ARTIFICIAL HELLS

pedagogic projects
play, only note my amused frustration at its impenetrability (to me, but
also to the performers I spoke to). 45 Looking at the audience, I could not
understand why such a mixed bag of people kept coming to hear these
obscure lectures and watch these opaque – almost gruelling – performances.
However, going through the whole experience again the following
day, I realised that this random collective presence was the point. Rain was
drizzling so there was less peripheral action; listening to Steinweg and
watching the audience I understood the function of the lecture not to be
one of information transfer, but of a shared experience in which many
different sectors of society were brought together. You didn’t need to
follow the content, just give yourself over to a quiet meditative space (not
unlike being in an open air, non- denominational church) and use this as a
time for pondering whatever came to mind.
During the play, the drizzle became torrential rain. For the first time
during The Bijlmer- Spinoza Festival, the performance had to stop and be
relocated inside, in a cramped space under the plastic sheeting. The
bedraggled audience surrounded the cast, while rain thrashed onto the
plastic roof, occasionally leaking torrents, and rendering the performers’
voices near inaudible. The finale of this insanely abstract
quasi- Dadaist play was a sequence in which two of the speakers alternated
the lines ‘Wat functioneert, dat produceert’ (what functions,
produces) for two minutes (which felt more like ten); this now became
an incantation in the face of the most unsympathetic and least functioning
of environments. It was both bathetically funny and extremely
poignant. Everyone was there for no reason other than the desire to see
and do the same thing: to share a play initiated by an artist, whose singular
energy propelled a self- selecting, entirely disparate bunch of people
to show up every night and perform or watch an abstract play that
nobody fully understood. The core of The Bijlmer- Spinoza Festival
seemed to be this juxtaposition of social types around a series of mediating
objects that were never quite what they seemed. The philosopher’s
lectures were not arguments to be understood or disputed, but were
performances of philosophy; they were the spoken equivalent of the
piles of photocopied Steinweg essays that form a sculptural presence in
other Hirschhorn installations (for example, U- Lounge, 2003). The
meaning of the theatre production also lay in the fact of its dogged
performance, relentlessly taking place every day, regardless of the
weather or number of performers who showed up. Like the lectures, it is
pointless to analyse the specific content of this shambling spectacle;
more important is to pay attention to its ongoing existence, willed into
being by the artist, who managed to motivate people into performing
something strange enough to continually captivate an audience. Similarly,
the newspaper must be produced each day, regardless of the
availability of news, or images, or relevant stories. At no point in The
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