Telepathic Improvisation (2017) by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz (Boudry/Lorenz)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Telepathic Improvisation (2017) by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz (Boudry/Lorenz) Farrah O’Shea TELEPATHIC IMPROVISATION (2017). By Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz (Boudry/Lorenz). Witch Hunt, Hammer Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. October 22, 2021. Entering a small, unlit room with black walls and carpet, audience members hovered around the edges of a short black stage at the Hammer Museum to view the film installation, Telepathic Improvisation (2017) by artist duo Boudry/Lorenz, known for installations that reimagine normative approaches to historical narratives and spectatorship. With its own dimly lit stage, the world of the film mimics the dark walls and floors of the installation space, thinning the boundary between the audience and the film and setting the stage for an experiment in telepathy. To begin the film, which is looped, a performer (Marwa Arsanios) dressed in a vermilion jumpsuit walks to the center of the stage, which is bare and set to look like the backstage of a production. Arsanios—an artist, filmmaker, and researcher whose work concerns gender relations, collectivism, urbanism, and industrialization—is framed by a line of downstage lights, a guitar, and a white motorized unit. Looking into the camera, she addresses the installation’s audience: “You are attempting inter-group, or interstellar telepathic transmission, following the 1974 score, Telepathic Improvisation by Pauline Oliveros.” While she is speaking, performance artist MPA, whose work explores how the social and the political impact the body; Ginger Brooks Takahashi, who creates collaborative project-based feminist and queer works; and Werner Hirsch, a freelance artist, dancer, and drag performer (sometimes also known as Prince Greenhorn or Antonia Baehr) walk on set, dressed in shades of red and white, with Arsanios and MPA in jumpsuits. Audience members are instructed to close their eyes and telepathically send actions to the performers, which include the four human beings as well as the guitar, lights, and motorized units. When the performers receive the action, they enact it. To illustrate that actions are being sent to and received by nonhuman subjects, onscreen stage lights flicker [End Page 370] as though receiving messages, and two motorized platforms suggest independence, at one point pushing a performer onto the screen. As audience members recognize the action they sent onstage, they are to raise an arm, completing the exchange. With this choreography, present-day audience members interact with performers filmed five years ago, activating the installation through a reification of the film’s promise of telepathic exchange. Click for larger view View full resolution Witch Hunt, installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, October 10, 2021–January 9, 2022: Marwa Arsanios, Werner Hirsch, MPA, and Ginger Brooks Takahashi in Telepathic Improvisation (2017). (Photo: Jeff McClane.) On several occasions during the piece’s run at the Hammer, although not when I attended, MPA appeared in person wearing a red jumpsuit and matching face mask. This visual reference to the COVID-19 pandemic contemporized the film, further connecting it to the installation audience. Moving around, sitting, or lying on a short lighted stage, MPA interacted with the film and a new sound-scape written by Rashad Becker for the Hammer installation. In MPA’s absence, the stage was both a reminder of past performances and those yet to happen. Somehow incomplete, the stage served to connect to the visual, darkened aesthetic of the film while suggesting a reality that was partial and not yet realized. Thus telepathy was construed as an exercise that invites engagement with the past meant to inspire action in the future. The stasis of the present moment, indicated by the vacant, darkened stage, served as a call to action, a reminder of political work yet to be done. In the 1974 performance score from which Telepathic Improvisation takes its name and cue, the late composer/performer Pauline Oliveros deconstructs the boundaries between audience and performer. Through the collective practice of group listening, what she calls “deep listening,” a practice meant to connect its participants to one another and the environment, Oliveros asks the audience to imagine sounds and manifest them as part of a group. Boudry/Lorenz take this practice a step further, engaging multiple dimensions by inviting an intergroup, interstellar...