Apex Art 291 Church Street
New York, New York
October 22 - December 6, 2008
Opening reception:
Wednesday, October 22, 6-8 pm
Perverted by Theater
curated by Franklin Evans and Paul David Young
With works by Laylah Ali, Mel Bochner, Luis Camnitzer, Kabir Carter, Ele D'Artagnan, William Daniels, David Dupuis, Igor Eskinja, Jackie Gendel, Kate Gilmore, Trajal Harrell, Elana Herzog, David Humphrey, Ross Knight, Virgil Marti, Ryan McGinley, Martin McMurray, Jim Nutt, Ann Pibal, Shahzia Sikander, Jack Smith, Mickalene Thomas, and Alexi Worth
Performances
Trajal Harrell: Oct. 22 during the opening
Kabir Carter: Nov. 1, 5-8 pm at apexart
John Jesurun: Nov. 2, 7 pm at Monkeytown in Brooklyn
"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."
more
[graphic from Apex press release. Caption: "Mickalene Thomas, Lovely Six Foota, 2007."]
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