New Art Theatre: Evolutions of the Performance Aesthetic: Performance Ideas
Autor Paul David Youngen Limba Engleză Paperback – 10 feb 2014
The first of PAJ Publications' "Performance Ideas" books: small books that crossover performance, visual arts, dance, sound, and media.
One of the hotly debated current issues is the turn by visual artists towards theatre as a way of working, by using plays, acting and rehearsal techniques for their art. The first of the new “Performance Ideas” books by PAJ, this volume includes playwright and curator Paul David Young in dialogue with many crossover artists, including Pablo Helguera, Liz Magic Laser, David Levine, Janet Cardiff, Alix Pearlstein, and Michael Smith, who offer wide-ranging views on performance, video, photography, and sound.
Table of Contents
Metamorphosis:
How Visual Artists Turn Theatre into Art
Theatrical Ephemera and Alternative Performance Spaces:
A Conversation with John Kelly, Liz Magic Laser, David Levine, and Alix Pearlstein
Beckett, Brecht, and Minimalism:
A Conversation with Gerard Byrne
Sounds Like Theatre:
A Conversation with Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
Scripts and Process:
A Conversation with Pablo Helguera, Ohad Meromi, and Xaviera Simmons
California Conceptualism:
A Conversation with William Leavitt
The Rebirth of Character:
A Conversation with John Jesurun, Joe Scanlan, Michael Smith, and Elisabeth Subrin
California Conceptualism:
A Conversation with William Leavitt
The Rebirth of Character:
A Conversation with John Jesurun, Joe Scanlan, Michael Smith, and Elisabeth Subrin
About the series:
Performance Ideas explores performance that crosses boundaries of all live art forms and media. The series highlights the long-standing editorial commitment of PAJ Publications to bring together the histories of performance in theatre and in visual art for a more expansive vision of artistic practice.
"newARTtheatre's greatest value may be that of a historical document of the understanding of a specific set of performance practices in its own time of making. The fresh and speculative perspective of these artists grappling with the evolving paradigm of the tightening entanglement between performance and visual artist is worth a read now and may be rich material for historians to come." - Jess Wilcox, The Brooklyn Rail
One of the hotly debated current issues is the turn by visual artists towards theatre as a way of working, by using plays, acting and rehearsal techniques for their art. The first of the new “Performance Ideas” books by PAJ, this volume includes playwright and curator Paul David Young in dialogue with many crossover artists, including Pablo Helguera, Liz Magic Laser, David Levine, Janet Cardiff, Alix Pearlstein, and Michael Smith, who offer wide-ranging views on performance, video, photography, and sound.
Table of Contents
Metamorphosis:
How Visual Artists Turn Theatre into Art
Theatrical Ephemera and Alternative Performance Spaces:
A Conversation with John Kelly, Liz Magic Laser, David Levine, and Alix Pearlstein
Beckett, Brecht, and Minimalism:
A Conversation with Gerard Byrne
Sounds Like Theatre:
A Conversation with Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
Scripts and Process:
A Conversation with Pablo Helguera, Ohad Meromi, and Xaviera Simmons
California Conceptualism:
A Conversation with William Leavitt
The Rebirth of Character:
A Conversation with John Jesurun, Joe Scanlan, Michael Smith, and Elisabeth Subrin
California Conceptualism:
A Conversation with William Leavitt
The Rebirth of Character:
A Conversation with John Jesurun, Joe Scanlan, Michael Smith, and Elisabeth Subrin
About the series:
Performance Ideas explores performance that crosses boundaries of all live art forms and media. The series highlights the long-standing editorial commitment of PAJ Publications to bring together the histories of performance in theatre and in visual art for a more expansive vision of artistic practice.
"newARTtheatre's greatest value may be that of a historical document of the understanding of a specific set of performance practices in its own time of making. The fresh and speculative perspective of these artists grappling with the evolving paradigm of the tightening entanglement between performance and visual artist is worth a read now and may be rich material for historians to come." - Jess Wilcox, The Brooklyn Rail
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781555541583
ISBN-10: 1555541585
Pagini: 137
Dimensiuni: 114 x 175 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.11 kg
Editura: PAJ Publications
Seria Performance Ideas
ISBN-10: 1555541585
Pagini: 137
Dimensiuni: 114 x 175 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.11 kg
Editura: PAJ Publications
Seria Performance Ideas
Cuprins
Metamorphosis
How Visual Artists Turn Theatre into Art
Theatrical Ephemera and Alternative Performance Spaces
A Conversation with John Kelly, Liz Magic Laser, David Levine, and Alix Pearlstein
Beckett, Brecht, and Minimalism
A Conversation with Gerard Byrne
Sounds Like Theatre
A Conversation with Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
Scripts and Process
A Conversation with Pablo Helguera, Ohad Meromi, and Xaviera Simmons
California Conceptualism
A Conversation with William Leavitt
The Rebirth of Character
A Conversation with John Jesurun, Joe Scanlan, Michael Smith, and Elisabeth Subrin
California Conceptualism
A Conversation with William Leavitt
The Rebirth of Character
A Conversation with John Jesurun, Joe Scanlan, Michael Smith, and Elisabeth Subrin
How Visual Artists Turn Theatre into Art
Theatrical Ephemera and Alternative Performance Spaces
A Conversation with John Kelly, Liz Magic Laser, David Levine, and Alix Pearlstein
Beckett, Brecht, and Minimalism
A Conversation with Gerard Byrne
Sounds Like Theatre
A Conversation with Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
Scripts and Process
A Conversation with Pablo Helguera, Ohad Meromi, and Xaviera Simmons
California Conceptualism
A Conversation with William Leavitt
The Rebirth of Character
A Conversation with John Jesurun, Joe Scanlan, Michael Smith, and Elisabeth Subrin
California Conceptualism
A Conversation with William Leavitt
The Rebirth of Character
A Conversation with John Jesurun, Joe Scanlan, Michael Smith, and Elisabeth Subrin
Notă biografică
Paul David Young, a Contributing Editor to PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, also writes on performance for Art in America. His work has been produced at MoMA PS1, Marlborough Gallery, the Living Theatre, Lion Theatre, Kaffileikhusid in Reykjavik, and elsewhere. His play In the Summer Pavilion, presented at the New York International Fringe Festival and at 59e59 Theaters, has been made into a feature film. Young is a recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award for his play No One But You. He translated (with Carl Weber) Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome and Macbeth, which appear in Heiner Müller After Shakespeare. Young also co-curated Perverted by Theatre at apexart in New York.
Extras
newARTtheatre: Evolutions of the Performance Aesthetic is a series of dialogues with contemporary visual artists who are appropriating theatre. While historically in the closed universe of art performance and visual art, theatre has most often been taboo, today many artists have come to terms with their use of theatre. Rather than shrinking from the opprobrium of being theatre artists, they turn consciously to theatre in order to expand their artistic practice in terms of both means and ends. In theatre, they have discovered powerful methods to make art and ways of addressing social and political issues.
As the compound word of the title suggests, this book is about the current use of theatre by visual artists. The freedom of visual artists to turn to theatre is new. Post-war art performance and visual art in the U.S. developed by and large in ideological opposition to theatre. In the 1960s, theatre was rejected in two very different ways. On the one hand, in the art world, the modernist critic Michael Fried famously denounced theatre as the “perversion of art” in his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood.” Fried saw the enemy in minimalism, an approach to art that activated the viewer and required an audience. On the other hand, as the social revolutions of the 1960s were unleashed, those in the vanguard of experimental theatre felt that they should abandon or destroy traditional theatre since it was a product of decadent bourgeois culture. When viewed from this critical political perspective, theatre’s rehearsal, prepared text, professional actors, division of spectator from performer, narrative impetus, and commodified consumption perpetuated the patriarchal rigidity of capitalist society. Thus, the word “theatre” became a way of describing what art was not.
Not only art performance as a genre, but its critical reception as well has been radically separated from theatre in the post-war era. As Bonnie Marranca argued in her 1999 essay in PAJ, “Bodies of Action, Bodies of Thought,” apropos of the 1998 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, the art world’s narrative of post-war performance history fails to integrate theatre history, despite the obvious relationship between theatre and performance in their use of forms and the issue of audience reception.
It is against this backdrop that the appropriation of theatre emerges as a significant trend today in the work of visual artists and in the institutional reception of art. Some visual artists, such as Eleanor Antin, Joan Jonas, Scott Burton, and Paul McCarthy, to be sure, were using theatre all along, despite the denunciation of the form by the reigning ideologies. Other visual artists, who have taken up theatre more recently, find themselves less encumbered by the prejudices of modernist visual art criticism and are discovering in theatre many useful methods to pursue in their work. Theatre functions as a toolbox, offering practices that lead to the creation of visual art. For some artists, the experience of the processes of theatre is in effect the work of art: collaborative interpretation of the text, for instance, is an exemplary communal enterprise. For others, the fascination is with theatrical ephemera, the parts of theatre that exist outside the performance, such as rehearsal and auditions, which more readily retain a feeling of liveness and spontaneity. For still others, the dramaturgical concept of character draws them to theatre as a vehicle to explore identity and ideology. In some cases, theatre texts, from ancient Greek classics to Samuel Beckett, provide references and conceptual vessels that may ground or augment the reception of visual art. For many artists, the theories of theatre (such as the writings of Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal) are a framework for developing forms of art performance.
Many factors and trends tend to encourage the use of theatre in art today. In part, theatre may be available for appropriation by visual artists now because as a cultural phenomenon theatre has declined considerably in its importance to the society at large and, viewed by some artists as a dead art form, is therefore fair game. Another factor may be generational change. The anti-theatre values and taboos of the 1960s may appear to the younger generation as something to be productively defied and reexamined. To become the vanguard, today’s artists must stake out a new position, in opposition to what has come before. Moreover, the use of media, and particularly the ubiquity of video in contemporary visual art, may have helped to overcome the prohibition on theatre. If there are bodies appearing before the camera, reciting texts in some fashion and creating the impression of narrative, however disjunctive in form, it is only natural that visual artists would discover the antecedent tradition of theatre. Similarly, in photography, the staged photographs of Francesca Woodman, Martha Wilson, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons, for example, are linked to theatre, as they invoke acting, theatrical props, sets, and narrative.
In addition, the widely recognized trend toward the dematerialization of the art object finds in theatre a ready-made form: theatrical performance has always been ephemeral and experiential. Specifically, Fluxus, a movement grounded historically in forms of participatory theatre, maintains considerable currency among contemporary visual artists and curators. Moreover, contemporary art is based largely in conceptualism, which often inclines in practice toward performance and thus also leads visual artists back to the prototype of theatre.
The communal practices and immateriality of theatre make it an attractive medium as artists explore political themes. When seen as an inherently social medium (collaborative work not only among the designers and performers but also with and through the audience), theatre offers an ancient and well-developed set of practices to deploy. Street theatre as a model for art interventions lends itself readily to political engagement, as the work of Suzanne Lacy has demonstrated for decades. Recently, Sharon Hayes has attracted attention for her staging or restaging of public protests and showing the resulting video documentation in a gallery setting. In her exhibitions, she has also displayed archival audio and video documentation from demonstrations of the 1960s that she has reformatted or reconfigured. For example, in her project In The Near Future (2005–09), a performance staged on the streets in Brussels, London, New York, Paris, Vienna, and Warsaw, Hayes held up placards with historically accurate or newly invented slogans at sites known for past public protests. Hayes’s street theatre was accorded a solo show at the Whitney Museum in 2012, and she won a “special mention” award at the 2013 Venice Biennale for, in the jury’s words, “making us re-think the importance of alterity and the complexity of the interplay between the personal and public.”
In this vein, the use in the art world of what looks like the participatory theatre of the 1960s and 1970s has furthered the incursion of theatre into visual art spaces, institutions, and audiences. A subfield of this has come to be referred to as “social practices,” as, for example in the writings of Shannon Jackson who has explored this side of art production in her book, Social Works, or in the work of Lacy, as she has described it in her book Leaving Art. A contrary point of view, deploring the degradation of art by its funding mechanisms and the politics of community and identity, has been expressed by the critic Claire Bishop in her 2012 book Artificial Hells. Bishop’s criticisms were, in many ways, anticipated in Marranca’s earlier essay, “Bodies of Action, Bodies of Thought,” in which, among other things, she questioned the widely accepted assumption that performance is linked to democratic participation in the political sphere properly speaking.
The experience of visual art is now often conceived of as a performance in which the spectator activates the artwork through the perception and interpretation of her surroundings. This is precisely what Fried had feared. The objects and space in which they are displayed are no longer seen as inert, independent, and timeless. Rather, they exist in specific contexts and their significance varies, depending upon how they appear to the viewer. They thereby acquire a narrative and political meaning that can no longer be ignored. The
dramatic performances of Andrea Frasier, impersonating an art critic or docent, are built on these themes. This historiographically sensitized understanding of visual art underlies the critical discourse surrounding the constitution of the subject and the nature of subjectivity. Similarly, relational aesthetics, that is, the overt consideration of the social context of the creation and reception of art that was initiated by the writings of Nicolas Bourriaud, converts the experience of art into a kind of improvisational theatre. Likewise, the interest in durational art performance, which occurs over hours, days, or even years, intentionally exceeding the capacity of the spectator to perceive the entirety of the work, is meant to overstep the traditional architectural and critical boundaries and to transform art into live theatre.
As theatre gains ground in the art world, the qualities once deemed essential to most art performance, those of being unrehearsed and unrepeatable, are no longer as dominant. Repetition has gained respectability and whittled away at the art world’s resistance to theatre and the attempts to distinguish art and theatre, as Rebecca Schneider has discussed in her book Performing Remains. Reenactments of performance art, such as Seven Easy Pieces, Marina Abramovic’s 2005 New York Guggenheim Museum re-performance of various works originally created and personally performed by other artists, and her 2010 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, The Artist is Present, in which dancers and actors were trained to re-perform her earlier work, have further eroded the boundary between art and theatre. She had said in 1978: “The spontaneity which is an important factor in our work comes about because we do not rehearse or repeat a performance.”
Art world institutions have recently turned a welcoming eye toward theatre, as performance in its various denominations becomes more central to contemporary visual art practices. In New York alone, the trend is quite clear. The Performa 11 biennial hosted numerous traditional theatre pieces and works that incorporated references to, or the practices of, theatre, though most often avoiding mentioning the forbidden by name. The 2012 Whitney Biennial focused squarely on performance and featured a staged play, puppetry, dance theatre, and an extended rehearsal in the museum conducted by the theatre director Richard Maxwell. When it relocates downtown, the Whitney has announced that performance spaces will be incorporated into the architectural design, including a fully equipped black box theatre. The Guggenheim Museum has also turned into a theatre impresario on occasion of late. The atrium of the Museum of Modern Art, a product of the most recent renovation, has become a venue for dance theatre and other kinds of performance. The New Museum performance program in its new home on the Bowery has included work that for all intents and purposes is theatre. What is happening in New York can also be seen internationally. At the 2013 Venice Biennale, the Golden Lion—the top prize for an individual artist in the international exhibition—went to Tino Sehgal, whose works are performed live by hired actors who follow a script he has devised.
The panelists and interviewees in newARTtheatre were selected not only because of their distinction as visual artists whose work has drawn critical attention but also because of the diversity of their positions within the visual art world as well as their approaches to theatre. Some of these artists have consistently and unapologetically turned to theatre, and they are known primarily for their work in theatre. Other panelists have deployed theatre more recently and in forms more self-conscious, fragmented, and critical. Rather than interpreting their work within a theoretical scheme, these conversations permit the artists to frame their practices and to engage with the issues surrounding theatre in their own terms. They talk about what theatre means to them and how they understand its use in their creative processes and work. They explain how and why they are now turning theatre into art.
I hope that this book will foster a dialogue among artists and critics across disciplines. It seems too often the case that the art world is unaware of the rich and varied 2,500-year history of theatre in the West, not to mention the Eastern theatrical traditions. Likewise, beyond the use of video on the stage, theatre could do well to examine how the visual art world is able to maintain a more contemporary conversation with the culture and to evolve much more nimbly. There is a great deal to be learned on both sides.
As the compound word of the title suggests, this book is about the current use of theatre by visual artists. The freedom of visual artists to turn to theatre is new. Post-war art performance and visual art in the U.S. developed by and large in ideological opposition to theatre. In the 1960s, theatre was rejected in two very different ways. On the one hand, in the art world, the modernist critic Michael Fried famously denounced theatre as the “perversion of art” in his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood.” Fried saw the enemy in minimalism, an approach to art that activated the viewer and required an audience. On the other hand, as the social revolutions of the 1960s were unleashed, those in the vanguard of experimental theatre felt that they should abandon or destroy traditional theatre since it was a product of decadent bourgeois culture. When viewed from this critical political perspective, theatre’s rehearsal, prepared text, professional actors, division of spectator from performer, narrative impetus, and commodified consumption perpetuated the patriarchal rigidity of capitalist society. Thus, the word “theatre” became a way of describing what art was not.
Not only art performance as a genre, but its critical reception as well has been radically separated from theatre in the post-war era. As Bonnie Marranca argued in her 1999 essay in PAJ, “Bodies of Action, Bodies of Thought,” apropos of the 1998 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, the art world’s narrative of post-war performance history fails to integrate theatre history, despite the obvious relationship between theatre and performance in their use of forms and the issue of audience reception.
It is against this backdrop that the appropriation of theatre emerges as a significant trend today in the work of visual artists and in the institutional reception of art. Some visual artists, such as Eleanor Antin, Joan Jonas, Scott Burton, and Paul McCarthy, to be sure, were using theatre all along, despite the denunciation of the form by the reigning ideologies. Other visual artists, who have taken up theatre more recently, find themselves less encumbered by the prejudices of modernist visual art criticism and are discovering in theatre many useful methods to pursue in their work. Theatre functions as a toolbox, offering practices that lead to the creation of visual art. For some artists, the experience of the processes of theatre is in effect the work of art: collaborative interpretation of the text, for instance, is an exemplary communal enterprise. For others, the fascination is with theatrical ephemera, the parts of theatre that exist outside the performance, such as rehearsal and auditions, which more readily retain a feeling of liveness and spontaneity. For still others, the dramaturgical concept of character draws them to theatre as a vehicle to explore identity and ideology. In some cases, theatre texts, from ancient Greek classics to Samuel Beckett, provide references and conceptual vessels that may ground or augment the reception of visual art. For many artists, the theories of theatre (such as the writings of Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal) are a framework for developing forms of art performance.
Many factors and trends tend to encourage the use of theatre in art today. In part, theatre may be available for appropriation by visual artists now because as a cultural phenomenon theatre has declined considerably in its importance to the society at large and, viewed by some artists as a dead art form, is therefore fair game. Another factor may be generational change. The anti-theatre values and taboos of the 1960s may appear to the younger generation as something to be productively defied and reexamined. To become the vanguard, today’s artists must stake out a new position, in opposition to what has come before. Moreover, the use of media, and particularly the ubiquity of video in contemporary visual art, may have helped to overcome the prohibition on theatre. If there are bodies appearing before the camera, reciting texts in some fashion and creating the impression of narrative, however disjunctive in form, it is only natural that visual artists would discover the antecedent tradition of theatre. Similarly, in photography, the staged photographs of Francesca Woodman, Martha Wilson, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons, for example, are linked to theatre, as they invoke acting, theatrical props, sets, and narrative.
In addition, the widely recognized trend toward the dematerialization of the art object finds in theatre a ready-made form: theatrical performance has always been ephemeral and experiential. Specifically, Fluxus, a movement grounded historically in forms of participatory theatre, maintains considerable currency among contemporary visual artists and curators. Moreover, contemporary art is based largely in conceptualism, which often inclines in practice toward performance and thus also leads visual artists back to the prototype of theatre.
The communal practices and immateriality of theatre make it an attractive medium as artists explore political themes. When seen as an inherently social medium (collaborative work not only among the designers and performers but also with and through the audience), theatre offers an ancient and well-developed set of practices to deploy. Street theatre as a model for art interventions lends itself readily to political engagement, as the work of Suzanne Lacy has demonstrated for decades. Recently, Sharon Hayes has attracted attention for her staging or restaging of public protests and showing the resulting video documentation in a gallery setting. In her exhibitions, she has also displayed archival audio and video documentation from demonstrations of the 1960s that she has reformatted or reconfigured. For example, in her project In The Near Future (2005–09), a performance staged on the streets in Brussels, London, New York, Paris, Vienna, and Warsaw, Hayes held up placards with historically accurate or newly invented slogans at sites known for past public protests. Hayes’s street theatre was accorded a solo show at the Whitney Museum in 2012, and she won a “special mention” award at the 2013 Venice Biennale for, in the jury’s words, “making us re-think the importance of alterity and the complexity of the interplay between the personal and public.”
In this vein, the use in the art world of what looks like the participatory theatre of the 1960s and 1970s has furthered the incursion of theatre into visual art spaces, institutions, and audiences. A subfield of this has come to be referred to as “social practices,” as, for example in the writings of Shannon Jackson who has explored this side of art production in her book, Social Works, or in the work of Lacy, as she has described it in her book Leaving Art. A contrary point of view, deploring the degradation of art by its funding mechanisms and the politics of community and identity, has been expressed by the critic Claire Bishop in her 2012 book Artificial Hells. Bishop’s criticisms were, in many ways, anticipated in Marranca’s earlier essay, “Bodies of Action, Bodies of Thought,” in which, among other things, she questioned the widely accepted assumption that performance is linked to democratic participation in the political sphere properly speaking.
The experience of visual art is now often conceived of as a performance in which the spectator activates the artwork through the perception and interpretation of her surroundings. This is precisely what Fried had feared. The objects and space in which they are displayed are no longer seen as inert, independent, and timeless. Rather, they exist in specific contexts and their significance varies, depending upon how they appear to the viewer. They thereby acquire a narrative and political meaning that can no longer be ignored. The
dramatic performances of Andrea Frasier, impersonating an art critic or docent, are built on these themes. This historiographically sensitized understanding of visual art underlies the critical discourse surrounding the constitution of the subject and the nature of subjectivity. Similarly, relational aesthetics, that is, the overt consideration of the social context of the creation and reception of art that was initiated by the writings of Nicolas Bourriaud, converts the experience of art into a kind of improvisational theatre. Likewise, the interest in durational art performance, which occurs over hours, days, or even years, intentionally exceeding the capacity of the spectator to perceive the entirety of the work, is meant to overstep the traditional architectural and critical boundaries and to transform art into live theatre.
As theatre gains ground in the art world, the qualities once deemed essential to most art performance, those of being unrehearsed and unrepeatable, are no longer as dominant. Repetition has gained respectability and whittled away at the art world’s resistance to theatre and the attempts to distinguish art and theatre, as Rebecca Schneider has discussed in her book Performing Remains. Reenactments of performance art, such as Seven Easy Pieces, Marina Abramovic’s 2005 New York Guggenheim Museum re-performance of various works originally created and personally performed by other artists, and her 2010 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, The Artist is Present, in which dancers and actors were trained to re-perform her earlier work, have further eroded the boundary between art and theatre. She had said in 1978: “The spontaneity which is an important factor in our work comes about because we do not rehearse or repeat a performance.”
Art world institutions have recently turned a welcoming eye toward theatre, as performance in its various denominations becomes more central to contemporary visual art practices. In New York alone, the trend is quite clear. The Performa 11 biennial hosted numerous traditional theatre pieces and works that incorporated references to, or the practices of, theatre, though most often avoiding mentioning the forbidden by name. The 2012 Whitney Biennial focused squarely on performance and featured a staged play, puppetry, dance theatre, and an extended rehearsal in the museum conducted by the theatre director Richard Maxwell. When it relocates downtown, the Whitney has announced that performance spaces will be incorporated into the architectural design, including a fully equipped black box theatre. The Guggenheim Museum has also turned into a theatre impresario on occasion of late. The atrium of the Museum of Modern Art, a product of the most recent renovation, has become a venue for dance theatre and other kinds of performance. The New Museum performance program in its new home on the Bowery has included work that for all intents and purposes is theatre. What is happening in New York can also be seen internationally. At the 2013 Venice Biennale, the Golden Lion—the top prize for an individual artist in the international exhibition—went to Tino Sehgal, whose works are performed live by hired actors who follow a script he has devised.
The panelists and interviewees in newARTtheatre were selected not only because of their distinction as visual artists whose work has drawn critical attention but also because of the diversity of their positions within the visual art world as well as their approaches to theatre. Some of these artists have consistently and unapologetically turned to theatre, and they are known primarily for their work in theatre. Other panelists have deployed theatre more recently and in forms more self-conscious, fragmented, and critical. Rather than interpreting their work within a theoretical scheme, these conversations permit the artists to frame their practices and to engage with the issues surrounding theatre in their own terms. They talk about what theatre means to them and how they understand its use in their creative processes and work. They explain how and why they are now turning theatre into art.
I hope that this book will foster a dialogue among artists and critics across disciplines. It seems too often the case that the art world is unaware of the rich and varied 2,500-year history of theatre in the West, not to mention the Eastern theatrical traditions. Likewise, beyond the use of video on the stage, theatre could do well to examine how the visual art world is able to maintain a more contemporary conversation with the culture and to evolve much more nimbly. There is a great deal to be learned on both sides.
Descriere
The first of PAJ Publications' "Performance Ideas" books: small books that crossover performance, visual arts, dance, sound, and media.