—a kind of chamber rock outfit. Scribbling feverishly in tandem was calligrapher Brody Neuenschwander, who worked on Greenaway's 1991 Prospero’s Books and his 1996 The Pillow Book, the movie that first fully integrated all the elements at play in Writing on Water. As Neuenschwander rendered the text, Greenaway captured it electronically, superimposing every parry and thrust of brushstroke in real time over images of flowing, bubbling, gurgling, undulating liquid.
Interspersed with wide shots of the scene are syncopated cutaways to the conductor chopping the air with his baton, the ensemble playing intently, cameos of individual musicians with inflated cheeks beet red and hard, the male trio chorus and the ink-splattered calligraphist painting with a quiver of brushes on a continuous stream of translucent paper drawn across a light table. Cutting in and out from these images, set shots and full screens of the primary visuals of clear fluid are close-ups of Greenaway as VJ, i.e., video jockey. Seen over the shoulder poking at thumbnails of the image bank on a large touch-screen panel. Or head-on, looking up from below at him checking the media array overhead as he launched it.
After a second pass, all this generates a hybrid impression. Part making-of promo. Part performance document. Dramatic in scale. But lacking real drama. Neither here nor there. Some would dismiss anything this equivocal as unworthy of serious consideration. And certainly this is the reception the London press gave Writing on Water. The Guardian, Independent, Telegraph, and Times were terse and tepid at best. Strange because of Greenaway’s reputation for provoking critical controversy. As auteur he is anything but wishy-washy.
What’s interesting, without knowing all this before looking at the video, is that familiarity with a lot of his work can lull the informed viewer into embracing Writing on Water as definitive Greenaway product. There is so much going on visually. So many recognizable visual themes and techniques. It can be deceiving. Pyrite for the eyes. Fool’s gold. A shimmering millefeuille of image, sound, and graphics that distracts critical acuity as it disguises the foibles of not just the video but the piece itself.
Writing on Water is neither exactly boring nor vapid when revisited. It is uncharacteristically soulless. A realization as surprising, confusing, and fascinating as it is fundamental because the lapse is problematic on formal grounds. Take Kant’s Critique of Pure Judgment. “Soul” is one of the four “requisites of fine art.” An “animating principle of the mind” or “psychic substance” that “sets the mental powers into a swing” in a way that is “self-maintaining and which strengthens those powers of such activity.” Regardless of whether we grant Greenaway the other three criteria of “imagination, understanding…and taste,” the absence of soul—that substantial, mind-engaging, self-sustaining content that moves the viewer—is symptomatic of the conceptual anemia of the work itself. But even in a vernacular sense of soul, the void is marked. Because soulfulness anchors Greenaway’s work. Which more often than not has gravitas that billows with pathos and sardonic wit while injecting fresh if dark insight into the “pure, true, and profound knowledge of the inner nature of the world,” as Schopenhauer put it in The World as Will and Representation. Or in Greenaway’s case, into our understanding of the uglier realities of the human condition.
This kind of aesthetic failing could warrant ending this discussion right here. But despite this and the fact that it is a minor work, it is unnecessary to dismiss the video as offhandedly as the London critics did the performance. Writing on Water is a useful analytical lightning rod. It both shares in and deviates from a Greenaway method that has produced one of contemporary cinema’s most distinctive, memorable, and noteworthy oeuvres. What makes Writing on Water important is how it illustrates what breaks down and why. And as such it merits further consideration from at least the following perspectives:
- Technology as vehicle versus content,
- Artistic content as basis for language,
- Deep structure of Greenaway’s cinematic language,
- Compression as vehicle for meaning,
- Technique without trope,
- Mistranslation as a fatal metaphor, and
- The auteur as his own subject
The sum of which engulfs Writing on Water. Swamps it, actually. And ultimately diagnoses Greenaway’s Kantian pitfall.
Technology as Vehicle versus Content
Thinking about Writing on Water brings to mind Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi Trilogy— Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi. A few years ago, Reggio toured his film suite with the Philip Glass Ensemble for three consecutive nights’ live performances in various cities around the world. Make no mistake—it was a live performance, not unlike Writing on Water. What made the Qatsi Trilogy Live exceptional was the way the live and filmed performances blended.
At San Francisco’s Davies Hall in February of 2006, the screen was huge and auditorium cavernous yet somehow the scene felt intimate. Glass & Co. decked out in black head-to-toe played the film scores. Even in the dim of the darkened stage Glass’ subtly rapturous gesturing at the keyboard reached into the audience. Extending the embrace of the music on him out into the great acoustic horn of the venue. Surrounding the sold-out house in emotional and aural reverberation while the audience bathed in the reflected glow of the onslaught of alternately wild, subdued, and morphing motion. The amplified sight and sound dug in every melody hook deeper. Counterpointed by the operatic manner of musical director Michael Riesman conducting from his keyboard. Reeling the crowd in closer to the looping repetition and soaring phrasing. He knew where each scene began and ended. Bent and flexed with the idiosyncratic flow of the visual aria. Guiding the ensemble through real time interaction with the gargantuan celluloid diva of the screen.
Qatsi Trilogy Live was a marriage of concept and execution around the theme that technology sends life out of balance. Live delivery of the soundtrack humanized the high-impact cinematic experience. As Glass intended. Something well characterized in an interview he gave after the tour’s world premiere at the Sydney Opera House in January 2005. “What I wanted to do,” he told Demetrius Romeo of ABC NewRadio’s Music News, “was to maintain a kind of passageway between the human heart and these images.... Our receptivity, our ability to empathize with the film is tremendously enhanced by that.” Thus letting the urgent power of the message stand out from the time-lapse, slow motion, and digitally manipulated imagery driven by the frenetic edits.
Technology as a medium is rooted in the rarefied codes and machinations of engineering and computer science. Too often it creates more problems as it solves others. To wit, the entire software industry is economically grounded in the fallibility and accelerated obsolescence of its product. But technology is also a culture that has taken on an independent life. Operating against its own agenda according to rules it writes for itself. Unbridled, it tends to run roughshod over whatever’s in its way.
In contrast, the Trilogy Live contains and channels it. Aside from the screen, the only evidence of enabling and in this case electronic technology on stage during the nearly six hours of the Qatsi Trilogy was the shadowy presence of the instrumental kit and a mere scatter of red diodes. This difference is what makes these other back-to-back multimedia performances apropos this consideration of Writing on Water. Qatsi tamed the beast that is technology to let the viewer see through it more clearly. Which as Walter Ong points out in Orality and Literacy isn’t just about the view, but about impact. “Technologies are not mere exterior aids,” Ong said, “but also interior transformations of consciousness… [that] can be uplifting.” Which the Qatsi Trilogy Live was.
Although a first fly-by of Writing on Water was, too, the typical Greenaway production isn’t “uplifting” per se. But if anyone has leveraged film technology to have this kind of transformational, or intensely emotional, impact on his audience, it is Greenaway. He has gone to great lengths throughout his career to incorporate the latest cinema technology into his work. Like a postmodern, adamantly secular Athanasius Kircher. The 17th Century Jesuit who furthered the Church’s moral educational aims by appropriating, repositioning, and deploying technologies previously condemned by the Inquisition. Except Greenaway works without the overtly didactic agenda and shuns spectacular effects. Producing instead unexpected even startling results with technology and through it. Such as the raining pages of Prospero’s Books. Or sending his output on orthogonal trajectories into entirely different orbits. Like the multilayered reality within the play within the religious festival within the film of The Baby of Mâcon. Or imbuing his work with a surprising extra edge that is his stock in trade. À la the sadism, misogyny, and cannibalism of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Unlike these other films, however, the technology behind Writing on Water is so far forward that it overwhelms.
Ultimately, audiences care about the show not the technology behind it. Even the geeks think so. “The magic…is not just in the technology but in devising the content,” Wired magazine wrote in a December 2003 profile of Shane Booth, a researcher working on advanced advertising technologies at Mitsubishi’s Electric Research Lab. Continuing, the article quotes Booth for emphasis: “Content is king,” he said. “The system could be smart, but if your content sucks, people aren’t going to watch.” The value judgment rooted in “sucks” notwithstanding, this is as true for advertising as anything.
Writing on Water doesn’t simply let the techno-genie out of the bottle. It does so uninterestingly. Which is worse. We watch Greenaway at the flat-panel display. Neuenschwander at the light-table. The Sinfonietta churning away. The screens hovering in the abyss above the idle workstations of the electronic insurance market. The only thing missing would have been something like an impassive Brian Eno dwarfed by a monstrous sound board.
These are nothing but apparitions of equipment and personnel that should have been left in the editing suite. Or in the shadows of the sideline. Where they and the VJ belong. Working the tech on the front line this way, the team fumbles what Michel Foucault called “the sorcery” that “lies in an operation rendered invisible by the simplicity of its result.” But here the result is simply in-your-face technology that undermines the presentation. Of the piece as artwork. Of the video as a discrete and distinctive work. Of the substance of the content, such as it is.
This is precisely where the video breaks down. The substance doesn’t matter. The problem with Writing on Water is the absence of the conceptual content. What Schelling called the “ideas.” Which “to the extent that they are intuited objectively, are therefore the substance.” The very stuff promised by the canonical sources of Greenaway’s inspiration. And the consequences of this are big.
The video is all surface gloss. With a libretto that’s the calligraphic equivalent of literary lip-synching. A marquetry veneer. Crowded with what appear to be the meaning-making details of a mature Greenaway production. But not the kind of meticulous construction that Hegel had in mind in the Lectures on Aesthetics. That is, “an intelligent movement of imagination which [can] vivify and expand the smallest detail.” Nor what E. E. Cummings was driving at when he referred to “such minutiae…in which my Firstness thrives.” Nope. We’re talking about a void that abhors even self-appropriation. Reducing the work to what Vilém Flusser called “the excessive fullness of kitsch.”
In the aesthetic realm, the critic Clement Greenberg nailed down the definition of this in “Avant-garde and Kitsch.” Saying that it is “mechanical and operates by formulas… borrows …devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, [and] themes, converts them into a system and discards the rest. It draws its life blood…from this reservoir of accumulat[ion.]” In other words, Kant’s soul drained of its life blood becomes empty content. The oxymoron that characterizes so much of contemporary cinema.
Writing on Water doesn’t work because as Flusser put it “ ‘Art’ is that which opposes habit” to avoid the doubled “anaesthetic” effect. Unaesthetic and unfeeling. Which is why all the habitual tools and techniques Greenaway pulls from his bag of tricks don’t add up. And why Writing on Water does not and cannot translate. Not from kitsch to art. Not from stage to video. Not from one medium to another. Not from one language to another.
| page up |
Continue| Reading | Page II