The keynote address at this year's New York Conference was given by renowned British author, director, producer, lecturer, and physician Jonathan Miller. Miller's book, Subsequent Performances, addresses the notion of afterlife, "the peculiar transformation undergone by works of art that outlive the time in which they are made." His eclectic exhibition, Mirror Image: Jonathan Miller on Reflection, is touring to galleries and art centers around the world. In preparation for his New York keynote, Miller spoke with ISPA member Graham Sheffield, Artistic Director of London's Barbican Centre.

Sheffield: There's so much more history for new artists to cope with. I wonder what kind of a burden that puts on people trying to write new things when there's all this range of reference?
Miller: Well, I don't think it puts more of a burden on them than it did in the sixteenth century. Knowing that there was this mass of classical art, they exploited it and used it, revived it, turned it round. The burden of the past is only, I think, oppressive when you've got to go on the experience of the avant garde. Now there hadn't been an avant garde until the 1900s and once you invent the avant garde you actually blow the top off all possibility of what you do next: you have to saw cows in half and hang them in formaldehyde.

The avant garde wasn't called the avant garde but there were always people working at the fringes and pushing things forward.
But never in such a fundamental way. The entire nature of artmaking changed fundamentally. I mean everything changed between about 1890 and 1910. Science itself changed. Uncertainty crept into science. Indeterminacy. It's easy for science because there's business to be found out.

And you think there isn't in the arts?
Well, it's very hard to know what the unfinished business is. Besides, science creates its own agenda. There are problems leftover at the end of the day which you have to solve the next morning. Art doesn't create its own agenda in quite the same way. There are moments in which it seems to. There are moments, I suppose, between about 1905 and 1910 when the deconstruction of physical appearances under the auspices of Cubism, created an agenda and it created Constructivism. But you see all that's being blown apart now.

What are the unanswered questions?
I don't think there are any, really, at the moment. People are casting around and they're actually recycling dada again and again and again and again.

That's what I mean about the burden of history in the sense that people working in the fourteenth and fifteenth century had the range of classical art and culture to fall back to but it wasn't available in the same way.
No, it is universally available. That, I suppose, is a difficulty, but I think that the difficulty is just simply that the rules and regulations that determined the constraints within which art was working just have been removed. You can exhibit anywhere. Once Marcel Duchamp decided that he would put up a urinal at the exhibit and simply declare the art to be art by fiat, there is no limit to what you can do. And there is also now very little criteria by which you judge quality.

Because technique is no longer a prerequisite.
Well, one doesn't quite know what the technique is in the service of. You see, there was a time when you could judge whether someone was a good draftsman or not. People can't draw now and don't feel it's necessary. Art students don't seem to want to draw. Many of their teachers actually make it hard for the students who do want to draw. And I think probably the same is true to a certain extent in music academies. The rules of composition and harmony and counterpoint are actually regarded as dead. And I think it's very hard.

I look at some of my own younger colleagues, all these sort of Richard Jones-like figures, Peter Sellars and so forth, and you realize that there is a routine deconstruction. As long as the work can be made enigmatically unintelligible on the stage, you've scored. It's unfair. I'm not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings. They're arbitrary. Sellars, who's a clever director, doesn't deconstruct; he does what I call theatrical transportation. Every single thing is just simply dropped in a truck and driven 200 miles, 200 years up the freeway and dumped in the art class Thursday afternoon. "It's in Malibu; it must be good."

Actually, with [Tan Dun's Peony Pavilion] he tried to find a contemporary interpretation to play alongside it. He had several couples playing out different versions of the same story on stage at the same time. [It was] quite illuminating. That wasn't transportation.

But all the other things that I've seen, all those Mozarts, are just simply transportation.

But in a way that's taking your point about people seeing pictures in a different way.
I'll tell you what it is. It's simply automatic. Now I'm not averse, as you know, to transportation, but I've always tried to avoid bringing it into the immediate present day, apart from that Così I did at the Garden. What I have transported, I've always set it forty or fifty years before so that it preserves what was quite clearly in the composer's mind, which is that it's at a distance. So I bring Rigoletto into 1950, I bring Tosca into 1940. I don't make it yesterday. But there are hundreds of ways of skinning this cat.

Quite a lot of people will be reading this and going to see your exhibit [Mirror Image: Jonathan Miller on Reflection]. Could you talk a little bit about what you've tried to do in that?
Well, first of all, [it's best to] describe what I was trying not to do. Most exhibitions consist of monographic collections of a particular artist or a school or the glory that was Venice or something of that sort. It seemed to me that one of the things that happens to pictures if you juxtapose them in unexpected ways is that aspects of them which are reticent under one description become extremely salient under another, merely by being juxtaposed. I was struck by the widespread phenomenon of glitter and gleam and sheen and shine.

Although we take it for granted as one of the ways that [a painter's technical] virtuosity can be expressed, no one really ever asks the question of what this damn thing is, and how it culminates in a perfectly reflective surface such as a mirror. And what mirrors really have done, what we've used mirrors for, and what their metaphorical functions have been.

So, in that sense, it's an argumentative exhibition. And I think there's a great future for that. Argumentative exhibitions bring issues to life in a way that very much irritates traditional curators who want to see their pictures valued for themselves. I'm not quite certain what being valued for itself would be like, really. They are irritated by the idea that the pictures are at the service of an argument, but I think that's one of the things that you should do. Now it doesn't preempt the possibility of merely exhibiting them, but I doubt that there's ever such a thing as merely exhibiting. Any exhibition, no matter how you decide to exhibit, even in the most reticent sort of traditional, conventional way reintroduces you to the picture, partly because you haven't seen that many of them before. Also, when juxtaposed with others of the same type you start to see what's common to them all, so aspects that were invisible when you saw them on their own become extremely prominent.

Have you surprised yourself [with] the juxtapositions you were able to create?
It's very hard to say exactly that, but in thinking about this question of shine and sheen, all sorts of things that I had really not thought about had begun to become apparent. Its relationship to transparency: I became aware of all the peculiar differences in what I call the prepositions of perception, of the difference between looking at something, looking into something, looking through something. I became very surprised by the extraordinary, startling differences – notwithstanding the underlying similarities – between windows and mirrors and pictures and doorways.

What is a surface?
That's right. Exactly that. And so I became interested in the whole nature of surfaces. And I did surprise myself. I became startled by the extraordinary difference between something whose surface is completely invisible which only makes itself present by virtue of what it reflects, and a window, which doesn't make itself apparent at all, in the ideal case.

Do you think there's a possible analogy with the way one might curate a show or an event in the performing arts?
Yes, juxtaposition is an interesting thing. My first experience of creating a dramatic event in addition to directing it [was] about twenty-five years ago. I put on a season at Greenwich called "Family Romances." Of course the critics were too ignorant to know what I was talking about, but the title was taken from one of Freud's essays. You know the family romance about the young man who has a sort of ambiguity about his relationship to his mother and father.

So I put together three plays which you might have thought had nothing whatever to do with one another, and you suddenly realized that they're the same play. I had The Seagull, Ghosts, and Hamlet. And you realize they're exactly the same, that you have a young man whose father has disappeared, whose mother is having some sort of illicit and unallowed relationship with someone else, which frustrates and thwarts and compromises his otherwise normal relationship with the girl of his choice.

So I cast all the same people all the way through. I had Robert Stephens playing Trigorin, Manders, and Claudius. I had Irene Worth play [Arkadina, Mrs. Alving, and Gertrude]. It was an extraordinary event. Peter Eyre played Konstantin, Oswald, and Hamlet. By juxtaposing them and having them played on successive evenings, with the same cast, aspects of the plays which were perhaps reticent under the previous description became prominent.

Because of comments you made earlier I'm struck again by the analogy with music. One might say now that in the musical world the music has become at the service of record companies and artists, and [presenters are] not allowed to juxtapose the piece of music in that kind of contextual way.
They plan for stars. This is part and parcel of what I call the Jurassic Park Syndrome. You put on The Three Tenors, and the next stage we'll get is "Highlights from Nessun Dorma."

Just the top note?
Just the top note. And it's all to do with stars. I've just done a Nabucco that [was] the Jurassic Park. I had a wonderful girl playing Abigaille, but I had this ghastly Jurassic man playing Nabucco. And he was terrible. His attitude toward the rehearsal and working was typified by [a particular incident]. My designer went in to give him his costume for his fitting and turned modestly round to face the window while he undressed and got into his costume. She turned round supposing he would be ready and found him putting on his costume over his suit!

And then there are those little dinosaurs who regard rehearsal as an impudent intrusion on their more valuable time. They don't get paid for rehearsal; they get paid for performance. So they remain at an opera house elsewhere where they're being paid for every performance and then turn up at the last minute for perhaps the pre-dress, as a sort of courtesy. The result is they don't know what the production is like. You get these idiotic monsters and the answer is finally, "Well, we have to concede that they put bums on seats."

I work in Zurich a lot. At least half of the productions are vehicles for the Jurassic Park. In one week when I was there, in three successive revivals, three of the monsters appeared – Carreras, Domingo, and Pavarotti. One after another, they were let out of their cages and went out to perform while someone hosed down the inside of the cage.

I did [Fedora] in Bregenz, first of all, and then I took it to Vienna, and once again, Jurassic cages were opened. Well, [one singer] wouldn't wear anything except her own dress for the second act, so she wore a 1950s concert dress. It's unbelievable. And they're allowed to do what they like. I stood behind the curtain, just before we went to take our bows with the conductor [who said], "Jonathan, you know and I know that what we have done today is trash, but listen to the audience." And there was a fifteen-minute standing ovation for these absolutely crass, vulgar idiots.

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