by Mark J. Jones

The Glass/Wilson production of their 3D opera, Monsters of Grace, finally came rolling through Toronto in April, along with an onslaught of advertisements and full page feature articles in almost all newspapers – including a four-page pull-out in Toronto’s entertainment weekly. Along with the hype came the usual expectations of something beyond the simple eye-candy-of-the-day, perhaps something which inspired, made the audience look at the fusion of music and 3D graphics in new ways, enough to make other artists better their own craft. The ongoing comparisons between Monsters of Grace and Einstein on the Beach, Glass and Wilson’s 1970s production which was something of a theatrical revolution for its time, followed the production with its tour. A word-of-mouth campaign also followed the show’s tour for about a year and a half, as it went from city to city, that the show was continuing to evolve and change as it went, becoming something a little different from the performance before it.

Not a chance.

But by the time both performances in Toronto were over, Monsters of Grace was almost universally disliked. I won’t say hated or even panned, but disliked. Disliked in the sense that it didn’t even represent something to get angry about. It was dismissed. After speaking to many people who saw the show, the common comment was that it was not even memorable enough to get worked up about. Several people booed. While a few people did give it a standing ovation, it wasn’t clear if they were standing because they thought the work was a masterpiece or because they liked the attention.

What made Monsters of Grace so difficult to enjoy was the lack of connection between its various elements. Oftentimes the music and the images did not have an apparent relationship, forcing the audience to choose which they wanted to pay more attention to. The computer-generated images were often flat and gratuitous, certainly not of the caliber that today’s Hollywoodized audiences are used to when it comes to computer animation. It wasn’t clear if this was an aesthetic choice of the director or a reflection of lack of resources or time. The film’s print itself was so dirty that the small sea of speckles that went along with many of the sequences distorted the 3D effect.

Some sequences worked better than others. "Don’t Go Back to Sleep" was sent against a suburban landscape, seemingly a still image with trees in the foreground while houses peeked from behind. As the lyrical music continued to play in monotonous but surprisingly effective – almost hypnotic – tones, it became apparent that the camera had been slowly closing in on the houses, moving past the trees, to reveal a young boy riding a bike on the path below. The music and the imagery, combined with the zooming in of the camera at such a slow rate that it was completely unnoticeable at first, produced a stirring effect that gave a glimpse of the kind of effect work like this could have. Sadly, on the whole it still came across as an experiment or a work-in-progress, and an expensive one at that at $75 for a 73 minute show (phone sex is cheaper).

This isn’t to say that a lack of relationship between a show’s elements is always a bad idea – it can provoke curiosities around the juxtapositions of oddly-placed pieces as a way of shaking up sensibilities – but it still has to be clear. In most cases, Monsters of Grace was just vague. Many proponents of so-called visual theatre make the claim that the choice between abstract imagery and other seemingly disconnected elements is a deliberate choice of the artist to allow audience members to inject their own sense of meaning. But this is often stated as if the artist himself is devoid of any the responsibility of the reaction to their own work, and that if an audience doesn’t get it, well then, they’re probably not sophisticated enough to understand it. Right.

Packer’s Monsters of Immersion article received some criticism that the creators of Monsters of Grace continued to imply that what they were doing was a new form of art. Some believed that this showed a lack of awareness or acknowledgment of other work which has been going on in this field for a long time. The criticism is valid. Not to consider the work done by such groups as The George Coats Performance Group, The Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre, or by the Institute for the Exploration of Virtual Realities at the University of Kansas is to deny them their fair place in the history of art and their valuable contribution to it. The problem, of course, is that when someone as famous as Philip Glass continues to say that he and Wilson are the first ones to do this, some people are eventually bound to believe him, and that becomes that – the books are written.

For me, this was in some ways a realization of how lucky we in electronic art are still not to be dogged by a star system. Yes, one of the results (or perhaps causes) of this is that, on the whole, the work continues to be looked at as obscure, academic, not appealing to popular tastes. But this will change in time, and eventually pop culture will embrace some electronic artists the same way it embraced Andy Warhol, changing the face of the artform faster and more profoundly than even the change of the technology itself has so far.

So let’s take advantage of this period, while we can, and continue to document our history while there is still a relatively level playing field. In ten years time, we could be seeing the faces of George Lucas and Bill Gates on the cover of our history books.