The Gods Of Overload Are Pounding Us Into Pancake People

: A review of Richard Foreman's The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (AKA Lumberjack Messiah)

by Joseph Nechvatal

Richard Foreman's ingenious play The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (Lumberjack Messiahs) is, of course, a slippery extravaganza about many many things; as is always the case with his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre productions. However this year’s theme is primarily slapstick rumination on the topic of inner annihilation in our age of electronic/telematic dispersion. Specifically, it examines the annihilation/obsolescence of an earlier form of complex and cryptic personal ontology based in slower/deeper processes of personal accumulation - now self-perceived through the techno-apparatus of the cybernetic circuit.

Less explicitly political than the anti-Bush production King Cowboy Rufus Rules The Universe, less transgressively onanistic than Paradise Hotel/Hotel Fuck, and less tragically Dionysian than Maria Del Bosco, self obsolescence here is theorized as cultural/political exhaustion while simultaneously yielding to technocratic control because the intractability of the body can no longer be central to our ontological being (our abstract notion of the self) due to the discontinuous aspect of digital/electronic transmission/dissolve/overload. In short, the gods have pounded us into fidgety “pancake people” (in Foreman's own words): thin, flat and superficial. Something Foreman does not find all bad. Or all good. Here flesh is no longer the grounds for ontology as the subject is licensed through a décadent extension and cybernetic post-flesh achieves ecstatic disembodiment within high technology.

All this matters completely as after this climactic extravaganza, Foreman plans to move away from the physical embodiment of the stage and into a more mixed media mode of creation. If true, we will no longer be able to stare deeply into the well-lit quivering membrane of a live actor’s eye from the distance of around ten feet. And we will no longer feel the actor’s gaze examining our eyes either. We will have the screen between. And so a reflection on the disappearance of physical embodiment into machined circumvention is indeed relevant - and great grounds for far-fetched burlesque. Thus with The Gods Are Pounding… we are invited to consider the slippery elocution between the fleshy embodiment of the stage with the actors physical presence bearing down on us (space remains primarily frontal in this piece) and electronic dis-embodied ontology. So Foreman’s work is not just being famously DaDa disingenuous while having the rigour of religious practice. Now it is an ambiguous corollary to the virtual reality net and it’s by now famous interface/dialectic between body and machine: the cyborg. Indeed while watching and listening to Foreman’s provocative postulates one cannot but help thinking too about the infomorphic words of Klossowski, Baudrillard, Haraway, Gibson, Ballard, Ascott and Dick. But the grounding visual clue this time for me was the painting reproduction on the left wall of the stage (a typical inebriated coo-coo-clock contraption/cosmos speckled with skulls, doves and mushrooms) that looked ever so much like a mid-career post-machinist piece by Francis Picabia. To be sure, painting seems to function here as the primary trope for that threatened complex personal ontology based in slower processes which Foreman is examining in that the unchanging canvas is a rich site of personal reflection as opposed to the flash and hum of the moving image screen.

Along those lines, Charlotta Mohlin splendidly performs the gyrating role of an auto-erotic and narcissistic wood nymph called Maud by looking and acting at times as if she had recently fallen out of a fairy painting by Henry Fusel. Particularly riveting was the scene in which she orgasmicly clicked away while straddling the black phallic chimney of the stage’s primary prop: a baguette-fed steam engine. This was a tasteful performance that brought to my mind Daniel Maclise’s painting The Disenchantment of Bottom; a depiction of a frisky fairy-ring of sprites dancing circuitously about a central omphalos toadstool.

On the other hand, a Bozoish lumberjack Dutch, amusingly performed by Jay Smith, often gazes pretentiously upwards into hyperreality as he postulates the bottomless contemporary dilemma of ontologies adrift. And I think it is permissible to say that his evident state of wary pining is emblematic of consciousness swept up into a vast infospace of omnipresent communications as he attempts to orient himself in the span of expanded/connected computer-space. His lumbering gaze upwards expresses a person lost in an inner simulacrum so abstract, so large, so indescribable, and so pregnant with the darkness of infinite but smooth space that it frightens him and thus returns him to a state of tentative and bumbling restlessness.

The other flamboyant lumberjack named Frenchy, played by T. Ryder Smith, seems less pensive about our technologically hallucinogenic culture. Frenchy is quite formidable in his versatile span, yet he rarely pauses to postulate perversely. Rather he functions swiftly along the lines of a phantasmagorical dream worthy of Raymond Roussel. This is particularly true towards the sprightly honey-laced finale. For him it appears a well worn cliché by now that we live in the era of information overload.

If Foreman’s goal here was to express something “totally  metaphysical”, as he states in the program notes, he has at least produced something semi- metaphysical in so far as the play deals with self-memory and the intensity of love working together in making up an internal model of the self.

The play’s innermost undertaking, it seems to me, is in it’s addressing our being as a personalized megasymbol. We still are about what we select and value and love – only there is a lot more now and the speed of interaction is greater. The play’s value, besides offering the viewer a highly enjoyable fun time, is in its non-linear principle of intermingling micro-relations in an ongoing processes of macro-relations. Therefore it theorizes principles of transversality and excess within the personal obsessions of the individual. It theorizes principles of linkages, of connectivity, and of intersection which gives rise to theoretical production and creativity. May I just say that this personal production and creativity has the most urgent political/social ramifications in our media infected society.