The Fourth Wall as Sculpture

Blued Trees in WW III

Rishauna Zumberg labors to move under the weight of blued branch, as the wife of a fossil fuel executive, in the performance of, “Blued Trees in NYC; The Sea Will Have The Last Word,” at the Anita Rogers Gallery October 30, 2024.

Theater can be political and certainly all politics are theater. Politics and war are the most consequential theaters of all, sculpting civilizations and their stories for eons. The outcome of this election will also sculpt the land as nothing else.

In the past weeks since the American presidential election, the world has witnessed unparalleled political theater in which almost everyone has participated simultaneously as both performers and audience, even those Americans who chose not to vote.

For some time, I have been convinced that we are well into WWIII, that the battles are all narrational even as the casualties are all too living. It is no accident that generals refer to battlegrounds as the theater of war.

This election was a time-based performance. It took place at a time when climate change is accelerating and the time remaining to address those changes is rapidly vanishing. .We have been forewarned that Trump plans a no holds barred assault on the environment, to drill baby drill us all into ecocidal oblivion, impatient to act as an environmental war criminal, anticipating complete impunity and lots of money. The consequences of the collision between a MAGA narrative and inexorable environmental consequences will become imminently apparent.

"Blued Trees in NYC; The Sea Will have the Last Word," for the Anita Rogers Gallery was also time-based. In a short time, days before the election, another kind of vote was staged over two hypothetical poles: accountability vs. impunity in an artworld venue. The story behind producing the October 30, 2024 event hinged on negotiating the tension between those poles. I negotiated those poles with a series of experiments in the fourth wall.

The fourth wall is an imaginary barrier between audience and performers. It can be broken open for dramatic effect or to convey a secret conspiracy between actors and observers. It is a device that triangulates an experience that is half real and half illusory to let the audience experience hidden agendas and insights that might not be otherwise apparent in the story line of the production. 

November 6, Putin gleefully broke the political fourth wall of political theater by applauding his useful idiot, Donald Trump. Since then, the Taliban celebrated the American 'return to sanity'.

I conjecture thar when Putin used the word "useful," he broke the illusionary impunity of the fourth wall between himself and the American presidential election. KGB tactics are brilliant. Could they have been the key to how the RNC engineered the desired outcome in this war theater, to divide and conquer the USA? Would it matter? Is every conjecture nothing more than a good story?

Whether Russia had her thumb on the scales of American justice and democracy is moot. We know there is an international hegemony of fossil fuel champions and oligarchs at work. In the end, in time, the sea will have the last word for humanity in the final act of this global play.

The elements of theatre shape and reflect dramatic responses to human interactions. Sculpture shapes a relationship to physical space, which may include land. I am interested in the relationship between us and the Earth as a spatial experiment, performatively modeled and modeling and the trigger points for possible change in that relationship.

Trigger points for change has been my focus for decades. My dissertation, "Trigger Point Theory As Aesthetic Activism," and then my work memoir broke down that my thinking, and simultaneously found correlations between aesthetic processes and basic thermodynamics in complex adaptive systems for change. I first learned about change when I set about restoring degraded habitat for Ghost Nets (1990-2000).

In creating Ghost Nets, my task was to sustain a relationship to a particular site over a decade of time. Over a ten-year period, I engaged in changing the site into a flourishing habitat. That was both a performative and a sculptural process. The goal was to shape the site, myself and my relationship to land. As I observed change, I developed trigger point theory, about how deliberate change occurs in an ecosystem.

Trigger point theory (TPT) was an idea I developed to help me see the unseen. It emerged from Ghost Nets and was useful in designing the inception of the Blued Trees project. TPT in Ghost Nets applied the tools I knew from artmaking, from the fundamentals of painting, drawing and sculpture, to conceptual and performative means, to the problem of restoring degraded habitat. In that process, I observed how systems thinking applied to my process. Out of that experience, came TPT. I described that evolution in greatest detail in my book, "Divining Chaos; The Autobiography of An Idea," including how I applied it to Blued Trees. Now I am imagining how it might be applied to this new theater of war.

When I came to Blued Trees (2015- present), I applied my abstract lessons to the legal ecosystem. I conjectured at the outset, that it might take six years. That was unrealistic. By 2021, we were well into the first Trump administration. I had been looking for a trigger point for deliberate intervention to produce cascading effects of change. The complex adaptive relationship I considered was in interactions between silos of the law. But that calculation was upended by the under mining of justice during his administration, a process I expect to accelerate in his second administration.

The trigger point I originally focused on was in a relationship between copyright and eminent domain law. I did not discover that myself. I applied Peter Von Tiesenhausen's strategy, copyrighting the top 6" of soil in his farm as sculpture . My goal was to leverage and test that strategy in a courtroom. I wanted a trigger point to reinvent definitions and perceptions of what can be owned, by whom. Now I think the new trigger point is in our perception of human agency. The tension is between remaining law-based institutions of democracy and the sea's judgements is where our fourth wall will play itself out.

2023 marked the first major salvo against the established American legal system in the Roe vs. Wade decision. Since then, despite the Biden administration, the Supreme Court comprised of Trump appointed radical conservatives, has systematically overturned one bulwark against authoritarianism and religious oppression after another. Since 2023 and particularly since this election our society has explored the limits of law and social engagement., as right-wing influencers like Joe Rogan tested political boundaries in their personal theater of operations before enormous audiences of fans. The most obvious evidence of a new world with fewer boundaries was the scale of American support for a convicted felon who has promised to murder his opponents.

Simultaneously, as I have continued my work on Blued Trees, it became apparent that legal issues in recent international court cases over Earth rights and environmental justice were challenging long held assumptions about property ownership and anthropocentric attitudes. The fundamental spatial relationship between humans and the planet is still extractive. Earth continues to be viewed by most people as a source of unlimited supply. That is how I got to thinking about ecocide and narcissistic disorders. Applying a rule from trigger point theory that layering information will test perception, I continued to layer silos. That is why it was important to include expert witnesses in the event, Gale Elston and Wendi Goldsmith.

The analogy I saw between ecosystem behavior, fragments of legal theory and narcissistic disorders was in the dynamics of extraction and discard. That is both a tragedy of operatic theatrical dimensions and a matter of how relationships are defined in personal terms when power is imbalanced, and democracies are undermined. There is nothing more dramatic I can think of than murdering the whole planet for the sake of personal power for a small group of beneficiaries.

Where art can reflect and intervene in those dynamics is my study. Our relationship to the material space of the planet is what interests me. Moving around dead branches, people and sound have been my most recent sculptural means to explore alternative models. I view that process as spatial choreography with political implications. It is also another way to consider extraction.

I saw the 2018 mock trial for The Blued Trees Symphony as the bones of a terrific opera. I thought it could be a vehicle to explore some modeling. I thought about my task as conceptual sculpture. The 2023 opera preview was structurally traditional. I thought the outcome was very beautiful. We successfully conveyed the generational tension of fossil fuel use and consequences. The narrative spun on family conflicts. But after the production, I began puzzling out another model for the fourth wall and how engage the audience in questions about accountability that would play out in the narrative.

In creating the opera preview that emerged from the 2018 mock trial for The Blued Trees Symphony, with Julia Schwartz and Catherine Filloux, we re-established the traditional walls by playing to a seated audience, whose only participation was admiring applause for extraordinary performances within defined silos. Other elements such as the branches I thought were so important in other venues had a minimal role. The October 30 event at the Anita Rogers Gallery, pushed back against some those conventions and broke down formal boundaries by investigating variations on the fourth wall. The branches were crucial to that investigation.

The systems explorations typical of post-war art, such as Fluxus or John Cage, are now being applied to a Fascist coup and the innocence of those experiments are going to be challenged. The structure of the original version of The Blued Trees Symphony, begun in 2015, was like the performance tradition I grew up in from that post-war period. In 1971, I sought out Allan Kaprow to be my mentor because he was prominent in dissolving separations in the fourth wall between audience, performers and staging. I learned a lot from his explorations of inter-disciplinary boundaries.

The subsequent trial for The Blued Trees Symphony explored one of those boundaries. The trial made the audience-observer participants in a real live event: a mock trial that tested real legal ideas. The decision for the precedent of an injunction, even in a moot trial, had real implications for their own lives. I believed it was closest to how Joseph Beuys conceived of social sculpture as interactions crafted by art but having political implications.

In Blued Trees in NYC; The Sea Will Have the last Word, I imagined a narrative that internalized a relationship between the audience, myself and the fourth wall. I sought to build that into the structure of the event, all deliberately timed days before the American presidential election. My philosophical trigger point was in the relationships I was trying to understand between audience agency, narrational accountability and political impunity.

On the evening of the event, I told the audience they would be voting on the culpability of a fossil fuel executive and his wife and we would have experts to inform us of the legal limits of liability and accountability.

I gave the video editors, Lauren Petty and Tracey Yarad, the following instructions about revealing a narrative sequence to guide their work through hours of documentation:

"The climax of the performance was when the dancer raised the branch over her head the highest as the music crescendos. The sequence built to that climax. Each sequence tested another aspect of the fourth wall. The rest of the event was psychologically diminuendo with the audience in open but organized conversation. These were the trigger points that challenged the fourth wall in sequence:

1. I tell the audience I will task them with a judgement of two people, one (the husband) already convicted and facing punishment, the other one (the wife), who might be tried. The only evidence they will have to make their judgement is a dream, the knowledge that she sleeps alone and expert testimonies. The fourth wall test was to go public with their opinions over whether the wife had impunity.

2. After the intro, the performance starts with the music, builds as the dancer, Rishauna Zumberg, drags the branch towards the musicians and ends when the branch is handed over to the soloist, Alison Cheeseman. Then it is brought to me & I place it on the floor. This broke the fourth wall by creating a public relationship between performers and producer.

3. My subsequent instructions to the audience were that: "this will be a game about accountability & agency to make the vote, prefaced by expert testimonies." This broke the fourth wall by asking the audience for creative participation to build agency.

4. Expert testimonies were given from Gale & Wendi to summarize considerations for accountability. This broke the fourth wall by asking the audience to judge information.

5. The testimonies & votes. This broke the fourth wall by demanding the audience connect their personal beliefs, the performance they had witnessed and the imminent presidential vote.

6. My final statement about voting in a few days for a president and that no matter what happens, the sea will have the last word. This broke the fourth wall by insisting that power has already escaped our control but voting could restore agency.

Each of these marks in the sequence could be a trigger point for intervention in sensitive initial conditions for change.  Each point might be a place to depart towards a more systematic strategy for relational change.  The story is in how we went from the initial conversation about motivation & evidence in the dress rehearsal to human accountability in the final votes. But in the end, the sea will still have the last word.

Everything took place in the gallery, under suspended branches from dead trees, before photographs of some of the trees that were part of the original Symphony, interspersed with a series of drawings themed with the text, "Are We Lost?" Each of these elements may become points for me to explore further in future experiments with the same material.

Now, we shall start to watch the sea judge this election, the viability of our narcissistic culture and the permanence of Putin's machinations, whether or not and to what extent they were directed towards the USA and how anyone has judged the evidence at hand. Going forward, many of us will be tasked with difficult choices. We know narcissism doesn't brook any challenge and neither will the new administration. But if we remain silent, like the wife in my aria may have been, we could be enablers and collaborators of ecocide. If this culture is as narcissistic as I have judged it, flowering as strong man fascist totalitarian politics in the imminently embodied future of the new administration, all these experiments in the fourth wall may be moot for generations to come. Visibility and seizing agency may become acts of valiant courage or foolish martyrdom. But resistance will still count, regardless of the risks or consequences.

This arena of risk is the spatial choreography of our political future. These experiments and others like them, may still provide information for some people willing to challenge the status quo, if not to see consequences in our lifetimes, if not for contemporary researchers or whether any of us will survive the rising seas. They are the answers art has to answer the KGB or the Heritage Foundation, corporate masters of the universe and fossil fuel oligarchs across the planet: spatial choreographies within the fourth walls of culture for the long view.