In his 1967 essay Art and Objecthood, art critic
Michael Fried established as his central thesis “theater’s
profound hostility to the arts”: “theater and
theatricality are at war today, not simply with modernist
painting (or modernist painting and sculpture) but with art
as such.” Art was being “corrupted or perverted
by theater.” Theater threatened art through its “sense
of temporality” and, even worse, “theater has
an audience – it exists for one – in a way the
other arts do not.” Fried tied the audience to the creation
of the subject/object relationship in the experience of art,
which was like “being distanced, or crowded, by the
silent presence of another person.” The purported horror
of theater and its human presence, temporal dimension, and
dialectical subject/object relationship were thus, according
to Fried, the “negation of art.”
Cognizant of the critique of Fried by postmodern theory and
contemporary art discourse, Perverted by Theater
gleefully inverts Fried’s thesis, purposely selecting
art for its theatricality and installing it in an environment
molded by theater, to evoke temporality, the subject/object
relation, the audience, the presence of the actor, the performance
text, and the implication of dramaturgical concepts such as
character, story, and plot structure.
The quirky handbills of the delightfully strange and extravagantly
theatrical Jack Smith invite us to perform Perverted by
Theater. Smith notoriously dilated time and a plethora
of stage elements, metatheatrically employing scattered, disordered
scripts and dwelling at length on the selection of his costumes.
His art was so perverted as to be judged obscene and seized
by the New York City Police.
A prime element of theater is character, the dialogic and
corporeal representation of persons on the stage. Fried, in
his 1980 book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and
the Beholder in the Age of Diderot, sought to identify
a negative turn marked by French Rococo art: from painting
in which the oblivious and unconscious figures represented
were absorbed in an activity and world that excluded the audience;
to painting, especially portraiture, in which the figures
gazed outward or were otherwise conscious of the presentation
of the self and the presence of the beholder. The characters
along the portrait wall, to varying degrees, engage the viewer
through the consciousness of theatrical (re-)presentation:
Mikalene Thomas’ boldly self-aware Lovely Six Foota,
Martin McMurray’s sly poseur in Yawning Abyss No.
1, Ryan McGinley’s open-mouthed and camera-ready
Morrissey 22, Ele D’Artagnan’s baroquely
costumed Vulva Veneris Son Scala, Laylah Ali’s
untitled masked and sculpted figure, William Daniels’
eerie recreation of the self-portrait of Samuel Palmer,
and Shahzia Sikander’s delicate drawing of her actress
mother.
Theatrical performance also utilizes stock characters. David
Dupuis’ Portrait of the Artist as Bitter Clown
offers grim entertainment through his ineffectual makeup.
Mel Bochner’s Fool evokes the enduring tradition
of that character seen, for example, in Shakespeare’s
King Lear.
Fool is one of Bochner’s “Thesaurus”
drawings, which are also included here to refer to the specifically
textual or literary nature of Western theater since the Greeks.
The text incorporates the plot, and Bochner’s Liar,
another “Thesaurus” drawing, offers a textual
and pictorial representation of the gist of much theatrical
narrative: either a lie that effectively deceives and leads
to harm, as Iago’s deception of Othello, or, conversely,
the lie revealed, which is the inciting incident or the climax
in many plays. These texts allude to Fried’s derision
of minimalist art as “literalist” which he equated
with “theatrical.”
As the plot unfolds, the audience undertakes the making of
the theatrical experience by its reception of all of the elements
presented—the sounds, the set, the dialog, the nonverbal
art of gesture, the story, and character. This process is
much akin to the concept of Luis Camnitzer’s Painting
under Hypnosis in which he documents the collaborative
work of the audience in instructing the artist, under hypnosis,
how to paint. In the process of reception, the audience sees
itself and the fragments of an external reality mirrored in
the staged representation. These points of identification
and difference provide the building blocks of the theatrical
hermeneutic. Virgil Marti renders this queasy reflection in
his Sconce (The Lady from Shanghai), an anti-minimalist
and explicitly decorative sculptural object, titled after
Orson Welles’ 1947 film.
Frequently in contemporary theater, icons placed on stage
recall the natural world. Albero by Igor Eskinja
is a sort of pictogram of the tree, a set piece that appears,
for example, in Beckett and the stage work of Robert Wilson.
The elements of the set and the characters having been established
and the audience hard at work creating the theatrical experience,
the plot brings all the elements into play. The inherently
narrative quality of David Humphrey’s Black and
White connotes the questions that envelop the unfolding
action of drama: who are these characters really, why are
we watching them, what is going to happen to them.
With the plot in motion, new aspects of the characters are
revealed or indeed created by the events we witness. Jim Nutt’s
untitled reconfigured visage and the layered multiplicity
of Jackie Gendel’s untitled portrait show the characters
in motion, changing, searching to find a new identity as their
world and story evolve. The characters typically encounter
obstacles in attempting to achieve the object of their will.
Ross Knight’s They’re Dangling may be
seen to represent just such a treacherous passage for the
protagonist, while also probing the relationship of Fried’s
beholder to the exhibition space and its objects. The decisions
that the protagonist makes, together with other changing circumstances,
create a situation in which she is tied up, unable to escape
her fate, just as Kate Gilmore finds herself in Before
Going Under.
The narrowing possibilities that flow from her decisions
and actions are abstractly represented in the ineluctable
and singular opening of Ann Pibal’s Drifter,
whose title may also evoke the plot arc of the stranger who
arrives and causes the action to be set in motion, only to
move on in the end, leaving behind a world altered by her
intrusion. After the climax comes the denouement, or literally
the unraveling of the plot’s knotted structure, leaving
shredded remnants of the action, as in the mutilated fabric
remains of Elana Herzog’s Plaid. And finally,
a new stasis is created, one often marked by an absence, a
death, a dream vanquished, a picture obliterated, the theater
going dark as the audience and actors exit. Alexi Worth provides
in Lenscap the end of the show.
Kabir Carter’s sound installation Shared Frequencies
recalls the audience, listening, alienating a portion of itself
to identify with the illusionistic representation and simultaneously
fusing with the other listeners in the feedback loop of theater.
The audience reunites with itself at the end, as the experience
is discussed and digested and the performance in this sense
continues.
Perverted by Theater includes a live reflection
on mimesis at the October 22 opening by members of Trajal
Harrell Dance Style, leaving a residue of the performance
as part of the exhibition. Kabir Carter performs live at apexart
on November 1. On November 2, Monkeytown in Brooklyn hosts
a four-channel projection of John Jesurun’s play Snow,
concerning a television diva’s on- and off-screen perils.
Snow was performed and edited live in 2000.
As Fried later rued, an “onslaught” of “theatrical”
art submerged the modernism he defended. It was, however,
a theater without theater, careful to avoid theatrical conventions
in order to become art. The material and philosophical innovation
of twentieth century visual art (DADA, Futurism, Surrealism,
Happenings) propelled the development of avant-garde theater,
even as the visual arts inched ever closer to the realm and
practices of theater. Important contemporary theater artists
(Robert Wilson, John Jesurun, Romeo Castelluci) were trained
in visual art. As Hans-Thies Lehmann wrote in his book Postdramatic
Theater, because of these influences, concepts from the
visual arts drive the forms and meaning of “experimental”
theater. Theater has dissolved into dance, performance, movement,
video, film, and installation, as theater has been absorbed,
deformed and, even by its own practitioners, deemed irrelevant
and roundly criticized when examined psychologically, socially,
politically, and artistically. How is “theater”
defined today? By its relationship to the picture plane, performance
space, audience, content, text, art history, media, artistic
training, marketing, or the historical repertoire?
Fear of and antagonism toward “theater” persist
in today’s curatorial orthodoxy. Witness the Performa
biennials and the recent exhibitions The World as a Stage
at the Tate Modern and A Theatre without Theatre
at the Berardo Collection in Lisbon. Despite the obligatory
rhetoric of “transgression” in almost any artist’s
statement and gallery press release, theater qua theater remains
forbidden in high art culture. This very abject position,
however, may offer theater the freedom to be reinvented and
find itself possessed of an unexpected power, as Fried suggested,
to negate or pervert “art” as we know it.
* Selected from apexart's annual Unsolicited
Proposal Program. |