Serious Fun

Despite really enjoying Elizabeth Grosz’s Chaos, Territory, Art, this is a difficult blog to compose for some reason. My best guess is that the collection of terms Grosz uses like art, music, dance, pleasure, vibration, territory, chaos, all seem straightforward upon first glance. However, the way she puts these elements together, or rather the way they have put themselves together, all intertwining, deriving for and from one another, makes it difficult to distinguish where one ends and the other begins. When one concept is mentioned, the others are not far behind. I think the biggest challenge of this work is to be open to a re-envisioning.

Grosz’s concepts of pleasurable interaction between the senses, the natural and the artistic remind me of The Blue Man Group.

They don't want to work. They just want to bang on the drum all day.

The Blue Man Group is composed of artists who simultaneously create that which is visible and audible while staying true to the suggestion that all art is derived from vibration and pleasure. The group’s performances imitate elements of Grosz’s theories on art. Beginning with their appearance: they consistently paint their bodies a bright blue which conveniently mimics the colorful display birds take on as they begin their courting ritual. Grosz suggests that the birdsong, like other artistic endeavors, does not result from natural selection or necessity but from a desire to express an “elaboration of the most primitive fragments of an ancient animal prehistory” (35). And like the birdsong, the Blue Man Group’s creation of music is due to an impulse to manifest that which is bodily, pleasurable and desirable.

The group makes a point to not respond through speech when they meet their audience members. They really do seem to take on a primal attitude, approaching with wide inquisitive eyes, autograph by smudging paint on their fans and respond to “new” technologies by staring at it if they were unfamiliar with what cell phones or other devices can do. The group often performs neon paint drumming, where the vibrations from making music results in the spray of paint which covers the group, their instruments and often, the audience. The art is framed chaos which, as it is being produced, is uncontrollable. The group celebrates the fact that they have no idea how their performances will turn out. The pleasure derived through the spontaneous vibrations of these artistic events resembles Grosz’s statement that “Art proper, in other words, emerges when sensation can detach itself and gain an autonomy from its creator and its perceiver, when something of the chaos from which it is drawn can breathe and have a life of its own” (7). The audience members can perceive the creation of art by watching and hearing the vibrations manifest themselves through the sprays of paint. I’m having a hard time articulating, but the way the Blue Man Group makes the audible visible recalls for me the way Grosz discusses the manifestation of art outside of oneself. The primal, animalistic pleasure the audience feels through music is made visible to them through another medium. The artistic purpose is to intensify the feelings, “to resonate and become more than itself” (4) and that art “is the most vital and direct form of impact on and through the body, the generation of vibratory waves, rhythms, that traverse the body and make of the body a link with forces it cannot otherwise perceive and act upon” (23). So the Blue Man Group does more than just create its tag line “Serious Fun”; instead, the art they produce allows for one to perceive their being and becoming.