Theatre, Exhibition, and Curation

Displayed & Performed

Georgina Guy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317564799
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Théâtre

Examining the artistic, intellectual, and social life of performance, this book interrogates Theatre and Performance Studies through the lens of display and modern visual art. Moving beyond the exhibition of immaterial art and its documents, as well as re-enactment in gallery contexts, Guy's book articulates an emerging field of arts practice distinct from but related to increasing curatorial provision for 'live' performance. Drawing on a recent proliferation of object-centric events of display that interconnect with theatre, the book approaches artworks in terms of their curation together and re-theorizes the exhibition as a dynamic context in which established traditions of display and performance interact. By examining the current traffic of ideas and aesthetics moving between theatricality and curatorial practice, the study reveals how the reception of a specific form is often mediated via the ontological expectations of another. It asks how contemporary visual arts and exhibition practices display performance and what it means to generalize the 'theatrical' as the optic or directive of a curatorial concept. Proposing a symbiotic relation between theatricality and display, Guy presents cases from international arts institutions which are both displayed and performed, including the Tate Modern and the Guggenheim, and assesses their significance to the enduring relation between theatre and the visual arts. The book progresses from the conventional alignment of theatricality and ephemerality within performance research and teases out a new temporality for performance with which contemporary exhibitions implicitly experiment, thereby identifying supplementary modes of performance which other discourses exclude. This important study joins the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies with exciting new directions in curation, aesthetics, sociology of the arts, visual arts, the creative industries, the digital humanities, cultural heritage, and reception and audience theories.

1 Performer & Exhibit

Theatrical Conditions

Imagine a world without things. It would be not so much an empty world as a blurry, frictionless one: … there would be no resistance against which to stub a toe or test a theory. … Nor would there be anything to describe, or to explain, remark on, interpret, or complain about. … Without things, we would stop talking. We would become as mute as things are alleged to be. If things are “speechless” perhaps it is because they are drowned out by all the talk about them.

—Lorraine Daston¹

Projecting the monotony of an undifferentiated territory, historian of science Lorraine Daston asks that we visualise the tedium of an objectless space, not empty but inert to the possibility of physical opposition and academic challenge. Here, there would be no matter with which to be concerned, no events to arrest our attention or to construe in speech and writing, in fact, no living ‘things’ to experience and encounter any other being or entity. ‘Things’ enact an intricate relation to the silent and the spoken, the inanimate and the animate, the non-human and the human, the displayed and the performed. They are significant to a study concerned with contemporary object-based renderings of performance and the ways in which aesthetic things perform in museums and in the theatre. In Daston’s assemblage of Things That Talk (2004), the objects are specific, not general indescribables but particular things which convey meaning through their materiality. In her edited collection of essays, the objects are not merely spoken for by those who contribute on their behalf, rather these ‘things are the dramatis personae of the book’ and it is in their characterisation as actors in the drama of the text, as agents which perform and partake of action, that Daston’s objects resonate with the things to which this chapter is addressed.²

Objects of Study

Given that debates concerning the relation between the performing and visual arts have perhaps been most polemic with regards to the specific nature of what constitutes sculpture as a category of creative production, it seems useful in this first chapter to engage with two cases wherein the sculptural condition is central to the distinctive premise of each work. The first objects of interest, or rather collection of things, with which this chapter is concerned are those brought together within the construct of Drama Queens, a play by Berlin-based artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset with text by performance maker and writer Tim Etchells. Performed at the Old Vic Theatre, London, on 12 October 2008, following performances in the Münster City Theatre as part of Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2007, this first case study represents an object-based engagement with theatrical conventions. The production is essentially a play on object drama and transfers six iconic and recognisable sculptures, associated with various twentieth-century visual arts movements and philosophical schools, including conceptual art, existentialism, pop and contemporary art, and, perhaps most significantly, modernism and minimalism, from situations of storage and display onto a stage where they are mobilised on moving plinths in relation to a seated audience. In the context of the theatre, the sculptures find themselves presented in a collection unlikely to be assembled by curators in the art world and, drawing on their relative art historical expectations and receptions, attempt to make sense of their unfamiliar surroundings.

Artist and theorist David Batchelor reminds us that the ‘debate over what counts as an appropriate context has become a drawn-out war of attrition in academic art history.’³ In an apparent inversion of Drama Queens’ relocation of art objects into the theatre, the second gathering of things addressed in this chapter was presented as a cluster of performances by international artists staged in the gallery spaces of the Whitworth Art Gallery, part of the University of Manchester, as they stood in 2009 and prior to their recent substantial remodelling, completed in 2015. Programmed under the leadership of former Gallery Director Maria Balshaw, Director of Tate from 2017, and the auspices of the biennial Manchester International Festival (MIF), Marina Abramović Presents… was curated by the title artist along with curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist and required that the galleries be emptied of the art objects habitually housed therein. The Whitworth’s collections include historic fine art by Millais and Rossetti, Thomas Gainsborough, and J. M. W. Turner; modern and contemporary art by Degas, Gaugin, Picasso, Paul Klee, Bacon, and Frank Auerbach, as well as more recent work by Cornelia Parker and Rachel Whiteread; textiles and wallpapers; together with, following the event, a range of videos and drawings remaining from Marina Abramović Presents… The act of emptying the galleries of these and other existing works rendered these exhibition spaces, in one sense, objectless, and in another directed very specifically towards different categories of ‘things’ and their particular relations to contexts of display. This second case study represents a gallery-based engagement with performance art.

Like the things of Daston’s historiographical enquiry, Drama Queens and Marina Abramović Presents… display objects and create events that ‘exhibit a certain resistance to tidy classification’. In Daston’s enquiry, the objects, which refuse any kind of neat cataloguing, end up generating theoretical engagements precisely situated within the confines of the respective disciplines of Daston and her collaborators from across the arts and sciences, as if, she writes, by some sort of ‘process of reciprocity, our things individualized us as we picked them out of all the possibilities.’⁴ My interest in the things discussed in this chapter is likewise founded on subject-specific concerns, even as the objects are categorically resistant to such delineated areas of specialism. It is through this defiance that the things come to speak to the problematics of performance in relation to spaces of exhibition so that, as in the case of Daston’s study, what these ‘things have in common is loquaciousness:’ they communicate fluidly and significantly on the relation between theatre, exhibition, and curation, the displayed and the performed.⁵

Conditions of Theatre

In Drama Queens the way in which the objects talk is literal, they are given voices and actions, they move. Before looking in more detail at the mechanics of this movement, it seems only appropriate to introduce the legacy to which this motion refers, particularly, to borrow the terms of performance scholar P.A. Skantze, in relation to ideologies which value ‘stillness as a higher, more refined state over the messy daily quality of those things that move’.⁶ The characterisation of things in motion, that is, we might say, of performance, as something disordering and disruptive recalls something of the influence on discourses of performance studies exerted by modernist art critic Michael Fried’s oft-cited proposition that ‘Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre.’⁷ In his seminal 1967 essay, ‘Art and Objecthood,’ Fried influentially cast the qualities of minimalism which make central the position of the visitor as negating and retrogressive to the category of art, aligning theatricality with temporality in his notion of the theatrical ‘condition.’ Remarkably for the terms of this book, Fried objected not only to the time-based emphasis, or theatricality, of such work but also to the way in which this is made manifest through the prominence or projection of ‘objecthood’, that is to say via its aspiration to appear as ‘literal’ rather than ‘pictorial’ and to be experienced as ‘nothing more than objects’ (120) through a visual proximity to everyday things traditionally outside the classification of art. In his response to Fried’s argument, Batchelor laments the ways in which labels, such as ‘minimalism,’ work to perpetuate differences that might be superficial and wonders whether all art must be distinguished as either pictorial or theatrical; ‘if this work persistently fails to stay put within either of the preferred alternative theories of modern art, might this work not lead us to consider what kind of alternatives are on offer?’⁸ It is towards such ‘alternative’ modes of categorisation, association, and interpretation that Drama Queens and Marina Abramović Presents… motion.

For Fried, theatre is ‘the common denominator that binds together a large and seemingly disparate variety of activities’ (141). Employing ‘theatre’ as a collective term related to certain qualities and characteristics, it is important to remember with performance theorist Philip Auslander that ‘Fried’s prejudice is not against theatre per se,’ that is to say not against theatre as a specific mode of production, but rather, and crucially for my project, against sculptural objects which engage with the terrain of the durational.⁹ Writing ten years after Fried’s critique, art theorist Rosalind Krauss makes use of ‘theatricality’ as a collective term under which we might assemble forms of live and performance art, as well as sculptural interventions. In her prominent study, Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977), Krauss follows philosopher, dramatist, and art critic Gotthold Lessing’s eighteenth century aesthetic treatise, Lacoön, in order to investigate the possibility, inherent to Fried’s position, of defining the ‘unique experience’ of sculpture or the ‘general category of experience that sculpture occupies.’ For Krauss, Lessing is still relevant to contemporary discussions because of the questions he raises about the nature of sculpture as an art form and whether or not there is an ‘inherent difference between a temporal event and a static object’. According to Lessing, the ‘character of the visual arts is that they are static’ and, Krauss surmises that, by the 1930s, the distinction between an ‘art of time and an art of space had become a basic starting point from which to assess the unique accomplishments of sculpture.’¹⁰ The underlying premise of Krauss’ study is that, in relation to analytical engagement with any medium, dimensions of space and time are inseparable and that the ‘history of modern sculpture is incomplete without discussion of the temporal consequences of a particular arrangement of form.’ Thus connecting minimal art to a longer history of modern sculpture, for Krauss the element of ‘theatricality’ associated with the work of particular artists is key to the ‘reformulation of the sculptural enterprise: what the object is, how we know it, and what it means to “know it”.’¹¹ In a direct reversal of this statement, my interest in the minimal legacies evident in the contemporary works discussed in this chapter speaks rather to a concern for what performance is and how we might nowadays encounter that form in relation to the object.

Drama Queens

Whereas Fried was responding to, what Krauss calls, an ‘uneasy feeling that theatre had invaded the realm of sculpture’, Drama Queens represents a specific instance wherein sculptures occupy the realm of the theatre. The interest certain post-war European and American sculptors demonstrated in theatre and an associated experience of time resulted, Krauss abbreviates, in ‘sculpture to be used as props in productions of dance or theater, some to function as surrogate performers, and some to act as on-stage generators of scenic effects.’¹² In this chapter, Drama Queens stands as a kind of synecdoche for this direction of exchange, wherein languages of visual art have influenced the theatre, and its relation to the counterpoint practices central to the project. It is not my intention to rehearse this history here but rather to observe the ways in which an exchange between sculpture and theatricality is registering differently across arts institutions and performance venues in the early twenty-first century. Drama Queens takes up and makes literal the ‘condition of theatre’ denounced by Fried, extending this not only to a broader range of scu...