Keren Cytter’s I Eat Pickles at Your Funeral
Admittedly, my interest in Keren Cytter’s performance for the Images Festival was piqued by the title: I Eat Pickles at Your Funeral. There was also something piquant about the fact that a show with such a title was being staged at the Al Green Theatre, in the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre at Bloor and Spadina (years of identifying as a cultural Jew have traced a direct semiotic line between pickles and Judaism).
I was previously only vaguely aware of Cytter’s work. An Israeli-born video artist, she deals mainly with performance and language. Her videos revel in a certain self-referential artificiality. Generally available for perusal on Vimeo, they run a gamut of subject matters, but the through-line is a specific kind of schizophrenic performance mode enacted by her actors: by turns ponderous, naturalistic, melodramatic, restrained, a whole chorus of competing voices and moods contained within each individual. This rhymes with her script’s tendency to call bullshit on itself, to break any semblance of a continuous narrative by having it announce its intentions and mechanisms in as loud a voice as possible.
It doesn’t always work. Especially in her earlier videos, this modus operandi seems tricksy and self-indulgent. It wears especially thin in aggregation; the more videos you watch, the more aware of her postmodern flourishes you become, the less they surprise you, the more you begin to wonder if that’s the only trick Cytter’s got up her sleeve. At its worst, it’s like a bad comedy show whose jokes you can spot coming a mile away.
When it does work, however, it comes off like a magic eye picture: Cytter is very conscious of showing you all the messy incongruent patterns, but when they’re brought into just the right focus, the superficial reality of her videos melts away to reveal an supernatural depth. In The Milkman or Video Art Manual, the mechanisms of the videos are worn, as always, quite visibly. But the self-referentiality is woven so intricately into the texts and performances that it has a paradoxical effect: the meta-commentary doesn’t read as an interruption. It becomes a seamless part of the narrative fabric, reality and meta-reality suddenly indistinguishable.
Given the opportunity to work with theatre, Cytter doesn’t change her game plan. I Eat Pickles at Your Funeral opens with a bare stage and a few props: a guitar, a bag full of wireless mics, a mirror on the floor, four chairs. One by one, characters enter and sit, spout seeming nonsense, amble on and off stage without apparent motivation. Meaning accrues through implication rather than any kind of character interaction: David cheated on Susanna with Lisa (or was it the other way around?); Fabian tries to fill the void left behind by Ariel; they’re all stuck together at sleepy, lispy Anke’s house, up in the Alps. There is a back projection of subtitled videos; the subtitles are displayed backwards, and all of them are eventually spoken onstage. The actors occasionally mirror the projected video images. They continually break character and comment on what each other are doing.
There was a general feeling of bewilderment as everyone left the theatre. Certainly I have no idea how to process 40 minutes of a narrative that starts nowhere and goes nowhere. Among the better parts of the performance was the pacing: the actors kept up a demanding rhythm, constantly striding to and fro, delivering lines in rapid-fire succession. I thought repeatedly of Ryan Trecartin, another video artist whose dizzily paced work plays heavily on language. Trecartin’s work is urgently relevant because the speed and vocabulary of its language mirrors (and tries to anticipate) emergent youth and internet culture and its concomitant culture of exploitation; Cytter’s broken, jittery script references only itself, leaving me to wonder not only whether there’s any there there, but why I should be compelled to care in the first place.
The actors tumble on and off stage, announce their bewilderment at each others’ performances, but no fourth wall is broken. On the contrary, it’s bricked up and cemented over. All this inward-spiraling self-allusion only closes the audience off from what’s going on onstage. What seems an expansive gesture — letting the viewer in on the game — in the closed narrative circuit of her videos fails when translated into theatre. The performers are making constant references to their performance, but to what end? Ironically, expository commentary on artificiality doesn’t yield any critical insight, only more artificiality. Cytter doesn’t seem to understand how a theatrical context works. Her script is already fragmented, her set is already bare-bones. All the super- and subtextual commentary has already been shouted as soon as the first actor walks on stage. I Eat Pickles at Your Funeral is a tale told by a very intelligent artist; nonetheless, it is still full of sound and fury, and in all its self-signifying efforts, signifies nothing.
I Eat Pickles at Your Funeral will be performed again tonight at the Al Green Theatre, 7 pm.
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Sholem Krishtalka is the Toronto Standard’s art critic.
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