Greta Alfaro: Comedias a honor y gloria
Text by Alba Braza Boïls and Luis Vives-Ferrándiz Sánchez
Plays to the honour and glory of the Bread
which this crowned city
celebrates with devotion,
so that its praise may be
the confounding of heresy
and the glory of our faith,
they all deal with divine stories.
Lope de Vega, Loa entre un villano y una labradora
Comedias a honor y gloria (Plays to the honour and glory) is a project conceived specifically by the artist Greta Alfaro for La Gallera. In it, a carefully designed architectural structure lined with shelves full of wine glasses with red wine, a pistol and surveillance cameras compose a stage setting for an audience that, once transformed into actors, take part in its violent destruction. The project comprises two moments, the action and its result, the offering and the remains after the catharsis.
Comedias a honor y gloria is a twist on the classic theme of the great theatre of the world in a particular place—La Gallera, a building originally designed for cockfights—and at a particular time—the present—that builds bridges between the Baroque, the Christian tradition and an understanding of our historic moment. Similarly to previous occasions, the artist has imagined a scene that is impossible to come across in our everyday life but which, nevertheless, is grounded in our Western collective imaginary, because her apparent fantasy feeds off popular culture, religious rituals, legends, myths and sometimes fables and fairy tales. In fact, Alfaro’s work is underwritten by repeated references to the Baroque. That being said, the allusions are not constrained to mere formal inspiration or to a recovery of erstwhile artistic themes, but are fully engaged with the problematic of the currency of the Baroque today. The meaning of the work is already encoded in the title of the piece—lines borrowed from an auto sacramental by Lope de Vega—which also introduces the presence of the Baroque, a constant in Alfaro’s artistic research, and draws together the ideas to be found folded within it.
The auto sacramental (sacramental play) is an allegorical form of drama peculiar to Spain though in some ways similar to the old morality plays from the medieval period. This genre exalts and glorifies the sacrament of the Eucharist in its two forms—bread and wine.(1) Though the storylines of an auto sacramental can be highly varied, the central theme is always the same: the Eucharist or, alternatively, the theme of human salvation or redemption by means of the Eucharist and the presence of God in the consecrated form. The doctrine of transubstantiation is key to a proper understanding of the auto sacramental. Sanctioned in 1215 at the Fourth Council of the Lateran, transubstantiation defends the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine. Transubstantiation is not a metaphor for the presence of Christ but operates with the real and effective presence of the body of Christ in the consecrated host and wine. Matter is the meaningful form under which the divine is manifest.
The auto sacramental, on the other hand, understands temporal existence as a kind of great virtual stage. The conception of human life as a dream, as an illusion or as a play sustains a fictionalist strategy and a way of thinking that suggests the idea of seeing the world through the optic of fiction. It is an epistemological recourse that opens up access to knowledge of the world through fiction.(2) The auto sacramental conceives the world as a great play in which humankind is assigned a given role. This idea was dealt with specifically in Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s sacramental play El gran teatro del mundo (The Great Theatre of the World), an allegory in which the idea of life as a play is put to the service of glorifying the Eucharist.(3) Life is viewed as a work of fiction with a script written by God, a drama, an illusion, a show, a simulacrum… in short, an image.
The installation Comedias a honor y gloria contains elements that bring to mind an altar. However, it is not merely the artist’s aesthetic conception, nor a mystic-religious question. Rather, the purpose is to create a powerful image able to incarnate a series of cultural referents until making them real and then turning its destruction into a heinous act. Thus, the immaculate whiteness of the shelves lined with delicate lacing and containing one thousand five hundred glasses with red wine will soon be legend, because whoever wishes to visit the installation will be invited to use a pistol handed over by the uniformed security officer who guards the door. Once inside, alone, after the door has been closed, it is up to the actor to make use of time, the arm and the elements as he or she sees fit. The act of destruction will inevitably take place, and will be watched by the audience from the balcony on the first floor and recorded by the surveillance cameras.
Three hundred litres of spilled red wine signal both the blood of Christ as well as Dionysus, the Greek god of the theatre, the grape harvest and wine, the instigator of ritual madness and ecstasy. But they also represent an excessive and obscene way of being in the world today, one that disconcerts by combining celebration with drama, where attraction and fascination are truncated in a drastic finale announced to the spectator, who intuits its arrival yet refuses to believe that it will actually happen.
As if they were the facets of a kaleidoscope, the themes of the Baroque, the theatrum mundi, the mystery of transubstantiation, profanation, the sacramental plays by Lope de Vega and by Calderón de la Barca, sacrilege and iconoclasm are all soldered in a precise fashion, in a play that recalls theatricalised liturgy in which the boundaries between reality and fiction are fused together as if they were a baroque trompe l’oeil.
Alfaro proposes a form of narration concerning issues pertaining to the present age yet using recourses proper to the Baroque. Her work captures some of the affinities that exist between the Baroque and our contemporary age, a theme addressed by various theorists who have on occasion coined the term Neo-Baroque to describe the way in which the Baroque returns to us, to culture, art, literature, film or entertainment.(4) They view Baroque as an eternal category of culture, a concept that never dies and keeps returning, like a ghost, to appear in the most unsuspected places of our time.
The venue in which Comedias a honor y gloria is presented had a strong impact on the conception of the work. The La Gallera exhibition hall was originally built for holding cockfights, an amphitheatre for drama, a stage where the tragedy of life is played out and in which death always has the last word.(5) A panoptic architecture, with stands on the upper floors that allowed people to watch the spectacle taking place in the centre down below, and with a floor (no longer existing) prepared to soak up the spilled blood of the animals. Here, the artist reproduces the building itself concentrically, respecting the lack of ceiling and offering the visibility of the action, both to the natural eyes of the audience as well as to the artificial eyes of the three surveillance cameras that record images of what is happening inside. Access to the first floor is permitted; and whoever so wishes can be a spectator of those below firing the pistol, now converted into actors. The roles of the audience are constantly changing from passive to active, just like in our everyday life, where the unrelenting use of smartphones to capture images and their ready insertion into social networks furthers our constant ambivalence between spectator and actor.
On the first floor of La Gallera the signs warning of danger add a degree of tension to the usual atmosphere of an exhibition hall. One can follow, or not, these safety recommendations while the pistol is being fired just a few metres below. The surveillance cameras that record the action not only emphasize the sensation of danger and control on both floors, but also enhance the idea of continuous performance in front of an audience that we believe to be always present in our great theatre of the world. Ultimately, this gives rise to a video piece that forms part of Comedias a honor y gloria and which is shown in the second phase of the exhibition.
The idea of the great theatre of the world and surveillance cameras leads us again to the theme of transubstantiation on a more complex level. On one hand, as Eduardo Subirats argues, comparing life with fiction is a complementary strategy to the mystery of the transubstantiation, because in the two cases a process of transformation affecting reality takes place: “in the sacrament, the transubstantiation of a reality in itself insignificant into the material of divine incarnation is officiated: the sacramental representation celebrates the transformation of something intrinsically meaningful, in other words, the existence of mankind, into the miserable reality of the wretched of this world.”(6) Nature, the world, is transubstantiated in divine entertainment, a transformation symmetrical to the transubstantiation of the logos in the forms of bread and wine. On the other hand, Subirats also examines how the foundations of the technologies of mechanical reproduction of the world—read photography, video or smartphone cameras—are based on their ontological value as the preeminent generators of reality. In Alfaro’s work, the surveillance cameras fulfil this role and operate a transubstantiation of the real that runs in parallel to the transubstantiation of bread and wine in the Eucharist.
Image production technologies are key to defining modern virtual cultures; cultures in which the mechanical reduplication of the world takes on the status of more real than reality itself.(7) Simulacrum, the spectacle or the total screen are the spaces in which the transubstantiation of reality into the unreality of representation takes place. This permutation of the value of reality is not owing to the fact that the representation obtained by these means has an illusionistic quality. Rather, the cause is that the fiction has taken on an ontological value: the simulacrum precedes reality.(8) The image is reality.
The theatre of the exhibition hall is a space prepared for acting but also for observing from on high; an action that ties in with the former function of La Gallera. Greta Alfaro invites us to see and to act, to be spectators and actors. The theatre calls for a gaze, an act of seeing that is implicit in the very etymology of the word, as it comes from the Greek thea, which means vision, and also gives rise to verbs like theaomai, meaning contemplate or visualize. The play in honour and glory of the transubstantiated body is looked at and contemplated by spectators, but also through the inclusion in the piece of surveillance cameras that record what is happening on the stage. In many ways La Gallera is a panopticon, a type of architecture in which everything can be seen both by the real eyes of the spectators as well as the artificial eyes of the cameras that record images of what is happening inside. And similarly to a panopticon, the work brings into play the concepts of vigilance, of power, of seeing without being seen and control. Thus the gaze, whether biological or artificial, exercises the function of control. In addition, in these times of liquid modernity, smartphones and social networks are new forms of surveillance that enable control without being seen.(9)
The video piece inevitably recalls images from TV news programmes that show scenes from horrific events that have taken place recently, which may be extrapolated in time and in space; images of people caught red-handed committing appalling deeds; scenes that are reproduced endlessly in the cinema under the guise of fiction. Once the performance is over and the exhibition opens to the public, only by going up to the first floor will the audience be able to confirm that the tragedy intuited in the video actually took place there, and can make the connection with the smell of spilt dried wine following a party with a fateful toast, contemplate the red stains on a white floor prepared like the original floor to receive blood, imagine the beauty of this space before being dirtied, and relish in the charms of its ruins.
Profanation only makes sense if we accept the surplus value of the image created by the artist. Both the adoration as well as the destruction of images (of fictions, of depictions) are based on the same principle: a belief in the effect of presence they possess.(10) Comedias a honor y gloria plays with this effect and invokes an iconoclastic practice. The comedy becomes a tragedy because the shots fired against the wine glasses represent a destructive practice and profanation.
In short, the image destroys and that is why it is an iconoclastic act. Returning to the Christian tradition, the body of God is the image par excellence so that any act of profanation of the forms of this divine body is therefore an act of iconoclasm: God made man in his image and likeness and by means of the Incarnation, the mystery of the logos was made corporeal and sentient. God is the authorised “maker” of images. Therein the prohibition included in the second commandment, which is the basis for the iconoclasm and aniconism of Islam and Judaism.(11) At once, transubstantiation carries out this symbolic inversion in which bread and wine (re)present the body and blood of Christ. The surplus value of the host and the wine rests on this effective, real presence. It is worth recalling at this point some medieval stories of the profanation of consecrated hosts by Jews who did not believe in the presence of the body and blood of Christ in its two forms; legends that usually ended up in blood spilling from the sacred form with the goal of demonstrating the effective presence of the divine in the material.
Comedias a honor y gloria discloses the world as theatre, wine as body and the virtual as real; the drama of profanation transformed into spectacle, violence disguised as entertainment, a celebration that longs to cover up everyday unhappiness.
(1) Ignacio Arellano & J. Enrique Duarte, El auto sacramental, Madrid, Ediciones del Laberinto, 2003, p. 16.
(2) Javier García Gisbert, “El ficcionalismo barroco en Baltasar Gracián” in (eds.) Miguel Grande & Ricardo Pinilla. Gracián: barroco y modernidad. Madrid, Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 2004. pp. 69-101.
(3) Calderón’s work was first performed in Valencia in 1641 coinciding with Corpus Christi, a celebration in which the glorification of the transubstantiation was doubly sanctioned. Alexander Parker, Los autos sacramentales de Calderón, Barcelona, Ariel, 1983, p. 97.
(4) Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2004.
(5) Theatre and death are entwined by virtue of a rhetoric that couples the great theatre of the world with the dances of death. With the end of the performance and the dropping of the curtain, the actors are made equal by the levelling role of death, a power that connects with the macabre dances of the Middle Ages in which death played the same role: levelling all social layers. Víctor Infantes, Las danzas de la muerte. Génesis y desarrollo de un género medieval (siglos XIII-XVII), Salamanca, Universidad de Salamanca, 1997, p. 340-341.
(6) Eduardo Subirats, Culturas virtuales, Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva, 2001, p. 100.
(7) Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London-New York, Verso, 2002.
(8) Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995.
(9) Zygmunt Bauman & David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance, Cambridge, Polity, 2012.
(10) W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Surplus Value of Images”, in What Do Pictures Want?, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 76-110.
(11) Gottfried Boehm, “Iconoclastia. Extinción – superación - negación”, in Carlos A. Otero, Iconoclastia. La ambivalencia de la mirada, Madrid, La Oficina, 2012, p. 37-54.