OAS Node #1 @BAT HAUS: Whatever It Maybe ∞ [Internal Review]

Page 10 of Jeff Sugg's portfolio. Click image to download the PDF of Jeff's portfolio.

Whatever It Maybe ∞
Jeff Sugg at OASN1@BH (August 22, 2012)
By Paul McLean

Jeff Sugg parked his street-painted punk van directly in front of Bat Haus about an hour before his Occupational Art School Node 1 presentation was slated to begin. After a quick smoke, Jeff - master theatrical projectionist, designer, artist, visionary and enabler of visionaries [+] -  commenced to unload the gear he would be using during "Digitizing Theater" into the Bat Haus space. For tonight's program, OASN1 co-organizer Chris Moylan had supplied a digital projector, which Jeff would use to share his slideshow, movies and to create a real-time vignette, an immaterial hand-operated & projected reference table for Sugg's favorite inspirational picture texts. Sugg's influences? Svoboda, Bucky Fuller, Da Vinci...

I provided an overhead projector. The overhead throws a representation of Peter Cooper by Shane Kennedy in the rear of the screening area. The Cooper is our OASN1@BH mascot. Alice Cooper's "School's Out" is the OAS theme song, though I haven't shared that bit of intel with anyone yet, except for you, dear reader.

Tonight (that night), we're in for a treat.

∞

So much for painting a word-picture of the scene. It's not necessarily helpful to note that the 22nd of August, 2012, was a gorgeous night in Bushwick. The light was lovely, child. Passersby, arriving from the city after a day's work, stopped to read the sandwich board Bat Haus owner Natalie Chan had set out on the sidewalk. The text on the sign offers the invitation for the night's walkers to join us inside for the multimedia-assisted discussion. Throughout the show and talk, pedestrians would peek though the glass at the darkened room, usually a curious look on their faces, and move on. Next time, maybe.

Shortly after 7, Chris arrived with Jean Moylan, his daughter and a film student at one of the city's art schools. Jean would be documenting the program with her cameras. My wife and seven-month-old son arrived with a spare battery for Jeff's laptop, and shortly thereafter we were joined by Al and Melinda, neighbors from our building. Al had worked with Jeff before, and Melinda teaches theater. [Later, Daniel, a Canadian theatrical professional, right on time, ventured in and completed our little band.]

It was opening night for Occupational Art School Node 1, class-wise. We all chatted a bit on the sidewalk, generated a format for the opening sequence of our exchange, on the fly, then walked through the door and took our rolling, non-assigned, ergonomic seats. At first the conversation seemed casual, but it didn't take long for the shift into exposition to occur. Once we got "there," the wonder got all over everything.

OK. So I'm fudging the chronology, but only a little.

∞

I won't spend a lot of word count on the details of Jeff's slideshow, the intermittent discussion or the demonstration. These have been recorded, and I wouldn't want to risk being caught at mis-translation. The URL linked to the PDF of Jeff's portfolio, which was the content of the slideshow portion of the session, has already been posted on our various online organs, minus the moving images - which are significant, make no mistake, but you can get the gist of the narrative seam from the stills alone. Sort of. Not really, but more on this realization, later. The fact of the "Digitizing Theater" event is in the can. We'll be sharing that via our websites soon enough. I would rather riff on the night, on Jeff, on the proposition of a new school, and a new theater.

Or would you prefer I stick to the record, give you a straight play-by-play? Well, there wasn't any, at least not the sort that functions properly in plain text, which is how I'm typing the story out.

I believe I'll stick to the original plan, or script, then, and improvise.

∞

A pattern, a progression is already emerging at OAS. Starting with Bold Jez, the Novads, the Anarchives, rolling through Eric Leiser's holography, sweeping into the dimensions of Jeff Sugg's dramaturgy, we are starting as admins and dimensional analysts to recognize a form in the sequence, on the Occupational Art School Node 1 timeline. That is our job, right? Our struggle, mission and task as system architects is to not exactly pilot the craft, but to get a sense of the shape of the vessel, its direction, the substance of the seas and stars between which we are navigating. To where? For what?

As Natalie was closing down Bat Haus, at the end of the evening, Jeff, Chris, Jean and I stood in a circle and reflected on Whatever It Maybe ∞ , which is what I'm calling the OAS mojo, or ________, today. Naming the spirit of a thing is always a tricky business. It's a neat metaphor, to think of the occupation as a voyage.

I guess this is vital, because we have a responsibility to be open source, to transparency. Which invites the reducing of our enterprise to an object, objective, or a Thing, instead of a subject or subjective thing. If your intention is to spread the word about The Thing, the object of your attention, as such, you're slipping into the muck of modern marketing, by default. Fair enough. We're about to launch an ad campaign, and the tag line, meme or hook - the working title - is "Something beautiful is happening in Bushwick." That thing that's happening in the meme is no thing. That no-thing is a phenomenon, and it has legs, or at least, appears to. You can see we're in a metaphysical pickle here, and we've barely started. What a trip!  

∞

I imagine that a slideshow can be reduced to a reel with commentary, if you speed through it fast enough, and we tried that on Wednesday. Jeff's career spans decades, but its markers are tall, which helped with keyframing. Sugg's curriculum vitae is an impressive mixture, a gumbo even, a spectral transit intersecting many current theatrical realities (and other confabulations) along its course. Starting with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, with a wavy through-put to big ol' populist fare like Magic/Bird and Bring It On: The musical, and sparkling nodal points at Cynthia Hopkins' Accidental Trilogy*, 33 Variations by Moises Kaufman, The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island* and Stew: Making It*, plus inserts for the esteemed Wooster Group, plus Shakespeare, too (& what a Shakespeare!) [+], we, as Jeff's audience, were made witness to a technical progression that traces the evolution of a neo-theater, one that blurs lines among contemporary mediums or disciplines. Thanks to Jeff's praxis, as a catalogue file, the puzzle - what exactly IS theater today in a digitized world? - made quizzical by an underpinning query - likewise, what is digital art, cinema, text, performance, and so on - the so-called convergence or "New" in the domain of experiential Live Art Event - the mechanized autoportrait or collective drama of electronic means - was, if not solved, then at least verified as a soluble equation.

∞

A few weeks ago, in my role as Bushwickian Mr. Rogers, I had visited St. James Theater for a tech rehearsal of Bring It On, to see Jeff in his element, in the lab, so to speak. The transformation of theatrical hierarchies by the intervention of computer-based processes, evidenced in the production prep for this musical was astonishingly apparent. I had only stepped into recent theater on tangents over the past decade and a half, in LA, mostly, but elsewhere, too, in a bunch of rural-to-urban environments & venues, so I was very fresh to the material reformation of the stage by the technology of the electronic network, as exists at this juncture on Broadway, one of theater's pinnacles, if not yet THE top of the heap.

For some more backstory, my relationship with theater is an on-and-off-again romance, now spanning three+ decades. In high school and college I had thrown myself into theater and loved it, forming troupes of players, and receiving roles in increasingly demanding shows. My first love affair with a girl was a theatrical one, hidden in the wings. I lost my virginity at a cast party. I was in deep, once I dove in, as a young adult.

When I caught the art bug, my trajectory veered away from theater toward the white cube, toward the gallery and museum, off the stage, or so I thought. Sure, there were overlapping instances here and there. I didn't grok that I was moving in loops. In the early 4D collectives, in the late 90s and early oughts, our collective crews [DddD, 01, Art for Humans] always included performers, and we collaborated with actors, filmmakers and such, but the anchors of our troupes weren't of theater, as such. They were dancers and musicians.

Over the years, I lost track of theater's evolution into a prime driver in actualization of 4D. I should have known better. Every so often I would encounter a clue that these changes were happening. In Vegas in Cirque and other productions, on programs I encountered via the web or the odd TV or cable special, during courses with Anne Bray at CGU or others, like Hubertus von Amelunxen's at EGS, for instance. Although, I hadn't assembled it, the evidence was often directly in front of me. In 2009 and -10 I should have had the AHA! moment when I focused on Wagner, as Achim Freyer's controversial Ring Cycle passed through town. The research into Bayreuth ought to have been the tell.

∞

Resettling in NYC, though proved the undoing of the barriers separating the sets of art and theater and life, and all. Our first rental was in the financial district co-op of a producer. There's more, but I'll cut to the chase. Occupy Wall Street erupted. The connections to theater, especially revolutionary theater, materialized as more than theater, and at times, I found myself in the middle of this, or invited to be. I'm positive the living philosophy of Wolfgang Schirmacher had something to do with my attenuation to the discourse around Occupy as performative art, which has been at the heart of the discourse on Occupy culture from its game-changing inception.

Occupy with Art documented many instances of effective street theater coupled with OWS protest, from the poets, to monologues, to interventions like the Tax Dodgers. Because Occupy Wall Street occurred in close proximity to Broadway in the Big Apple, the impression on the movement by actors and stage hands of all varieties seemed inevitable. The Living Theater, for example, proved a tremendous ally at important points early on. Other companies and players, too, made big impacts on the Occupy identity, and, I would conjecture, the influence has been reciprocal. Panels such as the one hosted by Hrag Vartanian toward the end of the Spatial Occupation @Hyperallergic residency generated compelling talks about the nature of Occupy and the nature of performance. Zefrey Throwell, Jim Costanzo of Aaron Burr Society and others contributed on-the-ground perspectives about the parameters, the limits of both theater and revolution in effecting what amounts to a better expressive topology for the 99%. Of all the players, no flux-group has done more than the original Arts & Culture crew, the revGamers, the Novads, along these lines. Although the Brecht revival within the context of Occupy is possibly the historically most-likely-to-succeed, as a going concern. Suffice to say, theater and OWS are intertwined, like DNA.

The real nut to crack, though, isn't performance relative to occupation, as such, and clearly not performance production, which is precarious in the movement, even more than it is outside, which is for most participants precarious enough! The real Real is in OWS as itself, a staged/not-staged spectacle and negation of spectacle, and then a demonstration in the architecture of ubiquitous global media, relentlessly relegated to the dark matter of the nightly news, or spun by opposition into a brutal and false caricature. Not to mention the personal stories, the drama of self that every Occupy situation contains, as in "I Am the 99%."

Beyond these subterranean transitional dynamics, which are more suitably sited in metaphysics than media, we have phenomena like Reverend Billy, who has in a sense been actualized by OWS, and whose value has been determined by the happenings at the heart of the movement, as much as it (his value) has by virtue of the Reverend's personal, or ontological evolution, which is quasi-public and theatrical, at least locally, although in Billy's case, where one self starts and the Other begins is blurred. The Reverend in these aspects is paradigmatic.

But who can forget the unforgettable early-OWS Zombie March? No one, is the answer, because the "performance" as protest survives as international documentation, at least in what Bold Jez has defined as Occupy's anarchives, which I find correlates well to Avital Ronell's conception of anahistory. In Switzerland at EGS two summers ago I questioned the prevalence of Kafka in the EGS curriculum that season. I don't anymore, given the OWS encounters with the matrix of Power, from prison to surveillance to police brutality, to the top of the grim hierarchies, the castle of Bloomberg's pervasive and undemocratic, plutocratic authority complex.

To be in Occupy requires the all-directional suspension of disbelief, which is why anarchy, as such, is insufficient. There is order to be confronted everywhere one turns, but it is not the order that we have been told our collective and individual lives belong to, much less the order a 99% life can be enriched by. Democracy, we have discovered, has been eaten away from the inside out, the way cancer consumes a body, by the 1% program.

∞

So our scene is complicated.

A scenario like ours, which may actually be historically unique, makes credible the incredible, like David Graeber appearing in a Roman legionnaire costume. Or a Law & Order episode with Occupy components in its story being occupied by "real" occupiers. These events happened. They were documented and dispersed across the web in real time, streamed or uploaded to Twitter, as stills or moving images, as points on a map overlaying a grid of mediated reality that refuses through the present to acknowledge the actual events' veracity, which cannot possibly be extracted from the hyperreal versions of them, or exploited without collateral damage in the managed perceptual schema, either. Talk about hard to spin, easier to shun! Which is why the NY Times, for instance has been and continues to be so shitty at covering any of the massively important arts and cultural developments happening in the midst of Occupy.

∞

The oeuvre of Jeff Sugg explains why to a lot these issues, or at minimum establishes a point of departure for exploration of them at depth. Jeff's portfolio also suggests, coupled with the emergent theater precipitated by New Media's invasion and qualified conquest of the playhouse, the potential for a 4D iteration of the play that is so close to Life that the binaries embedded in the architecture cease functioning in the domain of command. It's no coincidence, Jeff and Laurie Anderson collaborating. If the computer is victorious in theater, it is no more so than George W. Bush and America were on the flight deck where "VICTORY" was declared in Iraq. Such assertions, as it turns out over time, are no more true than any other failed propaganda serving a dead or doomed status quo, not that the computer itself is behind any propaganda campaign. Industry and capital are behind computer-propaganda. This same condition, the computerization-myth, applies emphatically to  the entirety of the 1% top-down "world" of arts and culture. The truth is the old guard don't have a handle on what's happening, and it's always easiest to point at the culprit who cannot defend himself, or in this instance, itself. The computer doesn't get to deny the charges.

∞

What's the real 900 pound gorilla in the room? The sea change indicated by Occupy terrifies all the old-power gatekeepers and beneficiaries, including those ensconced in the arts, and powerful people generally behave badly when afraid. They rarely accommodate a perceived threat, except to try to lure it to an early and anonymous demise.

The new, dimensional, Occupy-catalyzed theater, like Occupy on the whole, has cagily avoided that fate. Which gives us a good chance moving forward. All of these circumstances are still incredibly fresh, as data, as event-moment, as precursors. We can't predict the scope and scale of change, especially change driven by perceptual evolution and accompanied by profound technical innovation.

As a rule of technics, the mechanic knows what's up first. Ask Jeff. Occupational Art School did, and we're much the better for it, decidedly so. I can't speak for him, and like most of the mechanics I've known, he may or may not feel comfortable sharing knowledge on the basis of informal Q&A. Who knows! Maybe he's more inclined to the out-of-context contextualization and ratification when it comes to straight transmission. A technician who learns to navigate amongst the experts, the auteurs, the critics, the epistemologists of all stripes, learns to let the know-it-alls have their wind. "Mechanic" is a catch-all badge, in my lexicon, like "mad scientist." It's an encoded honorary, and maybe all this is, too. Respect is the recursive denotation. Sugg has achieved significant professional awards. Outside the bounds of those recognitions, amongst one's fellow travelers, speaking for myself now, certain identifiers in the peerage are almost as important as the medals and laurels. There's practicality in both, which most mechanics enjoy.

∞

In Jeff Sugg's case, with respect to OAS teaching circles moving forward, it's helpful to have discovered in the course of our class, that his foundations are in theory, or thinking, as in philosophy. It was the ground for our concourse, as much as it was the ground for our shared arts language. I mentioned my exchange with Badiou at EGS, in the brief talk Jeff and I had outside the St. James during a break in the action, as I was leaving. To recap: two summers ago during a coffee break I expressed to Badiou my concern that, while art needed philosophy, I wasn't certain that philosophy needed art in anything like the same measure. He emphatically disagreed, saying "Philosophy needs art, today." Although I had suspicions to the contrary, prior to Jeff's presentation at OAS, I must admit, even enthusiastically assert asymmetrically, that art today needs philosophical theater, of the very kind and quality, wired and all, camera-enabled, that Jeff Sugg has been developing and proving for decades, now. Jeff's mechanical theater of magic logic makes 4D live art events possible, materially and immaterially. It is the sign of the time.

∞

Afternote: We are now in pre-development on a project. FYI, the practicum of OASN1 is in one substantial portion devoted to production. The name of this essay is my suggestion for a working title for our new theater piece, or series. Whatever It Maybe ∞

Also, I encouraged Jeff to produce a list of barter items for OAS students who prefer that mode of gift exchange. Here's Jeff's list of $10 value equivalents:
-pound of coffee
-1 pack of camel lights
-$10 metrocard
-some gum

Finally, from Chris: "OAS is the SETI program for signs of life in the NYC art world." LOL

*In collaboration with Jim Findlay.