Does your mind keep getting fogged up? Yes, mine, too. The fog’s why I keep a “memento mori” on or around me. I recommend it. When a thick bank of the opaque, cold, humid stuff rolls out of the wild wood and into my carefully cultivated garden, I clutch my memento mori and feel slightly saner.
My memento reminds me to remember just exactly what I am, what my biology, years of psychoanalysis and honest on-the-spot self-assessment says of me and mine and what personal experience teaches me about the likelihood of unintended consequences no matter the choice of action made. Memento action may be slow, it may involve finishing a bottle when it’s not quite noon, it may involve discretely missing an appointment, but: “Some barbarian is waving my spear,” wrote the poet, “But I am here now, combing my hair.”
What is good in the private human sphere is often good in the public human sphere as well, so I would like, very humbly, to propose that humanity adopt the performance piece Consul & Meshie as its global memento mori, also as its sacred icon of the Age of Aquarius. Perhaps Facebook could permanently fund Antonia Baehr, Latifa Laâbissi and Nadia Lauro, the piece’s creators and performers and its set designer. Google could provide free, itinerant, self-performing holograms anytime its universal detectors pick up the words “Let’s…” , “I have an idea…” or “Seriously, though… if…” .
It was Nina Santes’ all-night, multi-part, multi-notion eco-feminism-inspired Fictions, une nuit en creation, that put Consul & Meshie in my way (social activist-artist Latifa Laâbissi’s controversial W.i.t.c.h.e.s., among other works) no doubt drew Santes’ attention in her programming decisions…) Fictions kicked off Santes’ 2019-20 stint as choreographer in residence at the Atelier de Paris-Carolyn. Her big night out, which also included a banquet, a cappella singing about death, a midnight walk in a wood seeded with dance vignettes, club dancing, mysteries, loud intimations of shamanism, art therapy and a comfy place to sack out, left me with Consul & Meshie lodged in the third eye, wondering about ecstasy, sacredness and dance. I recommend it.
The chimpanzees Meshie, whose “human-like” behavior – affectionate and self-conscious – and Consul, whose highly-publicized shows of “civilized” living – baths, stimulants, car driving and beds – were marvels of their times. Their stories, complemented by the visual, dramatic and emotional effectiveness of the Antonia Baehr, Latifa Laâbissi and Nadia Lauro piece and proof, if it were needed, of their intellectual and artistic integrity.
H.C. Raven, from 1921 until his death a Curator of Comparative Anatomy and a collector for American Museum of Natural History in New York, bought Meshie, a female, in 1930 during a visit to colonial Cameroun. There is a risibly Moses-in-the-bull-rushes air to his right-thinking contemporary narrative in the American Natural History Museums's Natural History: the purchase of white-scalped Meshie is clearly a rescue from darkest Africa's dusky hunters.
The provenance of Consul, a male, is not known. An undated, unsourced newspaper article of the period relates his death in Berlin. Consul, the property of an American impresario called Frank Bostock, was said to be insured for £20,000. It seems likely that Bostock hid Consul’s actual death (which is estimated to be between 1904-08) so as not to compromise the draw of his Animal Arena performances. Other “Consuls” were seamlessly substituted into Bostock’s “intelligent monkey” show. Although investigation by the American Psychological Association in 1915 concluded there were indications of inchoate human-like qualities “such as sympathy”, the rest of Consul’s behavior was due to chimpanzee’s trainability and mimicry. The “marvelously suggestive” intelligence of Consul, then, is an almost perfect medium for demonstrating the projection of human mythologies and their underlying anxieties: "The very sight of it brings forth a grin from ear to ear…” – The Capricornian (Australia)
As then, is now. The very sight of Baehr and Laâbissi’s Consul & Meshie makes the uneasy spectator grin from ear to ear.
Set designer Nadia Lauro has created a set for Baehr and Laâbissi’s shines that is chock full of amusing visual innuendo. For instance, seeing these “monkeys” on a gigantic, elaborately upholstered upscale-hotel-style bed is surely funny. But it does beyond funny to wordless commentary. Lauro’s tasteless pile of gated-community display is upholstered in the moral equivalent of “Naugahyde”. “Naugahyde”, remember, is one of the first commercialized polymer artificial leathers – one of the first of examples of our era’s “delusional consumerism”. This is the belief that buying what you don’t want is just as good as buying the thing you are kept too poor to afford. It has choked the very oceans with plastic crap. Naugahyde’s lawsuit-proof all-media marketing suggested to urban boobs that Naugahyde’s stick-to-the-unnaturally-hot-ass sitting experience was just what the hide of the (darkest African?) “Nauga” naturally felt like. At the time, the owners of Naugahyde patents and factories said… nudge, nudge… that the… ahh, suggestion… of Naugahyde’s natural origin was just a harmless… haw-haw… joke.
But the performance is also packed with the well-timed tics and well-pointed allusions suggested by the histories, situations and conditions of Consul and Meshie. First off, Baehr and Laâbissi, who have taken care to project pendulous “native” breasts, turn on its head, then give a sharp twist to, the risible conceit that apes, baboons and chimpanzees are “almost human”. Their ridiculously inaccurate depiction of “monkeys” could not be more dramatically effective. Also, over the three-hour performance, the duo uses studied activity such as touching, embroidery, listening and learning situations to bring out the monkey in the hominid. Although the duo absolutely radiates that tight, vaguely paranoid self-absorption that characterizes humans, gestural timing subtly and surely recognizes then involves spectators.
In sum, there’s not an intellectual or artistic hair out of place in Consul & Meshie. They’ve left no doubt in my mind these monkeys are the enemy Pogo Possum also met. Join with me to make Consul & Meshie our global memento mori and epochal icon.
CONSUL & MESHIE – performance • 190 minutes • Concept & performance: Latifa Laâbissi, Antonia Baehr / Set: Nadia Lauro / Costumes: Antonia Baehr, Latifa Laâbissi and Nadia Lauro / Sound and lighting: Carola Caggiano • Théâtre de l’Aquarium, la Cartoucherie, 8 June 2019 • June Events 2019/Fictions une nuit en creation • Concept & general direction: Nina Santes
Antonia Baehr (Pact Zollverein) performance calendar / Cie Figure Project (Antonia Baehr, Latifa Laâbissi and Nadia Lauro) performance calendar / Nadia Lauro – scenographies / Nina Santes performance calendar
Latifa Laâbissi will present her new work White Dog 9-12 October 2019 for the Festival d’automne in Paris. Festival d'automne 2019 calendar
Nicely done, Paul. The Age of Aquarius -- you said it and the song from "Hair" sings itself in my head. Nifty photos. -- DL
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | June 28, 2019 at 10:42 PM