Breaking the Fourth Wall: On Aliza Nisenbaum’s Paintings at the Met Opera | The Brooklyn Rail (2024)

Painting becomes theater and theater becomes painting in these four works by Aliza Nisenbaum at the Met Opera. Revealed is the iridescence of the surface that is opera—the color, artifice, pageantry, and gestural drama—while also foregrounding, via conscious construction, the designers, make-up artists, directors, and stagecraft labor that goes into opera as “total art form.” Engaging the language of opera, along with its complex production, Nisenbaum conducted behind-the-scenes research in the Met archive, immersed in photographs, costumes, wigs, the workings of stage design and set machinery, and in conversation with four different Divas preparing for one of the most difficult roles in opera: that of “Violetta,” the archetypal nineteenth-century “fallen woman,” in Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata.

This essay follows a reverberating current back to 2015, when I wrote about the artist’s work for her first solo at White Columns. A show that introduced Nisenbaum’s approach to the public, as a form of quasi-ethnographic portraiture—time spent with people in specific contexts of labor, leisure, or art. Returning now after many years to Nisenbaum’s work, and to conversations around her practice, I was struck by the peculiarity of these Opera paintings. “Staged” at the viewer’s height behind a corded-off section on the second and third floors at the Met, the position of the paintings, as much as their content, echoes theatrical techniques of estrangement—breaking the fourth wall and taking up an almost Brechtian emphasis on social gesture over empathy. Pulling at the rope of illusion and truth without letting go of either end, these opera paintings engage a theatrical back and forth between artifice and truth, absorption and estrangement, edging us into the power of images in an age of mass hypnosis by digital screen.

I first saw Nisenbaum’s opera paintings on a wintery evening while attending the operaX: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (composed by Anthony Davis, libretto by Thulani Davis, and story by Christopher Davis). As things sometimes go, this chance combination allowed me to take hold of a lingering train of thought about the relation between painting and theater, or more specifically, painting as a form of “staging” arising within my own painting practice, and through my broader research as a cultural anthropologist. Following this thread, and drawing on the dialectics of proximity and distance involved in ethnographic fieldwork, I began thinking about the generative role of estrangement vis-à-vis the medium of painting.

My first real introduction to opera was through an Italian friend I met while working in Vienna briefly after college. We would get the cheap stehplatz tickets—around five euro then—used mostly by students and serious opera aficionados with little money. Standing for three plus hours, after all, requires commitment. To hold your spot during intermission, you simply tied your scarf to the rail where you were standing—an honor system among those without “assigned” seats. It was magical to me: not only the eventfulness and the emotion of the music in this out-of-time art form, but also the way people responded to it. Especially in our misfit section. I remember seeing the same woman over and over again. During the opera, she would stand completely still, enraptured, mouthing every line of every lyric to herself.

Excepting this wonderful lady—and I’m sure many others—I don’t think it too far off to say that the opera form to a contemporary audience can feel anachronistic. In any case, it is hard to imagine that our attention, as divided as it is, still finds itself in the rapt absorption that opera once inspired. Such absorption has long been reserved for moving images, the medium of dreams, or, more insidiously today, the black hole of media images consumed on phones and other “devices.” In a situation where free-floating screen images work their way seamlessly into everyday consciousness (do dreams change, I wonder, with every passing medium, from analog to digital, and so on?) there is something about the very physical presence of theater, of living bodies on a stage, that seems to push back at us. The experience of opera is not, for me at least, one of total absorption into spectacle.

Opera is often said to be a “total art form,” merging word, music, design, dance, and acting. But opera seems increasingly, whether intentionally or unintentionally, to affect an estrangement in the form of a separation of its elements. Gesture, movement, music, language, voice, acting—all set within imagined tableau—sit in uncanny relation to one another. It is not only that lyrics really can’t be understood by most. In any case, the emphasis is not on conveying meaning through language alone, but conveying affect through the power of the voice. Opera makes us pay attention to the form and rhythm of language betraying its deeper relation to music, without necessarily having to follow, consciously, the narrative. Then, there is the effect of repetition. Opera is repetitive because (at least in traditional operas like La Traviata) it is familiar—recall the Viennese woman who could mouth every line. This familiarity, even the lulling quality of the music, often has the strange effect of highlighting the gestural language of performers. The effect is a familiarity in distance: as gestures become visible, they are separated out from other forms of expression. As if the potential hidden within opera lies not in its ‘totality’ as form, but in the tendency to affect a separation of its media—a potential activated by contemporary directors like O’Hara in X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. In this sense, whether La Traviata or something more contemporary, I wonder if opera opens us to a different mode of attention, increasingly ‘strange’ to us today.

Bertolt Brecht hoped for this effect in opera: if the elements could be separated out, made less harmonious, less hypnotic, the form could escape its reduction to what he considered a kind of “culinary principle” of entertainment—art devoted to merely sensual satisfaction. Brecht was ambivalent about opera—apparently a lover of the form in his youth, he continued to critique opera even as he created three operas of his own, including the famous The Threepenny Opera. In any case, his relationship to opera, it is said, in many ways informs concepts critical to the development of “epic theatre.”¹

Walter Benjamin seemed to share Brecht’s soporific view of opera as a bourgeois form, yet never dismissed it entirely. Hidden within opera, Benjamin located nascent elements of an older form he deemed more profound—the German Trauerspiel, or Tragic Drama. Here, he located an unresolved, allegorical melancholy built-up through the piling on of excessive images and affects in tension. It is this unresolved quality that becomes lost, according to Benjamin, when opera becomes too polished, too melodramatic, too rarefied, too cut off from the life and struggle of history. What is important is that something remains open in the form, productive of dialectical tensions, and echoing a broken unity (between language and music)—a unity yearned for but never given. For Benjamin, then, opera’s success lies in its failure. Only in opera’s failure as total, or rather “totalizing” art form, does it reveal the separation or gap between language and music, as an unredeemed unity. All this is to say that there is a power in the unintentional separation opera effects visually, musically, and gesturally. Such moments of separation, when they occur, in the context of opera or here, in the context of paintings about opera, bring out elements that have much in common with what Brecht and Benjamin considered the “alienation effect”—that power of estrangement to paradoxically bring the truths in art closer to the mystery of human experience.

Quick Change 1

Note: Nisenbaum’s painting Backstage at the MET: The Quick hange Booth (Traviata) (2023), which I will return to, refers to the back-stage partitions where immediate costume changes and other adjustments take place during a performance.

In the soft golden light of the Met, one is met by layers of rounded balconies overlooking the foyer. These balconies appear to function like miniature stages, where everyone plays a double role, at once actor and audience. Covered in that undeniable hue of alizarin red velvet, your attention heightens to other bodies and spaces, suddenly aware that your presence is already part of an unfolding action. Today, entering this state of public attention feels marked, not only because of the spectacle of nineteenth-century grandeur such operatic space carries, but also because it demands a mode of attention so at odds with our tendency to disappear from public space into the “not here” of screen worlds.

Seeing Nisenbaum’s paintings while attending X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, and not another La bohème or La Traviata, impressed upon me the idea that opera was shaking off her nineteenth-century slumber. The pageantry of Black community—the beauty and power of it—was on full display that night, an elegance and warmth accompanying the weight of the life story of one whose nameless-name, X—a refusal to take the name given by the oppressor, as much as a double mark, as I understand it, of loss and endurance—brought opera as theatrical form squarely into the here and now. Directed by Robert O’Hara, the opera realizes Malcolm X as an everyman—“pulled out of time and space”—and with its Afrofuturist messianic ascent, puts X in cosmic-space among the stars. That felt right, not only because we are brought close to Malcolm X biographically as an “everyman,” but also, insofar as, via techniques of estrangement, the visionary treatment of this opera brings the spectator out of consumption as entertainment, and into a collective, cosmic now. What stayed with me was this production’s referential use of theater-within-theater: a miniature curtained theater set upon the stage, a prop throughout the opera that served as a cosmic portal through which actors escape into other narrative spaces and times. Through such reference to the stage-as-stage, and moments where Malcom X addresses the audience directly, the performance breaks the fourth wall—the audience is no longer separated as spectator, from the performance, but becomes an involved collective, implicated in the retelling of the life of Malcolm X for the present.

It is the “naturalism of the fourth wall” that “gives the audience the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place [italics mine],” says Walter Benjamin in his writing on Brecht’s idea of “epic theatre.” Safely seated and “unseen” in the darkened theater, you can extend your senses toward the stage, fully absorbed with the role and accompanying emotions being performed. No doubt this separation by an invisible wall is an “illusion.” But what is illusory about it is less obvious than I initially thought. The illusion is not what is presented by the art itself—the “representation of life” on stage—but the fact that you believe you are entirely separate from this artificed form of life. In other words, this wall allows you to enjoy the story without understanding how the “event which is really taking place” relates to you. And does Benjamin’s description of the suspension that takes place, within this “naturalism of the fourth wall,” not fit our experience of what it is like to be in public spaces today? Spaces in which the “events” happening around us feel as if they don’t concern us? It seems only in moments of shock or public crisis that our ‘shared reality’ enters consciousness. Doesn’t it sometimes feel, as Gilles Deleuze put it, as if the characters living the stories streaming on our screens, are living the real “script”? Deleuze diagnosed this problem, back in 1985, as a lack of “belief in the world”—belief in the link between us and the world.

In any case, Brecht wanted to resist the Aristotelian view of theater, which had as its aim the evocation, and catharsis, of emotion in the audience. Instead of a theater of emotional catharsis Brecht’s conception of “epic theatre” sought the “alienation effect.” “This is not to say,” says Brecht in his essay on Chinese theater, “that the spectator experiences ‘no empathy’ but that ‘he feels his way into the actor as into an observer. In this manner, an observing, watching attitude is cultivated.” Benjamin would note that Brecht’s plays tried to cultivate a “relaxed state” in the audience—not the strain of tensed absorption, but “the reaction of people who have an interest in the matter.”² While not bereft of emotion, the audience should have enough distance and space to avoid a “totalizing” identification with the character or scene. A contrary space of emotion, if need be, should be available to the audience,who, as “observers,” keep a “check” on the action “on the basis of its [their] own experience.³ As Brecht puts it: “Rendering the outward signs of emotions as a way of effecting alienation […] is not about not having emotions, but having the freedom to have emotions which are not identical with those presented by the actor.”⁴ I take this to mean that art should elicit a range of emotions that are not didactically dictated (say that three times) by what is being represented, but at crucial moments, make room for the audience to refer back to their own experience in the world.

Resonant with such Brechtian alienation effects, Nisenbaum’s work holds open a kind of ethical room for the audience, wherein “the spectator can feel joy at the sight of sorrow, disgust at the sight of anger.”⁵ Such room is achieved through the sense of distance in her paintings—a distance that paradoxically arises out of intimate encounters with her subjects. On the one hand, the bold use of color, graphic elements, and decorative patterns abstract the portraits, pushing against what would maybe otherwise be a more Alice-Neel-like expression of subjectivity. On the other, and remarkably so, the portraits still communicate the singularity of her subjects. The face is not blended but constellates discrete shapes of color. Seen up close, such separation makes Nisenbaum’s faces alternate between being mask-like and impersonal, and at the same time expressive of character. This doubling of distance and proximity, personal and impersonal, in Nisenbaum’s work, avoids the kind of over-identification Brecht located between an actor and the role they play. Brecht sought a minimal identification only, one that allowed for a “rendering” of the “outward signs of emotions as a way of effecting alienation.”⁶

You are absorbed into image by the content, color, and pattern, then pushed out again by the surface effects of the self-same outward gestures. Painting can do this. In this sense, I do not understand Nisenbaum’s work as a matter of representing a particular group—though, to be sure, the work also carries this. Rather, and increasingly, her work seems to me to take up bodies in public or quasi-public contexts to draw attention to the conditions of social roles as such—how they are played, arranged, choreographed—and how such social arrangements, in turn, arrange social consciousness.

Painting 1

In Backstage at the MET: The QuickChange Booth (Traviata)(2023), a slightly curved composition of interposed planes opens multiple perspectival spaces. In the center of the painting, billowing curtains hang on what looks like a hovering screen—a view as if seen from the front of the house. Framing either side of the composition are views of the performers onstage looking out at the audience, while the central, dominant space of the painting gives us a behind the scenes, or backstage view.

A performer in green sweats, leg jutting up into the air, makes eye contact with us in a direct, almost self-conscious act of presenting oneself to the viewer. This more direct contact—looking at the viewer—is not unlike the actor who breaks the illusion of the fourth wall by addressing the audience. A simple look is all that is needed to say “you too play a role in this arrangement.” What is the weirdness of this look? The figure appears somehow too aware of their own performance—as if in looking at us, the dancer is also “seeing themselves and their performance as alien”—an art of estrangement by which the performer can achieve a sense of astonishment in the audience, according to Brecht, adding: “by this craft everyday things are removed from the realm of the self-evident.”⁷ What appears in these paintings appears so candidly, matter-of-factly, but there is always something off, removing Nisenbaum’s figures and their contexts from the “self-evident.” What is it about this focus on social arrangement and our implication in it that at once mimics the self-evident order of things, yet, in doing so, makes everything less self-evident?

The gaze of the dancer in green is dramatized by the figure’s centrality in the composition, flanked on either side by figures who appear indifferent to the viewer, absorbed in their own actions. For instance, the Diva, Angel Blue, just to the right of the dancer in green, is shown being fitted in a white dress by two attending persons in a “quick change booth.” Through this subtle de-centering of the Diva, Nisenbaum’s composition directs attention to the arrangements in action of multiple stagehands, attendants, costume, and lighting/tech designers. In making visible the social arrangements that condition opera, to put it in Brechtian terms, Nisenbaum has situated “the cult of the artist” within a wider social frame. A star is not born in this painting; the social relations that make up opera are given a spotlight. If these opera paintings give us a behind-the-curtain image of labor, they also perform, as art objects, the magic whereby labor, including that of the artist, becomes an exchange commodity. Nisenbaum’s ‘theaters’ of labor, as paintings, bring us closer to that mysterious “method” of Benjamin’s—“or was it a trick,” asks Michael Taussig via Adorno—“as the need for everything to ‘metamorphose into a thing in order to break the catastrophic spell of things.’”⁸

I want to say there is something theatrical about painting, itself a set of movements that congeal things seen and witnessed, staged on a material surface in a material medium (paint) through a language of form, gesture, and color. Quick Change, then, performs this theatricality in painting. Multiple stages open up to the viewer through the division of space and its recomposition into multiple movable sections, like painting in its own right. The compositional logic is one of association, spaces across time—parts and backgrounds taken from disparate areas and moments that together compose an alter-space, a different assemblage of relations. While compelling enough to hold your gaze, this new stage never lets you forget the fact of its composition, of being made-up and that it is a painting. Going over Nisenbaum’s process photos, taken during her many visits backstage, she remarked on the strange black boxes with handles that sit behind the stage, stacked, labeled, and organized into drawers set within metal scaffolding. These large black wooden suitcases are actually mobile sets that, once folded out, become the material worlds or painted scene-scapes for the opera story. These unassuming boxes offer a slightly obvious metaphor to painting as movable two-dimensional objects framing intensive worlds.

Nisenbaum also mentioned a moment when, while spending time backstage, she watched the stage crew take down the set, noting that the fluid, seemingly choreographed actions on the part of the workers “felt like theater.” “Watching the stage crew laying out the stage-set tableau-like on the ground,” she said, “was like watching a painting being made behind the stage.” This scene in Quick Change, foregrounding stagecraft workers in action, is then the story within the story, and the painting itself, a second-theater within the theater. Here, the artist’s reconstruction of intersecting theatrical planes is in service of creating an alternative stage for the story behind the curtain that was never meant to be seen. Yet, in depicting the workers in monotone grays, in contrast to the bright, complimentary colors used for the front stage areas (now background), Nisenbaum reminds us that an inversion has taken place: what was foreground is background, what was “grayed out” and unseen is pushed into the limelight.

Vertical gray walls hold the center of the composition, scenic tableaus seen from the back, divided into framed squares with hieroglyphic Cy-Twombly-like chalk marks. Marks in a coded language not for us, decipherable only to the initiates of stagecraft labor. Representing “a subjective expression of the workers” is not the point here, made clear by the fact that the workers’ backs are turned, in contrast to the performers who are seen both from the front or the side. Their actions compose a complete “scene” of carefully choreographed movements and signs with minimal expression.

Nisenbaum’s focus on the physical movements and repetitions of labor, along with the inclusion of those Twombly-like chalk markings, gives us an accumulation of what Brecht called those “outward-signs” that make up the Gestus,or social gesture: outer attitudes of the body that belie deeper social determinations and histories (class, gender, race etc.) In other words, it is the gestural language of the body that captures the concrete social attitudes—or contextual conditions—of life. Art, when it tries to “universalize” a feeling or “man” writ large, removes the “social from the gest,” according to Brecht. Gestus then names not an expression of interiority or individuality, so much as a becoming-visible, through the specific social attitudes of the body, of our common condition(s). So too with emotions; these are not presented in Brecht’s theater only as interior states but as emotional gestures, or what I take to be the social composition of our affects. An actor using minimal, repeated gestures to represent emotion or action—paired down and abstracted to show the gesture itself qua gesture—gives “expression to the relationship between the action being performed and everything that is involved in the act of staging per se.”⁹ Linking the action performed to the “act of staging per se,” enacts a doubling of the action with a second-order awareness that such actions are staged—in effect denaturalizing all actions. In revealing the labor behind the stage as itself a stage, putting in relief the many gestures that compose this hidden second-theater, Nisenbaum’s paintings ask us to become—more than spectators—observers of an event that is really taking place.

Quick Change 2

This was not the first time opera had accidentally, so to speak, revealed something of its conditions to me. Around 2009, I visited a small family-run opera house, the Amato Opera, once alive and well in lower Manhattan’s Bowery, known for giving opera Diva’s in training a place to learn. It lacked all the production power and artifice of major operatic productions. There were fold-out chairs and Snickers bars and Cokes on sale at the back end of the room. There were no assigned seats so we sat near the front and could see the sweat on the faces of the performers. I had never experienced opera so intimately, so provisionally, as an art form. Somehow seeing the up-close cracks in the performance made opera become all the more magical for me, more alive. As if I was both watching an opera (La Bohème, in this case) and watching the action of opera-as-living-labor, joining bodily movement, music, emotion, and idea. Recalling this moment got me thinking about how low-fi productions generally show the cracks in a medium, often giving such productions the power to crack open an alter experience within our otherwise slick, AI-generated world. And how painting, sometimes, powerfully does this. As if slowing time down, seeing the materiality of the medium, the brushstroke on the surface, is itself a look behind the curtain—a crack-up breaking the fourth wall vis-à-vis our experience of images.

In a diary entry, Benjamin recounted how Brecht spoke of “the children’s theater in which errors of presentation, [function] as alienation effects” giving “the performance epic features,” adding that “with small companies something similar can happen.” To Brecht’s sense that the task of epic theater “is not so much to develop actions as to represent conditions,” Benjamin adds that represent here means “uncovering those conditions”—that is, to “make them strange.”¹⁰

While it would be hard to identify naïve “errors of presentation” in the confidence of Nisenbaum’s paintings, I see a child-like vibrancy expressed in her color palette and the play of patterned atmospheres that contextualize her figures. Children, in their wisdom, like things that glisten and glitter. Iridescence communicates an animacy. In the paintings of the Divas, Nisenbaum uses the shimmer of iridescent colors to open up the painting to light and thus atmosphere. This is especially striking in the portrait of Nadine Sierra, where the cold fluorescent light of the vanity shines on and illuminates the gold iridescent in the dress. In 15 Minutes to Curtain, Soprano Angel Blue (MET Traviata) (2023) the entire room feels as if it bends toward the shimmer of soft pastel blues, pinks, and greens in her transparent dress—colors reflected in the patterned walls and ornate headpieces that sit just behind the figure. Seen in person, the golden dress of Ermonela Jaho dances in an atmospheric light. The dance of iridescent paints on the costumes worn by each of the “Violettas” communicates an atmospheric presence, while attenuating the more graphic qualities of the paintings.

There is something very old in this, something of the wisdom captured in fairytales—in mirrors and crystal balls, and on the surface of water and the seduction of gold. Iridescence promises to transport us into other realms. In the shine of an iridescent dress, and maybe even, in the beads of sweat glistening on the face of an actor seen too close. Here, in a certain glimmer held in the paintings, we encounter a strange low-fi kind of magic—worlds that desire to transport us to other realms, even as the paintings never let you forget their theater, their artifice. One of the many things Nisenbaum’s paintings do, and do well as paintings, is express the iridescent shine and fairytale power of stagefront magic in the language of color and form, while lifting the curtain to reveal the conditions of creative labor behind this magic. Not only the various movable parts of quick-change boxes, interchangeable scenic tableau, and costume fittings, but, more profoundly, the labor by which such things are made and learned.

Quick Change 3

“Like a storybook come to life” is how Wes Anderson’s production designer, Adam Stockhausen, described the new short-story films based on the “adult” stories by Roald Dahl.¹¹ Set research for the colorful jungle scenes in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, included looking at paintings by Henri Rousseau. While Anderson’s films often seem to play with the idea of film-as-proscenium, these short story adaptations push this further and feel like a challenge to our experience of film, slowing down our short attention spans and frenzied on and on consumption of empty virtual images.

While Nisenbaum’s paintings take up the language of opera, Anderson’s films take up the language of theater. There is a resonance here, a shared sensibility—an estranging play of distance and proximity, a back and forth between frontstage and backstage, an inclusion of behind-the-scenes labor and artifice. In any case, these short films walk a controlled, fine line, pushing and pulling at you. Push: abstraction and distancing of the actor from the role they play. Pull: the use of brightly colored painted scenes that draw you in. Push: the trompe l’oeil of the scenic backgrounds reveal their artifice, deconstructing themselves as simple movable parts—painted shapes of color.

In Anderson’s adaptations, stagecraft is made visible through scene changes—painted landscapes and interiors slide in and out of view, pushed along by stagehands, while the actors switch back and forth between actor and narrator, moving inside and outside the scene. In these visual retellings of Dahl’s stories—themselves writerly feats moving between matter-of-fact chronicle and fairytale—the fact of storytelling as an artistic process and experience is put in relief. The story shows itself as a story, unfolding before your eyes, not only in the actions and words of the narrator/actors, but also in the dramatic movement of props, scenic backgrounds, guys carrying ladders. By calling attention to these extra movements, typically pushed behind the curtain, you find yourself in a strange state, neither fully absorbed in that Aristotelian sense, nor distracted. It is at moments a meta-state of attention that makes you aware that you are paying attention.

A wall moves here, a hedge there, nothing is fixed in the space of filmic illusion. In The Swan, suddenly a trap door opens in what should have been a hedge, and another actor walks through who is now part of the scene. The narrator is not an actor in the scene but gestures attention toward the scene—actor, narrator, and scenic stage, are separable pieces, movable parts of the story. Again and again, Anderson takes us behind the illusion, the Oz-like curtain of film through a theatrical reveal. The fourth wall is broken and with it the illusion of film, its power as time-based media to absorb the audience in the action, to suspend disbelief.

Brechtian echoes are also found in the perfected small gestures and a rarefied manner of speaking of Anderson’s actors, which lay bare not only the content and affect of what is being said, but also the fact that someone is speaking and feeling. Despite all this, or because of it, as if by some slight of hand, you continue to follow the story. Not in the form of a critic with their ears up, but more like a reader with room to wander in newly opened spaces of imagination, at once inside and outside the story.

In this sense, these films achieve that strange separation of elements, apropos Brecht’s understanding of alienation effects. The words especially stand apart. I had the experience of hanging on every word like a reader, while still slipping, imaginatively, into the images. In adapting the stories to film, Anderson apparently held it crucial to stay true to Dahl’s words: the content as much as the rhythmic clip is matched visually in the language of the film. By including the artist, Roald Dahl, played by Ralph Fiennes, in the Henry Sugar film, writing in his shed—red slippers, cigarettes at hand, typewriter balanced on a board across his armchair—Anderson folds an image of creative labor into the story. Outside becoming inside, the act of storytelling enters the story. Another Brechtian showing, revealing the conditions of art within the art.

In an easily overlooked scene in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, a Yogi floating mid-air in deep meditation suddenly stands up. He turns the box toward us. With this subtle gesture, the Yogi reveals he was sitting on a simple wooden box painted to look like a gap of air between the ground and his hovering body. The character takes a seat, making no note of this action—there is no recognition of this reveal in the story, no hint of irony or self-consciousness. So simple, so strange.

This reveal reminded me of the role of the chair in one of the earliest magic tricks on film, Georges Méliès’s The Vanishing Lady (1896). The trick of the lady “vanishing” begins and ends with the chair. The trick plays on the magic specific to the medium of film—the cut in time and image that allows the lady to appear and disappear. But what makes the trick, it seems to me, is the chair. It is all about the chair.

Why is it so delightful, so surprising then, in Anderson’s film to see a filmic illusion be exposed as something simpler, more material—a painterly trick involving a wooden box? Does the magic in this reveal lie in the fact that the trick that conditions this artificed world is revealed as simple and material? Or is it that it touches upon the mystery of images? Images, as painting reminds us, are always double: virtual flimsy things that float through the air, and into our dreaming, and material objects, both real and really made-up. Exposing the materiality of the trick within the filmic image, plays with the doubleness of images, as both virtual and material things—the “magic” that makes the magic. It is the matter-of-factness of this revelation—the childlike simplicity of the gesture whereby the Yogi reaches out and turns the box to reveal itself as box—that avoids flattening the mystery. To quote Benjamin again, it “makes strange.” And this strangeness enters the magic of storytelling by showing the story within the story: the ‘tricks’ of media, and their specific material qualia (whether film, writing, painting or theater).

In all four short story films, Anderson evokes the prehistory of film, its proximity and break from theater as much as the history of trompe l’oeil through the use of flat painted “movable panoramas” and dioramas, like those used in the nineteenth century. Recalling the scenic painted backgrounds of ancient puppet and folk theater, Anderson’s two-dimensional scenic tableaus suddenly achieve depths, allowing us to enter in. The experience felt like opening a children’s pop-up book, where an imagined geography of words, become carved, tangible edges, bring forth a world. This proximity of film, theater and painting, is most pronounced in moments that reveal the ‘tricks’ (and cracks) of stage production, teetering on the edge between illusion and exposure of the illusion.

Fairy tales, said Benjamin, “come to our aid” against the tragic foreclosures of the mythical. This is mostly in the form of natural forces—animals, as well as ‘earthy’ beings like fairies, dwarves, magic beans—that come to the aid of humans, as if in “complicity with liberated man.”¹² “The wisest thing—so the fairy tale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to this day—is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits.”

Like portals, the Diva portraits hang almost at floor level against a wall of alizarin velvet, the same velvet upon which the audience stands. The purely gestural rope typically used in theater is here used to cordon off the paintings, further removing any sense of that fourth wall separating art from viewer. Nisenbaum’s three Divas, Angel Blue, Ermonela Jaho, and Nadine Sierra, are all pictured in costume readying themselves for their role as Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata. Violetta is the archetypal nineteenth-century fallen woman, a woman who has lost her reputation and standing as potential wife. An ambivalent societal position that holds a kind of liminal power and fascination. If Violetta occupies the edges, it is her exclusion from the center that also gives her a freedom to truly act. It seems to me her action is the only true action in the opera, or at least the only truly ethical action: she sacrifices a life with the man she loves to protect his social standing, and (spoiler alert) contracts pneumonia and dies. A “beautiful” nineteenth-century death for a woman: the pallor of pneumonia on her skin. Always a tragedy, opera’s heroines almost never live to see their “happy ending.”

In a sense, Nisenbaum’s paintings relieve Violetta of her tragic fate, her mythical role. In choosing to paint each Diva in preparation for the same role, the artist enacts a repetition that shows the gap between performer and role performed. As a portrait, the centrality of the Diva as star is emphasized, while the use of repetition paradoxically decentralizes the star and situates the performer within the larger history of operatic roles. In this sense, these portraits got me thinking about the roles women play as repeated histories—repeated act(s) of stepping into given roles and given gestures.

In creating reference photos of Ermonela Jaho, Nisenbaum asked that she spontaneously perform some gestures as Violetta, while also talking about what this role meant to her throughout her career in opera. Jaho, as the title of her painting suggests, has played Violetta 301 times. Behind Jaho, in the painting, hang small-framed prints—an archive of costumed actors performing the gestures of different opera characters. The gestures of Jaho playing Violetta are doubled by the history of gestures depicted behind her, and thus the history of opera as such. Both the presence of these pictures, and the title, Violetta for the 301^st Time, Soprano Ermonela Jaho (MET Traviata), 2023, suggest repetition as a gestural language is related, not only to the storied characters of operas, but to broader social histories. Extending this thought, we might say painting, too, is a form of gestural repetition congealed in paint, that makes visible the passage of time through the body as medium. In any case, Nisenbaum’s focus on the repetition of Violetta, gesturally and otherwise, recalls Brecht’s insistence that the “alienation effect” is best achieved through the performance of old, not new, stories—stories that relax the audience. After all, it is in those moments when the familiar becomes unfamiliar that the uncanny, as Freud understood it, appears—and this as an effect of repetition.

In Brechtian theater, both gesture and social context come into view as techniques of interruption (Benjamin). Interrupting an action that is taking place on the stage creates an interval of space where things stand still, allowing images to emerge. The image that emerges is that of the social gesture or Gestus. Interruption halts the expected action, it creates an interval in the narrative and allows a gestural language—a language of the body—to come into the foreground. This language of the body congeals layers of social context and history: the situation of each of the characters, and the diverse historical conditions of their positionality. If the painting of Ermonela Jaho draws attention to the performance of Violetta as a repeatable event, it does so by interrupting the narrative of La Traviata to give us an image of gesture. By highlighting the gestural language within opera, Nisenbaum’s paintings also interrupt the idea of opera as a total form—a crack-up of opera’s easy digestion—that releases us from cathartic overidentification. The distance that opens is not, it seems to me, a cynical or ironic one, but as Brecht would have it, a way of making us think—of making the familiar, well, strange.

The same could be said of the presence of the hairdresser, conductor, and Nisenbaum’s photographers, all visible in the mirror’s reflection, standing behind the seated Nadine Sierra in Opening Night, Soprano Nadine Sierra (MET Traviata), 2023. While posing in a dressing room aided by others, costumed as Violetta, the central role the Diva plays is re-contextualized by the roles of labor and recognition performed by others. Again, the artist’s emphasis is on the arrangement of social roles that decenter the Diva qua Diva, even as Sierra remains the focus of the painting. In 15 Minutes to Curtain, Soprano Angel Blue (MET Traviata), 2023, the MET’s visual history is itself contextualized by the artist’s inclusion of Marc Chagall’s paintings through an imagined window in the room where Angel Blue stands. Interruption gives way to gesture, gives way to context, as the social layers that make-up bodies in time. Even as portraits, these paintings lead us into context and what came before.

Quick Change 4

Benjamin also believed a relaxed state was the necessary condition of storytelling:

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. […] His nesting places—the activities that are intimately associated with boredom—are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift of listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.¹³

Storytelling, whether through opera, painting, or film, has something to do with our capacities of attention. To pay attention is a spiritual and ethical act according to Simone Weil. Attention creates the space in which we can think, but also empathize—that is, feel into the lives of others. Attention allows us to enter into the images put before us, as opposed to simply consuming them numbly. Attention, like storytelling, makes listeners, as much as seers, of us all. Through techniques of attention we are able to see and intuit the vague outlines of past and future folded into the present. And without attention, we miss everything—not only those we love, but those who remain behind-the-scenes in a world that is too quickly approaching its final curtain. Unlike in fairy tales, our situation is one in which “nature,” whom we have failed to hear or see, no longer comes to our aid. Maybe, in a situation where we increasingly lack attention, the “alienation effect” offers a subtle antidote—a way of pushing us out of cathartic absorption and into the story of this world. A story that concerns us most deeply.