A DAY THAT HAS EVERYTHING

This obscurity, this uncanny character is the essence of A Day That Has Everything – as if the video performance aims at voicing what is principally ambiguous (to us). And what is principally ambiguous (to us) – the feeling of not knowing where we are – is namely time. Time is in us, yet we are in time, as Vassil Levski wrote in a letter to Panayot Hitov in 1871 – „Time is in us and we are in time; it changes us and we change it.“ (in this case, the Apostle of Freedom proved an out- standing philosopher). It is truly so: time is dialectical. It passes through us, yet we also pass through it. Time

structure us, yet we also structure time. We change it, yet it also changes us. If so, this change of time, this turn of time, whether a revolution or an uprising of time – is it not a different time? Time’s double?

So, the main subject, the principal problem of A Day That Has Everything is the following one: how does time pass? What is the figure of time? Can we re- flect on time as lack of events or can we understand it solely as a flow of indiscernible micro-events or micro-passages? This time of semi-solidification, a time without attributes, this vague time is obviously, in Ani’s view, the time of pleasure. A number of her works – from S to Total Damage and the installation In-Out – revolve around the idea of boundless pleas- ure, of infantile pleasure as well. She is interested in the infantile, “regressive” states, in the pleasure prior to its codification and channeling by institutionalised cultural, social and political regimes. Therefore, play, joy and pleasure come to be the main subjects in A Day That Has Everything. Yet, play has a dark side to it, play teems with doubles.

The dark side of time and the cinematic unconscious

The problem of time is a problem of subjectivity: we witness a subjective form devoid of content. What Ani says about theatre is perfectly valid for the modern idea of subjectivity – subjectivity is determined by the act. If there is no act, what then is the subject? What are we? In modern literature – from Goncharov’s Oblomov, through Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, to Joyce’s Ulysses and Perec’s Things – we find excep- tional examples of the way to make a description of or a story about what is not happening, of the nothing that (does not) happen.

Ani’s story shows the basic conflict between our de- sire to exist in a certain time of pleasure and the im- possibility of fully remaining in it. At this point, we come across a media effect of the Unheimlich: the split or the duality affects the media fabric itself, i.e. the media’s formal parameters. It is the source of the dif- ficulty in defining “what this is”. Beyond the personal presence, there is also an impersonal presence: that of the medium. There is a memory of the medium.

In his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin claims that cinema lends expression to the optical uncon- scious of reality (“It is through the camera that we

first discover the optical unconscious…” – the famous quote that will later become the title of a capital study on art, The Optical Unconscious by Rosalind Krauss). In A Day That Has Everything, we are confronted with the optical unconscious, but in a different form – the cinematic unconscious: it works through the very form of the unconscious; it is the form of the medium itself. We face a case of a media Unheimlich: the medium of A Day… seeks itself, but in doing so it splits itself, it evades coinciding with itself.

Trans-subjectivity and trans-temporality

In A Day That Has Everything, we come across a form of trans, not in the sense of transgressing gender or other sociocultural codification, but in the more general sense of trans-subjectivity. We do not know who is who; the personages constantly shift their roles, both via their formal positions and their masks. We are thus confronted with a sort of fluid subjectivity. (However, notice the following: the dog Diana is al- ways “herself ”.) Evidently, the roles are not fixed; this fact relates to the very structure of play which is a re- versible phenomenon – everyone can be everyone else, yet at the same time everyone possesses even a momentous subjectivity. The personages of A Day… are seemingly always on the verge of playing their part and, having barely crossed the threshold of identity, they once again step out into the obscure “outside”. They exhibit a constantly fluctuating, pulsating iden- tity, corresponding to the event structure of the film or the video performance. Here, the events flicker, they resemble will-o’-the-wisps. At any given moment, something is about to happen, it may happen any mo- ment, or it may have just happened, but in fact it does not happen: the event reverses itself, goes back and be- comes something else. It is not so much about resist- ance to conflict (perhaps this is not the most precise

term), but about resistance to climax, to the peak point of the event. The situation always remains on the same level where the event is reversible; the time of A Day… is flexible. It can go back, reverse itself – it is therefore reversible.

By all means, cinema has invented a technique for organising, accelerating, retarding and even reversing time: montage. Montage produces a scission similar to the one that Deleuze and Guattari describe as scission of chaos. We make out of chaos a world via scissions. In A Day…, montage is a form of (super)control. On other occasions, I have stated that the modern artist is a kind of a control freak: he insists on maintaining a complete monopoly over the interpretation of his work – precisely the opposite of the idea of limitless semiosis. A Day… attempts to rework this tension di- alectically – a characteristic trait in the work of the Metheor collective in general.

Ani talks about boundless pleasure, about time without attributes or events, which makes things change; at the same time, the video performance is obviously based on a formative power. The process of pleasure-production is developed and mobilised. Such is the dialectics of time and pleasure: it is pro- bably the source of the dual nature of time and the feel- ing of Unheimlich towards the work itself. A rhythm of repetitions and differences: now it is the same, now it is not the same. In the part “The Dark Side of Things” – the gothic chapter – the doubles of things suddenly come to light and what follows is a synthesis of the two parts; it suddenly turns out that the whole is subject to structural zeal and formative potential. The dou- bles meet and pass by one another, coming together in an ever disassembling and reassembling puzzle – the world of A Day That Has Everything.

Pleasure, act and resistance of time

Doubtless, this is a critique of the convention of act- ing – a search that defines the Metheor collective’s en- gagement with theatre. We could propose an attempt at reversing the Aristotelian legacy model of the plot that determined the structure of the narrative for two millennia – dominant to this day in Hollywood cine- ma – through its own means. The four parts that make up A Day… could be described in Aristotle’s terms as: things as they are; things as they could be; things as they are, but not quite – the very modality of fiction; and finally – things as they should be. In A Day…, Ani shows how reality is constructed by fiction, and more- over – that reality itself is a fictional construct. At the same time, fiction displays an active character. Fiction even has the potentiality to “cut through” reality and reverse it.