Theatre for the Dead (original) (raw)
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On Art, Keeping Theatre in Mind…
Roczniki Kulturoznawcze
The presented statement is part of the volume it covers a variety of responses from people who interact with art in different ways. The aim is to suggest to the participant of the contemporary world a new, personal perspective to rethink what is this area of our world that we label with art; thoughts with and without theoretical suggestions - reflections by the creators and reflections by the audience, teaching humility and uniqueness, perhaps - forming a fresh perspective on art.
Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty and Subversive Strategies in Today's Art
MONITOR, 31/32 VOL. XI / Nº 1-2, 2009 Rivista di antropologia storica, sociale e altre antropologie, 2009
The aim of our paper is to treat some aspects of subversive potential of contemporary live arts, especially in relation to links between notions of madness and artistic creation in theories of Michel Foucault and Antonin Artaud. we will try to question the utopian role of art as an instance that transcends those epistemic structures that determine how we think or even that we think.
Starting from the famous and enigmatic quotation of the Aristotle’s Poetics, who argues that the human has a natural desire and pleasure to see corpses if mediated by art, is intended to show the relationship between the attraction for the horror and some contemporary art practices surrounding the depiction of death, particularly with regard to the ultimate use of the human corpse as an artistic resource. Avoiding any kind of ethical approach or questioning of the limits of the artistic production, is meant to highlight the phenomenon through the examples brought out by the work of some contemporary artists such as Andy Warhol, Eric Fischl, Damien Hirst, Von Hagens, Andres Serrano, Joel-Peter Witkin and Teresa Margolles: From those who use the corpse in and turn it in something aesthetically pleasant, to others who turn human corpses in sculptures of scientific value, and further other kind of artists who assume the morbid and dramatic life of the corpse in their art production as something structural. Partiendo de la famosa y enigmática cita de la Poética de Aristóteles que sostiene que el ser humano tiene un deseo natural y placer de ver cadáveres cuando mediada por el arte, se pretende mostrar la relación entre la atracción por el horror y algunas prácticas artísticas contemporáneas en torno a la representación de la muerte, en particular con respecto a la radical utilización del cadáver humano como un recurso artístico. Evitando cualquier tipo de enfoque ético o cuestionamiento de los límites de la producción artística, tenemos la intención de resaltar el fenómeno a través de los ejemplos presentados a cabo de la obra de algunos artistas contemporáneos, como Andy Warhol, Eric Fischl, Damien Hirst, Von Hagens, Andres Serrano, Joel-Peter Witkin y Teresa Margolles: partiendo de los que utilizan el cadáver y lo convierten en algo estéticamente agradable, a otros que transforman cadáveres humanos en esculturas de valor científico y, además, otro tipo de artistas que asumen la vida mórbida y dramática del cadáver en su producción artística como algo estructural.
2013
Chapter 2: Survivals and the uncanny (p.90) Chapter 3: Superstition and an iconography (p.120) Part Two Chapter 4: What do we see in theatre-in theory? i. "To establish that theatre thinks..."-thought and event (Alain Badiou) (p.148); ii. "...through the medium of its concept"-theatre and aesthetics (Theodor Adorno) (p.152); iii. "Often what a word expresses..."-theatre and theory (Martin Heidegger) (p.164) Chapter 5: A question of appearance-enter the actor i. In the mirror of the uncanny (Sigmund Freud and Jean-Pierre Vernant) (p.176); ii. "As if for the first time..." (Tadeusz Kantor) (p.183); iii. "A sign charged with signs..." (Jean Genet) (p.192); iv. In the image of the photograph (Roland Barthes, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Luc Nancy) (p.198) Part Three Chapter 6: Tadeusz Kantor-An avant-garde of death Introduction: analogies and aporias of a concept (p.208); i. What is remembered of the Cricot 2 theatre practice-between actors, objects, and photographs? (p.210); ii. What particular conditions of production of the Cricot 2 are remembered in exhibitions? (p.219); iii. What returns in the impasse between formalism and naturalism? (p.230); iv. "Once again I am on stage..." How is Kantor's theatre of death informed by the thought of demarcation and participation? (p.235); v. How does the past of Kantor's theatre, with the "example" of the Cricoteka as a "living archive", resist the claims of what is "post"modern? (p.245); vi. How do claims for the autonomy of art resist those for their historical specificity-whether as avant-garde or anachronistic? (p.253); vii. In place of a conclusion: how might "the return of Odysseus" offer an image of and for the concept of the theatre of death, in the testimony that Kantor's appearance "on stage" offers to the short twentieth century? (p.266). Bibliography (p.272) 5 The Theatre of Death: The Uncanny in Mimesis Introduction: Thinking of the dead through a concept of theatre (part one) When I speak of truth, I'm not thinking of the weight of moral significance attached to this word, but of the formal consequences of it. Truth, for me, is the counterbalance to the stylisations employed in theatre and literature... Cricot has always had a very precise artistic-conceptual programme: a programme precisely defined at each stage of our investigations... The artist "creates" more or less within the artistic conventions dominant in a given period. I would cite the example of Wyspianski, who has an impeccable individuality,
The New Theatre of the New Artists Group and the Russian Avant-Garde
Art & Culture Studies
The multimedia practice of the Russian Avant-Garde, in which theatrical art is inseparable from literary, visual and musical art, found its continuation half a century later in the work of the New Artists group, founded by Timur Novikov in 1982 in Leningrad. This article is the first study of the so-called New Theatre of the New Artists, which is associated with the following happenings or performances: The Ballet of the Three Inseparables, Anna Karenina, The Idiot, and their predecessor, the literary-noise action The Medical Concert. The article discusses three elements of the avant-garde theatrical tradition that resonate with the New Theatre: Nikolai Evreinov’s comprehensive concept of the “theatre for oneself”, the musical-spatial theatrical experiments of Mikhail Matyushin and his followers, and the absurdist theatre of Daniil Kharms and OBERIU. The second and third, despite being so dissimilar to each other, share the borderline, where zaum (alogism) and absurdism converge. Th...
Postmodern Deconstructive Theatrical Tactics of Reading the Avant-Garde
In our paper we are going to examine some of the postmodern readings of the avant-garde that had been developed within the field of contemporary theatre and performing art during the latest few decades. We will focus on what Aleš Erjavec calls politicized art under late socialism or postmodernism in the postsocialist condition. The starting point for our discussion (is) will be the assumption that postmodern performing arts intuitively or rationally employ Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Western philosophy as its own (artistic) reading of western theatre tradition and its orientation “toward an order of meaning – thought, truth, reason, logic, the World – conceived as existing in itself, as foundation” (Culler) This reading of the tradition is positioned within its critique of what Derrida calls “theological stage” with its structure comporting with the elements of author-creator regulating the time or the meaning of representation understood as something that represents him, his thoughts, intentions, ideas. Postmodern theatre thus develops something that Philip Auslander calls “other grounding concepts” of logocentricity, for example director’s concept or even stage designer’s concept, in which “the logos of the performance need not take the form of a playwright’s text …”
Bodies of Evidence: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics of Movement, ed. Gurur Ertem and Sandra Noeth (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2018), 101-21., 2018
For the Russian artist, activist, and "actionist" Petr Pavlensky, art is not an aestheticized commentary on politics. It is, rather, the expression of the political in aesthetic form. Through carefully planned and staged "actions," which are radical aesthetic-political performances, Pavlensky creates disturbing and thought-provoking scenes that put into question the legitimacy of state institutions and their disciplinary practices, as well as the dominant ideology that induces individuals to conformism and passivity. These actions catapult the artist's body into centrality in the artwork, delineating it as the main conduit of the artist's political intervention. By pitting the individual's singular and material corporeality against the might of sovereign power, these actions aim to create a rupture in the texture of everyday life, forcing an interruption in lived experience, a distanciation from dominant ideology, and a break in submission to structures of power. As such, they combine an anarchisant politics with a materialist aesthetics that goes well beyond conventional performance art. This paper will investigate Pavlensky's artwork focusing on the ways in which a radical politics is interwoven with a trans-gressive experimentation with the artist's body in it. In light of the complex relationship between the individual body and the political his artwork articulates, I propose to consider Pavlensky's artistic practice as pointing us to an aesthetic-political strategy that I will call the "corporeal avant-garde."
Socially Engaged Theatre and Performance in Italy: Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics
2021
In historico-critical terms, the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in performance and social theatre in Italy can be exemplified by the publication, between 1968 and 1969, of the Italian editions of Antonin Artaud's Le théâtre et son double (1938) and Walter Benjamin's Programm eines proletarischen Kindertheaters (1969). What these two powerfully visionary and heterodox texts have in common is, above all, the emergence of the performative device, highlighted by the body-action synthesis: the core of an anti-narrative and anti-representative artistic process, brought back to the ground zero of a non-specialised cultural action, which goes beyond the closed, self-referential forms of the mainstream theatre. In this perspective, the performative device feeds a widespread creativity, with a socio-anthropological matrix, capable of influencing the transformations of the political system, without ever indulging in instrumental and functionalist ideological drifts. Within this scenario, the revolutionary path indicated by Artaud is one of desecratory cruelty, of a regressive and painful aesthetics of the body, heading in the direction of the synthesis of body and mind. This indissoluble unity of thought and action, represents, for Artaud, the original source of a lost organicity, and of an affective athleticism made of poetry, flesh and breath, oriented more towards life than towards art, for the regeneration of the human being and consequently of society (
2018
The paper investigates the problems of interconnection between performing arts, politics and the machinery of state, based on works of the famous French philosopher-post-modernist A. Badiou. The analogy between theatre and politics, proposed by him, analyzed when applied to Russian culture and interaction with political realia of past and present. An attempt is made to compare politics and theatre as phenomena that have much in common from the conceptual, structural and functional points of view. The paper also brings up the problem of the status and the role of a person and a society at large as components of creative process, some aspects concerning the extent of influence that theatre makes on both individual consciousness and collective thinking and their view of the world.
Horea Avram (ed.), Moving Images, Mobile Bodies: The Poetics and Practice of Corporeality in Visual and Performing Arts, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambrige Scholars Publishing, pp. 161-180., 2018
The architectural reminiscences of modernist utopianism can be described as "dead metaphors" (Anselm Franke), metaphors from another world that are unable to speak to us because the semantic ground upon which they were formulated is gone today. In selected (video) performances and video works from recent years, the body plays a major role in reflecting these semantic ruptures and shifts that occurred since the 1990s by means of corporeal acts, movements and language. This paper positions the index at the crossroad of art and history, as well as at the intersection of the body and urban space, to investigate performative and linguistic artworks involving experiences of absence left behind by both the socialist past and the post-socialist transition. My aim is to utilize the index as a conceptual tool for an analysis of post-socialist memory from a perspective of visual culture studies. After the semantic ruptures and shifts that occurred since the 1990s, the body has become a reader of outlasting indices such as buildings, historical soundfiles and avant-garde sources. A theory of indexicality drawn from Rosalind Krauss’ reading of Charles S. Peirce and Roman Jakobson will be used as the base for an investigation of three performative works by Vilnius-, New York- and Brussels-based artist group CORO Collective, Vilnius-based artist collective Cooltūristės and Paulina Olowska from Warsaw.