Archaeology in the face of death
As the title suggests, Netti Nüganen’s performance The Myth: last day moves between a mythological origin story and an end-of-time scenario, evolving from theatre to dance to a black-metal-inspired doomsday concert in the process.
It all starts with a ruin. Heaped up on a patchwork landscape of old denim and other fabric remnants, covered by sand and stones, it refers to a hidden, bygone, different time. We wait. Nothing happens, nothing moves, the past lies still before us. After a while, the (end-of-)time formation begins to crumble. Individual fragments of a disorganised body, first a foot, then a hand, emerge until all of Netti Nüganen’s naked body finally surfaces from the ruined layers of time. Risen from the ruins, the undead figure becomes an archaeologist who takes a (pseudo)scientific look at the surrounding area that had sunk with her as if it was a historical excavation site. With sandy hands and dusty tools, she discloses the remains of her own past, object by object: a stretch band, an egg, a PET bottle filled with a liquid identified as lemonade after a taste test, a rock formation (“heavy like my head”), coffee beans, a handbag, too-long trouser legs, a golf ball, a deadly poison, casino chips, a roulette wheel. These are consumer fragments of a gambling-indebted, capitalist past not too distant from our present times, which the archaeologist promptly estimates to be the “early 2000s”. She comments on her excavations analytically and documents what she says with a children’s tape recorder that seems to have fallen out of time.
Her excavation-archaeological approach – “inspecting, examining, removing rubble, unearthing relics, determining findings, exposing, supplementing, reconstructing”[1] – is similar to the psychoanalytic process of uncovering repressed objects and memories, as Sigmund Freud liked to explain in his attempt to establish psychoanalysis as a scientific method.[2] In 1899, Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fließ about the analysis of his patient E. by referring to the famous archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, whom Freud held in high regard: “Buried deep beneath all his fantasies, we found a scene from his primal period […] which meets all the requirements and in which all the remaining puzzles converge. […] It is as if Schliemann had once more excavated Troy, which had hitherto been deemed a fable.”[3] While Freud – by using the metaphors of archaeological formulas of activity ‒ defines psychoanalysis as a process of uncovering, revealing, deciphering, translating and understanding, the thus evoked idea of unrestricted access to the past remains an unattainable ideal for all time.
In the performance, the archaeological excavation does not bring the truth of the past to light, either. Rather, the archaeologist, who basically pursues an archaeology of her self, is confronted with images of her own transience in an attempt to process and objectify the past: a phantasmatic counterpart prophesies her imminent death, a masked other (death itself?) circles around the excavation site and the audience, stealing some spectators’ mobile phones, on which he leaves selfies and death messages. The archaeological-psychoanalytic classification system collapses in the face of the truth of death and progresses into a death-metal excess. “Constructions cannot hold the decay”, Netti Nüganen shouts repeatedly. Doomed to die, she spells out the words “S-K-E-L-E-T-O-N” and “E-D-G-E”, between growling everyday grievances (“The plate is too small at the breakfast buffet”) and aggressively comical threats (“I flatten you like a pancake”). The scientific excavation site becomes a scene of devastation and death, the sandy ruin of the past evaporates into dust, “Claimed by the dust / Of the Underworld gods, doomed by foolish words / And frenzied wits”[4].
Sophia Roxane Rohwetter works as an art scholar and art critic in Vienna. She studied cultural studies, art and philosophy at Leuphana University Lüneburg, with stays abroad at the Zurich University of the Arts and at Bennington College, Vermont. She is currently completing her master’s degree in critical studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with a thesis on the tragic and the comical in the work of Mike Kelley. She regularly writes art reviews, including for Texte zur Kunst and Spike Art Magazine, and has written numerous essays for scholarly anthologies and exhibition catalogues.
[1] Original German text: “in Augenschein nehmen, befragen, Schutt wegschaffen, Relikte aufdecken, Befunde bestimmen, enthüllen, ergänzen, rekonstruieren” (p. 13). Claudia Benthien, Hartmut Böhme, Inge Stephan, “Meine Vorliebe für das Prähistorische in allen menschlichen Formen – Zur Einführung in diesen Band”, in: Freud und die Antike, ed. by Claudia Benthien, Hartmut Böhme and Inge Stephan, Göttingen 2011, p. 9–30.
[2] For example, Freud states in the Gradiva paper of 1907: “There is, in fact, no better analogy for repression, by which something in the mind is at once made inaccessible and preserved, than burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell a victim and from which it could emerge once more through the work of spades.” Sigmund Freud, Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva, ed. by James Strachey, London 1959, p. 40.
[3] Letter of 21 December 1899. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1877–1904, ed. by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Cambridge (MA) 1986, p. 391.
[4] Sophocles, Antigone, translated by Paul Woodruff, Indianapolis/Cambridge (MA) 2001, p. 27.