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I have always thought of Goat Island's work as like a train ride. The ride is often too long, an unenjoyable test of one's ability to sit in place. Despite the moments of scenic relief which are pleasurable in themselves, these seem exercises in delayed gratification, the point of the trip is not the experience of travel, but the destination. This destination is a thought, one turns over what one has seen for some time, and like anamorphasis, it is only from the oblique angle of a week or two distance that the image of this thought, the meaning of the piece gestalts.
It's Shifting Hank is no different than their previous work in this respect, incorporating the same eclectically appropriated masochistic-athletic exercises, little text, no narrative, and a painful sense of duration. At times the performers crawl across the floor only to be lifted, by the top of their pants and dragged back to where they began. One performer dances a salacious dance, one hand waving over his head, the other rubbing his stomach just above his genitals. At one point the performers turn in what appears to be a statuary set displaying each other, holding one performer over their head
The piece repeats the metaphors of breathing and drowning. This is most evident in the repeated dunking of heads in metal buckets filled with water, only to be saved by other performers who seem to come always almost to late to pull them up again, and only, instantly to have the head re submerged. This happens most effectively, at the end of the piece perhaps when x naked save cardboard angel wings on his back (cherubim or the angel of death, or angel as a sign of his immanent death). These are metaphors are carried further and contexturalized through a woman, on her deathbed calling out for her dead husband to "bring the boat closer", a scene from x movie in which one man attempts to save the life of a friend who is trapped in water under a log via mouth to mouth breathing and speculate on the worlds interpretation of this relationship as homosexual. It is this last section which gives the piece its title, it is the log that is shifting and without seeing the movie, and as the performance leaves us hanging to wonder if the log has shifted on or off. In another the performers share the same water as mouth rinse, the water becomes coded as a site of paranoia of contagion (LSD, AIDS, Fluoride?).
In It's Shifting Hank, the thinking seems a bit clearer than Goat Island's previous work, while remaining essentially unresolvable and complex. It is the section on Ezra Pound, I believe which makes the work read more clearly. One sees the drowning breathing as metaphors for our relation to ideology. On the one hand it is inescapable necessity to breath, but to breath water is death. In many ways one can see them taking in a whole subtext of modernism with their depiction of Pound becoming a sort of foil for the modern itself.
In the last section, one is forced to deal with the necessity to understand fascism like this log, always shifting through history, ready to pin the unwary to the bottom hold them down and force them to breath water. Always unseen, just below the surface of ideology, but when experienced deadly. Seen in relation to the sections on drowning as a metaphor for ideology, the figure of Ezra Pound seems to acknowledge the existence of modernism as an ideology prey to the same movements towards fascism as any other aspect of culture.
Ultimately, the piece presents us with the contradiction of form and content, critical of a modernism which attempts immediacy, and yet partaking of the ideology of performance, what appears as an attempt to guarantee authenticity and immediacy through the presentation of bodies in pain, is also no more than the theatrical representation of the body in pain.
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