Attempts at a Description: Rose English’s Plato’s Chair and the Hear Tell

Abstract

At a commercial gallery in London in 2019 I’m listening to audio recordings of Rose English’s 1980s performance Plato’s Chair, while a video of the show is projected on the wall ahead. The effect is of the performer describing what she is doing as she does it, the description displaced from one medium or occasion to another. Although, what she appears to be doing – for all her constant motion – is enacting a kind of hiatus while she ponders her next move, alone with herself, removed from her audience, thinking it all through and using words to do so. Description attempts to move things along. At play here, a certain – or uncertain – mimetics. Pleasures, for sure, for those who were there, or are placed there now. And a theatrical know-how – comedy, melodrama, opera-dance, and dressage all get a try-out – which is rooted in repertoire, but which ponders how to proceed. She is at once, she says, a comedian and philosopher. Which is to say also, ironist. In her book-length study of our ordinary acts of self-description, The Words of Selves (2000), Denise Riley locates in irony a ‘political astringency’ that corrodes ‘excessively vaunted’ categories, such as the human. But she finds irony also arising spontaneously within injury, compelled into intensities of self-contemplation. The injury, for instance, of one – as human as they come – who describes to me, on the phone, a tree outside her window. ‘I don’t know what to call it’. Description goes around.