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Do Play with your Food

Tom Cone, True Mummy. Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2004.

Reviewed by Andrew Klobucar
The Rain 2:4 (July-August 2004): 2


Make mummy of my flesh and sell me to the apothecaries.
— James Shirley (1596-1666), Bird in a Cage

Condensed, yet redolent with high suspense, True Mummy presents a quick succession of emotionally charged confrontations between three characters, Patti, a sculptor, Caroline, a “fire-spotter” and Stanley, an ex-rabbi, brought unexpectedly together a propos of their own recent personal dealings with mortality, the loss of social ritual within society and the resulting confusion over the significance of death within modern culture. Weaved in and around their unique summit, like a long lost family secret, is a second somewhat shadowy narrative originating within the romantic nadir of Ancient Egyptian myth. As it turns out, over the play’s duration, the Egyptian scenes will present their own unique covert history as a kind of symbolic retort to the main story.

Of course, such a pairing is hardly unique within modern art.  In fact, as Edward Said has popularly pronounced, it remains a central legacy of cultural modernism’s formative relationship to the “Orient” as the exotic “other”—the pre-modern antidote to analytical thinking and the discourses of technology, progress and imperialism historically encompassed therein. Said’s “Orientalism” has become the standard text by which the modern west’s longstanding romantic involvement with the pre-modern east is cast as a cultural byproduct of 19th century Europe’s Imperialistic destruction of Egypt’s ancient past. The actual history begins with Napoleon's short-lived conquest of Egypt in 1798 when vast numbers of antiquities were exported from Egypt for use in the first significant museum collections of the modern period.  One should be aware, Said argues, that such items, though extremely significant to the development of cultural modernism, recall a history of theft, colonialism and forced modernization that effectively transformed what the museums may call the ancient world into what economists call the “developing” world.

In many ways, Cone’s work effectively re-plays this specific historical moment in European cultural politics. The Egyptian scenes, played in counterpoint to the work’s primary drama, follow the life, death and mummification of a young Egyptian princess. Her story proceeds far beyond her mortal end, however, carrying us straight into the heart of19th century imperialist Europe where her remains, newly excavated in the modern era, are re-imagined first as archaeological finds and then as museum artifacts.  Here, Said’s analysis of the West’s fascination with Egypt might be momentarily suspended to consider Hegel’s even earlier contemplation of east/west relationships, specifically his chapter on “Natural Religion” in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) where he discusses animistic, “pre-western” belief systems as an important dialectical juncture in the evolution of consciousness. For Hegel, Ancient Egyptian society typifies the spiritualised culture of the “artificer” where art mimics natural found objects of veneration—for example, the pyramids or obelisks. Distinct from the western “artist” as autonomous creator, the artificer produces collaboratively by way of nature, that is, as an act of compulsive participation within a divinely realised material world. By contrast, western culture, originating in Greece, presupposes the artist-as-subject’s first full separation from the natural.  Here, the artwork stands in opposition to nature as its own fully imagined construction, exchanging an imminent relationship with materiality for a more objective, creative autonomy. It is the princess’s final incarnation, though, that remains uniquely foretold in Hegel’s ontology.  In a deliberate reference to the use of mummy ash as a superior type of resin called shellac to varnish oil paintings, the princess’s mummified body endures one last transformation when her cremated ashes are ground into gloss for use in a modern painting. Here, her end—the final form of her being—follows the Hegelian ideal of aesthetic objectivity. She has become both metaphorically and literally, a “true” mummy—in other words, “pure art” in its ultimate modernist culmination as an autonomous object of creative expression. The play’s final scene orders a respectful silence around a single John Turner painting from the British Impressionist movement. Turner’s works are known for their common use of the shellac resin.

Cone’s use of Turner is consistent with the impressionistic tone and structure of the princess’s entire monologue.  Vague, sensuous, at times almost playful, her delicate, ethereal voice establishes the story’s primary mood, while providing a wider cultural context for the work’s more theoretical issues.   

A soft egg
from my chin
to the top
of my head.

A soft egg like a crown
inside
my skull

With these lines, the play begins on lyrical note with the princess preparing for her first royal appearance before the court. While the princess is being ceremoniously dressed – public fashion being the most elementary mode of aestheticising one’s body – Patti’s character appears to be undergoing exactly the opposite conversion.  We meet Patti in the process of being rescued from a near drowning and subsequently revived by Caroline. Patti is grateful to survive, but Caroline’s efforts at resuscitation have also effectively prevented the character from successfully objectifying herself as her own art piece.  Upon regaining consciousness, Patti’s concerns seem equally divided between her unborn baby and her failure to finish her project.  It is a piece based upon the myth of Narcissus. Lying on her back in the water, camera in hand, Patti almost kills herself attempting to re-create the notorious death scene from the Greek tale. In an intriguing parallel to the Egyptian princess’s own transformation, Patti’s aesthetics seeks a methodology capable of representing the world, while simultaneously invoking its materiality, in other words, its sensuousness, as an actual object.  It is a process that purposefully blurs all distinction between representation and the real, between production and process.  Her relationship with Catherine evokes the same aesthetic (not to mention, social) dilemma.  Upon saving Patti’s life, Catherine finds herself instantly cast as her new friend and confidante, as well as her latest art project.  As their relationship develops, we encounter scene after scene of Patti searching for new ways to incorporate Catherine into some kind of art piece.  “I can save you,” Patti implores the one who has just saved her; “Let me use you ... Please. Don’t be afraid.”

Once again, few of these issues lie outside the concerns and concepts of cultural modernism, especially with respect to the more experimental aesthetic movements that have sought to question or at least address the role of the material world within representation. Probably the most direct depiction of this theme remains the bizarre, neo-cannibalistic funeral ritual revealed mid-way through the drama. Congruent with the Egyptian narration, a second secret, spectral history shared between each of the characters gradually emerges within the play’s dialogue.  Stanley, we find out, once administered the death and cremation of his father, a semi-public event accidentally stumbled upon by Patti en route to “a different state of mind”. Instead of shellac, however, Stanley’s father’s ashes ended up mixed into bread dough to be symbolically and ritually consumed by the mourners who were present. Another example of conceptual and social boundaries between art, ceremony and private life being deliberately obscured? Both Patti and Stanley, it seems, have been asking similar questions concerning the social interplay of aesthetics and material practice for much of their lives and working relationships.

As has Tom Cone. When Cone introduces Patti and Stanley’s relationship in terms of their ritual consumption of the latter’s father’s ashes, we are reminded of Cone’s earlier play Cubistique (1974) in which two women also share a particularly evocative, somewhat taboo, recollection of their common past.  Cubistique shows as well the same fascination with issues and ideas drawn from the annals of high modernism. Here, played out in a bohemian salon of 1920s Paris, the aesthetics of cubism helps both define and obscure the psychologically complex, entangled relationship that has evolved between two women friends, Annie and Francis.  Perhaps even more significantly, Cubistique also shares with True Mummy a similar focus on the mouth, or rather, the oral cavity, as a type of all-inclusive nexus of communication, sexual gratification and, of course, consumption. Cubistique opens with Francis, the older, more sophisticated Londoner teaching her younger American friend to speak French. Yet it is not the language, i.e., the mere “symbols” of speech, that interests Francis, so much as the physical pronunciation of actual French sounds and phonemes. The first scene immediately zeros in on the American woman’s mouth being delicately shaped and moulded by the British woman’s fingers as she instructs her charge how to properly sound the French vowel “a” in the word “mange”.  In deed, once again, as in True Mummy, we find one character caught up in the incredibly personal act of teaching another how to eat. Characters don’t discuss or analyze in a Tom Cone play; they feed on each other, invading each other’s materiality, exploring the actual body hidden behind the words. “Mange,” intones the British teacher. “Merde,” replies her younger charge. “Mange merde,” they repeat together. “Eat shit.” It’s difficult not to see the modernist echoes, not only of Picasso and his radical reduction of painterly perspective to the materiality of the canvas, but also of Freud and his identification of excrement as the primordial form of gift or exchange between two subjects.

Like Annie and Francis in Cubistique, both Stanley and Patti realize that they have surpassed important personal boundaries by consuming Stanley’s father’s ashes. For Stanley, the act of consumption invokes a symbolic pronouncement of community, the ritual of exchange marking exactly where the personal meets the communal. Patti’s fascination with the body’s materiality, however, derives more specifically from her aesthetics. For Patti, art, itself, signals a certain death knell, indicating the precise process by which life ceases to be real and slides into mere representation. The same might be said of Cone’s dramaturgy. Many of his plays appear less as dramatic works in the conventional sense of theatrical writing than as complex, multi-layered tableaux vivants, his characters acting out artworks rather than social situations, much like Patti transforming into Narcissus for her photography. While at times, this technique can result in less than life-like characterization, the primary outcome is a very substantial set of aesthetic questions: a life drama not resolved, so much as temporarily stilled, pending further discussion and reflection. Cone’s plays present a remarkable talent for layering history, visual art, philosophy and contemporary social issues to produce works that must be consumed with care, given the complexity of their ingredients.