Page 97 - PIP

According to Plato, for any given object there is a name, a definition, a visual form and a sensation. But what would it mean if we had no name for it, no definition, no visual form, no sensation?
This appears to me, after these two years of research, as a pure object of representation, as the act of representing without any object to represent. Emptiness. There is no meaning, not even an abstraction that would say "it is what it is", a desperately empty thing. But it is at the same time free of responsibility, like the liberal market: it has nothing to stand for other than itself.
I had planned 'Der grüne Stuhl' as a way to re-open the knowledge we have of things – particularly of a green chair. And I wanted to do this in the physical and associative ways we developed in the last performance 'to allege'.
The most important and intriguing question was: what is this?
In looking for ways to address the known as if it was unknown, we finally chose two ways: a direct live experience and a mediated one.
By using a very common everyday object I dreamed that the enormousness of its references would allow it to drift away and start signifying something else on top of its references. But it never happens, the thing remains itself, desperately common. Or, rather, beautifully common.
"The words imply the absence of things, as well as desire implies the absence of its object... One and the other end up at
a dead end: one of communication and one of happiness."
- Tzvetan Todorov, Poétique de la Prose
Der Grüne Stuhl is the third performance I made with Pubic in Private. It was a piece on the side, a very simple gesture that would add to the presentation of 'to allege' an exploration of the nature of things, through as many ways as possible, leading of course to the impossibility to reach their essence.
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