I am currently writing a narrative for a film that is intended to represent the fragmentary nature of lived experience. The central character will, at the beginning of the film, appear to be suffering from the continuous and repetitive stream of activities that fill her life (driven primarily by an unfulfilling job). The way in which I want to articulate the real source of her discontent, is through the perceived cohesion of her comings and goings. That is to say, it is as if everything makes too much sense; all of the time and space in which play, nonsense and distortion may be allowed to reveal the ‘productive cracks’ in the perceived monotony of her life, has been compressed almost to the point of not existing at all. These ‘productive cracks’ are important on a meta-level because they reveal the inadequacies of the reductive narratives that sustain the power structures within which we all reside. They are also important on an emotional level because they provide an individual with moments of stimulating disruption, moments of engagement in a disconnected system. These moments still arise, but they are not often able to be acknowledged as sites of resistance because the apprarently cohesive steamroller of productivity moves one’s consciousness on to the next chapter in the story.
In Jean Fisher’s article, an archetype with an anthropological history that spans multiple cultures is posited as a potential agent of change amidst a climate of impotence in the face of so much global commercial productivity. Trickster posseses the power to rebell not by negating systems of meaning, but by interogating and disrupting them. As Fisher says, that “which limits the self also provides the key to its liberation from constraining patterns of thought.” (Fisher, p66) By embodying ‘otherness’, trickster is able to manifest that which is unable to be articulated. And without a code of ethics and a productive bottom line to adhere to, trickster is able to jam the system by revealing the cracks the system itself produces.
I see trickster elements at play in the work of John Ward-Knox. Through subtle shifts, sleights of hand, he is able to ‘return shit to productive use’ (Fisher, p69). The objects he uses are not so obviously the waste produced by globalisation in an industrial sense. Nonetheless, they are often pieces of rubbish or just stuff that was lying around, the waste produced by one’s daily routine. The resulting sculptures toy with functionality, releasing a kind of beauty that was lying dormant within the original object. In this way, Ward-Knox reveals the cracks in our predetermined meanings for objects that liberates us (and the objects) from constraining patterns of thought, even if only temporarilly.
References
Jean Fisher, ‘Towards A Metaphysics Of Shit’, Documenta 11, Platform 5, The Catalog, Ostfildern/Ruit, 2002, pp63-70
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I see what you mean here with the example of John's work and even though he is quite the joker I'm not sure if I think he is much of a Trickster. One tactic of the trickster is to present a shocking aspect of something familiar and importanantly shift perception. The use of recycled or used materials has been used so much that unless it was used in a way to reveal something unfamiliar, (not just some kind of beauty) it does not shift any perception, well its nothing that we are already aware of. I think that in a sense, maybe not in such a literal way the word shit used in this essay refers to waste but could also be seen as a word that refers to a product with associations, connotations and pre-existing ideas. Which is why art relates so immediately to this.
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