In the past few weeks we’ve spoken extensively about the concept of voyeurism in our house, a word I was not perhaps entirely comfortable with. The official definitions of voyeurism I have found are lacking, most of them say something to the effect of ‘sexual stimulation derived from the act of intruding and observing’. This idea of sexual voyeurism is something of an anomaly for our class as we are considering our own everyday voyeurism, looking in the front windows we pass on the street. Not to mention what Jonathon Metzl calls “Voyeurism Television” (( Metzl, Jonathon (2004) ‘Voyeur Nation? Changing definitions of voyeurism, 1950-2004’, Harvard Review of Psychiatry. XII (2) March: 127-131, p. 127 )) or reality tv to us. Big Brother and a raft of similar programs are based in watching people live, intruding on their privacy, the ‘Mass consumption of information about others” (( Metzl, Jonathon (2004) ‘Voyeur Nation? Changing definitions of voyeurism, 1950-2004’, Harvard Review of Psychiatry. XII (2) March: 127-131, p. 127 )). One stimulus that we keep returning to is Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) a film about a wheelchair bound man that takes to spying on his neighbours, slowly he begins to fill in the stories of their lives; He does not however receive sexual gratification for this act, can this mean that the seminal film about the voyeur is not in fact voyeurism at all?
Perhaps this discussion about the idea of voyeurism in its new context as everyday activity rather than “deviant psychopathology” (( Metzl, Jonathon (2004) ‘Voyeur Nation? Changing definitions of voyeurism, 1950-2004’, Harvard Review of Psychiatry. XII (2) March: 127-131, p. 127 )) is so interesting to me because we are performing in a house which is inescapably the domain of the private, the performative act in itself however is public. Our performance can’t help but open the private to the public, so that the audience may derive joy (admittedly not of a sexual nature) from the act of watching.
This leads to an interesting idea, the audience as voyeur, how do we exploit that feeling of intruding? As to that I have a few ideas. The front room of our house looks out across the front door, it is most likely that it is the first glimpse of the house’s interior our audience get. This space currently the least domestic of rooms used to “to project an image to the world” (((Heathcote, Edwin (2012) The Meaning of Home, London: Frances Lincoln, p. 35 )) onto the street so that passersby would be impressed, a kind of trophy room of domestic life. It is past time that our front room was once again used for this purpose to be the centre of domestic life, a life that can only be observed through the window. What if this act is everyday like eating dinner but lit by a strobe light, or the act through the window could be more explicit or taboo evoking a more traditional form of voyeurism.
The most obvious voyeuristic opportunity in our particular house is provided by CCTV footage, there are nine cameras in the house covering most of the rooms, some from multiple angles, can we show the audience themselves on CCTV allowing them to see the other side, the violated rather than the violator. The footage of our audiences could be projected out into the public, that which the audience believed to be private, making audience into participant. Perhaps the audience are shown other audience members journey through the house allowing them to become implicit in the voyeuristic act. There could be another place where the CCTV footage is screened, separate from the house set out much like a cinema. With just one performer to illicit conversation and reaction from the audience, invite them to sit down chat casually then comment and speculate on the actions and intentions of others.
There is no doubt for me that our final performance will have clear voyeuristic overtones, the act of asking strangers into our house, watching them on cameras, recording their reaction to their setting and to us. It is a kind of mutual and multi-layered voyeurism typified if you like by the concept that perhaps we can record an audience member watching another audience member, as they walk in on a performer having a bath. Each observer unaware that they too are being watched, that the spectator in the act of watching has become a participant in the voyeuristic act. In the 21st century voyeurism is, to a point, a part of our everyday lives. The acceptable activity of people watching, the plethora of reality tv on offer every night of the week all contributes to a society that is deeply concerned with the private lives of others. It is time to test these boundaries, how can our homes be safe from this violation if that same violation has become what we all crave.
As to the question of whether it is voyeurism when it does not directly constitute a sexual act, Seth Blazer instead proposes that “Scopophilia” (( Blazer, S. M. (2006). Rear window ethics: Domestic privacy versus public responsibility in the evolution of voyeurism. Midwest Quarterly, 47(4), 379-392, p. 379 )) could replace the idea of the voyeur in a non-sexual context. He continues “Voyeurism is too narrow a term with too ugly a connotation to describe the full range of our own natural curiosities” (( Blazer, S. M. (2006). Rear window ethics: Domestic privacy versus public responsibility in the evolution of voyeurism. Midwest Quarterly, 47(4), 379-392, p. 379 )). Yet the word voyeur has its power, conjuring uncomfortable images of being observed against our will, that the privacy of our homes is being violated. So for now, at least for the purposes of our performance with its concern for the intimate and private sanctum of home, we’ll keep the word voyeur and all its negative connotations, they might just come in useful.