THEATER OF WORDS

I just returned from TSL (Time and Space Limited) in Hudson, NY after viewing a film by Werner Herzog entitled Theater of Thought. Ask me what I thought? And I must honestly reply, “I don’t know what to think. I’m writing this to collect my thoughts.” Neuroscience seems to know so much, yet the mystery continues, because every discovery is followed by more questions that fuel the quest for answers.

Of recent, I’ve become obsessed with the idea that so much about human behavior can be explained by delving into the neurons of the brain, chemical processes within the body (regulating pain and pleasure) and the very stuff we ingest that influences how we feel and behave. Not to mention the eventual outcome of our health and well-being. I respect the scientific counterpoint to how we typically think and talk about our feeling lives. Yet throughout the film, I’m reminded how much language and stories shape our thinking.

After the film, I encountered three paintings —one in the corridor and two inside the gallery — painted on raw canvas and push-pinned to the walls. I stand spellbound in front of them and listen to a conversation between me and the b/w lines, words, phrases, sentences seeming to come out of nowhere, questioning our presumed sanity. Painted by Linda Mussmann, co-founder of TSL, the canvases had a striking rawness and bluntness to them. Looking at each canvas, my eyes dart around to follow the randomness of the work. Each painting is a field of chaotic lines and words speaking perfect sense.

When I queried Linda about the paintings — as to their origins and meaning — she responded that they happened automatically.  These paintings did not result from quiet reflections, written down and later  transcribed onto the canvas. To me, this work of  improvisation (during the time leading up to the elections and the day after.) sounded a deep signal of distress and a warning for the future. Yet, it caused in me a sense of relief that someone is expressing a collective response to the cultural craziness going on. Coming from a theater person and activist, trained in the use of language to convey meaning, even beyond words.

Linda has long been fascinated with words and their meanings. And even beyond meaning, the tone and accents of how they can be spoken, which can expand the meaning immeasurably.  I somehow think that words to her are an experiment in living, where she can change the course of her life, if just for a moment, by how you express what you think or feel. Obvious as it may seem, language to her is a way of making palpable what she thinks and feels.

What is going on inside the brain of Linda Mussmann is curious. Her “THEATER OF WORDS” is an ongoing play In time and space. Sometimes, her work past and present is visible on the walls. At other times, it happens in conversation with her.  What she curates in the films at TSL is an example of someone who lives well outside the mainstream. The rawness of the warehouse, pieced together magnificently from what they can afford, is a testament to resourcefulness. And to the imagination of a theater person who can stage “an honest place” in an age in which honesty is trumped by slickness, misinformation and lies.

On one painting, titled YES I KNOW THIS, is written the words “CALL ME MUSSMANN” It appears more than a signature. Yet, as she told me, if anyone has read Melville, they know what’s buried in a name, “CALL ME ISHMAEL.” There’s more to a name than anyone can fully understand or imagine, until you’ve lived the novel. Such is the nature of language, such is the nature of life, and such is the nature of Linda. In her words, “Meaning is very complicated. How to get to the point of what one says in nearly impossible.”