Scenography and Art History

Performance Design and Visual Culture

Astrid Von Rosen, Viveka Kjellmer, Astrid Von Rosen, Viveka Kjellmer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350204461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performance Art

Scenography and Art History reimagines scenography as a critical concept for art history, and is the first book to demonstrate the importance and usefulness of this concept for art historians and scholars in related fields. It provides a vital evaluation of the contemporary importance of scenography as a critical tool for art historians and scholars from related branches of study addressing phenomena such as witchy designs, Early Modern festival books, live rock performances, digital fashion photography, and outdoor dance interventions. With its nuanced and detailed case studies, this book is an innovative contribution to ongoing debates within art history and visual studies concerning multisensory events. It extends the existing literature by demonstrating the importance of a reimagined scenography concept for comprehending historical and contemporary art histories and visual cultures more broadly. The book contends that scenography is no longer restricted to the traditional space of the theatre, but has become an important concept for approaching art historical and contemporary objects and events. It explores scenography not solely as a critical approach and theoretical concept, but also as an important practice linked with unrecognized labour and broader political, social and gendered issues in a great variety of contexts, such as festive culture, sacred settings, fashion, film, or performing arts. Designed as a key resource for students, teachers and researchers in art history, visual studies, and related subjects, the book, through its cross-disciplinary frame, does consider, implicitly and explicitly, the roles of both scenography and art in society.

1

Introduction

Re-imagining scenography in relation to art history

Astrid von Rosen and Viveka Kjellmer

In recent decades, cross-disciplinary scenography studies have emerged as a thriving academic as well as creative domain. Not only has the concept of scenography moved beyond more traditional theatrical settings to potentially include all environments, it has also been intensely debated and theoretically honed. Its expansion and theorization has borne fruit in performance studies and practice-based/artistic research; however, apart from a few stimulating exceptions, it has not attracted the same level of attention within art history and related disciplines. In response to the lack of attention, this book examines recent developments in order to reimagine scenography as a critical concept for art history. We, the editors of Scenography and Art History, propose that such an endeavour can pave the way for new, innovative and critical approaches to a wide range of visual and multisensory topics and objects of study.

Looking briefly at the etymology of ‘scenography’, the Greek word skenographia combines skēnē, referring to a small stage building, and graphia, meaning to write, or perhaps to make or metaphorically to paint. Although skenographia is often translated as scenic writing, the term has remained obscure, as it is still difficult or impossible to determine what it actually meant (Aronson 2017: 7). It is not only its obscure Greek origins but also its diverse historiography depending on location and context that render scenography a complicated concept, one that we have seen scholars avoid rather than affirm. Therefore, the main ambition of this book is to aid art historians and other scholars as they navigate and position themselves in relation to recent scenographic debates and developments, rather than to go over older writings on the topic.

In this Introduction, we observe scenography through the lens of three particularly noteworthy theoretical shifts that are foundational to this book. First, the concept has expanded beyond the theatre, which means that a great variety of settings and situations can be considered scenographic (McKinney and Palmer 2017). These can include presentations and interventions in galleries, museums and heritage spaces, for example (den Oudsten 2011). Second, the mise en scène process and scenography as a holistic and durational event have, to an increasing extent, been theoretically separated. As a consequence, and perhaps provocatively, practitioners working with set design, costumes, lighting, sound, smell, video-technology and so forth are understood as contributing to scenography as an event, but are not seen as creators of the holistic occurrence that happens in time and place (Hann 2019). A third and central concern of this book covers what we call ‘the end of the visual’. We argue that when scenography is conceptualized as a holistic event, it goes from being a primarily visual and distanced phenomenon to being a multisensory, situated experience, involving all participants in the co-creation of a durational occurrence.

This anthology is a result of scenography research undertaken at the Department of Cultural Sciences at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. In the interdisciplinary project Dream-Playing across Borders (von Rosen 2016), a holistic and cross-disciplinary understanding of scenography was employed to explore costumes, music, set design, lighting and bodies in a pioneering German production of A Dream Play. The initial ideas were further developed as a result of scenography sessions at the Association of Art Historians (AAH) conference in Loughborough (2017), the Critical Costume conference in Surrey (2018), the NORDIK conference in Copenhagen (2018) and the AAH in London (2018).¹ We would also like to mention that our Nordic Scenography Network, also established in 2018, has become a platform for promoting international exchange and inviting scholars, practitioners and others to take part in developing the field.² With this said, we will now move on to more closely explaining the recent understandings of scenography that invigorate the contributions to this book.

Scenography has expanded . . .

One of the most important and liberating components of the ongoing theorization is the shift from wanting to understand what scenography is to being interested in what it does, as an active co-creator of performance within and outside the theatre. This idea is wonderfully expressed (and worth quoting at length) by two pioneers of the conceptual expansion of scenography, former artistic director of the Prague Quadrennial Sodja Zupank Lotker and performance scholar Richard Gough:

We perform scenographies and they perform us. Our roles change with these scenographies. Environments conspire and collude to construct scen ographies for our actions, and sites, places and locations are subverted, co-opted, occupied, translated and mutated for the needs of our performances. Everything we do and almost everything comprehend scenic formation – landscape, site and setting – but also a way of constructing the physical, perceptual and emotional environment of/for the event. (Lotker and Gough 2013: 3)

In the anthology Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design (2017), edited by scenography scholars Joslin McKinney and Scott Palmer, this expanded scenography theory is firmly established. Drawing on affect, relational aesthetics, post-humanist and new materialist theories, the editors emphasize the emotionally charged, relational and material character of scenography. They argue that ‘scenography facilitates spaces of encounter; that may be in the form of encounters between spectators and performers in ways that are conventionally familiar, but it might also encompass encounters with other spectators, spaces, sites and objects’ (McKinney and Palmer 2017: 8).

McKinney and Palmer moreover suggest that ‘the ways in which scenography engages the attention of spectators – through the organization and transformation of space, through the selection and manipulation of images and through the action of the scenographic materials themselves – are often indirect and oblique; an experience or a set of potentialities rather than a singular message’ (McKinney and Palmer 2017: 10). In recognition of this, Scenography and Art History stresses that it is the mobilization of familiar and unfamiliar resources, rather than the promotion or unpacking of a singular message, that is paramount to understanding scenography as a durational and reciprocal relationship between people, environments and contexts. Arguably, this situated, embodied and affective understanding of scenography has social and political implications. Several of the contributors to this book appreciatively explore sensations as powerful and transformative aspects of scenographic occurrences.

. . . and been theoretically honed

As exemplified earlier, expanded scenography emerges as a complex landscape filled with celebratory approaches, a critical impetus and fruitful innovations. However, while the expansion may be enticing and inspiring, if it means that anything and everything can be considered scenography, the concept risks becoming unclear. This can be compared to how the notion of a performative artwork has become redundant, because all art does something; all art is performative (von Hantelmann 2010: 17–18). As suggested by scenography scholar Rachel Hann in Beyond Scenography (2019), works of art, be they sculptures, installations or light art, ‘evoke methods of placing and orientation that are scenographic in conception and execution’. Hann further proposes that if performativity has become redundant, ‘scenographics afford a useful counterpoint when articulating an artwork’s affinity to staging’ (Hann 2019: 30). Moving on from performativity, Scenography and Art History proposes that scenography theory is a useful tool for addressing the complex, affectively charged interplay between artworks, environments and bodies.

As a helpful response to the seemingly unavoidable conceptual unclarity that arises when a concept expands, Hann sets out on a double quest. Wishing both to clarify scenography’s roots in theatre methods and to account for its critical capacities beyond the theatre, she constructs two entangled yet different concepts: scenography and scenographics. Scenography, a concept of and for the theatre, is understood as ‘place orientation’, and refers to the crafting capacities of the theatrical devices of light, costume, set, sound and video. Scenographics, on the other hand, refers to extra-daily features ‘which orientate interventional acts of worlding’ (Hann 2019: 17) and which need not involve theatre methods proper. Worlding, a concept Hann borrows from Kathleen Stewart (2014), is a way to address how scenographic encounters can make worlds appear, to better define them, and to unsettle and expose the ideologies and normativities at play. Combining new materialism, affect and assemblage theory, and queer phenomenology, Hann urges us to focus on ecologies, or ‘felt relational interdependencies of material circumstances within and beyond the theatre’ (von Rosen 2020b: 76). Hann’s manifesto aptly summarizes much of what is at stake for new scenography theory:

Scenographics irritate the disciplined orders of world.

Skenographia has many legacies.

Scenography has exceeded the scenographer.

Scenography is not set; scenography happens.

There are no stages without scenographics.

While all scenography is scenographic, not all that is scenographic is scenography.

Whereas slow architecture pertains to monumentality, fast architecture is scenographic.

Scenographics score acts of worlding. (Hann 2019: unnumbered pages)

Several of the contributions to this book bring Hann’s scenography theory into the realm of art and theatre historiography. Scenography and Art History thereby contributes exemplary case studies of how recent scenography theory reinvigorates analyses of historical topics ranging from medieval festival books to postmodern dance interventions at an art museum. The book also demonstrates the usefulness of scenography theory for studies that focus on practitioners (e.g. scenographer-artists or costume designers), archival traces of practice (such as designs), the mise en scène process, and explorations of live events.

The end of the visual

Scenography and Art History argues that when scenography is conceptualized as a holistic event, it goes from being a primarily visual and distanced phenomenon to being a multisensory experience. This means that all participants, or agents (human, non-human and hybrid), are involved in the co-creation of durational, situated, past, present or even future occurrences. Scholars of visual culture have repeatedly argued that the term ‘visual’ does not only refer to seeing but also encompasses other sensory modalities such as touching or hearing (see, for example, Mirzoeff 1999, 2002; Mitchell 2005). This book suggests that scenography is a useful term for addressing multisensory dimensions of ‘visual’ culture. Scenography theory, we suggest, usefully avoids creating hierarchies between the senses and opens up for innovative and critical approaches to a great variety of historical and current topics.

Recent scenography theory, then, testifies to what playfully can be termed ‘the end of the visual’.³ Even if the visual will always be there, and will always have important functions, the scenography theory presented here is more interested in multisensory potentialities and affective mobilization of resources than in the communication and effects of defined messages. Indeed, as theatre scholar James Thompson argues, affect can be understood as ‘the bodily sensation that is sustained and provoked particularly by aesthetic experiences’ and that forms a ‘precondition for critical engagement with the world’ (Thompson 2009: 135). For example, when affect is manifested as intense or subtle feelings of joy, sadness, fear, pleasure or irritation, then scenographic thinking can help connect multisensory expe...