Tatsuo Majima: 'The Dinner Party'
In: Exotic Excursions. By Michael Curran, Clair Joy, Tasuo Majima, Fernando Palma Rodriguez, Kate Smith. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995.
Dinner Party examines the current state of so called 'internationalism' or 'globalism' which seems to be the unquestioned premise of today's politics, art, social and cultural studies. Dinner Party, in a domestic and colloquial manner, explores the process by which what is regarded as international and global is performed and at the same time, fails.
Imitating and parodying familiar styles of TV sitcoms and documentary films, Dinner Party works on a delicate uncertainty of the interrelations between fictions/non-fictions, what is acted/not-acted, as well as narrative/non-narrative.
'Do you want to change the world? If you don't want to change the world, if you give up changing the world...' says Russell (John Constable), who has recently came back to his country after a few years in Asia, at a welcome home party celebrating his return. There are his old friends Lesley (Cindy Owen), Lewis (Trevor Stewart) and Juliette (Melanie Pappenheim), who have also visited Asian countries themselves. Four of them are sitting at a table full of exotic foods and are engaged in animated conversation.
They talk about the relationship between ecological sewage and bottom jokes, the difficulties of mutual understanding between two different cultures, the evil effects attendant upon tourism, and so forth, until their conversation is exhausted.
What Dinner Party asserts is the inherently domestic nature of 'internationalism' and 'globalism'. The aim of the Dinner Party is not to deny the superficiality of these concepts, but to criticise them by assimilating itself into the grand narratives of popular 'internationalism' and 'globalism' in order to undermine their static structures of internal/external, subject/object and domestic/foreign.
Dinner Party is a chaotic space where criticism is already prescribed by what it criticises. Exhausting itself through an excessive and vulgar conversation which essentially cannot avoid being an auto-intoxicated monologue, Dinner Party, in a positive way, works as a negative criticism against 'narrative'.
Tatsuo Majima