Itziar Barrio: A Dream of Different Weather/ the society of the spectacle in the age of zoom
Sergio Cabrera: A film cannot change the world, but it can generate reflections that change people who change the world.
Blanche Dubois: I don’t want realism. I want magic. Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people.
A Review by Eva H.D.
In recent years, many of us have had the occasion to question, like Ford assembly line veteran and poet Philip Levine, what work is[1]. What constitutes work, however—whether it’s answering a manager’s texts at eleven at night or risking one’s life to ring up Starbucks lattes—has long been a subject of debate. A songwriter friend’s grandfather used to tell him, “You can’t call it work unless you’re sweating”; this maxim might ring hollow to the systems administrator plagued by twelve-hour work days and round the clock carpal tunnel syndrome. Like queer Marxist auteurs Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Pier Paolo Pasolini before her, visual artist and filmmaker Itziar Barrio is deeply preoccupied with the nature of labor and its complications, and she shares with them a profound suspicion of the omnipresent market as carnival ruse, a chump’s game. (Perhaps Pasolini’s iconic Accattone would still be a pimp today; it seems more likely he’d work for Amazon.) Her awareness of cinema-as-labor, and of labor as a performance, informs a central premise of her latest film: What happens when actors—workers themselves—are subjected to unexpected pressures within the context of the cinematic work? According to Barrio, “the work cultivates conditions for unscripted consequences to probe codes and limits of film, performance, sculpture, and installation.”
“You can’t call it work unless you’re sweating”
Barrio’s THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE (on exhibit earlier this year at PARTICIPANT INC, NYC) probes the limits of performance: of gender, of violence, of love, of control. What is, she asks, the performance of performing, or of spectating—and what does this signify in the age of zoom, when virtually all aspects of daily life are recorded and available for exaltation and critique? For Itziar Barrio, the work of filmmaking is a performance – and the idea of the performative as it pertains to power dynamics is fundamental to her work, as is the lineage of queer Marxist cinema in which she positions herself. THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE is a synapse-teasing concatenation of experimental film, sculpture, texts, archives, and cinematic ephemera, the culmination of twelve years of filming in multiple locations. In it, questions are layered for a textural effect that calls to mind abstract painting—the facts of color and composition trumping literal interpretation—cumulatively occasioning a broader inquiry into the nature of a culture of terminal spectacle itself.
The centerpiece of the show is Barrio’s film You Weren’t Familiar, But You Weren’t Afraid, a mesmerizing and allusive meditation in which the apparatus of filmmaking is ostentatiously on display. The film follows three performances, one set in New York, one in Bogotá, and a third in Rome, through casting and rehearsal – each riffing on, respectively, A Streetcar Named Desire, La Estrategia del Caracol, and Accattone. (References and jeux de mots abound; the through-line here is the character of ‘Stella’, who literally, as the language shifts from English, to Spanish, to Italian, becomes a ‘star’ over the course of the film.) The installation, which also includes a taped interview with the director of Italy’s Pasolini archive, a collection of sculptural works, and an active, ever-expanding web archive, is a synthesis of pop culture, historical documents, and aesthetic inquiries into the nature of materialism; Barrio’s interest lies in reconfiguring the iconic in order to “break the meaning,” as she puts it, to build something new. Drawing inspiration from sources as varied as Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps, Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends, THE PERILS asks: if workers are governed by what they produce, how are they affected when what they produce is desire?
The film opens with a shot of Desire Street in the leafy New Orleans neighborhood where playwright Tennessee Williams wrote his breakthrough hit; we then find ourselves in a Manhattan white cube art space, where four performers rehearse scenes from Streetcar, punctuated by the interruptions and interrogations of an initially unseen director. Barrio’s intelligent use of casting is notable, here: the gender and racial diversity of the performers revitalizes the play’s now familiar tropes, provoking fresh and intriguing insights . This process continues in Bogotá, with a show that inserts Streetcar’s Stella, played by Endry Cardeño, into the setting of Sergio Cabrera’s La Estrategia del Caracol (a 1993 Colombian film that outperformed Jurassic Park at the box office but is largely unknown to American audiences). The final act takes place in Trastevere, Rome, a bohemian neighborhood with a storied working-class history; Stella, in this iteration the reluctant sex worker of Pasolini’s Accattone, encounters the goddesses Venus and Minerva sipping tea in a ornate sitting room, where the three debate sex workers’ rights and the nature—essential or otherwise—of womanhood, labor, and love. As these scenes are rehearsed and rerehearsed, new meanings emerge from the texts, from our understanding of the actors as individuals performing the roles of themselves. The result is the cinematic equivalent of what musicians call woodshedding: as the performers repeat their lines to the point of reflexivity, a surprising and irresistible jazz emerges.
In each iteration, the individual scenes’ directors question the cast members regarding their characters’ motivations, but also probe more personally, asking, in one instance: “Could you lie?” We eventually learn, with help from the archive, that we are not simply watching footage of plays being rehearsed, but of the casting itself; and that there is an audience present observing the process. We see the actress playing Blanche interviewed as Blanche; as herself, Miriam A. Hyman; and then rapping in a music video—forcing us to consider how performers find and identify truth within the constructed world of the theatre. The diverse cast going through the now familiar motions of Streetcar implicitly calls into question the performance of gender both on stage and in life; we may wonder what is entailed for men in performing ‘man’, as we watch actress Kelly Haran flawlessly embody the 1950s working stiff Mitch. The nature of existence itself is performative, Barrio suggests; the least gesture a potential film in the making.
During the pandemic, this sense of universal spectacle was exponentially enhanced: formerly discrete privacies became screenings that bled each into the next—birthdays, funerals, schoolchildren taking their first faltering steps towards literacy filmed and framed; business meetings chaired from the toilet, everyone coiffed for the camera at all times. (Are the conditions for unscripted consequences a dwindling quantity in a world where everyone is her own amateur dramaturge? As writer Zadie Smith remarked in 2016 essay, this desire to make the quotidian spectacular via social media has infected even the most introverted of pursuits: “We’ve gotten into the habit of not experiencing the private, risky act of reading so much as performing our response to what we read.”) Barrio’s inquisitive, restless scope of vision is remarkably prescient; in You Weren’t Familiar, begun in 2010, her camera picks up on the backstage banter, the cords and wires, the gaffes, revealing the blurred line between spectacle and reality, person and performer, revelation and presentation, theatrical and social roles; and the power dynamics inherent in these configurations—astutely prefiguring contemporary life, in which seemingly no one is free from the all-seeing camera’s multifarious gaze.
“She consistently references Queer cinema where the subject is class exploitation.”
It is notable that Barrio, a Basque artist based in New York City, fixates on filmmakers whose works concern the excavation of deeply painful and concealed national memories. Although she consistently references Queer cinema where the subject is class exploitation, perhaps her worldview is closest to that of Cabrera: unlike Williams, Pasolini, or Fassbinder, Barrio is proposing an alternative to the world in which the sucker, farlocco, always pays. Layerings of contrapuntal imagery, including recurring footage of a fountain, a significant trope employed throughout, underscored by ambient piano music remind us of the seductions of simple beauty. Barrio immerses us in her lexicon, as Toni Morrison put it, letting “the rest of the world move over” to her frame of reference. The fountain becomes a character, a conduit, conducts us from one setting to another. Like Pasolini, Barrio uses the symbolic in practical ways, her gaze often lingering on inanimate objects, or rather, occasioning an animation of objects, in the sense of anima: a be-souling; a sort of metaphorical intervention.
The show’s title, THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE, taken from Stanley Milgram’s now widely criticized experiment of the same name,[1] performs double duty; it evokes the familiar discussion over how far a person might go to obey instructions from an authority figure, but also calls into question the perils of obeying any prevailing thought current—why were we, as a society, so inclined to believe in the authority of Milgram’s heavily doctored results? After all, Milgram, who had an “astute sense of what works on television” was a director of sorts, too: he privately characterized his work as “merely effective theater.” Barrio, meanwhile, includes footage of herself working in order to expose her complicity in the embedded power structure of filmmaking. In THE PERILS, the installation’s guests watch the film’s audience watching the on-screen audience watching the director watch the cast watching the director; each an uneasy collaborator in the creation process.
Authority presents itself in various guises: actors submit to the orders of the director; the public to the rules of the performance space; the audience to the dictates of the performers’ fame, and so forth. Artists submit to the authority of intuition or of form, to the exigencies of space, of the available equipment. A discussion between Barrio and her cinematographer over camera lenses culminates in inevitable acquiescence to pragmatism: “Well, this is the shit we have.”
The presentation of the film on three screens effects a quasi-theatrical expansiveness—a sense of heightened control over the field of vision; we can choose to oscillate between a close-up of a performer and a pan of the crew, abstract meaning from a clip of Fassbinder’s Fox lying dead on the ground, juxtaposed with the performer playing Blanche explaining that her character’s husband committed suicide after being outed as a homosexual. (This theme a thread woven throughout: a triptych of boys whose queerness—sexual, political—has killed them.) The split consciousnesses suggested by the multiple screens work together to form one fastidiously coherent socio-political-theatrical narrative.
‘Chronotope,’ a literary term indicating the connection between location and the timeframe in which a story unfolds, is useful here: for Barrio, location is a character, and emptiness—of a street, a building—merely a construct of the uninquisitive eye. (What, indeed, is empty?— consider microorganisms, atoms, the air!) You Weren’t Familiar illuminates how the chronotope affects the behavior of the individuals (re)acting within it. Barrio takes this concept further, illustrating how our location in a specific body inextricably entangles with the scripts we are assigned. Pasolini’s fluid sequences reveled in documenting bodies that do not normally appear in cinema; Barrio too finds vitality in the quotidian, a statement political as well as aesthetic: when capital is privileged over labor, the body becomes fodder, collateral damage.
Applied to the hackneyed theatre of political spectacle, Barrio’s perspective allows for enhanced possibilities. In March of 2022, senator Marsha Blackburn (a de facto thespian making a desperate bid to accrue campaign footage) demanded that Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson define what it is to be a woman—in a cynically disingenuous interrogatory technique presumably cribbed from Pontius Pilate. Barrio’s film reminds us that taking such predictable scripts and putting them in other places and times opens up the question to the possibility of genuinely interesting answers. In You Weren’t Familiar, a director poses the same question; with the chronotope shifted to a less sinister context, the alteration makes room for the apposite (and practical) response of performer Lilith Primavera, who brilliantly pinpoints the universal in the specific: “I don’t know what it means to be a woman. I barely know what it means to be Lilith Primavera.”
An archaeologist in real time, Barrio sifts through contemporary cultural detritus, in an attempt to determine the nature of the society that created it. THE PERILS is a project that prompts and rewards further research on the part of the viewer—it accumulates layers of meaning, each reference a symbiotically enriching reverberation of the whole. Fortunately, every aspect of the creation process as well as a plethora of ancillary information is currently available in an encyclopedic online archive including scene outlines, poetically gnomic hand-printed notes[2], recordings of auditions, a scrapbook of Pasolini clippings, written questions such as: “are you in touch with your violence?”, photographs of sculptural pieces, and film stills from Fox and Accattone. Co-created by writer and curator Elizaveta Alexandrovna Shneyderman, the archive forms a kind of personal cinematic grammar, a cipher by which to read and interpret the film anew.
Barrio is concerned with making the invisible visible, whether in a discussion of the viability of unionization for sex workers, the presentation of a baker plying his trade elbow-deep in dough, or her questioning of the figurative dough that greases the cogs of culture—and asks us to consider the seductions of power, social obedience and submission; and the nature of the conduits that connect us, across otherwise unbridgeable divides of geography, history, identity. Included in the web archive’s dramaturgical artefacts is an audition monologue from Basic Instinct: “I’m a writer, I use people for what I write. You write what you know. Let the world beware.” But Barrio, sensing that unconsidered obedience to any narrative is fatal, proposes the opposite—I learn something through creating. And there is an open invitation to the process. Her camera’s hunger to take in just that much more than the eye can see: Let the world be here.
[1] Levine’s gnomic and acerbic conclusion: “you don’t know what work is.”
[2] “Participants were told by an experimenter to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to another individual. Unbeknownst to the participants, shocks were fake and the individual being shocked was an actor. The majority of participants obeyed, even when the individual being shocked screamed in pain. While Milgram's reports of his process report methodical and uniform procedures, the audiotapes reveal something different. During the experimental sessions, the experimenters often went off-script and coerced the subjects into continuing the shocks.” (https://www.thoughtco.com/milgram-experiment-4176401) Milgram’s assistant “even came to blows with one forty-six-year-old woman who turned the shock machine off.” (Gina Perry, Behind the Shock Machine. The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments, New York, 2013. p.134)
[3 i.e. “recuerdo del día de mi nacimiento, recuerdo del día de mi nacimiento, recuerdo del día de mi primera comunión”
Eva H.D. is the author of the poetry collections Rotten Perfect Mouth, and Shiner. Her poem, 38 Michigans won the Montreal International Poetry Prize .” Her poem, "Bonedog" was featured in Charlie Kaufman’s recent film I'm Thinking of Ending Things, (Netflix). Her new collection of poetry,The Natural Hustle will be available from McClelland & Stewart in 2022.
Photos by Daniel Kukla
THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE Video Stills by Itziar Barrio
itziarbarrio.com
Itziar Barrio. THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE (Participant Inc, 2016) Poster. Designed by Jaume Marco
Itziar Barrio. Minerva plegada en cañería II. Concrete, clay, used plumbing pipe, paint, and latex (DETAIL). 126 x 50 x 30 cm. 2019.
Itziar Barrio. You Weren’t Familiar, But You Weren’t Afraid Film Poster. 2022. Co-designed by Jaume Marco and Itziar Barrio
Itziar Barrio. THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE at Participant Inc, 2016. New York. Photo: Olivia DiVecchia
Itziar Barrio, THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE (PREMIERE), 2022. Installation view at Participant Inc, New York. Photo: Daniel Kukla.
Itziar Barrio, You Weren’t Familiar, But You Weren’t Afraid Still. HD, 98 min. 2022.
Itziar Barrio, THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE (PREMIERE), 2022. Installation view at Participant Inc, New York. Photo: Daniel Kukla.
Itziar Barrio, It’s all whatever we want it to be, 2022. Participant Inc, New York. Photo: Daniel Kukla.
Itziar Barrio, Untitled (JEFF 6), 2022. Silkscreen on latex, latex, Metallic structure (IKEA
JEFF Chair), and cement. Participant Inc, New York. Photo: Daniel Kukla.
Itziar Barrio, Plegada, 2022. Participant Inc, New York. Photo: Daniel Kukla.
Itziar Barrio, THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE (PREMIERE), 2022. Installation view at Participant Inc, New York. Photo: Daniel Kukla.
Itziar Barrio, Minerva plegada en cañería IV, 2022. Participant Inc, New York. Photo: Daniel Kukla.
Itziar Barrio, Putting it into our bodies, 2022. Cement, rubber and spandex. 12 x 5 x 5 inches. Participant Inc, New York. Photo: Daniel Kukla.
Itziar Barrio, THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE (PREMIERE), 2022. Installation view at Participant Inc, New York. Photo: Daniel Kukla.