Her daytime viewing kept her wanting and alive.
She was all she had, and it was more than enough for now.
She was a survivor, living within.
This trance, this daytime viewing, where any world awaited her arrival.
The figures in the view were her best of friends for an hour a day, season upon season.
She would create an access ramp to the world of other.
Who has never felt like the housewife played by Jacqueline Humbert?
Generations grown up with advertisements, TV shows, and kitschy broadcasts have developed a symbiotic relationship with the cathode ray tube first and with the flat screen later.
The telly seems like an illusory window through which we look undisturbed, enveloped in sheer voyeurism, and enjoy what we think is others’ existence. It serves as a background noise that fills our days, annihilating our loneliness and blurring the emptiness surrounding us: an invisible wire connecting different generations and times.
Her fascination with the view had begun in innocence, a bare curiosity, a form of entertainment. She’d begun to take her cues from it.
She’d begun to rearrange her day to suit the view.
She’d begun to refuse to leave the daytime viewing.
She reduced her emotions to it an hour a day.
She devoted body and soul to it an hour a day.*
Daytime Viewing, is an exhibition project part of the series of events titled The Sound Quest, curated by ALMARE in collaboration with David Rosenboom and Mucho Mas! (Silvia Mangosio and Luca Vianello), hosted at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. The exhibition puts on stage the full play of Daytime Viewing, a theatre show written by Jacqueline Humbert and David Rosenboom, some of its stage props and archive documents putting us in dialogue with a masterpiece of contemporary production.
As soon as we enter Fondazione Sandretto’s spaces, we are drawn at the bottom of the room charmed by that living room corner—a domestic and intimate vision from the 1970s. Here we are welcomed by a recliner with sage green cushions that gracefully invites us to sit down, relax and watch telly.
In a paradoxical game of mirrors, in which reality and fiction unexpectedly merge without continuity, we find ourselves in the character of Jacqueline Humbert, abandoned housewives hypnotised by a profound state of loneliness, friends and confidants of TV figures, intimate repositories of their stories and dramas. We end up being spectators of a life we wish were ours, the embodiment of an unexpressed dream and a burning desire.
She was a survivor through no choice of her own.
She had no choice in the matter, it just happened this way…no victims in this home.
A wanting began to grow, and she fed it. The wanting was a real and she kept it alive.
She fed it stories from a private reservoir of imagined events and wishful ideas. Invention, she has heard, was the key to diversion, a detour to wanting.*
Lulled by the electronic music written by David Rosenboom both cheerful and disturbing, we find ourselves at the edge of violent shreds of reality and intoxicating fantasies: from the mellifluous soap opera notes, Daytime Viewing offers us a glimpse of contemporary society, its habits and abuses.
Written in 1979-80, Daytime Viewing is a multimedia show in which projections, music and video live together looking at daytime television and entertainment programs from rough points of view. From the glimpses opened by the script, uneasy stories mixed with gendered violences, destroying the idyllic appearance of entertainment industry.
Violent images are set in everyday backgrounds, breaking their superficial pantomime and crumbling the illusionary fourth wall behind which we are trying to hide.
You said I mustn’t fondle our baby boy, I’d poison his mind by a wandering hand. You said I’d better wipe all evil thoughts from my mind.
[…]
No more drunken beatings. No more blackened eyes. No more midnight terror. No more of your threats and lies. Just one more backhand slap, dear, and oh, what damage, I may do.
What man could think of beating his wife black and blue when he can see her looking like this.(2)
The scenes flow syncopated and we are struck in our disbelief: the fiction that has crowned the dream of being entertained turns with gloomy shadows, leaving us helpless in front of the play’s insinuations. Imagination solves itself into traumas and a bitter pill.
She missed a him but it did not fit the plot. Everyone already knew that joke. So she gave him a character. She found reasons for the characters’ movement away. This he she missed, this he she remembered. He could not see her anymore. He breathed in explanation. He looked for her in places too familiar. In crevices and curves, without imagination, he breathed in expectation. He’d lost her under him, slipped out of sight and surely out if mind. He looked for her in places too familiar.* (1)
Loneliness appears as a desperate desire to escape, a medicine to soothe one’s wounds and traumas. Daytime viewing is an extreme attempt to mute our emotions and scars: a contemporary fairy tale in which we lock ourselves far away from violence. A tale with real implications we can identify ourselves with: the 1970s are the new medieval-like scenarios of this story, which sheds light on our never-ending dysfunctional relationships.
You flail at me, cruel things you say. You ruin every other day.
This game you play is such a bore, don’t think that I can take much more, and lonesome puts its arms around me one more time, one more time.
Yes, lonesome takes me in its arms another time.** (2)
present: memories are weighing on our shoulders, shivers are blocking our stomachs. Those memories keep us awake at night, taking our breaths away. We are pretending to put them behind a veil, to be defended by the high telly volume. Daytime Viewing brutally reveals the deception. As the telly light is turning off, maybe we can count to 3 and try to face our scars one more “last” time.
____________________________
- From the voice-over monologue in the original screening of Daytime Viewing.
- From the song lyrics of Bareback and Domestic violence interpreted by Jacqueline Humbert.
