true lies

For several years now the Vienna Chamber of Labour has been initiating artistic interventions at the Theater Akzent. In 2006 Helmut and Johanna Kandl designed the Iron Curtain, a combination of painting with a video projection; in 2011 they followed this with their mirror works for the foyer, a new arrangement of the display cases and two temporary, artistic vinyl banners, changed every five years, in the auditorium, with which they contrasted the opulent post-modern architecture of the theatre with a cost-cutting aesthetics of the precariat and the makeshift.

Now Moussa Kone, the Austrian artist with the Delphic name, comes to grips with the society of the spectacle. Without further ado, the contract and the draughtsman lead us onto the stage and into the audience. Kone has drawn two triptychs, a format he prizes. Originally ink drawings on paper, the pictures for the auditorium were reproduced as large-scale images on 3 x 9 metre banners. They can narrate a good deal simultaneously; the levels overlap. Here Kone investigates for the Theater Akzent the relationship between performer and text, and of actor to audience. He knows that the reading of a triptych always proceeds from the centre, and he exchanged the centre panel of each triptych with that of the other installed vis-à-vis so as to interleave the content of both.

Using his memorable method of ritually controlled hatching, Kone brings home the liaisons dangereuses that pit the prompt box, the spotlight, a faceless audience, a mirror and an iPhone in a mysterious black-and-white dialogue with each other.

The artist begins with Denis Diderot’s famous theory of theatre, expounded in the form of a dialogue in The Paradox of Acting. The reflections contained there on alienation inspired modern dramatists such as Bertolt Brecht and his work as a director, epically or dialectically anchored in history.

Diderot contrasts the paradox of naturalness, which consists in achieving the feeling or impression of spontaneity and authenticity through imitation, that is, through cold strategy, with the paradox of emotion: only when the actor remains himself unmoved can he move others, for theatre is about not true feelings but the representation of feelings. In conclusion, Diderot points to the paradox of effect, which can be achieved only when it is not grimly striven after. The reflective actor should see his role as a mask and master it, for the imitation of feeling is more convincing than genuine feeling.

Kone translates Diderot’s dialogical method (his novel Rameau’s Nephew is also composed in the form of a philosophical dialogue) into images that throw light on the forms of discourse. He produces (visual) relationships between the actor and his text; the figure of the prompter represents the author and is meant to stand for authenticity in the broader sense; he looks from the box to the actor, and the actor in turn looks back at the prompter (the text). The centre drawing shows a quasi-neutral zoom of both. Role models, the social stage and the individual’s own conception of himself are the stuff of these drawings, which build on the ambivalence of appearance and reality. Performed reality becomes for the audience experienced reality.

The triptych along the right wall of the auditorium treats the relationship between the actor and the audience. The audience – we see it now from behind, its view directed on the stage, now from the point of view of the actor, who stands on the stage in a Hamlet-like pose – are a mass without identity. The pictures tell of anonymity, the formalism of rigid productions, the lies of the performer and the manipulation of the audience, of emotional distance and the gap that opens up between feeling and expression.

The prop of the mask appears in two of the three drawings. They leave open the connection of disguise, gaze and physiognomy from the philosophical, ethnological, sociological and art-historical points of view rather than restricting or defining it. Fantômas, the man of a thousand masks, might come to the minds of the theatre- goers, or the Grand Duke Rudolf of Gerolstein, who wandered through the ‘capital of modernity’ in the nineteenth century bestseller The Mysteries of Paris, or the Dark Knight Batman, or the super villains of James Bond films, the Phantom of the Opera or the characters of Edgar Wallace, who run through the genre from A to Z in countless variations.

The actor appears in the make-up mirror, photographing himself with a mobile phone. The modern form of self-promotion is the end of the narrative, but could also be the beginning. In his first solo exhibition, at the Charim Art Gallery in Vienna, Kone already took up the complex theme of the theatre. In these ink drawings on paper, which resemble the originals for the banners in the Theater Akzent, he treated the idea of the ‘fourth wall’, which describes the boundary in the theatre between the stage and the audience, between the staged and the real world. Kone looks behind this fourth wall of theatrical space, makes it permeable, and poses the question about the reality depicted in the drawn image.

‘As is well known, Diderot’s entire aesthetics rests on the equation of the theatrical scene and the painted tableau’, says Roland Barthes in ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, an essay from 1973. ‘The perfect play is a succession of images, that is, a gallery, an exhibition: the stage offers the audience as many real tableaux as there are favourable moments in the plot for the painter. The tableau (in painting, in the theatre, in literature) is an immediate, pure cut-out with clean edges, irreversible and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness, remains unnamed, while everything that it admits within its field is promoted into being, into the light, into focus.’

This sounds as if Barthes had been studying Kone’s drawings. Barthes proceeds from the assumption of the following similarity in the thought of Diderot, Eisenstein and Brecht: the search for that absolute moment in which present, past and future fuse into a magnificent sweep and everything absent appears present. ‘The true image of the past flits by’, says Walter Benjamin, ‘The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up in an instant of recognition, never to be seen again’. ¹ Which would bring us back to Moussa Kone, the draughtsman.

Text by Brigitte Huck for the Vienna Chamber of Labour Art Collection, 2013
(Translated from German by Jonathan Uhlaner)

¹ Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, in Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1-2, Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 1980, p.695. Often referred to as Theses on the Philosophy of History; literally On the Concept of History. Translation by J.U.