It was while walking around one of the bigger cities in the United States - I’m notsure completely but it may have been Chicago or New York – that I passed under a marquee sign for a theater. Upon looking up, I realized that the underside was a mirror and the traditional marquee lights came away from the surface by a few inches. It was in that act of looking up at the reflection that I was taken out of my fixed, individual state and was displayed as part of the crowd that was walking with me (or perhaps I was walking with them). I was no longer in my own thoughts; instead I was at a distance from myself, decorated with lights. That bit of memory stuck with me and I would often examine the complexity and the flash of wonder from that experience.
The marquee sign is very specific in that it announces a spectacle (whether this is for a theater production, musical, performance...etc.). At the same time, the sign is a spectacle in and of itself. This doubling became very interesting to me, much in the way that the reflection from underneath relayed the crowd with interweaving of light. If patrons were to partake in the event of seeing a show, they themselves in perhaps all their glamour, would be just as integral to the spectacle as the performers. Ultimately, seeing oneself as part of the event, affirms a place of status or more subtly, belonging to or a part of the show.
A sign is a signal and will define a direction to follow or move towards. It announces that, “all will be revealed, all will be known.” The mirror for the crowd will demonstrate it as significant. However, in my piece “Signal,” I’ve given the onlooker the sign and the performance all at once, without the reflection of self. The viewers demonstrate their gaze up to the underside of the sign awaiting the event.
Yet the video is of people entering and exiting the frame and lacks any choreographed performance. Seemingly, they come from an undefined place and withdrawal into undefined directions. In some ways it mirrors the actions of the people walking out in front of the display window of the garden theater.
Excerpts from Martin Heidegger’s, What is Called Thinking? :
-Whatever withdraws, refuses arrival. But-withdrawing is not nothing. Withdrawal is an event…The event of withdrawal could be what is most present throughout the present, and so infinitely exceed the actuality of everything actual.
-As we are drawing toward what withdraws, we ourselves point toward it.
-Drawn into what withdraws, drawn toward it and thus pointing into the withdrawal, man first is man. His essential being lies in being such a pointer. Something which in itself, by its essential being, is pointing, we call a sign. As he draws towards what withdrawals, man is a sign. But since this sign points toward what draws away, it points not so much at what draws away as into the withdrawal. The sign remains without interpretation.
What I think Heidegger is referring to is the state of encountering bigger question that human beings have to face. The quest for an answer, for instance, places one on a specific set of rails, in a specific direction. Viewers encountering Signal point their gaze upward and inadvertently become a sign for onlookers to gather or follow in suit. The event or spectacle is political in that it announces a moment that will come or is about to happen. Anticipation is the nucleus for the unknown- the mystery.
When first working on Signal, I had correlated many thoughts of the marquee with that of the cosmos. The lights being the representation of twinkling star-lights, actors/actresses referred to as stars and the viewer’s gaze being an upward direction. The cosmos is this thing that announces itself but only lets us into it to a certain extent. I personally attribute this barrier as being that of the edge of a stage.
All the romantic notions being tested by science, trying desperately to establish another form of life…perhaps to establish significance. And this thing the cosmos withdrawing from us, in some ways rejecting us, doesn’t offer us the same chance to be welcomed, always withdrawing. And so we build satellites, send golden records out on rockets, cameras fly by planets, relaying blips and beeps… waiting and hoping for a signal.
