The Golden Age from My Barbarian on Vimeo.
Forecast: Dystopia in the 22nd century, a collection of bodies so overly saturated with meaning that they become cultureless, a return to a barbarianism that resides in the singular body - My Barbarian.
Alex, Malik, and Jade embody allusion, fantasy, allegory, myth, and the notion that perhaps culture, in our modern understanding and use of the term, is a spectacle, an object of curiosity. What does Canada Day celebrate? What is Canadian “culture”? More importantly, where does “it” reside? It is the element of embodiment that seems to actualize culture; specifically, embodiment through the mode of spectacle, where the body as physical container of a cosmology becomes a watchful object.
My Barbarian’s use of spectacle within a spectacle objectifies the “cultural” body as to make the audience reconstitute the subjugation of their own bodies. But what is left to contain a body’s location? As borders separating countries are dismantled by transnationalism, it becomes difficult and even inconsequential, to a point, to locate a body on the east, west, north, or south side of a defining line. Such a fluidity of space places further emphasis on the individual body as a political entity. Thus, a new paradigm emerges- the paradigm of the performing self where borders become internalized allowing for the simultaneous embodiment of multiple spectacles.
How fitting then, to this theorizing, that in My Barbarian’s “The Golden Age” the audience’s physical body occupies the very space where meaning manifests, the space between spectacle and spectator. The spectator’s body, now the scene of the spectacle, becomes the canvas:
Standing between opposing video projections, the spectacle of a song and dance exoticising enslavement on one side and the performance of watchful spectators mimicking this cultural commodification of slavery on the other, the present, live body becomes the vessel through which allusions pass. The transference gives voice to the physical entity that is now left to decipher its place between the two walls. American, African American, middle class American, foreigner, perpetuator of the institution of slavery, evidence of the institution of slavery. How do the many constitutions of the singular body reconcile, must they reconcile?
Through the creation of hyper saturated bodies Alex, Malik, and Jade avoid the forecasting of their own political identities and place the risk and uncertainty of defining borders in the hands of the viewing body. As the only certain delineator of space, the physical body may become so impregnated with identities and histories that, as My Barbarian do forecast in one song, “only the supernatural will survive”.
