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Street Maenadism: Features and Metaphors of Dionysian Ritual in the Work Ever is Over All by Pipilotti Rist

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/695757

2328-207X

Nava Sevilla-Sadeh,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeStreet Maenadism: Features and Metaphors of Dionysian Ritual in the Work Ever is Over All by Pipilotti RistNava Sevilla-SadehNava Sevilla-Sadeh Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe video work Ever Is Over All by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist presents a woman in an ecstatic mood striking forcefully with a staff at random car windows, hitting some and ignoring others (fig. 1).1 Her ecstasy recalls the maenads’ Dionysian frenzy at the height of worship, as represented in Attic vase paintings (figs. 2, 3) and in Euripides’s Bacchae.Fig. 1. Pipilotti Rist, Ever Is Over All, 1997. Two-channel video with overlapping projections (color, sound with Anders Guggisberg), 2:45 mins. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and promised gift of Donald L. Bryant, Jr., 241.2000.a–c. @2017 Pipilotti Rist.Fig. 2. Hieron (potter) and Macron (painter), Maenad and satyr on Attic red figure kylix, ca. 480 BC. Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich, inv. 2654.Fig. 3. Macron, Maenad carrying a Thyrsus, fragment of an Attic red figure cup, ca. 480 BC. Musée du Louvre, Paris.Maenadism in antiquity was a phenomenon both manifested in myth and experienced in the lives of women, in rituals dedicated to Dionysus.2 The maenads in the ritual were women of the social elite, who would enter a state of ecstasy characterized by dishevelled hair and bare feet that symbolized the breaking down of order and the equalization of class. The ritual was accompanied by the sounds and rhythms of the tambourine and the aulos, with its high tones, as well as by increasingly turbulent singing, reaching piercing cries that totally liberated the participants and conferred an ecstatic atmosphere. The maenadic dance was of a violent nature, comprising repeated hysterical shaking of the head and body and loss of the senses. In mythology this unconstrained frenzy ended in the sparagmos—the tearing apart of deer and hares—while in the more mundane rituals raw meat was eaten.3 The height of this activity was the moment of falling to the ground that embodied the total merging with the divinity, and was followed by euphoria—absolute silence and tranquillity.4An apt mythological and literary reference to Ever Is Over All is that of Euripides’s Queen Auge, who destroyed everything, even her own son Pentheus, whose head she stuck atop her thyrsus.5 Indeed, the long-stemmed flower held by Rist’s “maenad” is very similar to the thyrsus held by the mythological maenads depicted in archaic and classical vase paintings: a fennel staff topped with a pine cone. The top of Rist’s staff is even stained with red, as an allusion to bloodshed.Rist’s maenad bursts into the street as if she has lost her way during a ritual ecstasy and found herself suddenly in a different historical time and space, as a fragment detached from a remote narrative.6 This fragmentary scene erupts violently, offering a faint memory of maenadism, and thus of a “mythical time” or “the Great Time,” in which ritual cancels secular time and transfers human experience to a mythical time.7 This maenad invades the secular realm, and thus suspends time, evoking Mircea Eliade’s discussion on the seeming invasion of the spirits of the dead that suspends secular time.8 Eliade notes that the wish to erase the passage of time and to cancel history is inherent in humankind.9 Ritual in general includes the nullification of time elapsed, confusion of the social and universal order, reestablishment of the primordial chaos, and repetition of the cosmogonic deed. Hence, cancellation and Creation occur simultaneously.10 The destruction and restoration of order were the main features of maenadism in the Dionysian rituals performed by women, since the god himself blurred boundaries and confused order, and his cult involved bloodshed and led to catharsis.11 The Dionysian mania was aimed at creating a temporary disorder for the sake of purification and the restoration of order.12These features appear explicitly in Rist’s representation of an ecstatic exultation held in the street. This maenad seems to be punishing indiscriminately, and the objects of this violence are the cars she confronts. These cars stand in for the victims of the Greek maenads, the hares and deer they destroyed during their ecstasy, and specifically Pentheus, who was torn to pieces by his mother Auge, as the god Dionysus’s retaliation for Pentheus’s sin of denying his divinity. What, therefore, might be the cars’ sin?The cars would seem to represent the Western world that Guy Debord has defined as a society of spectacle, in which the spectacle is both its goal and its main production, and the language of spectacle consists in the signs of production.13 Debord defines this society as spectacliste; the show is its only purpose.14 As a consequence, this society has become materialistic and antispiritual, utilitarian, alienated, morally indifferent, and selfish.15 A very salient manifestation of this selfishness is the increased experience of instability and temporariness present in the exploitive forms of contact between organizations and the employed.16 This society deprives employees of their rights and controls individuals’ lives according to the needs of organizations.17 Both Pentheus and postmodern society, symbolized by the cars, reject god. Pentheus ignores Dionysus’s ritual, and thus the human need for consecration and exultation; while the postmodern, cynical, and alienated society of spectacle has abandoned spirituality for the sake of materiality.This society of spectacle, as indicated by Michel Foucault, has developed sophisticated practices of supervision and control in order to increase individuals’ output and benefit organizations.18 Foucault’s scheme of the panoptikon is relevant here: this construction allows only a one-sided observation: that of the supervisors over their subordinates. While the subordinates can never know whether or when they are being observed, they are constantly exposed to the gaze of their supervisors.19 This mechanism, which is adopted by many employers in today’s capitalistic reality, exploits sophisticated technology such as transparent and open-space architecture, hidden cameras, and other devices. The declared purpose of such a mechanism is to strengthen the power of control and to increase production and profit for the company owners.20 Such advantages are gained in postmodern organizations, necessarily, by the often abusive exploitation of the workers.Returning to Rist’s maenad and the allusion to ancient maenadism: The maenads in antiquity were women whose every move in their daily lives was observed and controlled rigorously, but who were able to experience freedom, for a limited time only, during the Dionysian rituals.21 Rist’s maenad thus offers a symbolic image of contemporary resistance to suppression. Her subversive act is carried out provocatively, using the same mechanism typical of a society of spectacle. The policewoman who passes behind her and salutes the ecstatic maenad stands in for Dionysus, as the protecting god of women. As a bisexual god, Dionysus was the patron of women, who were his main devotees, and the stimulator of the maenads’ frenzy.22Considered as a salient feminist work, Rist’s maenad brings to mind the demand for women’s liberation.23 However, the self-evident metaphor here is that of the indiscriminate and unnecessary destruction of values. Following Luce Irigaray, this suggests a highly crucial issue in second-wave feminism—the disregard and denial of the physical and biological differences between men and women that lead to differences in worldview, perspectives on life, and priorities.24 This denial results from the misleading nature of the word equality. Equality in the eyes of the law, in the right to vote, and in fair salaries is one thing. The objective anatomical differences between men and women are another thing, and must be taken into account when speaking about equality. Those differences necessarily lead to different priorities and perspectives and, unfortunately, women have been harmed when they have ignored this.25 As a critical image, Rist’s maenad offers a metaphor of early feminism on its journey to maturation.Rist’s ecstatic maenad is seemingly destroying her surroundings by an artistic, and therefore creative, activity. Creativity is indeed Dionysus’s realm. In that sense, the allusion to the Dionysian catharsis suggests a cry for creative inspiration. The saluting policewoman, symbolizing the role of Dionysus, certifies this maenad’s activity, which is simultaneously destructive and creative. The maenad’s action confuses the sacred with the profane, since it is sacred in its original context, but is now located within a secular time and place. What lies behind this confusion?As Friedrich Nietzsche noted, in pagan Greek religion everything mundane aspired to become divine.26 The immanent human wish to merge with the divine is portrayed poetically in Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue, which recounts the yearning of the soul to return to her primordial source, the sublime realm where she had dwelt among the divinities.27 The yearning for the sublime is manifested also in the scale of beauty portrayed in Plato’s Symposium.28 The divine as an embodiment of the sublime appears in Plotinus’s Enneads as “the One” (to Hen) with whom the soul yearns to unite. Plotinus considered the purification of the soul from its corporeality as leading to a merging with the sublime or the divine, achieved by entering into a state of ecstasy through the rituals of a mystery cult.29 Madness was declared by Socrates in the Phaedrus dialogue as a gift when it was given by the gods: “And we made four divisions of the divine madness, ascribing them to four gods, saying that prophecy was inspired by Apollo, the mystic madness by Dionysus, the poetic by the Muses, and the madness of love, inspired by Aphrodite and Eros.”30 Madness is considered as a pharmakon by Plato also in the Laws. This kind of madness is temporary and positive in nature, and purifies the soul through catharsis.31The Dionysian mystery cult sought to achieve catharsis by imbuing the initiates with an illusion of merging with the divine—with enthousiasmos. This cult featured vital and unruly activity by which the consecrated, or the mystes, became an entheos—one with the god. This exultation was intended to free the mortal from the burden of corporeal life, leading to catharsis and thus to the divine realm, and promised eternal life after death.32 The climax of the Dionysian ritual and ecstasy was the moment in which the bacchants lay prostrate on the ground in a complete silence that symbolized euphoria, the total merging with the divine.33 As noted earlier the Dionysian destruction was intended to pave the way to redemption and to create an illusion of merging with the divine. In contemporary reality there is no opportunity for apotheosis. As asserted by Jacques Derrida, the absence of god is immanent:Please be here, open my lips. So the prayer of the prayer, the prayer which is encrypted or included in the prayer is this address to an invisible addressee, God is perhaps not present, I don’t know, I’m not sure of that, I’m not sure … so that the presence of God depends on the prayer. … The possibility that God remains eternally absent, that there might be no addressee at the other end of my prayer is the condition of the prayer. If I was sure that my prayer would be received by some addressee, there would be no prayer. So, that’s why I would go so far as to say there should be a moment of atheism in the prayer. The possibility that the God doesn’t answer, doesn’t exist.34Nonetheless, it seems that the strong disappointment derived from the absence of god has failed to eliminate the human primordial need for spiritual elevation. Despite the sense of the “Death of God,” the human primeval and fundamental urge for excitement, for divine inspiration and eternity, has never really vanished. The sacred has never been eradicated from the contemporary, as noted by Foucault.35 Foucault names the various spaces—the private and the public, the familial and the social, and so on—and stresses that all of them are still imbued with a dim holiness.36 This continuity is reinforced in popular culture by Beyoncé’s video clip “Hold Up.”37 In the beginning of the clip the singer emerges, with water rushing around her, from a huge building with giant classical columns. In her golden dress she seems a divine revelation and recalls the goddess Athena suddenly departing from the Parthenon. Beyoncé smashes wildly with a baseball bat the windows of parked cars and causes further damage—to the delight of a group of children—breaking open a fire hydrant and later sparking an explosion. However, it seems that the character played by the singer enjoys the damage itself, remaining in mundane existence without any spiritual exaltation, while Rist, in contrast, makes use of the act of madness as pseudo-ritual for the sake of elevation. Rist herself has pointed out: “As an atheist I think about the shared rituals we need and those we should not allow to disappear.”38 This might still be achieved, whether via the sacred or the secular, whether by ritual or by creativity. By merging the sacred with the secular, Rist’s maenad seems to authenticate the primordial human need for ritual and exultation in order to merge with the divine.Notes1. Pipilotti Rist, Ever Is Over All, 1997, video, 2:45 mins., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a56RPZ_cbdc. The work was presented by Rist at the 47th Venice Biennale. See Peggy Phelan, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Elisabeth Bronfen, Pilpilotti Rist, exh. cat. (London: Phaidon, 2001), 59.2. For a comprehensive study on maenadism, see Jan N. Bremmer, “Greek Maenadism Reconsidered,” Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik 55 (1984): 267–86.3. Ibid., 275–79.4. Ibid., 277–82.5. Euripides, Bacchae, trans. Geoffrey S. Kirk (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 137–39, 734–42, 743–64, 1114–43, 1203–17.6. Jean-Francois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1988). On the ahistorical society see Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 18; and Frederick Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 2009), 7–10.7. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. William Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954), ix, 35–36.8. Ibid., 68.9. Ibid., 81, 86.10. Ibid., 55–59.11. Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Pantel, Religion in the Ancient Greek City, trans. Paul Cartledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 198.12. Plato, Laws, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 220–21; Steven H. Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 79–80.13. Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet, Chastel, 1967), 32.14. Ibid., 14.15. Ibid., 215, 216.16. Israel Katz, Organizations in a Postmodern World [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2012), 24.17. Debord, La société du spectacle, 31, 43.18. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Daniela Yoel (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2015), and Heterotopia, trans. Ariella Azoulay (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2003).19. Foucault, Heterotopia, 248–54.20. Katz, Organizations in a Postmodern World, 88–103.21. Bremmer, “Greek Maenadism Reconsidered,” 267–86.22. Zaidman and Schmitt Pantel, Religion in the Ancient Greek City, 200.23. Phelan, Obrist, and Bronfen, Pilpilotti Rist, 59.24. Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1977), and Je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1993).25. Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts—a Sociological Explanation, trans. Shiran Beck [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Keter, 2013).26. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).27. Plato, Phaedrus, ed. Harvey Yunis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 251, and The Symposium, trans. Walter Hamilton (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1951), 203a. See Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 47.28. Plato, Symposium, 210–12.29. Plotinus, Aeneads, trans. A. H. Armstrong (London: W. Heinemann, 1966), 5.8.10, 11; 6.9.4; 6.7.34–35; 6.9.9–11.30. Plato, Phaedrus, 264–65.31. Plato, Laws, 672, 790; Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion, 79.32. Euripides, Bacchae, 298–301. On the Dionysian mysteries and cult, see Ugo Bianchi, The Greek Mysteries (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 3–7, 13–15; Marvin W. Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries—a Sourcebook: Sacred Texts of the Mystery Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean World (San Francisco: Harper, 1987), 63–65; Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 12, 18–24; Susan G. Cole, “Landscapes of Dionysus and Elysian Fields,” in Greek Mysteries—the Archeology and Ritual of Ancient Greek Secret Cults, ed. Michael B. Cosmopoulos (London: Routledge, 2003), 93–194, 197–99, 205; Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults of the Ancient World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 105–36; Martin Peersson Nilsson, The Dionysiac Mysteries (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 123, 130, 131; Walter Sorell, The Other Face—the Mask in the Arts (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), 51; Francoise Frontisi-Ducroux, “In the Mirror of the Mask,” in A City of Images—Iconography and Society in Ancient Greece, ed. Claude Berard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 151–64, 156; Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion, 79.33. Bremmer, “Greek Maenadism Reconsidered,” 281–82.34. David Shapiro, Michal Govrin, and Jacques Derrida, Body of Prayer (New York: Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union, 2001), 63. See also John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 328–29.35. Foucault, Hetrotopia, 9.36. Ibid., 10.37. Beyonce, “Hold Up,” Lemonade, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeonBmeFR8o.38. Pipilotti Rist, Congratulations!, exh. cat. (Baden: Lars Müler, 2007), 21. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Source Volume 37, Number 1Fall 2017 Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/695757 © 2017 by Bard Graduate Center. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.