Corporative correct

After he had shown us his performance To Whom it may concern, some ten years ago, in which he attempted to explain that corporations have life to them, that they are likeable and pretty because, hey, they are people too, so we should rather admire them than let ourselves be turned into diligent and perfectly trained machines, Phil Soltanoff is now taking us several steps further in the process of the corporative super-system pushing human beings even deeper into the abstract.

Where does the parallel with corporations come from? Entering the performance, one passes under a huge Société Générale bank banner and at the performance which is, believe it or not, from France as well as the bank, one watches dancers dressed in the same grey suits the employees of the bank wear. I am not going to mention the name of the bank. The one mention should be considered a free advertisement. I might sound paranoid but if we remember Catherine Bigelow’s film Strange Days, and days of Bitef are always strange days in Belgrade, we cannot but remember the main villain line: “It’s not about whether you’re paranoid but are you paranoid enough!” that is how it goes in the world of big corporations and capitalism and high technology.

Though not musically educated, I have noticed traces of song “Old McDonald had a farm” and “United States of Europe” corporation anthem in the fanfare intonation announcing the beginning of Bitef. Speaking of the anthem, Schiller’s words which were left out are: “Milions of people, embrace!” The performers in More or less Infinity embraced bars and lines but never each other.

People and things are both well organized and at a disposal. The audience showers the same points with rounds of applause as it does at the Olympics or a circus. Implants and braces run away from people (or people run way from them) but the grey suits bring everything back to its place and everything resumes its perfect state. Thus the performance constitutes the ideological plane which tells us that perfection, aim and sense are blending in the mechanism of depersonalized people and bits in computerized corporative game – or can those creatures be called people at all? And, let’s not forget the meaning of the word profit: it is the unpaid work!

Naturally, none of it would work out if everything wasn’t so excellent, perfect, beautiful, extraordinary, fascinating, just like a TV commercial… and that’s as it should be when corporation’s money is invested.

The level of fascination depends on the ticket price and on the position of the seat. The mathematics in the performance serves to fascinate not to teach. “Line as a form and line as a metaphor” shows various uses of a line in diagrams until the people turn into lines as well.

Idea of More or Less Infinity is meager (unless it is a well hidden evil which is more than my paranoia), neither tragic, nor comic nor tragicomic, but it does show a huge tragedy of our times. We witness a financial ritual as art becomes fascination, as a mirage is the only aim of the author who boasts using illusionist principles developed in optical art, saying that “object of research is a literal and metaphorical juggling with the possibilities”. What does it tell us about the ethics of the author, of the financier and of the Bitef festival?”

Ivan Pravdić