Cara Tolmie: Chinese Whispers

‘Postulated Space’

The echoes in the piece are not of Monk but rather of Beckett. With its minimalist theatricality, repetition and fixed circularity, The End brings to mind his short theatrical work Footfalls (1975), in which a woman paces up and down – ‘revolving her revolves’, as Beckett writes in the stage notes – within strictly confined coordinates while musing on her alienation.¹¹ In response to an accusation of difficulty Beckett replied, ‘I’m not overly concerned with intelligibility, I want the piece to work on the nerves of the audience.’¹²

 The End Is a Tumultuous Noise operates within similar terrain; while multiple interpretations manifest themselves, the work resists reduction to psychoanalytical, political or theoretical analogies. It inhabits a third space in which its own logic is enough.For her performance Myriad Mouth Line at the Frieze Art Fair in 2011, Tolmie performed a series of short theatrical acts, or as she calls them, frames. Each frame acted to sequentially layer meaning whilst simultaneously frustrating homogenous interpretation. In the first frame she mapped out a space through the use of vocal techniques, once more walking within strictly choreographed coordinates. In frame two she came to a fixed microphone and performed abstract vocal gymnastics while standing with arms theatrically outstretched in a beseeching posture. For the third frame she sat in a revolving chair, spinning while intoning a knowingly overblown poem:

‘You draw your gaze from the vaults of the dead acts.’

In frame four she explored the space mapped in frame one, this time moving around it in an awkward contorted shuffle and stopping to scream, as she says, ‘like an industrial machine’,¹³at each of the four corners. In the final frame she returned to the swivel chair and in the form of a short lecture deconstructed what each part of the performance ‘meant for her’. In this case the work does bring to mind Monk’s statement that: ‘I work in between the cracks, where the voice starts dancing, where the body starts singing, where theatre becomes cinema.’¹⁴ Tolmie maintains that each frame ‘re-describes everything that has come before it using a slightly different mode of language and consequently contributing another layer to the narrative and history of this postulated space.’¹⁵There is a constant tension between a demand to suspend disbelief, following Tolmie’s logic, and succumbing to the techniques of alienation.

Moreover, the idea of creating a temporary ‘postulated’ space through the voice within the confines of a commercial art fair is a tactic of denial and disavowal. Tolmie’s performance took place outside at the very edge of the fair, where a path through Regent’s Park passes close to the ticket office. This meant that casual passersby could easily view it. Was it acting as advertisement, rebuttal, supplement? How are we to read this ‘postulated space’? In what way does the context mediate its meaning?

Faith

The artist’s key tropes (looping, translation, layering) were also present on a grander scale for her solo show ‘Read Thou Art, and Read Thou Shalt Remain’ at Dundee Contemporary Arts in May 2011. The title of the show is a play on the Reformation debate on transubstantiation in which one priest famously refuted the notion by saying ‘bread thou art, and bread thou shalt remain’. Tolmie’s work is made in the spirit of a kind of secular faith, in that it seeks a third space outside the divide of knowing or not knowing. In this sense the reference to the Reformation – an attempt to prohibit faith from becoming dogmatic and corrupt – may act as a critique for the ‘doctrines’ surrounding the making and theorising of contemporary art.

The show grew out of the desert. Film footage shot from a car travelling through Death Valley in the US, shown on continuous loop, is the first work encountered. This is then reinterpreted in the second piece, a framed, printed list of actions ([fence]post, foreground, post, camera zooms in, etc.) – and then as a framed graphic representation and finally as a 21-minute film or as Tolmie has it, ‘mini-opera’. The works examine how knowledge changes through representation – as if mediated through a game of Chinese whispers. Indeed, in Tolmie’s work, a process or game whereby meaning is constantly shifting through (mis)representation or deliberate guile, this might be as good a description to hang on it as we might find.

In his catalogue essay for the exhibition ‘For the Blind Man in the Dark Room Looking for the Black Cat that Isn’t There’ (2009), the show’s curator Anthony Huberman asks: ‘Can one imagine a new epistemological map that reaches outside and beyond the familiar north/south poles of knowing and not knowing?’ Tolmie’s work seeks this space;on that is also outside of the bind created by postmodernism. It seeks to frustrate absolute systems of meaning, and – it must be acknowledged – at significant risk of obscurantism, replaces them with, I believe, a call for a secular faith, ‘not faith in God, but faith as “an experience of fidelity to a demand that I hold to be true”’, a faith that structures life ‘be it politically or artistically’ and, indeed, that structures the artwork itself.¹⁶

Homepage image: Cara Tolmie, The End Is A Tumultuous Noise, 2010, performance.