Originating from the avant-garde's attempt to supplant the structural limitations of perspective which ‘bound the spectator to a single point of view’,Footnote ¹ installations emerged during the 1960s and the 1970s as critiques of the pure, self-referential modernist work of art. Installation redefines the work of art as an open multi- or supra-sensorial system which imposes a consciousness of the artistic and ideological contexts in which the work occurred.Footnote ² It is a hybrid, impure genre which criticizes conventional categorizations by the radical reconsideration of perceptual conditions and the blurring of the old distinction between arts of space and arts of time as introduced by the German author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Laocoon (1766). Being time- and site-specific, installation art is a situation that virtually or literally includes spectators by engaging them in an active perception of the three-dimensional space and, consequently, of everyday life. What is central to installation art is essentially the presentment of indefinite duration. It is an intense experience for the viewer that implies temporality as it persists in time. Introduced as a visual-arts term by the minimalist artist Dan Flavin in the late 1960s, installation art can be considered as a counternarrative to the modernist art theory based on the experience of instantaneousness since at every moment the modernist work of art itself is wholly present.Footnote ³

Trained in visual arts, architecture and theatre, the Belgian artist Kris Verdonck (born 1974) integrates that modernist debate about temporality into art. Since his early projects he has situated his work in the grey area between the arts as a transgression of the generic boundaries of performance and installation art. In Dancer#1 (2003) a grinding disc suspended in space by cables performs a dance and burns itself out because of the excess of energy it receives,Footnote ⁴ and in the project In (2003) spectators revolve around an aquarium observing an immersed performer while hearing his breathing and heartbeat amplified through speakers.Footnote ⁵ As a theatre-maker and visual artist, Verdonck has conceived and directed a wide variety of projects for theatres, museums and public spaces. He often proposes combinations and variations on the same theme or on the same form, like the video projections on a water surface in a large container in Syncope 1 and Syncope 2 (2010).Footnote ⁶ Verdonck uses sophisticated technological devices in order to blur binary distinctions such as time- and space-art, inanimate and animate figures, ephemeral and static elements, immateriality and materiality. I want to suggest the term ‘performative installations’ as a common denominator for his interdisciplinary projects. Appropriated from the visual arts, the term characterizes those situations where the event aspect (the here and now moment) is, in art historian Angelika Nollert's terms, ‘linked to the materiality of the installation in the sense of simultaneousness of action and experience’.Footnote ⁷ Developed out of a specific yet complex spatiotemporal condition, the performative installations redefine both the status of the artist and the place of the spectator in order to ‘juxtapose different levels of presence, temporality, space and experience’.Footnote ⁸

Here I will focus on End, which was conceived for a large theatre space and premiered on 9 May 2008 at the Kaaitheater in Brussels as part of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Kris Verdonck provided the concept and mise en scène and Marianne van Kerkhoven shaped the dramaturgy of the performance. More specifically I want to analyse End as an echo of the Futurists’ performance strategies prefiguring a broadening of the formal aesthetic boundaries of performance art. The Futurists attempted to achieve this by blurring the distinctions between spatial and temporal arts and were heavily influenced by French philosopher Henri Bergson's theory of time.Footnote ⁹

End shows the possible final stages of a human society in ten scenes.Footnote ¹⁰ The stage landscape is covered with ash-like detritus, a ‘snow’ composed of small pieces of very thin plastic which flutters continuously downwards like a reminder of the nuclear fallout of Hiroshima, or pollution. Upstage, a panorama of ominous clouds is projected in black and white, filling the entire back wall. From time to time, without apparent reason, the image freezes for a few seconds, then jerks before continuing again. Unlike his previous project for a large theatre space, I/II/III/IIII (2007), which consisted of four consecutive, highly choreographed, scenes with female dancers suspended like marionettes in the air (a solo, a duet, a trio and a pas de quatre), End is based on ten simultaneous tableaux which are linked with the monologue of the Messenger: the witness who sees it all happen and who is placed in a cage mounted on wheels which crosses the stage. The Messenger's textual materials were gathered from the work of, among others, Alexander Kluge, Curzio Malaparte, W. G. Sebald and Lord Byron, but also, and especially, from reports found on the Internet and in newspapers.Footnote ¹¹ Throughout, the man in the glass cage recites various fictional and real documents in the form of daily radio news, even when he is invisible to the audience. It is a pastiche of storytelling about strange unnatural phenomena, tragic accidents, global catastrophes, descriptions of the use of napalm, and the radioactivity in Chernobyl, as well as testimonies of survivors.

While the Messenger, as ‘survivor’, talks, a series of strange Figures appear on stage ‘as autonomous entities’: machines and people or a combination of the two, all trapped in common yet unfamiliar situations.Footnote ¹² As dramaturge Marianne van Kerkhoven explains, the choice of the term ‘Figures’ was inspired by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's writings on the Muselmann. Footnote ¹³ They are a ‘limit figure of a special kind’ in Auschwitz, the walking dead who have ‘really seen with [their] own eyes’ and ‘in whom not only humanity and non-humanity, but also vegetative existence and relation, physiology and ethics, medicine and politics, and life and death continuously pass through each other’.Footnote ¹⁴

End's Figures ‘are not symbolic, exemplary or abstract characters’,Footnote ¹⁵ but rather concrete and functional presences concentrated in the act of doing, in a midway position between living creature and dead matter, human and machine.Footnote ¹⁶ The Figure who leads this merry-go-round and literally forces this (staged) world to revolve is Alexei Stakhanov, a 1930s Soviet hero who, in one single day, mined 120 kilos of coal. He was held up as a model to his compatriots in a campaign to increase productivity. Like Atlas, he bears the whole world and sets the mechanism in motion. Several other Figures also wander across the stage landscape. A Musel-woman moves like a cyborg from stage right to stage left, suspended from a harness attached to her hips. This hybrid, self-transforming being is based on the German author Alexander Kluge's story about a woman from Chernobyl who walks around in a radioactive fur coat. A Woman with a Body Bag enters stage right dragging the too-heavy dead body of a man, whom she must carry away from the catastrophe that has just occurred. Sometimes she stops to rest or to smoke a cigarette. A suspended Birdman attempts to cross the entire stage by moving his arms and legs. This Figure is inspired by a picture, taken on 9/11, of a man in a suit falling from one of the World Trade Center Towers.

Meanwhile, Ned Ludd, a weaver who in 1776 smashed the first industrial loom and whose followers were against the Industrial Revolution, literally falls from the sky. He is the only Figure to go against the flow of the linear movement. Moreover, three inanimate Figures cross the stage: a three-litre-capacity car engine suspended from cables as an ‘industrial witness’, a small flame and a cart with four loudspeakers and amplifiers as a reference to the cars mounted with loudspeakers which, during the Second World War, went through German cities to warn the population about incoming air raids.

All Figures go from one side of the stage to the other, all in the same direction in a linear repetitive movement that strengthens their presence: the progressive exhaustion of the bodies makes spectators more aware of their physicality and their vulnerability. There is no communication among the Figures. What we experience rather is a series of parallel unfolding events following specific rhythms of movement while avoiding any intersection. The absence of communication accentuates the feeling of the uncanny and reinforces, for the spectators, the sense of a devastated public space: all Figures seem to be messengers, the last surviving witnesses of the end of the world.

This is not the first time that Verdonck has taken the end of the world as material for his work. The combination of seven installations presented at the 2008 Avignon Festival under the title Variation IV were articulated around the idea of the Apocalypse and the planetary catastrophes. In Box (2005), spectators are blinded by extremely intense light that emerges out of a glass cube like the flash of a nuclear explosion, while actor Johan Leysen delivers, in German, Heiner Müller's apocalyptic Waste Shore and Landscape with Argonauts. In the dark space of Rain (2005), little drops of fire fall from the ceiling into water like fireflies falling from the sky. End is Verdonk's attempt to expand his major preoccupation with the end of the world within a regular theatre space. The spectator is shifted from a position of bodily engagement associated with the artist's earlier installations to a disembodied immersion associated with the frontal stage: in End we are engaged with the stage action virtually but not physically, as we are seated in rows and look at the stage.

As in his previous productions, Verdonck juxtaposes human beings and machines and creates ambiguous interrelationships on stage: objects seem to be anthropomorphized and able to move autonomously onstage, Figures are manipulated by invisible machines fighting to maintain their body control. The fusion of machine and human behaviour could draw parallels to the historical avant-garde and more specifically to the Futurist attempt to redefine the very essence of theatre by calling into question the power structures conveyed by the naturalistic stage and bourgeois theatre conventions.

In the early twentieth century, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of Futurism, advocated hard-edged movement that would have a ‘sharp rigidity’. In spite of his ignorance of dance forms and terminology, and his apparent distrust of movement alone to convey meaning, Marinetti attempted to reshape performing arts through the transfiguration of the human body. In 1916 he published his first manifesto exclusively dedicated to a Futurist acting style, Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation. He demanded ‘a non-psychological performance which emphasized the mechanical aspects of the human body’.Footnote ¹⁷ In order to achieve vitality in theatrical action the Futurists encouraged actors to imitate motors and their rhythms to create unrealistic body movement ‘as coldly as an engineer or a mechanic’. Only by running with greater speed or by walking slowly the ‘body-in-freedom’ could appear onstage and converge with the dynamism of the new modern metropolis. Moreover, Marinetti specified that the performer should dress anonymously, dehumanize his voice and face, and ‘gesticulate geometrically’.Footnote ¹⁸ He described a kind of ‘movement spectacle’, making use of an improvisatory structure in which the performer was also to make use of props, interact with other performers, and move to different parts of the room. In his 1917 Manifesto of Futurist Dance Marinetti returned once more to the cult of the machine: ‘One must imitate the movements of the machines with gestures, pay assiduous court to steering wheels, ordinary wheels, pistons, thereby preparing the fusion of man with the machine, to achieve the metallicity of the Futurist dance’.Footnote ¹⁹ According to dance historian Patrizia Veroli, Marinetti faced the same problem which ballet masters faced in the early nineteenth century: ‘How can the ballerina raise herself from the floor and give a believable representation of fairies and similar such aerial beings?’Footnote ²⁰ Marinetti described the dancer's movement as ‘disharmonious, coarse, ungraceful, asymmetric, condensed, dynamic etc’; however, he did not give any detailed consideration about how the effect of flying through the air was going to be achieved.Footnote ²¹

Movement was a major preoccupation for the Futurists, as they considered it the quintessence of the ‘new man’. It was not encouraged for its own sake; however, it was, rather, performative, figuring a new activation of body politics and political dynamism. Αs Marinetti stated in his Manifesto, ‘Futurist dance can have no other purpose than to intensify heroism, that master of metals which has been fused with the divine machines of speed and war’.Footnote ²² What was interesting for the Futurists, as theatre historian Günter Berghaus points out, was exploring the boundaries of performance and object-centred art, as well as those between space- and time-based art. Rather than reflecting the world, the Futurist stage, and more specifically the electromechanical theatre of Futurist artist Enrico Prampolini, tried to evoke the ‘emotive qualities of simultaneous sense impressions by re-creating the same experience, in abstract form, with the integrated means of a luminous–dynamic stage machinery’.Footnote ²³

End deviates from natural laws such as gravity through an elaborate use of technology, echoing the Futurists’ visionary manifestos calling for a re-creation of the world based on abstract, absolute and universal principles. Nevertheless, Verdonck's animate and inanimate Figures evolve in a radically different sociopolitical context: his appropriation of technological devices is not born out of a faith in or a fascination with life-changing ‘new technologies’, technology being ‘part of the characters themselves and not an instrument for achieving an effect’.Footnote ²⁴ There is a balance between human control and submission to the machine. His enterprise does not aim at a political dynamism. It is rather to reconsider the Futurists’ claims for a non-realistic art remaining open to the unpredictable while avoiding a passive contemplation.Footnote ²⁵

Furthermore, Verdonck's ‘reactivation’ of Futurist discourse requires the viewer to encounter a unique conception of time. Time becomes the fourth dimension of space, in other words, a dimension beyond the viewer's senses. Through the mechanization of the human body, the stage escapes the conventional manipulation of time as a sequence of events. From the fusion of human beings and machines, Verdonck stages tensions and energies while also engaging the consciousness of the spectators. What we experience simultaneously in End is ‘a plurality of times, with different speeds of flow, all real, each one peculiar to a system of reference’.Footnote ²⁶ This is a Bergsonian conception of time wherein there is radical multiplicity of times within the single time. Bergson defends the uniqueness of time speaking for ‘a monism of time’, a continuous present in which we live, we move, we change. According to the Bergsonian theory of time, there is only a single, yet heterogeneous, duration in which everything participates, including our consciousnesses, living beings and the entire material world.Footnote ²⁷ French philosopher Gilles Deleuze stresses further that Bergsonian concept of always divisible but unique time:

What we experience in End is the inner face of time; in other words, we are inside Bergson's time abyss and his concept of simultaneous, coexisting temporalities. Considering film a ‘polyexpressive medium’ (as Marinetti wrote) most adapted to the complex sensibility of the modern urban way of life, the Futurists developed their ‘synthetic theatre’ under the influence of Bergson's spatialized time. Their appropriation of the concept of simultaneity can be considered an attempt to ‘parallel in stage terms the way in which motion pictures moved instantaneously from one locale to another, eliminating distance while compressing time’.Footnote ²⁹ In the play Simultaneità (1915) that Marinetti wrote within this ‘race with cinematography’, two entirely different places and their inhabitants occupy the same stage at the same time.

End entails parallel space–time blocs within a single stage frame, echoing the Futurists' aesthetics: time is unique and universal, yet not progressive. Conceived as an uncanny landscape, the stage in End seeks to avoid any conventional narration; there is no relation between cause and effect, no linear development of each sequence. The entire representation is seized in one large, ‘abstract’ movement which allows the coexistence or the juxtaposition of all degrees of time. As Verdonck states, ‘the key was the decision to regard the show as one big machine, as a structure that immediately crushes any kind of theatricality, a “closed circuit” that immediately prevents the performance from becoming “theatre”.’Footnote ³⁰ The estrangement produced by this anti-naturalistic spatiotemporal structure positions the spectator as an active observer of the progressive physical exhaustion of the Figures onstage. At the same time, the spectator experiences a mental exhaustion: the Messenger in the glass case reads aloud a catalogue of mankind's nightmares in a distanced monotone. This distracts the audience from conventional storytelling, as well as from rational understanding. An important detail on which Verdonck insists ‘is that the title is End, and not The End. End suggests a “state of being”, The End an ending of a narrative, and that is not the case’.Footnote ³¹

Verdonck adopts in End an analytical position resonating with early experiments in chronophotography that opened the possibility of making time by and through space. This allows spectators to capture time – better, to freeze time. He argues, ‘I try to put everything in a still, slow motion, to be able to dissect things, like a scientist [. . .] so we can discover the hidden dynamics, and understand our world better’.Footnote ³² By appropriating the principle of repetition, the Belgian artist dissolves the here and now moment into an open, potentially undetermined situation that escapes stage conventions. Repetitive, circular, ‘endless’ movement brings both spectators and performers to a spatial and concurrently temporal awareness: both are conscious of actual time, the now moment inherent to the theatrical praxis, while at the same time they realize the ephemeral nature of this specific praxis. Verdonck merges the real and the imaginary as well as the true and the false. All performers are repeating unrealistic, ‘untruthful’ movements but they are also exhibiting their bodily vulnerability by repeating them until their almost real exhaustion.

Once the limits of perception are challenged, Verdonck echoes the Futurists’ claims to reshape the stage so that it reflects the complexity and the uncertainty of everyday reality (in the contemporary metropolis). Thanks to its dynamic form, End could even be considered a concrete, intermedial realization of the ‘polyexpressive artificial living being’ claimed by the Futurists and particularly by Fortunato Depero, who called for the construction of the stage to be completely renewed and amplified in all electrical and mechanical ways ‘in order to open the stage in all possibilities so that the theatre becomes able to capture the rhythm of that cosmic machine that is life’.Footnote ³³ Verdonck clearly takes a position against realism onstage by breaking down ‘the corporeal boundaries of the moving object and integrating it as a structural component into the environment’.Footnote ³⁴ Time, like space, escapes the conventional system of representation in order to participate in a new theatricality. Nevertheless, unlike the Futurists, what interests the Belgian artist is not a theatre where the performer is little more than a moving machine, but rather the contemporary human condition. By questioning the dialectics of time, Verdonck articulates his enterprise around an intimate ‘community’ of spectators/participants that shares, exactly because of that direct experience, the feeling of alienation, inherent to the contemporary metropolis. We could even say that Verdonck de-naturalizes time in order to materialize the feeling of the uncanny that emerges out of the urban condition.

Although Verdonck's earlier installations more often implied a static, unnatural performativity, here, despite the repetitious nature of the action, there is a development as the Figures become increasingly fatigued and distressed (Fig. 1). The limits of the body introduce a very familiar dimension within a very minimalist form. In Bergsonian (and then Deleuzian) terms it is the action of the body that provides the substance of continuity, in relation to which representational forms are secondary, discontinuous reflections. Lying at the centre of performativity, human bodies play out the risk of their visibility and fragility.

Fig. 1

The Musel-woman (left) and the woman who drags the heavy body bag in End. Photograph by Cathérine Antoine. © 2008 Kris Verdonck/A Two Dogs Company.

Verdonck situates his performative installation in relation to theatrical conventions, creating a similar kind of ‘Futurist’ body through his stage conception. But, instead of a Futurist mechanized body, his interest lies in voluntary and involuntary aspects of bodily movement as experienced in everyday life. While Futurism clung to the mechanized ideal in opposition to the metaphorical passivity suggested by the human body, Verdonck's ‘mechanization’ is linked to his anxiety about the limits of the body itself and the limits of representation as a real-time experience. From this point of view, Verdonck's theatrical installation could be characterized as anti-dramatic: spectators are ‘allowed’ neither to adopt attitudes of faith as conventionally encouraged (in a dramatic event) nor to experience an event that occurs only within a here and now condition. Performativity in End is linked to a catastrophe that has taken place or shall take place in the world, a tragedy that happened or might happen. The stage creates an unfamiliar feeling that does away with theatrical conventions such as illusion: spectators cannot identify with what is happening before their eyes, yet they are far from being neutral observers. Once the stage dimension of time is restructured, spectators must position themselves intellectually and emotionally, but not psychologically.

Once the focus shifts from the representation of an event to the effect of this event, the stage opens up to the uncertain and the unpredictable, and thus to risk. Tracing its emergence out of the avant-garde notion of chance, risk is defined by and through temporal conditions, as it is grounded in its relation to something that we know might happen: ‘Our perception of what might constitute a risk affects how we act, which in turn alters the nature of the “objective” world in which the “risk” is situated’.Footnote ³⁵ Risk is an epistemological category – it exists as a feature of knowing and cannot be experienced directly as an objective reality that exists in the outside world as a parallel reality independent from human consciousness.

The problematization of the notion of risk allows Verdonck to distance his work from the ontological status of the stage as an aspect of being. The fatigue that imposes itself in End through the repetitive movements of his Figures who struggle across the stage places the spectator in a situation of insecurity and uncertainty about what might (accidentally) happen, something that cannot be calculated or controlled. ‘The performers in End’, Verdonck argues, ‘do not know the end of the show when they start, and that gives them a higher concentration. The world in End is very unpredictable, uncontrolled, so the actors are very careful of all their actions and decisions. And probably that is the beauty of End’.Footnote ³⁶

By introducing senses of instability and uncertainty into a highly constructed theatrical landscape, Verdonck questions any immersive effect of his installation and introduces onstage a perceptual awareness. Resonating with the very nature of the the apocalyptic events and catastrophes that occur at the end of the world, the sense of risk expands the performance's temporal frame and accentuates the Bergsonian perception of a unique yet heterogeneous time integrating past, present and future. Once time frees itself from its subordination to stage conventions, spectators free themselves from ideological constructions and perceptual limitations. By reacting to the conventional ways of doing theatre, Verdonck sets new conditions for a dialogue between artists and spectators while extending the boundaries of the aesthetic realm. In these terms, End could be considered a paradigmatic theatre installation exploring new modes of performativity through an embodied dialogue between listening and viewing, imagining and experiencing, mental and material, realism and abstraction. The piece is about a new stage condition which redefines not only the status of the artist but also the role of the beholder, allowing new sites of spectatorship to emerge. The stage thus becomes an extensive space, open to innumerable ways of thinking.