places to recall

Everyday life is a theatrical performance, according to the findings made in 1959 by the social theorist Erving Goffman.¹ Life is a stage, and we know that we are being watched while we act out the different roles of the protagonists of our own invention. So, too, the figures in Kone’s new drawings find themselves on the stage. They stand with trousers down and in front of silent prompter boxes, looking towards the faceless crowd that is their audience. Whereby the abyss of the stage pit is not only the borderline for the confrontation. Individual figures cross the threshold between the stage and the auditorium, and the audience itself provides a side-show in the galleries and boxes. While musicians from the orchestra pit flood onto the stage the audience in the stalls prepare for the accompanying performance, and their richly varied comedy replaces the polyphonics of the now silent instruments. The fourth wall of the stage space is transparent, also for the onlooker outside the image. For sometimes the onlooker looks down from the stage and sometimes she/he occupies the last row of the auditorium. Close behind a figure seen from the rear peering through the heavy curtain, she/he finds her/himself in an ambivalent place between, in front of, on and behind the stage.

Following the Dyonisian cult, the theatre retained, in the form of its curtain the function of the temple threshold. As a dialectic motif of separating connections, the threshold mediates between two conflicting places. Following the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, Walter Benjamin calls the ceremonial crossing from one symbolic order into another “Rites de passage” or “threshold experiences”.² This change of identities – along the line of the theatre curtain that runs between front and back, performance and audience, seeing and being seen. So the viewer finds her/himself caught up in a circular movement between focal points and the identities associated with them. The ambiguity of this role is continued in the sculptural extension of the stage space in the drawing, too.

A screen taller than a man stands in the exhibition space as abbreviated theatre architecture on which the viewer sees a schematic audience. However, their faces are negative forms carved in wood so that the aspects of confrontation and permeability overlap. Through the faceless heads stepping out of the drawing, the viewers themselves become voyeuristic actors encircling one another.

Like other objects by Kone, for instance the writing table (A&O), the motif for the screen stems from the formal vocabulary of drawing. Its three parts conform to the triptych drawings, the most recent of which conveys the connection between cultic threshold transgressions and theatrical role confusion. Here, too, the scene plays above all in the audience, behind the curtains of the boxes arranged in a semicircle, which transition into the shape of a temple as miniature stage architecture in the left panel of the drawing. On the stage, however, before the empty stalls, the last protagonist screws his role from his throat and leaves it in the company of other bodiless characters wandering around. Even though left behind by the actors as masks, in their mobile plasticity they ripen into independent figures, stepping as these out of the drawing and lining up in the temple-theatre architecture of the étagère (house of heads).

A place to recall; a place, then, that serves to confirm one’s own role, is the stage as much as it is the drawing and the exhibition for Moussa Kone. Both become permeable as a threshold between the artist and the audience, permitting the viewers to participate in the experience of simultaneously playing themselves while viewing.

Text by Oona Lochner, Berlin, 2010

¹ Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Penguin Books, London 1990
² Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin), Harvard University Press, Cambridge/Mass. & London 2002