Dialogues with Christopher Barnett on art, trauma, fugue, and on fascism

By Ruth Skilbeck

Christopher Barnett, self-exiled Australian poet, playwright and dramaturge, who since the early 1990s has run an experimental theatre laboratory, Le Dernier Spectateur, in Nantes, France,  is the subject of a documentary work-in-progress, These Heathen Dreams, that is being made by director Anne Tsoulis, based in Adelaide, with Georgia Wallace- Crabbe, producer, and in collaboration with French co-producer Les Films du Balibari.

I have had several interesting conversations with Christopher on facebook over the past two and a half years. Whilst a long exclusive interview between myself and Christopher, and Anne, is in preparation, I have been looking back at the conversations we have had, and am publishing these now as a foretaste of the longer new interview to come.

Facebook conversation with Christopher Barnett.    Posts: 7.26 22 May 2011 (Fr) -  2.30 am 23 May (Aust)

Christopher Barnett:  the contemporary western city represents today a form of pasolini’s ‘salo’.
the people are erased into a submission being witness to an ‘entertainment that is situated in their degradation – food, coroners, dancing, special police unit etc from the centre of necrophilia – california. a degradation that is intentionally addictive.
the self completely erased. no being. not being – non being- a waste product

C.B  little surprise then, that ‘resistance’ is transformed into western cities all over the world being uncontrollable. that state obliged to stem the violence by public order jurisprudence from the 18th century being reenacted. it is carnage on a degree that public ‘intellectuals’ remain silent because they are implicated by their neglect & contempt of the people. fools & town planners speak of cultural precints to attract tourism, money but what has happened is that these are places where primal violence is being enacted. the elites live in la la land – really they cannot imagine how deeply they are hated but because the violence alway falls within the nexus of being under submission it always veers from insurrection into forms of self destruction. this the elites can live with because in their minds they have already annihilated the people.

RS:  change can only come through transformation in human consciousness, what do you think of the work of IGP and Dieter Duhm eg his essay ‘Beyond 2012′ at  www.tamera.org

C.B  only class consciousness is capable of real & substantial transformation. the real object of cultural colonization is to destroy that consciousness almost at an atomic level. that is, with the communities i work with i try to take them from the – noise, agitation, disassociation & sometimes through mental collapse – back to elements of their singular symbolic orders – back to the tables & chairs & windows of their enfance, take them though trees, bushes, stones & sand – to the elements that were integrated into their beings when they were ‘innocent’. at the very least we have arrived at reducing the panic & agitation. fear has a way of poisoning everything & the more the economic situation collapses as it is inevitably doing there is an acceleration & consolidation of that fear & the work of artists like myself becomes more dense & more problematic because we are as much ‘victims’ of that crisis as the community. class consciousness is a mechanism as lukacs elucidated elsewhere & it is only through that mechanism that people can be liberated from fear

R.S  yes, fear – a consequence of trauma- which like loathing is perpetuated through those systems of oppression is the block that needs to be dissolved for release from oppression – internalised and externally projected…and it can be through intense devotion to healing and liberation… Would like to see more of your work

R.S  or just intense devotion to – what we do not yet know but which is becoming within as a change in consciousness of self

C.B  much of work which is passionate, precise & detailed is almost imperceptible & is often found in its traces

R.S fugal

C.B  but fugue in french has a different signification, a fleeing, an escape, a fuite – what i do is on the contrary is to confront people with remembering, not forgetting

R.S   in the musical meaning of fugue it is a dialogic form for many voices, each playing and replaying the theme, the cultural memory is traced in flight of transformation which may be a forgetting for one a remembering for another; or in oneself a remembering that comes from forgetting, transformation as amnesia of dissociation gives way through a shift in consciousness to remembering, associations. A process that happens in communication, dialogue.

R.S  through bearing witness artists allow buried memories – frozen by trauma- to come to self and cultural consciousness…

On Fascism

Christopher Barnett: within the site of struggle culture & creation has been central but outside the context of that struggle it’s role & the debates within it, incidental & peripheral.

the songs of that struggle stay in the hearts of the people even in this degraded epoch.

Ruth Skilbeck: repressive forces stifle creativity and free expression of the human spirit. Fascism is a cop out from the great struggle of  human life to grow and feel and keep humanity alive, that is expressed through creativity/art; fascism turns people into machines (which for some may seem an easier way out out).

First published in Arts Features International, Jan 7, 2013.

www.artsfeatures.com.