December 2009

To a great extent, the world of these photographs, like the photographs themselves, is a creation (in that outsider-art kind of sense) of the aparát. Not the buildings, for they are, by and large, much older; and not the people, for they, like early Christians, are in the world without being of it; but the whole impersonal network of social relationships that sustains the Party and, by extension, the State; carving out the tracks along which the passersby are always so determinedly marching. There is, in other words, an inherent ambiguity here, which places this particular tentacle of the aparát in the peculiar position of being simultaneously artist and spectator.

The separation implied by Sterling’s ‘period notion’ of virtual cyberspace is itself as mythical as the artificial intelligence whose inhuman laughter inhabits it. Certainly the gamelan ensemble is there to underline Gibson’s archaic, exotic rendering, but the parody, by dint of the performance, extends to encompass the artistic process itself. Gamelan, which is of profound importance in Javanese rituals, sets off not only Gibson’s cyberspace as mythical, but Condon’s performance of art-making as well, as he slyly lampoons his own confessed obsessions with transcendence and projection.

The dancers’ queer movements and nonsensical gibberish, all dictated by a sense of jouissance, reflect the unintelligible, undisciplined body hovering dangerously at the edge of pre-linguistic consciousness. Clearly transacting emotions within themselves, to each other, and to us, If I Sing to You is about the body coming into language, and all the gender disciplining (bodily or otherwise) that goes along with it. And through our kinetic familiarity with the performers’ everyday actions, the performer / spectator binary is recast, our subjectivities splayed out as raw as the bodies thrusting in front of us.