On Sleep

The idea for this issue of Performance Research was appropriately conceived in bed late on a winter's evening in January 2015 while reading ‘The Poetics of Softness’, Max Kozloff's 1967 essay on the sculptures of Claes Oldenburg. Kozloff refers to the ‘remarkable observations’ of the art critic Ulf Linde that he claims penetrate the secrets of Oldenburg's ‘comatose objects’ that are ‘taken out of, or removed from, “life” and are yet found to be preternaturally welling up with it – but life of a different sort, rioting in a stunned or dreaming matter’ (Kozloff 1970: 226–7). This observation seemed to have a broader resonance with more recent forms of performance work that have engaged with sleep, either as a means of reception (as for example in Max Richter's Sleep, 2015) or as performance that can enact, or traverse, the differing states of consciousness that the realm of sleep encompasses, or as a thematic or metaphor that can describe or induce such states.

In his introduction to the catalogue of Oldenburg's 1966 Stockholm exhibition Linde had written that:

Many of [his] works are concerned with sleep. The most obvious … is his Bedroom Ensemble. But he has also depicted the antechamber in which much of the ritual [of sleep] is enacted – the Bathroom; and the Wall Switches which produce darkness; the shirt hung on the back of a chair … the association of pillows, the most essential of all sleep-articles, is certainly meaningful. … During sleep, man is reduced to nature. This reduction also occurs in the soft sculptures. Oldenburg thus states in a new way the ancient problem of the relation of art to nature. … The artist operates in the area between consciousness and unconsciousness; so does the person preparing to fall asleep … it belongs to their roles. Consciousness opens towards unconsciousness, the non-natural toward nature. (Linde 1966, np quoted in Kozloff 1970: 227)

This analysis of Oldenburg's soft sculpture seemed to propose, in my semi-somnolent state, that sleep as performance, as a representation that explores the borders of consciousness and unconsciousness, might provide a compelling thematic for an issue of Performance Research. For Oldenburg, the close relation between the principles of sculpture and performance is to be seen in his theatre of objects and other performance work in the period between 1960 and 1966.¹ The theatre of objects reveals an underlying emphasis on spatial and visual relationships, a move towards the inclusion of everyday objects as subject, and an exploration of the continual transformations of form associated with an emphasis on the moving, performing body and its interactions with objects. Linde's reference to ‘pillows, the most essential of all sleeparticles’ suggested to me a journal issue whose front and back covers might be imagined as forming the simple structure of a pillow, or two surfaces enclosing a volume, with its various contents as it were sleeping between the sheets, to be (re)activated in multiple ways by each reader.

The front cover image of Albrecht Dürer's study ‘Six Pillows’ is taken from the reverse side of his Erlangen Self-Portrait (c.1493). It provides some resonance with Oldenburg's ‘comatose objects’ in its exploration of chance shapes, folds and indentations to suggest a dream-like fluidity and surrender to weight and gravity. Writing on Dürer's work Joseph Leo Koerner remarks:

A pillow is an appropriate place to hide faces. … [P]illows are the head's support in sleep. … Once used, the pillow preserves in its indented shape a loose impression of the sleeper. In the [Erlangen] study sheet, the hidden faces in the pillows merge imaginary sleepers with their place of rest, transforming the amorphous indentations of fabric into twisted, phantasmogoric countenances. (Koerner 1997: 28)

▪ Figure 1. Silver Box with Sleeping Eros (Roman/ Byzantine, c. AD 300–400). Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Sleep (and sleeplessness) as a trope, as a pictorial and literary image has been a consistent cultural representation since antiquity. The associations between night, sleep, dream and death are already established at the beginning of the Greek mythos where sleep (Hypnos) and death (Thanatos) are twin brothers born of their mother, Night (Nyx). These associations continue into the present through the Christian mythos with its central imagery of the resurrection, the triumph over death, of light over darkness.²

The depiction and narratives of sleep are a set of cultural representations that are in continuing transformation as recent work on the histories of the night by A. Roger Ekirch (2006) and Craig Koslovsky (2011) have shown. The recent ‘turn to sleep’ and to its medical and sociological ontologies as a topic of scholarly and popular concern over the last decade has seen a growing number publications in the fields of medicine and neuroscience, as well as the social sciences and philosophy.³

The topic of sleep – ‘great nature's second course’ as Shakespeare put it – is vast. As Sir Thomas Browne observed in his essay ‘On Dreams’: ‘[h]alf our days we pass in the shadow of the earth; and [Sleep] the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives’, (Browne, 2006 [c.1650]: 475) but as yet there has been little collected critical writing in the area of performance and its relation to sleep, despite the range of performance work that has taken sleep as its impetus. With this in mind, we therefore set out to gather research and speculative articles, artists’ pages and images, critical and creative writings on the performance of sleep and how sleep can act as a catalyst for performance, or is performed. The resulting ‘conversation’ falls into a number of sub-categories – the performances and representations of sleep; the uses and philosophies of sleep; and the places and conditions of sleep – categories that are loosely followed in the issue.

In the sphere of performance, artists (and audiences) often operate generatively in the transitions between waking to sleeping, at the borders where conscious and unconscious states merge with each other. A recent history of contemporary/performance art and theatre provides a number of familiar and compelling examples including Claes Oldenburg's ‘comatose objects’, Floor Cake (1962) and Bedroom Ensemble (1963); Andy Warhol's now infamous eight-hour film of John Giorno, Sleep (1963); Chris Burden's Bed Piece (1972) in which he remained in bed from February 18th to March 3rd in a Venice Beach gallery; Dumb Type's Plan for Sleep #1–8 (1984–6); Bill Viola's video installations The Sleep of Reason (1988) titled after Goya's etching, and The Sleepers (1992); Janine Antoni's Slumber (1994); Sam Taylor Wood's National Portrait Gallery video installation David (2004) perhaps echoing Warhol; Marina Abramović's Dream-Bed (2005) and more recently Duckie's performance of Lullaby (2011), an all night sleep-over for an audience of fifty sleepers at the Barbican Theatre, London; Cornelia Parker's The Maybe (2013) with Tilda Swinton; Dream Over (2014) at the Rubin Museum of Art, Chelsea, New York, with visitors invited to sleep under an artwork that the curator has chosen for them; in contrast to Zhou Jie's ‘participatory solo’ 36 Days (2014) at the Beijing New Art Gallery that involved sleeping naked on a bed of iron wire; or Jim Findlay's Dream of the Red Chamber (2014), a theatre performance for an audience ‘falling in and out of sleep’.

These contemporary works attest to our cultural fascination with the invisible realms of sleep and its association with forms of darkness, night and death. The worlds that sleep contains, borders or performs are worlds that not only inform or influence our waking lives, but also inform our ability (or inability) to navigate the thresholds of sleep. To perform sleep is perhaps to be caught or suspended at the thresholds between the waking and sleeping worlds as we see in Bill Viola's video installation Threshold (1992) at World Trade Center, New York where

The current news scrolls across an electronic display sign with up-to-date reports on the daily events of the world. The illuminated text is harsh and bright. A black open doorway intersects the sign, dividing it into two and leading to a dark inner room. Inside this room three, large, dim, projections of peoples faces appear on the walls. They are asleep and the sound of regular breathing can be heard in the darkness. Occasionally, one of the figures moves or shifts position, but they always remain asleep, unconscious presences existing beneath the incessant flow of worldly events. (Mignot 1998: n.p.)

Or in the literal dream work of Janine Antoni's Slumber (1994) in which the artist, drawing on the Homeric image of Penelope's loom, is

[c]onnected to a polysomnograph machine, which records her rapid eye movement during dream activity. When she wakes up, she uses the machines printout as a pattern for weaving, seated at an elaborate loom of her own design. During the day (interacting with the audience) she works, producing an endless blanket using pieces of fabric torn from her nightgown. The blanket covers her as she sleeps, dreaming the next day's template. (Horodner 1999: n.p.)

The digital booklet that accompanies Max Richter's compilation from Sleep (2015), staged in its entirety as an eight-hour live ‘overnight’ performance in Berlin and London in September 2015, tells us that ‘the work is an “investigation” into the process of sleep: an experiment to see how we experience music in different states of consciousness – to discover, if possible, how we perceive it in both a wakeful and a sleeping state’ (Cooper 2015: 6). Max Richter invokes Heraclitus – the first philosopher of change and transformation – in the epigraph: ‘Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world’ (Heraclitus – Frag. 90). For Heraclitus there is no discontinuity between sleeping and waking – ‘the soul is co-extensive with the universe’ – and, according to Robin Waterfield,

castigat[es] people for their failure to wake up to reality … Heraclitus calls our normal waking state ‘sleep’, and is urging us to wake up to a higher understanding. The logos, like the whole world, is common – accessible to all – and yet we fail to see what is right before our eyes. (Waterfield 2000: 36)

In The Poetics of Sleep Simon Morgan Wortham points out that we might understand sleep not principally as a physiological state but more ‘subtly and complexly’ as a ‘state of consciousness’ (2014: 6) and that what happens during sleep ‘is not simply a matter of pure physiology outside consciousness, but has to do with an alternate state of “consciousness” that in turn puts in question what we might mean by the term itself’ (9–10). This raises the idea that the arts might be thought of as forms of public dreaming that sit at or traverse the threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness and form a transitional and liminal state; the imaginative labour of performance that we can see in some of the contributions to the issue that follow here.

In his short essay ‘Sleeping It Off’ the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips observes that

sleeping is something that we do when we are not aware that that is what we are doing. When we sleep, when we act in plays, when we are under magic spells, we cannot at the same time give an account of what we are doing, without waking up, without breaking the spell. (Phillips 2011: 80)

In this sense and in order not to ‘break the spell’ sleep requires a set of conditions – it is ‘something to be striven for, a quiet state that needed to be gained’ (Summers-Bremner 2008: 8ff.) – a state of consciousness that enables us to access and make use of what it brings to us. Roland Barthes notes in his entry ‘Napping’ in Le Chronique de Roland Barthes (1978–9) for Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, this observation of the use of sleep as suspension:

Doors closed, the telephone switched off, curtains drawn and the doorbell detached, flat on my bed, I know that for an hour nothing can disturb a peace which from now on is up to me. What I get from napping is the suspension of my image: nothing comes to feed it; I am resting, not from others nor from myself, but from myself seen, thought, questioned, required by others. (Barthes 1985: 112)

In the introduction to Swann's Way (1922) Marcel Proust places an emphasis on the sleeper as an object among objects:

I would fall asleep, and often I would be awake again for short snatches only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or to open my eyes to settle the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness, to savor, in an instantaneous flash of perception, the sleep which lay heavy upon the furniture, the room, the whole surroundings of which I formed but an insignificant part and whose unconsciousness I should very soon return to share. (Proust 1957 [1922])

But sleep like performance is not only a state of consciousness but also requires a set of cultural as well as physical conditions – the complicity of the objects perhaps that Proust indicates – in order to provide a place within which sleep can occur. The bed and the bedroom have not always been considered or used as a private space for sleep as Summers-Bremner discusses in her cultural history of insomnia. She notes that ‘the beds of 17th century French aristocracy appear to have functioned primarily as theatres with events such a “lyings-in, births, christenings, marriages and deaths” serving as elaborate affairs for the receiving and entertaining of guests’ (2008: 36). The bed is both a restful and restive space, a space of memory and forgetfulness, a space of performance, as we see for example in Tracey Emin's My Bed (1998), not only of private events but of personal, social and political activity.

▪ ‘The Perfect Gift is Sleep’ Hästens, East 82nd Street and Madison Avenue, NYC. Photo © Ric Allsopp, 2015

If the threshold of sleep may be thought of as a condition for ‘public dreaming’, a condition for art work, for art to work – the merging of conscious and unconscious states – then the conditions and borders between the realms of waking and sleep are also inhabited by insomnia – ‘a resistance to the crossing into sleep resulting in the absence of unconsciousness, emphasizes both the sleep/waking border and the need to cross it’ (2008: 49). Summers-Bremner notes that insomnia is not simply a matter of the physical, cultural or social conditions that enable us to cross over into sleep, but, in an association now more or less lost to us, dreams ‘thicken and trouble’ human sleep:

For the ancients, insomnia are dark, desirous dreams within other dark states: sleep, night and death, the deepest. The imbrication of light with agency in the contemporary west makes it difficult to conceive and speak clearly of kinds of darkness which interact with each other. We moderns are missing a language for that interaction … the problem is that we seldom know it. (18)

Perhaps the recent ‘turn to sleep’ and the recurrent interest in sleep as a site of, and impetus for, performance links us to that interaction, as do the uses of sleep as a portal to dreams and hence to forms of interpretation and inspired divination that might be of use to the individual or to the wider community. Sleep then as a form of ritual performance and ascetic practice (and here quite literally a form of ‘public dreaming’) enables us to ‘see clearly’. Ruth Padel develops the idea that in the Greek world enlightenment depends on darkness as its source; that ‘[w]hat is dark and within can “indicate” what is wrong’, medically and divinely, for ‘[i]n darkness we see what we cannot see in light’. (Padel, 1995: 46, 65 quoted in Summers-Bremner 2008: 25)

As Summers-Bremner points out:

The earliest Greek oracles were ‘shrines to Night’ and the darkened seer was everywhere, as heroes passed through underworlds, blindness and caves or spent nights in incubation, the special sleep undertaken in the temples of gods, in order to see clearly [ … ] (2008: 25)

This ‘special sleep’, sleep as incubation, as brooding, a sleep that requires a special set of conditions that enable it to incubate dreams, is not so far removed from some of the recent explorations of the dynamics and resonances of sleep in contemporary performance. The classicist Robert Flaceliere writing on Greek oracles noted that the involuntary nature of dreams allowed them to be regarded as supernatural signs and that preparations for sleep using ascetic practices were a means of gaining access to transformative dreams. He goes on to describe how the sanctuary of Asclepios at Epidaurus contains two unusual buildings:

a mysterious round monument or tholos, and the remains of a vast two-storeyed hall which served as a dormitory for the sick; and which the inscription refers to both as enkoimetrion (the place of incubation) or abaton (the holy and secret place). It was here that the invalids, having performed the preliminary rites, came to spend the night on beds made of animal hides [cf. the statues of Sleeping Eros mentioned above], hoping that as they slept Asclepios would grant them an instantaneous and miraculous cure; that is to say, a dream that would reveal to them the appropriate treatment for their illness and the regime to be followed. (1965: 21)

These ‘performances of sleep’ direct our attention again to the recovery of an age-old desire to understand sleep not simply as a period of physical recuperation or restoration through oblivion, a necessary, but perhaps functional view of sleep, but as a space of performance and revelation that can invoke and provoke other means of interacting with and through the waking worlds that we inhabit.

I would like to thank all the contributors whose work has enabled this issue to take its shape; in particular Helen Gethin for keeping it all on track and not letting me fall asleep at the wheel; and all those artists and colleagues in Falmouth, Berlin, Zagreb and elsewhere over the last year with whom I have had some illuminating and at times somnolent conversations on sleep.

Notes

1 See for example Hochdörfer (2013) and Ehninger (2014).

2 For example, in the ‘Resurrection’ panel of the Englandfahrer altar-piece (Master Francke c. 1400–30) in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg, we see soldiers caught in torpid sleep while the nimble figure of the rising Christ steps out of the darkness of the tomb and crosses the border from death to life, from darkness to light, from sleep to eternal awakening; and through all manner of secular painting, portraiture and sculpture and its depictions of sleeping figures: from Roman statues of Eros, the god of love, asleep on a lion's skin with his bow in hand (fig. 1) offered as dedications at sanctuaries or as gifts; to Vermeer's A Maid Asleep (c. 1656–7) in which, to cite the caption, ‘an overdressed maid has dozed off after entertaining a visitor (two glasses, a pitcher, and a jug may be seen in the jumbled still life). The painting above her depicts Cupid unmasked, an oblique explanation of her dreamy smile’–both to be seen in the Metropolitan Museum, New York.

3 Including Simon Williams Sleep and Society (2005) and The Politics of Sleep (2011) as well as more recently Simon Morgan Wortham's (2014) The Poetics of Sleep and Jonathan Crary (2014) 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep reviewed in this issue, not to mention Jean-Luc Nancy The Fall of Sleep (2009) and other more recent philosophical work. See ‘Longing for Sleep’–http://www.somatosphere.net