The Neutron Hazer and the Mystic Gulf: Remembering Remembrance Day

The Neutron Hazer and the Mystic Gulf:
Remembering Remembrance Day

Performance by Johanna Householder with Carmen Householder-Pedari

(Published in Fuse Magazine, February, 2001.)

Several years ago, teaching at York University, I asked the students to observe a minute of silence on Remembrance Day. They went along with it, but seemed bemused, indifferent. Many thought WWII had something to do with the defeat of communism and the preservation of the “free world.” “We had to defeat Stalin”. “Hitler and Stalin were going to take over the world”. “The war was about beating Castro”. My father had served in the Second World War; theirs evidently did their time in the Cold War. That’s when I knew that henceforth I would have a Janus-like relationship to human time, looking backward to my parents’ generation, and forward to the generation of these students.

The Neutron Hazer

Walking into the old ballroom on the second floor of Dovercourt House, on a hot July afternoon, Sunday, and it’s filled with mist, smoke, fog, tinted now pink, now yellow as the sun filters through the red-gel-covered windows. The gelled windows made the light bulbs look green, an unexpected spectrum shift in the room Mist at dawn over the trenches in France; a foggy day in a televised Flanders Field; a ghost story. On a video monitor in the entranceway, the poppies, filmed in Johanna Householder’s garden, blow.

The Red Clothes

Strewn over the very large floor, pieces of red clothing. Johanna and her 13 year old daughter Carmen are wearing dresses made out of red clothes sewn together and trailing at odd angles. Carmen tells me in our interview that at the beginning of the piece, the clothes were stacked in piles. She and her mother took chokecherry (because red) branches and poked the clothes around, “as if we were looking for something under the piles, things that could have been left by loved ones who had died. By wearing the red clothes, we were making them part of ourselves.” From time to time, Carmen and Johanna pick up clothes from the floor, go over to a sewing machine, and sew them on to each other’s costumes. Walt Disney’s Cinderella is playing on a small old-fashioned TV set on a table. The movies Johanna watched as a child, she watched with her child, when Carmen was 3 and 4. The little animals, Cinderella’s familiars, sew her dress.

The War Movies

On small monitors on each of six window sills are playing, silently: The 49th Parallel, Sands of Iwojima, 12 O’Clock High, Back to Bataan, Guadalcanal Diary, Battleground. On the counter at the bar, on another old TV, Last Year at Marienbad, the ur-memory film, cause of Johanna’s “conversion to art” experience when she herself was 13, and subject of and inspiration for a previous mother and daughter performance. In each of the war movies, the son of an officer or war hero is brought in and has to live up to the heroic father or father figure. Watching the movies, Householder became interested in how experience, mediated by popular culture, is transmitted from one generation to the next. And the next.

The Dialogue

Johanna and Carmen sit on two curved banquettes, red plush parentheses. On a small table, two walkmans and tapes containing the soundtrack from the scenes in the war movies when the older man convinces the younger to fight, or to match his heroic deeds. The two women are simultaneously listening to the dialogue (which we can’t hear) and speaking it. Second wave feminism has perhaps had no greater influence in a single genre than that of performance art; indeed, Householder herself, through her work with The Clichettes, helped to define a movement and influence a generation (or two). Performance suited feminists because of it’s unreproducibility, it’s stubborn refusal or even inability to become part of the circulating capital of the patriarchy/art world; because it allowed the female artist to be both subject and object, to return the gaze; and simply because it gave women and women’s issues voice and visibility. Something else is happening here, though. It is the speaking women who are giving voice to silenced men–men forgotten by my students on that November day. Johanna’s father, like mine, served in the war. During the last year’s of his life, he suffered from diabetes, and much of the time either slept or fell silent. As Johanna sat with him, with his silence, she imagined the cranial space of his memories. She became interested in how culture is passed on through fragments, an act of voyeurism and love.

Knitting

Between these dialogue exchanges, and the sewing of the red clothes, mother and daughter sit and knit, one with red, the other with purple yarn. Carmen: “We were taking strands of knowledge and knitting it into something. It was special because we did it together and we both worked equally hard. We were knitting together to make this bouquet of knowledge, love and meaning. I liked doing that part of the piece. It was like when she taught me how to use the sewing machine, except better because it was something we did by hand.”

The Mystic Gulf

In theatrical performance, there is an un-crossable space between the spectator and the performer. Like one-point perspective “a visible and easily located point of view provides the spectator with a stable point upon which to turn on the machinery of projection, identification and…objectification.” (1) In Remembrance Day, tables and chairs are placed throughout the performance area. The viewpoint of the spectator is unfixed, ambiguous. Audience members stand against the wall, or sit somewhat self-consciously, unsure if they are using chairs meant for performers. The self-consciousness typifies performers, spectators and thirteen year olds. It’s awkward, but useful. The real relationship between mother and daughter, played out in real time, during the performance, is unrehearsable, unreproducible, now subtext, now the drama to which Remembrance Day becomes subtext. According to Carmen, some of the red clothes were from Buy the Pound, some were their own. “I kept getting worried my mom would accidentally sew my clothes and through the whole piece I kept trying to tell her, ‘Don’t Sew my Clothes!”.

Generations

Johanna Householder’s performance art stitches a fine seam between Walt Disney and war, memory and hope, mother and daughter. Sitting with her beautifully eloquent dancer’s spine erect, she links the ghosts of the last century to the presence of her daughter’s future in this one. Johanna: “I’m exploring untheorized, undocumented kinaesthetic psycho-social territory.” Carmen: “It’s like a firework that goes off and you think it’s the end and then another little one goes off, that’s how performance makes me feel. There’s always something there that isn’t answered. It’s like nothing else. I hope my daughter gets the privilege to do it with me some day.”
__________________________

Peggy Phelan, Unmarked, the Politics of Performance, Routledge, 1993, p. 163