Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 47

Monsters of Grace

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Similarly, in the sequence in which a series of digital helicopters roam a
phantasmal mountain terrain, and gigantic birds fly over the heads of the audience,
these images, too, are allowed to evanesce into video oblivion, relinquishing their
tenuous hold on the real authenticating, the truth of their constructed, synthetic
origins. If Monsters o f Grace succeeds so brilliantly as a work of art, and as the
operatic spectacle of the future, it is because of this alliance between the real and
the manufactured, which Glass and Wilson continually reaffirm, and transgress
upon. Indeed, the title itself re-states this pull between the mortal and that which
survives mortality — we are monsters who strive for grace and enlightenment, in
an i ncreasingly technological environment, which seeks (at its worst) to replace
the humanist instinct with synthetic visions alone: witness “point and kill” video
games, television programs where spectacle becomes content and violence super
sedes any human intercession, such as the recent spate of Fox television “specials”
involving high-speed automobile chases, crashes, and other disasters.
Monsters o f Grace thus occupies a site of contested ground between the
real and the hyperreal, and mediates this merging of the simulacric and the simulacra
through the ineluctable modality of visible human intervention — a merging of
performer and performance, in which emotion is not denied. Having seen the
opera performed several times, I can attest to the passion and commitment that
Glass and his ensemble bring to the proceedings, presenting a concert in one city
after the next in an exhausting road tour that many other artists would have avoided.
After all. Glass is quite profitably employed creating film soundtracks, among
other pieces, and it would be easy for him to simply sit back in Hollywood and
create music for The Truman Show (as he did), send out a road company of assis
tants to perform the work, or even stage the work solely in major metropolitan
centers, and leave the rest of the country with videodiscs and second-hand ac
counts of the actual performance. That he has not done so is a tribute both to
Glass’s own tenacity and commitment, but also to the inherent construction of the
piece. Designed for easy transport from one location to the next. Monsters o f
Grace has been performed at numerous sites around the world since its world
premiere on April 15, 1998 at Royce Hall, on the campus of UCLA.
In this, it signals the possible future of operatic presentation, because the
“spectacle” inherent in all operatic presentation resides, for this production, within
the confines of a film can, ready to be re-projected, re-experienced with each suc
cessive performance. But without the random operations of chance inherent in all
live performances, and without the visible proof of human agency provided by the
members of the ensemble during each presentation, much of the power of the work
would be lost. Thus, even as we beckon towards the digital future, we must re
member that we are the beings who devise that future, and those who must neces
sarily bear ultimate witness to all its creations. Monsters o f Grace may be either a
“springboard into the void” as Cocteau characterized all works that challenge con