Demonstration: Illustrative Irony

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I discussed performances by Ping Chong that link slide presentation, as an early information technology, to identity formation. Twenty years later, in 2006, Forced Entertainment’s The World in Pictures contains its own set-piece slide-show. Jerry Killick, still wearing his caveman wig from an early phase of the show, clicks on a laptop that emits electronic quacks, keytones not unlike those emitted when performer-technicians in The Wooster Group’s House/Lights (the first version of which was produced in 1997) clicked on their laptops. Both Kind Ness and The World in Pictures embark on an anthropological, historical narrative to undermine it. While the unseen, loudspeaker Narrator in Kind Ness has a cool, scientific detachment, Jerry speaks to his images with pathos in a long aside, or hiatus, in a show full of long asides, breakdowns in which meaning is broken down. Jerry’s slide-show, like his long set-up at the start and reflection at the end of The World in Pictures, has a veneer of sharing, of communality. He thoughtfully suggests, viewing a picture of a pair of shoes: ‘here is a gift you might have bought’. A snow-covered, anonymous perspective view of a road is accompanied by the speculation that ‘here is a street you might have walked down’. Later in the sequence, Jerry seems to struggle, several images bringing the commentary, ‘I don’t know’.