Attempts at a Description: Rose English’s Plato’s Chair and the Hear Tell

Abstract

At a commercial gallery in London in 2019 I’m listening to audio recordings of Rose English’s 1980s performance Plato’s Chair, while a video of the show is projected on the wall ahead. The effect is of the performer describing what she is doing as she does it, the description displaced from one medium or occasion to another. Although, what she appears to be doing – for all her constant motion – is enacting a kind of hiatus while she ponders her next move, alone with herself, removed from her audience, thinking it all through and using words to do so. Description attempts to move things along. At play here, a certain – or uncertain – mimetics. Pleasures, for sure, for those who were there, or are placed there now. And a theatrical know-how – comedy, melodrama, opera-dance, and dressage all get a try-out – which is rooted in repertoire, but which ponders how to proceed. She is at once, she says, a comedian and philosopher. Which is to say also, ironist. In her book-length study of our ordinary acts of self-description, The Words of Selves (2000), Denise Riley locates in irony a ‘political astringency’ that corrodes ‘excessively vaunted’ categories, such as the human. But she finds irony also arising spontaneously within injury, compelled into intensities of self-contemplation. The injury, for instance, of one – as human as they come – who describes to me, on the phone, a tree outside her window. ‘I don’t know what to call it’. Description goes around.

Keywords:

• Description
• Rose English
• Denise Riley
• performance

Notes

1. Sharon Marcus, Heather Love and Stephen Best, ‘Building a Better Description’, Representations 135 (Summer 2016): 1–21 (4).

2. Georges Canguilhem, ‘The Living and Its Milieu’, in Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 98–120.

3. Denise Riley, ‘Seven Strangely Exciting Lies’, Selected Poems 1976-2016 (London: Picador, 2019), 101.

4. Form, Feminism, Femininities, Richard Saltoun, London, March 1-April 13, 2019. English’s solo retrospective included visual and plastic works in addition to the Plato’s Chair materials. The artist’s notes in English and French created for the 1983 performance at Power House, Montréal is also reproduced in Guy Brett, Abstract Vaudeville: The Work of Rose English (London: Ridinghouse, 2014), 125.

5. I quote from the transcription of the performance at The Drill Hall, London in May 1984, printed in Brett, 131–36 (133).

6. I quote from the video of performance at The Western Front, Vancouver in September 1984. The same video shown at Richard Saltoun is archived online at https://front.bc.ca/events/platos-chair/ (accessed October 28, 2020). All further quotes from this version unless stated.

7. NOTES on a Return, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, 2009; Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980’s Britain, Tate Liverpool, 2014; Men Gather, in Speech …, Cooper Gallery, Dundee, 2015.

8. For instance, the horse tail and horse hoof shoes were made for English’s choregraphed installation Quadrille, 1975. See https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/english-quadrille-t14673 https://front.bc.ca/events/platos-chair/ (accessed October 28, 2020).

9. Rose English and Sebastian Jordahn, ‘Reconsidering the Big Show’, Kopenhagen Magasin, September 22, 2014, http://kopenhagen.dk/magasin/magazine-single/article/reconsidering-the-big-show/ https://front.bc.ca/events/platos-chair/ (accessed October 28, 2020).

10. Art360 – Rose English, Youtube, September 28, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZVcmzVveew https://front.bc.ca/events/platos-chair/ (accessed October 28, 2020).

11. Rose English, ‘Artist’s Notes’, in NOTES on a return, eds. Sophia Yadong Hao and Matthew Hearn (Sunderland: Art Editions North, 2010), 80–85 (82).

12. Compare Canguilhem, ‘The Living’, 111: ‘to study a living being in experimentally constructed conditions is to make a milieu for it, to impose a milieu on it; yet it is characteristic of the living that it makes its milieu for itself, that it composes its milieu’.

13. ‘In Conversation with Rose English and Catherine Spencer’, Cooper Gallery, Dundee, January 22, 2015, https://www.dundee.ac.uk/cooper-gallery/events/in-conversation-rose-english/ (accessed October 28, 2020).

14. For an account, focused on the 2009 exhibition, of accessing the work solely through the published reflection see Georgina Guy, ‘“NOTES on a return” to a not-Forgotten: Durations of the missed and the previously unvisited’, Performance Research 17, no. 5 (2012): 135–139.

15. Ramsay Burt, ‘Revisiting Plato’s Chair: writing and embodying collective memory’, in NOTES on a Return, eds. Sophia Yadong Hao and Matthew Hearn (Sunderland: Art Editions North, 2010), 69–77.

16. Brett, Abstract Vaudeville, 184-5. Brett cites Diana Simmonds, ‘Interview with Rose English’, City Limits, 15–21 February 1985.

17. Brett recounts English’s fascination with Cooper’s stage props (‘very modest props, homely things’), and how ‘what made you laugh was not the main event, the magic trick for example, but the “introduction” to it, the failure of it and so on’. Cooper’s voice, face, figure, act will still be familiar to anyone, like me, who grew up with British light entertainment television in the 1970s. English encountered Draper’s art from mid-century sound recordings, and Brett draws attention to ‘the paradox’, in Draper’s monologues, ‘of the solo performance, the suggestion of things that were not there, which involve the imagination, even the creativity of the audience …. ’ Ibid., 122–24.

18. Ibid., 135.

19. As suggested in Emma Metcalfe Hurst’s commentary on Acts of Transfer, Western Front’s online collection of performance video by female-identified artists, where the video is archived: for the viewer, the ‘spontaneous movement sections offer some motivation to keep the show going, especially when there is “no topic,” as English suggests’. Acts of Transfer (Vancouver: Western Front, 2018). https://front.bc.ca/acts-of-transfer/ (accessed October 28, 2020).

20. Brett, Abstract Vaudeville, 215.

21. Ibid., 16: ‘an attitude – which we might call “English” in a convenient double sense – of an ironic distance from an over-zealous or over-earnest identification with a literal notion of the real’. Brett also cites D.C. Muecke, Irony and the Ironic (London: Methuen, 1970) on irony’s ‘corrective function’. Ibid., 113.

22. Denise Riley, Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 183. My thanks to Emma Bennett for putting me onto Riley’s critical prose, and also for conversations that have informed this essay.

23. Ibid., 1, 9, 17.

24. Ibid., 59.

25. Ibid., 8–9.

26. Ibid., 57.

27. Ibid., 61.

28. Ibid., 89.

29. Ibid., 91.

30. Ibid., 183.

31. Ibid., 33.

32. Ibid., 111.

33. Ibid., 183.

34. Ibid., 157.

35. Ibid., 184, original emphasis.

36. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London: Athlone Press, 1990), 298-99; cited Riley, Words of Selves, 184.

37. Riley, Words of Selves, 173.

38. Lauren Berlant and Jordan Greenwald, ‘Affect in the End Times: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant’, Qui Parle? 20, no. 2 (2012): 71-89. Original emphasis.

39. Sarah Gorman, Women in Performance: Repurposing Failure (London and New York: Routledge, 2020). See chapter 2, ‘Taking back control: invective, irony, inscrutability’, 40-75.

40. Lydia Rainford, She Changes by Intrigue: Irony, Femininity and Feminism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 4. Cited in Ibid., 43.

41. Riley, Words of Selves, 156.

42. Gorman, Women in Performance, 42.

43. Sophia Yadong Hao, ‘Curator’s NOTES’, in NOTES on a return, eds. Sophia Yadong Hao and Matthew Hearn (Sunderland: Art Editions North, 2010), 25–33 (19).

44. Brett, Abstract Vaudeville, 187.

45. Riley, Words of Selves, 151.

46. See Georgina Guy, Theatre, Exhibition, and Curation: Displayed and Performed (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).

47. Riley, Words of Selves, 155.

48. Ibid., 162.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., 179.

52. Brett, Abstract Vaudeville, 135.

53. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetics of History: Rousseau and the Theater of Originary Mimesis, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 98. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert and Writings for the Theater, eds. Allan Bloom, Charles Butterworth, and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004).

54. Georges Bataille, ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’, trans. Jonathan Strauss, in The Bataille Reader, eds. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 279-295 (282-83). Cited in Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetics of History, 122–23.

55. Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without Its Flow (London: Picador, 2019), 13.

56. Ibid., 55–58.

57. Ibid., 59.

58. Ibid., 59.

59. Ibid., 64.

60. Ibid., 65–6.

61. Ibid., 74. Sigmund Freud, Letter to Binswanger, 1929, in Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960).

62. Riley, Time Lived, 63.

63. Alice Rayner, To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 127–8.

64. Riley, Time Lived, 53.

65. Rayner, To Act, 128.

66. Riley, Time Lived, 78.

67. Ibid., 83. See also Lisa Baraitser’s detailed account of Riley’s text that focuses on the maternal experience, in Baraitser, Enduring Time (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 87–92.

68. Riley, Time Lived, 84.