Michel Seuphor (with sets by Piet Mondrian) | The Ephemeral Is Eternal / 1982

complexity out of simplicity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michel Seuphor The Ephemeral Is Eternal, adapted by Donn B. Murphy and Judith Zilczer, sets by Piet Mondrian / performed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., June 25-27, 1982

 

With sets by Piet Mondrian and a script by Mondrian biographer Michel Seuphor, the first American production of The Ephemeral Is Eternal, billed as a "Dada play," could not help but intrigue museum-goers and devotees of drama alike. In the context of the De Stijl show at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, this production inherently raised the question why Mondrian, the genius of order, harmony, and color, the artist who declared himself as dedicated to communicating "the imminent order of nature," would have agreed to participate in an event connected with the Dadaists, who by 1926, the year in which this play was written, had long since established an international reputation for their embracement of the accidental and the absurd. How one answers that question and what this production reveals concerning Mondrian's attitudes towards Dadaism depend, I suggest, on how much one is able to separate text from context, critical perspective from expectation.

     For in many respects the play shares the Dadaist love of illogic and its relish of the gestures of shouting, screaming, and babbling. A conductor, dressed in white tails, undershorts, and bowler hat, leads his chosen chorus in groans and songs of gibberish; an actress, attended by Turkish and Japanese peddlers, soliloquizes nonsense in the style of Sarah Bernhardt; three robotized Black dancers glissade across the stage; and throughout, the play is filled with self-referential commentary, statements directed to the audience, and irrelevant intrusions that one has come to associate with Dadaist theater and its influence upon and assimilation into postmodern performance art. As with much of the most interesting of contemporary performance, The Ephemeral Is Eternal seems to be less a play—a dramatic statement frozen within dialogic plot—than it is a theater of process, an event occurring in real time and space.

     Yet, for all this, there is a certain tension at work in these "theatrical demonstrations"—as the subtitle describes the piece—that pulls one away from experiencing it as such. For all of its sense of happenstance, its seemingly clever inanities, and its automatic word associations, there is a stiltedness about the free-for-all that works against spontaneity, against accident and chance. There is always a tendency to dismiss such feelings by historicizing the work, by imagining that it was more shocking, more revelatory, more... whatever in its day than it is in our self-conscious and overly-literate age. Such historiographic apologies are generally dangerous, but in this case such a notion not only reveals a cultural myopia, but obscures the focus of the play. In its opposition between what it seems and what it is, The Ephemeral Is Eternal, I argue, is not only a fascinating work, but actually is a formalist, anti-Dadaist work of art.

     The play begins, in fact, with a metaphor that suggests the play will be a dialectic between the two: a woman enters from stage left and draws in pantomine a series of rounded figures—a circle, an ellipse, a disk; a male figure follows her, erasing her figures and replacing them with angular ones—a rectangle, a triangle, a square. Momentarily, these acts may appear as mere Dadaist gestures; but one soon perceives that for Seuphor the erasure has served less as a meaningless game between the old art and the new, between the irrational and the rational, between the ideal and the concrete—all polarities which in Seuphor's days were summed up in the female/male dichotomy. Later, during the soliloquy of a melodramatic actress, an offstage voice shouts: "No women on stage"; and soon thereafter the actress, dressed in green (a color detested by the members of De Stijl), is banned from the play. Throughout this piece, in fact, the sentimental, the mystical, the circle, the feminine, all, are opposed to the tree, the horizon, the straight line, the male, the art of Mondrian.

 

     For Seuphor, I suggest, this was less a sexist statement than it was a comment on the societal linkage of art to the feminine mystique. Like the De Stijl artists, the Futurists (Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis), and dozens of other visual and literary artists of the day, Seuphor clearly felt that society had connected art for too long with prettiness, sublimity, gentility—to all those things by which it defined woman. It was not woman Seuphor hated, but society's notion of art as it related to its sexual stereotypes. What he and others desired was tougher art, a sparer, leaner notion of the creative act, an artistic sensibility expressed in his play by a vaudeville-like ballet between two males, dressed black and white. With only a handkerchief for a prop, these two enact various human emotions—joy, frivolity, sexual arousal, anger, hate, pain, and forgiveness—by transforming the cloth into various shapes and patterns. It is this ability to shape and reshape nature with a single motif, with one simple focus, one realizes, that is at the heart of Mondrian's art and his sets for the play. And it is that complexity out of simplicity, it becomes clear, for which Seuphor is arguing.

     The Dadaist humor, the echolalia, pratfalls, and buffoonery are merely tools to point up the clarity and completeness of formal abstraction. Ultimately, The Ephemeral Is Eternal stands as a sort of formalist manifesto in Dadaist drag, a manifesto that uses a rival in an attempt to destroy an absolute enemy. To blow up the old art—the production ends with the detonation of a model of the theater itself—it uses the shock-value, the absurdity of Dadaism; but underneath lies a plea for order, for harmony, for an art that stands against the ephemeral in its eternality. Mondrian, one can surmise, comprehended that in participating in this Dada-like spectacle he was remaining true to his cause.

 

Washington, D.C., June 29, 1982

Reprinted from Washington Review, VIII (October-November 1982).

Reprinted from Green Integer Review (May 2009).