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the performance, these several modes of imitation overlap.”47 Let’s consider here Le dortoir (2002), one of Colomer’s earliest videos, where all the actors (except a baby and a man climbing a ladder) pretend they are sleeping. It’s another abstract drama. In Pianito (1999), a character smokes, quietly meditates, and mimes playing a cardboard piano. This is reminiscent of a work by Swedish Fluxus artist Bengt af Klintberg, whose title I have forgotten or perhaps never existed, that involved “playing of feigning playing the piano.” Fluxus concerts were musical dramas that consisted in deliberately creating weird happenings or events like, say, pouring out a bottle of lavender perfume in the auditorium and then disappearing.48 Nothing bars us from thinking of the various actions in X-Ville as musical numbers. Modes of imitation overlap, representational media become inter-mediated. Without doubt the most believable actors in X-Ville are a dog and a cockerel, protagonists in a kind of sketch, a chasing game with no beginning or end. The cockerel crows quite well. At a given moment, he decides to leap over a long red tube, which lies coiled upon itself on top of a pallet pretending to be a sculpture. A man nearby stirs sand with a shovel. He’s building an orchard on a wooden floor. A woman will come to plant pieces of vegetables in it later.
When the inhabitants of X-City mime sweeping the floor or exchange counterfeit money, it’s no simulation, they are not pretending to be working: they are showing us a representation of labor, and in doing so they are actually working. The play wants us to watch them. They are building a place to tear it down later, or tearing it down, endlessly, with fragments from another one. When they pass a dwindling volume of water around or reshuffle the fragments of an imaginary city, they are mobilizing the elements of a possible representation at its margins. They are working. The boundaries of representation and those of the city meet here.
What else are sculptures made of, if not little bits of cities?
47 William E. Gruber, “‘Non-Aristotelian’ Theater: Brecht’s and Plato’s Theories of Artistic Imitation”, in Comparative Drama, Vol. 21, No. 3, Fall 1987, pp. 204, 205
48 I’m referring to Carl Friedrich Reuterswaerd’s (aka Charles Lavendel) March 1963 concert in Stockholm. See Bengt af Klintberg, “Fluxus Games and Contemporary Folklore: on the Non-Individual Character of Fluxus Art,” in Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, Vol. LXII: 2, 1993,
p. 118.
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