RETURN
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A STRANGE STATEMENT

Beginning through a novel premise: there is a figure who is bound by the theatrical stage. An actor, an orator, an extra, a prop, a body, a subject framed by a proscenium and existing between the dressing room and its curtain. Isolated, they have been sequestered to perform, to enact specific scenes, recite the given scripts, becoming a stand-in under an unknown agency in a theatre absent of any spectators. As if rehearsing for a play that will never open, waiting for a director’s cue that may never arrive, or facing a curtain that shouldn’t be raised, this dramatic world is all the performer knows.

Dressed with a disidentification, the figures interiority is established through their absences. With each act further hollowing out their subjectivity, a character of gradual corrosion, to be oneself less, yet, unable to fully withdraw. Even when the subject's constitution is corpse and carted away, its presence still violates the status of its surroundings. Traces remain as they are replaced, reinstated, reified, and dissipated into the background. Their lack exposed, spilt on stage, only then to be reclaimed by a coercive emptiness that inscribes itself as an antagonist mise-en-scène. Divorcing the actor’s world to hold existence without clear destinations. They become paused in impasse, posed in a perpetual ending that might never be.  

Scenes echoing an external world have become truncated, transgressed into rarefied sites of exception. Provocative of an unreconciled world, of settings where vacancy as disparity acts as a suspension, a cutting, an intermission redolent of a change of order, an unraveling of an ideology, or the law of the land becoming dormant. Yet, what remains of these acts of exception, what is residual, is theatrical evidence. Released material of illegitimate posters, apparent scripts or indictment reports, divisions of scenography, relinquished props, seized photographs, private audio and film recordings. Documentation of the extra-juridical, which alone serves to distance us from the original events. A denial to the subject’s anti-spectacle, we ultimately remain a mere witness to the facsimile, to a world that was and is no longer. 

While the impulse to hunt for motive, prior meaning, to anchor this theatrical servitude of aesthetic and ethical liquidation, is, in effect, discoloured, redacted and repeatedly exploited. As any act produced and its remnants disclosed, the results undermines its predecessor, interrogates presupposition and discredits where and when this drama-affected backdrop, the subject-actor, the nominal authority and their timeless bondage, might remain just for show.

Behind the scenes this conceptual allegory concentrates Matthew Lloyd’s work in a dramatic world that is cinematically alluring, although strangely inaccessible. As if witnessing a secret ceremony or trying to peer beyond a restricted inner cordon. The work, quarantined in action and indifferent to spectatorship, keeps the observer at an appropriate distance, yet without dissipating the lure to stare, listen, and move more closely.

In this sense Lloyd’s work is a crime akin to a breach. Through incidents of adjournment by which this chasm-theatre, turned prison, turned courtroom, turned lecture hall, turned comedic stage, has challenged the given law, perhaps fallen from the outside world, and licensed its omissions to enter centre stage. Evoking a collapsing framework: when our socio-ethical coordinations of what constitutes reality begin to rupture, become strange. Think, the unacceptability of disquieting events, the unbearable imagining of sublime-horror, or the traumatic testimonies that flatline because they are all ‘too real’. In the vicinity of what should remain visually prohibited and excluded in our composed reality, we find ourselves confronting an antagonistic void which emerges, or instead returns, as the edge of the inconceivable departs. In this regard, the work, the crime, remains in question. Paused at the verge of an undisclosed catastrophe, abiding into the interruption, the extralegal, the gap itself.

For Lloyd’s theatre, apropos to the psychology of its maker, it is a spoiled philosophical territory, whereby fictional acts have inherited this incongruity and thus come into being. Backdrops, theoretically speaking, soaked with barbarity, position bankrupt characters, discarded scenery, and vacuous props to frame the stage and act out: the ethical consequences of the unrepresentable; the autonomous plight of the unspeakable; a subject's destitution to ground subjectivity; the aesthetic disavowal of a symbolic-order. And yet, what informs the work's unsettling ambiguity is due to their own prohibitions. As what is captured within Lloyd’s ‘performances’ lack complete theatrical relief. Rather, pieces, objects and scenarios exist, literally, out of place, emancipated from their own play; subsisting as wary uncustomary protagonists that dare our dramatic attention. Furthermore, the acts document and display apparent traumatic events of the stage as a vestige, an abstruse event, a remnant veiling of a world that has violently divorced from itself. While we, the estranged audience, although seemingly protected by the so-called curtain, from engaging with the forbidden, watch, what cannot be fully penetrated or really accepted. 

Whilst an impounded actor of impersonal character, whose backstory remains a blindspot, yet whose markings of authorship remain at large, performs somewhere between a subject of lack, a bodiless form, and that of the living-dead. Allows this theatrical void of tension, disruptive and contradictory material to blemish and excavate their selfhood. Although, the theatrical conflict between the figure and background is invariably staged as ontologically one. Being the subject-actor emerges, retreats and speaks into, from, or as this dramatic cavity, neither property becomes fully swallowed. Absences, pieces, signs, clues of the subject and their voided-surroundings hold on: a speechless body, an acousmatic voice, a blank signature, a censored statement, disembodied attire, an empty assembly of chairs. Here, the preservation of the whole of extinction is, again incomplete, cut, ceased from reaching its end, from ending its end.

However, the perversion behind this theatrical reality lies, not merely with the allusive director, the ruler of the Theatrocracy and their ceaseless psychoanalytic undoing of the stage-bound actor. But, when Lloyd’s positioning explicitly shifts to being a director against their own ‘artist’ self. Here, Lloyd, places the artist in custody, and the subtext throughout their play of detention, where inauthenticity and alienation are virtues, is a critique on artist subjectivity and the status of enlightenment and autonomy. This unexpected route into art’s theoretical foundations, articulates this hermetic ivory theatre, with no exits, trap doors and a revoked audience, as a radical grandstand in which art is perturbed by itself. An interrogation, led by Lloyd to set up their own work, doesn't simply empower art to claim its innocence and be assured. But authorises a (self) critique that charges how art embraces and abandons responsibility, effect, and fidelity towards a world in which it is rejectful of associating with, even perished from, or that in which the art was engendered, in this case, the outcasted fictional theatrical world. 

These symptoms are further materialised when the work is extracted from its histrionic beginnings, and detained for public inspection. In a reviewable setting, Lloyd’s work explicitly interrupts the gallery as a scene of production and inspection. With installations suggestive of detectives recovering evidence from a collapsing theatrical world. Held hostage with little plea, scenographic apparatuses besiege the space. Charcoal-toned curtains engulf the walls, shaping isolating enclosures, subdued stage lighting reveal what otherwise remains in darkness, objects, defended by velour ropes, become an internal affair, sets remaining at their full-theatrical-scale, unkneel to the white cubes architectural respects, whilst concealed sounds of audience murmurs or fragments of a show’s score repeat, cause a sense of disquiet that further opens up Lloyd’s world of mourning. Not only due to the work's depiction of grief stricken acts of absences, but, in how Lloyd’s world is that of withdrawal, of exit, where the works become ashes of an Otherness.

Unearthing this impounded evidence, furthermore, articulates the work quite inadmissible due to the proposition of being from the Other Scene, a private conception, so to speak. As the work’s admittance into public record, into the exhibition, arrives with explicit indications, markings of corruption and preservation. Works without time periods, absent of biographical information, muted voices, redacted directors notes and fragmented testimonies and contracts, intrinsically swells suspicion that revelatory information has been removed. The question, for whom, out of protection for the sovereign theatre, the subject-actor, or the symbolic/actual audience, remains unclear. 

What is clear is that this trail of ML, wishes to retain a privacy and dignity by such ‘invalidness’. That just enough information is able to penetrate, that is soak through, even if for good or ill, it stains. In this regard once in the public’s jury-eye, Lloyd’s acts can be better understood as cutscenes. Amputated pieces of a play, separated restricted files of internal conflicts and denials, that, by its disclosure, undercuts the larger case at hand. If indeed, there will ever be one to be found. When the disassociated chain of evidence mounts and perverts as such, on the stand the work forges an audience of sleuths into a deadlock over the cause of this incessant (in)subordination, along with its staged unease and false climaxes. But the dissensus this adheres to, denying witnesses complete access, Lloyd ultimately offers an unfamiliar yet intimate expression, upon how art might prefer to renounce itself towards aesthetic-legislators, the symbolic regime of the gallery and subsequently, art’s constitution.

In the end, Lloyd’s unstraightforward cross-examination is a show/case whose debt isn’t in performing for the white cube or black box, but elsewhere. A suspicious grey-zone, an autonomous locale that is sealed off by curtains, turned away from the world and into an untimely narrative. This is where as observers, the artist wants us to wait. That beneath this unescorted portrait of an artist qua dramatist, qua actor, qua art, and back again. The subject, once more, is getting ready to go on stage to commit to the clandestine and expect their final sentence.  

THE ACTS