THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING / 2007
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The Whole World Is Watching
The Whole World Is Watching: Weatherman '69 was originally realised as a
trashy home video shot by Raymond Pettibon and enacted by a host of friends
and musicians around Mike Watt, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore from Sonic
Youth. The text written by Pettibon for the video makes up more than 50 pages
of dialogues, slogans, song lyrics and monolithic text blocks.
The project originates from a work phase in the late 80s when Raymond Pettibon
dealt mainly with the American subculture of the 60s and 70s. The text is
inspired by a radical splinter group of the Students for a Democratic Society,
Weatherman, who from 1969 to 1975 fought a proxy war for the rights of the
nationally and internationally oppressed. Coming from the white middle-class
university milieu, the members of Weatherman used terrorist acts as well
as propagandistic and mass media weapons for their fight against American
imperialism and racism.
Creating a cast of more than 20 half fictitious, half historic characters
the text draws a collage-like image of the resistance group living in the
underground. Sketches of historic events and encounters with pop celebrities
like Jane Fonda and John Lennon appear along with a portrait of the daily
lunacy of the subcultural existence and the longings of politicised middle-class
kids.
A stage version of the material has never before been realised.
Humor doesn't trivialize the real consequences, the people that get hurt,
for instance. I'm not making light of that.
(Pettibon Interview)
Thematic Approach
At the core of this project lie the collection and collage of different aesthetic
methods of writing - particularly subcultural ones - and aesthetic strategies
of dealing with violence. In Pettibon's drawings and texts, violence is a
main topic. It is the violence that opposes a radicalized subculture to an
existing system. It is the violence of the petit bourgeois and the self-destructive
violence of drug abuse.
To Germans all this sounds quite familiar in the context of the events of
'68. But what makes Pettibon's text so special is the penetration of the
topic via his specific form of slogans, the structure of text and dialogue
as punk trash and the inclusion of complete songs as known from musicals
or Brecht's epic theatre The hard cuts, the powerful slogans and absurd exaggerations
evoke an atmosphere of instability and dissociation, which also characterizes
a violent life on the edge of society. The monolithic and massive quality
of the slogans and pop-icons underlines the difficulty to analytically and
empathetically make history accessible in retrospect.
When we were talking about heroes I brought up
that the usual person who is considered a hero is really the opposite of
what I would consider. And
it's a way of trying to break down this kind of natural awe and respect that
comes out of a fear or envy. There's this built-in respect that shouldn't
be there completely. I told you how much I consider characters like Gumby
with respect. (Pettibon Interview)
Accordingly ways of making sense of the past marks the second subject matter
of the work. In Pettibon's text the 60s/70s already are a conglomerate of
anecdotes, popcultural nostalgia and historic slogans, a hybrid mixture of
historically imagined and personal elements. History is not envisioned as
a fixed body of knowledge that refuses any direct access, but as a process
of acquirement and imagination. It is a kind of interferential historiography
(Jacques Le Goff), wherein memory and imagination, experienced and imagined
history complement one another. Pop music, fashion, languages, slogans and
their emotional weight are as important to this process as the historic knowledge
itself.
Artistic Approach
The artistic method of dealing with all these materials is describable by
the term “collection”; similar to the collections of historic
discourses in Foucault's writings: research collection, collage (without
moral or valuing intention), a clamoring order.
Pettibon's text will be starting point and red threat of the “show”.
It is not about dramatization of dialogues and scenes which can only be found
fragmentary in the script. The text parts will be mainly understood as lyrics.
The pop song as a time machine. Different layers of pop quotations and original
texts allow an approach to the topic (the history of a violent left subculture)
from different perspectives.
The historic perspective in this context is defined as follows: on the one
hand it focuses on the personal historic position, on the other hand it reveals
the historic difference in the mourning of a missed chance for social development.
Revolt and failure. Every performer brings his own biography into the recollection/mourning
work and thereby creates new crossing points for the historic subject. Popcultural
artefacts and products of the cultural industry (records, books, names, slogans)
build up to a kind of carcass to which the personal dreams and fears as well
as the historic knowledge are fastened. Through the performance on stage
they will grow to one complex hybrid monster.
The term “musical” deals in a very direct way with the superficial
structure of the text: dramatically important emotions, moods or events will
be translated into songs and performed. The singing and dancing is more or
less legitimated by the logical course of action and integrated in it. At
the same time, the genre definition of musical is rendered absurd by the
non hierarchical order of scenes and the destruction and reformulation of
the concept of ensemble play. “Musical” becomes an ironic reminiscence
of the brilliance of pop, as it was still shining into the underground hide
away of Weatherman from a distance. The aim is not to evoke the “spirit” of
an epoch, but to evoke the sometimes painful realisation of the historic
difference and ones personal historic position.
ALL AMERICANS MUST DIE. THEY´RE THE ONLY RACE OF PEOPLE THAT ACTS LIKE
THEY´RE IMMORTAL - AND THEY PRACTICALLY ARE. THE SOONER THE BETTER.
(THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING)
Artists participating
The Whole World Is Watching brings different personalities together who represent
specific historic and social contexts through their work and their biography.
These contexts are understood as historic materials and are inserted into
the composition as formal metaphors.
Raymond Pettibon first became famous
with his cover art for the American Westcoast punk label SST which he also
used to spread his hand copied artist booklets (published since 1978). Originating
from the subcultural scene, Pettibon's work has meanwhile entered the great
art institutions world wide, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los
Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the Documenta in Kassel/Germany.
One of Pettibon's first subjects of interest was the critic of the 60's subculture
and their (final) failure in the revolt against their father's authority.
Since the mid 80's Pettibon has been working obsessively on his universe
of combined picture- and text-fragments. Next to videos, texts, music and
cover designs (for Sony Youth, Black Flag- and Minutemen among others) this
universe consists of thousands of black and white drawings with which he
likes to completely cover museum walls.
His sources range from modern literature such as Proust and Pound to sport
reports in daily newspapers or pulp novels that are put next to his visual
material, not in a logical, but in a “lyric” order. The observer
is confronted with a maelstrom of codes, signs and texts from different origins,
seemingly arbitrarily assembled. Pettibon illustrates the stream of consciousness
of contemporary culture and works on an uncompromising portrait of the “American
nightmare”.
"It's a mistake to assume about any of my work
that it's my own voice. Because that would be the most simple-minded ineffective
art that you can make." (Pettibon Interview)
Pettibon will share the stage with Schorsch Kamerun. Kamerun can be seen
as one of the formative and most eccentric and versatile representatives
of Germany's punk subculture. He is singer and co-founder of the punk band “Die
Goldenen Zitronen” (The Golden Lemons) and, together with Rocko Schamoni,
he owns the legendary Golden Pudel Club in Hamburg. Kamerun and Schamoni
also initiated and produced the TV-show "Pudel Overnight". Schorsch
Kamerun is furthermore involved in several theatre projects, at the Berliner
Volksbühne ("Eisstadt"), at Schauspielhaus Zürich ("Macht
Fressen Würde") and at Staatstheater Hannover ("Der Chinese
Im Kinderbett") among others. In June 2005 he staged the world premiere
of "Draußen tobt die Dunkelziffer" by Kathrin Röggla
at the WIENER FESTWOCHEN.
When you're a red you're a red all the way
From your first party cell till your class takes the state
When you're a red you will fight till you die
With a gun in your hand and an armed struggle line
(THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING)
Also performing is the Japanese musician Keiji Haino,
one of the most radical artists of Tokyo's bizarre hardcore rock and punk
scene. The voice artist and
guitar and drum player Haino is the “great enigmatician among Japan's music
extremists” (DIE ZEIT). Protected by dark sunglasses during his performances
his age and sex are unidentifiable. The radical path of this equally dandyesc
as dark performer always leads him to the edges of contemporary music: „The
reason why rock music today is worthless, is because it's only trying to do the
possible. But I believe that rock means the impossible, the incomplete.“ (Haino)
Keiji Haino has collaborated among others with John Zorns Painkiller, Thurston
Moore, Fred Frith and Alan Licht (Mandarin Movie).
WE TRADED OUR LIEUTENANT FOR HEROIN, WE SURVIVED
THE WAR WITH BUT ONE
CASUALITY,
AN OVERDOSE. AND WE DIDN´T HURT NO ONE.
(THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING)
Jan-Philipp Possmann is freelance dramaturge and curator in Berlin, Frankfurt/Main
and Amsterdam. He is leader and curator of the initiative PLATEAUX - New Positions
of International Performing Arts as well as curator for the festival Schillertage
2007 in Mannheim. As dramaturge he worked together with „Rimini Protokoll“, „WILHEM
GROENER“, „electronic music theater“ and the directors David
Weber-Krebs and Oliver Sturm, the choreographer Christoph Winkler and the author
Peter Weber.
Anne Schulz studied cultural studies and aesthetical
practice at the University of Hildesheim, worked at the theater festival THEATERFORMEN
(Hannover/Braunschweig
2004) and for „Volkspalast“ (Berlin 2004). She was production assistant
for Christoph Schlingensief's „Der Animatograph“/Edition Island (2005),
production manager for Compagnie Thomas Lehmen (2005) and was delegated to Brasov/Rumania
on behalf of the Institute for Foreign Relations Germany (2005-2006).
There's
always something from the sky just about to fall on you. Even though my work
is usually just one drawing, it is more of a narrative than it is a cartoon with
a punch line and a resolution and a laugh at the end.
I think it's work that is best when there isn't any final resolution. When you
don't finally arrive.
(Pettibon Interview)
Picture
Film