Faki Day 4: The Artist as Commodifier, Elitism and White Supremacy

Faki produces some epic nights. Beginning with the performances, moving on to a drink, then creating a party on one of the stages, then spending some time with an old friend on the roof, then, well, what's the point in stopping there? Might as well see the sun rise.

There's normally a stage of the festival when the adrenaline really kicks in, and from that point on I am such a snowball of art, life and punk that certain routine necessities like sleep simply don't apply anymore. 

That's about where we are at today, as the below conversation can attest.

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Pettifer: We are both a bit delirious today, no?

Jašinskaitė: I agree with you. But you know, after 4 days here, I really miss my private space. - I cannot control who comes in and out of my zone. Here, even the toilet is without a lock.

Pettifer: This morning I was sitting in the living area, peacefully thinking, and a guy I never saw before came and turned the radio up too loud. And then all of these beautiful Croatian people came in, and it was party time. It’s comedy, because before I was really deep in thought, and then this radio comes on and I’m like ‘hmmm – that’s not the best’, and then the party starts. And I’m like – now I will go.  I always wonder what it’s like for the permanent residents here. 

Jašinskaitė: It’s probably how alienation happens, people stop paying attention to certain things done by others. 

 

Pettifer: Do you mean this in a good way, or a bad way?

Jašinskaitė: A bad way, because you are together with people but, at the same time, you are also alone. You share space, but not because you want to. If you could, you would make a selection. I was thinking about the toilet paper that’s always running out. In Lithuania, during Soviet times, there was always a lack of toilet paper. My friend has a saying: “I’m a Lithuanian, I steal toilet paper”. You never know if you find some in the toilet, therefore you always have some extra in your pocket. To me, having toilet paper in a shared restroom is an indication of a good life.

Pettifer: But I think this personal space is a luxury thing, like a ‘western’ thing, or maybe European thing, to have that personal space. I always think – is it natural, or not? And I think this again when this guy turns the radio up. There’s always a negotiation about this: on one hand, I liked my personal space, but on the other hand, I must acknowledge the others in the room. 

Jašinskaitė: But I think it should be two-way, this connection.

Pettifer: But it’s another thing when you can choose your types of contact completely. This is really extreme now in culture, we can create these ‘friendship bubbles’ where the only people around are ones who agree with you. You can curate your life so it is free of any resistance or annoyance. I am sure this is not a good thing, including for the person who does it – it creates a false reality.

Jašinskaitė: I agree completely. That’s why I enjoyed visiting Portuguese society. They have small chats in public space, even though they don’t know each other. But they are also not imposing themselves on others. And I think that’s the thing that we are afraid of. It seemed to me, when I visited Portugal, that they are taking care of each other without imposing. For me that’s a beautiful thing – they see if you need help or not, and if you don’t, they just leave you alone. It’s like having fairies around.

Pettifer: Is this complicity?

Jašinskaitė: I think complicity is the outcome of that. It’s this care. The same care that you don’t want! (laughs) When it becomes a habit and a common thing, it’s really a pleasure to practice it, and it’s not a headache anymore. I think you would enjoy it!

Pettifer: It sounds like a lot of labour for me.

Jašinskaitė: Do you want equality or not?

Pettifer: (Laughs).

~

SMEJ SE PAJACO

Pettifer: (cont’d) What did you think of our first show from last night, Smej se Pajaco (approximately: Laugh, Clown!). I see why you called it a work of literature. It’s talking about some deep philosophy, and in a way not really from the stage. The metaphors are literature metaphors, and not stage metaphors, I think. For example, Beckett often has both.

Photo: Dina Karadžić

Jašinskaitė: I agree. For me there were some interesting connections that he makes in his writing. But I see this play more as a staged reading, to make it public.

Pettifer:  Me too. But that’s not a bad thing. If we are talking about equality, there is a matter of who has access to the stage. Not only demographics of race, class, etc, but also only because they do not speak the language of the theatre.

Jašinskaitė: I agree. Theatre may be an expensive art, but when we let in the other kinds of artists to do the work, we can renew it in a way. I think what happened in Belgian or French theatre, and what we really miss in Lithuania.

Pettifer: When I was in Latvia, I noticed that they have a very strong playwrighting tradition – a lot of the theatre work was coming from text-based theatre. I don’t know if it’s the same in Lithuania.

Jašinskaitė: I think in Lithuania, we don’t really have the tradition of playwrighting. We are in the first steps. But our known directors like Nekrošius and Koršunovas, for them, theatre was pretty much a staging of the text.

Pettifer: I mean, it might be a good thing not to have this tradition. I was interested in the cornucopia of pop culture references that the writer Zoran Ilić is using. James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Andy Warhol… it felt like he was trying to talk about capitalism through its cultural product, especially from the United States.

Jašinskaitė: I agree with you, but I didn’t understand the function.

Pettifer: Me too.

Jašinskaitė: He was making a kind of hypertext – it was not clear exactly the quality of the final object. Like for example, John Lennon, and the word ‘imagine’ on his grave, that picture is shown on a screen. It leads me to the song Imagine, that suggests all the people living life in peace, so it’s a kind of utopian, hippie idea, a leftist idea, but I think the Beetles are also one of the best sold bands at the time of their life. The text was in Serbian , and I read the translation, which was quite helpful, but maybe that’s why I couldn’t fully understand. But it was not so clear what position Ilić is taking and how he draws the line. So I’m not sure about the links between the pop figures. It’s a kind of collage – which can give some idea of the elements we have, but says nothing about their relations.

Pettifer: I mean I think without the details, when we are reading from translation, it’s difficult. I feel like there was something there. Like there is a couple of lines, ­­ that seem to reveal his cynicism about art, and the role that art is playing in capitalism. Like there’s one line, that ‘the art dealer is the cause of capitalism’. So this is a critique of art’s role, and also looking at art as-

Jašinskaitė: A commodity.

Pettifer: Yes, but not only. It is also the cause – it causes the commodification of other things. 

Jašinskaitė: It’s very interesting for me what you say here. But can you say, what is there in the work that suggests this? 

Pettifer: It’s just a feeling, and there a few lines like the one I mentioned. 

Jašinskaitė: I think it’s an interesting idea, and if this idea were elaborated, with all the supporting arguments extended, then I think it would be super-interesting. In a way I’m not convinced. But I could be convinced, with the right arguments. Because I agree very much that art is in a way a commodity, but I see it is a commodity because a certain amount of people, these rich, anonymous buyers, that Ilić mentions in his text, have surplus money they can just throw around.

Pettifer: But you can see it in the figure of the celebrity themselves as Ilić deploys it – are they commodified, or do they in fact cause commodification?

Jašinskaitė: I think that’s a bit like a vicious circle. 

Pettifer: Still, it questions the role of the individual. So when we read this last part about the characters wanting to escape to Dortmund, this is a deus ex machina. 

Jašinskaitė: Yeah, suddenly it appears, that somewhere in Dortmund there is a community that lives without money and Pajaco goes to join them. I was thinking about that.

Pettifer: That seems clear from the last two lines. That’s where Ilić becomes a really cynical optimist. Our impact is somehow nothing, or the impact of change is to leave behind a nothingness, and go into nothingness, but the result  can still be optimistic.

Jašinskaitė: (Laughs) This is too complicated for today! I don’t understand this idea of nothing!!

Pettifer: Ok let’s finish on Smej se Pajaco then.  What about the other piece – what was the title?

THE WALL

Jašinskaitė: The Wall.

Pettifer: For me it was interesting to watch this character on stage, this fallen patriarch.

Jašinskaitė: I agree, but I think we should make an introduction about the cookies we got from the performer.

Pettifer: Ok, yes.

Jašinskaitė: So we have these Serduszka Toruńskie – a special gingerbread biscuit from Toruń in Poland. Let’s open them and see how it influences our thinking (laughs).

Pettifer: Ok, yes.

Pettifer (cont'd): I feel influenced. Negatively! (Laughs)

Jašinskaitė: Me not yet. I need to take another one.

Pettifer: This character, he is specific to Poland somehow, but also occurring in many post-industrial locations, where patriarchy is collapsing as people lose jobs etc.

Jašinskaitė: I’m not sure about the post-industrial part of that. I would say that it’s common not only in Poland, but other post-Soviet countries. I really enjoyed watching this personage, because for me he was very sympathetic in a way, but also I took him as a dangerous guy, whose actions are difficult to predict. And I felt a little bit trapped in the performance by Faki organisers who proposed that I sit in the front row. I was constantly addressed by the performer to the level that I was almost included into the show. While watching the performance I felt really ‘in it’, and easily manipulated, and without the possibility to take a step backwards, to take a wide view.

Pettifer: Always a problem for a critic, when it happens!

Jašinskaitė: And it was also a problem, because I had to act the other character a little bit... The stage of the performance was very small, like a prison cell, but also a kind of universe, which had everything that is needed. For example, we got coffee, we got pizza, we understood that there was a cat somewhere. There was also a drawing – a childish drawing on the wall, which opened the perspective of a dream – dream home, dream place, and so on. But I have a question for you – how do you think this work speaks about inequality?

Pettifer: Well in the sense of equality, the character is a kind of paradox, because this type of character senses inequality – a victim in a way – but then also creates inequality with its politics.

Jašinskaitė: What do you mean?

Pettifer: Like with the racism, and the ‘refugee politics’.  But it’s a perfect contradiction, or paradox – like someone would take a political position against refugees, but then if someone turned up on their doorstop, they would absolutely and without question, let them in and give them soup and shelter, etc. 

Jašinskaitė: But I think that’s a paradox of Eastern Europe!

Pettifer: Can be also, yes. I mean this character is like, er, a real figure of the paradox of nationalism that’s happening in different countries of Eastern Europe. And it’s difficult to watch because the character really cares – it’s not absence of love that makes the character aggressive, either politically or in behaviour, something more like a need for continuity or a feeling that something that will be taken away. A feeling of abandonment – to put it in psychological terms, a little bit like what was in the show. 

 Photo: Dina Karadžić

Jašinskaitė: Why do you say it’s abandonment?

Pettifer: I just speculate here.

Jašinskaitė: It’s a very interesting point that you make, and I think it points out a very difficult problem or idea. So if you could elaborate?

Pettifer: This is the best psychological explanation that I can come up with, but it’s a bit different to what is in the show –

Jašinskaitė: The text concerning black pedagogy was from Alice Miller's book For your own good.

Pettifer: Right. What I understood – I don’t know if you understood it in the same way – we were watching the results of this black pedagogy theory being applied, or possibly not being applied, during childhood development. So we had this delinquent character, whose development had somehow gone wrong in childhood, he spent time in jail and now had this kind of crisis. And – I use the word ‘abandonment’ but it can be that there is some other psychological explanation why he needs to be aggressive towards refugees, Jews, something like this, whilst also being super-fragile about the cat. When you are trying to ‘defend a culture’, the fear is that the culture will disappear, and you will be a alone – I think this is subconscious fear among white men – that my community, from where I draw my power and status, is simply vanishing, and I will be alone, perhaps alone with only my self-hate. So fear of abandonment would be something that happens during childhood. But that is really my explanation for white supremacy or anti-Semitism or other types of racial or sexual angst, there is not necessarily evidence for it in the text of The Wall.

Jašinskaitė: It doesn’t happen in the text, but what you say makes a lot of sense for me. But I wanted to add something. I think, actually it’s also a problem of a patriarchal world where the man feels he has to be responsible and take care about everything, and he doesn’t have enough tools. And I think I already mentioned, for me the most important thing in equality is culture and education. I think that people like this character are dealing with a world that they were not prepared for during childhood, and it happened because we had a completely different system for 50 years, and now we live in the world that nobody imagined. It’s a very huge difference from the life that we were having before.

Pettifer: Here you are speaking about some common Eastern European experience?

Jašinskaitė: Yes. You talk about fear of abandonment, and I don’t know exactly about that, but I know that nationalism and anti-refugee things often happen because of fear. But to deal with fear, you have to have culture and education. If you know things, it’s much easier to find arguments that your world, your country, your house won’t collapse if you open the door. However, in this performance there is a moment where there is a fear of opening the door for the neighbours, and that’s also a paradoxical situation. Because the character is taking his neighbours as the others, who are I think having the same problems as he does, but acting slightly differently, aggressively. 

Pettifer: I guess I don’t exactly share your contention about culture and education creating equality. I think it does help with this – when you watch this character, there is a disconnection, as I was saying before – he hates refugees but cares for the cat. So I think education or perhaps culture can operate against the development of these contradictions. So, don’t love the cat in the personal life and then vote for a party that campaigns on killing cats, just to choose an extreme example. This position of ‘I love my community, I love people, I am very social, but I hate refugees’ obviously makes no sense. So these contradictions are very interesting to watch on-stage, and I guess in my more cynical and pessimistic moments, I see these contradictions also existing in cultural and intellectual spaces. That’s where it gets super-interesting for me.

Jašinskaitė: But I think this character is going through some kind of therapy, and I think that’s how theatre comes into the piece, and I think it’s a kind of propaganda for theatre, and we can see that it was helpful for this character to know himself.

Pettifer: I see some value in contact with this character for a theatre audience. There is a lot of talk about the disconnect between elites and the ‘everyman’, the average worker or person, and this manifesting in strange ways. Like, they take up nationalist ideas because of a feeling that they are not understood. ‘I do not have a house, and meanwhile they are giving houses to refugees’, things like this. So contact with this character can open this dialogue, in some way. It’s an old technique, but I think it works.

Jašinskaitė: For me it could be a little bit too much, as long as it works, why not?

Pettifer: There is also a question of how it functions – if it’s a liberal theatre audience, having contact with this character who is just out of prison, your reaction can be a patronising of the character through empathy – ‘oh this poor guy, he doesn’t understand the pain that his nationalism causes’ etc, and this can make it worse I think. I don’t think that’s exactly what the outcome would be overall, and I think realising this character now is a good idea. The fact that the character is Polish seems significant – being a centre of nationalist thinking and white supremacist ideas, although he could also be Hungarian. Perhaps to a lesser extent, Czech Republic, Croatia, Lithuania or other Baltics, of in a slightly different way the former GDR or East Germany. This is a character whose contradictions are born out of these contexts. It’s a microcosm of this situation, and an effective one. I’m interested in where the piece goes next. I think it can work in the United Kingdom, and some other areas.

Jašinskaitė: You know what I like in this work? Sometimes works of art, especially theatre, become like high towers for princesses. Like artists may create art that may speak only to other artists or critics, or the audience that is actually very specific – the artists speak for artists in general. But this kind of work speaks for people. I don’t know about all over the world, but it could speak anywhere in Europe. Maybe some would recognise situations, others not, but on a human level, it functions. I think it’s one of the artworks where the artist is equal with the audience. The artist is part of a ‘folk’. I speak as a comrade! (Laughs). You will put that in, right?

Pettifer: Definitely! But this collapse of patriarchy thing is happening everywhere. It’s a slightly different situation in the Middle East, in North America, in different geographic areas and having different political manifestations, mostly populist or nationalist. So that’s something the play is talking about that is universal, I claim. But from what you’re saying I was particularly interested in the writing in this way. How, you know, this story of the writer Agnieszka Płoszajska had someone really visit to paint the wall in their apartment, and the scenario of the play is really based on things this guy said while he was painting the wall. And it feels like Płoszajska and Droszcz really listened to this guy, in a way that is not patronising and really tries to understand him. It’s critical still, but it’s not without empathy. And I think the result benefits from this attitude, even if I’m suspicious about this perspective, this possible scenario – perhaps liberal, possibly white artist, has some lower-middle class guy come and paint, and goes ‘oh, that’s really shocking to me’, and puts it in a play – that perspective can still be a bit elitist to me. 

Jašinskaitė: But I think that the reason for making this play was that they were not shocked at all that this guy was coming to your house. They took it because it was such a nice example, it had all of these dramaturgical tensions built-in, that were needed to speak about this problem. So for me this work, this universe that is staged, has some kind of genius way of gripping the problem. The performance was in a way very simple, but on the other hand really extraordinary way.

And now, I will eat the last gingerbread heart.

Pettifer: (laughing) Looks like some are more equal than others!

SMEJ SE PAJACO

written by  Zoran Ilić
Dramaturgy: Anita Čeko
Performers: Ana Takač, Martina Marušić, Zalmir Schauer

THE WALL

Performed by Damian Droszcz

Writing and Direction: Agnieszka Płoszajska

Sound production: Jędrzej Rochecki

Costumes: Matylda Hinc

Lights and Multimedia: Radosław Smużny, Robert Drygalski.
Technician: Krzysztof Kowalski