Abstract |
In contemporary visual culture there is an insult used often to refer to art that is too much spectacle. This art is considered to be excessive, indulgent, psychological, chaotic, not disinterested. This insult, in one word is "theatrical". The theatrical is considered to be acceptable in the theatre, but invisual art it affronts the cherished distance presumed between object and viewer. But the word theatrical is too often used to dismiss art that is anti-platonic, does not move strictly in the world of colour and form (the aesthetic rational), does not convey a dilneated sense of order. There have been attempts to assimilate this work with an institutionalized rhetoric of abjection, thereby 'aestheticizing' the work and evading a politically viable reading of it. However such narrow definitions of the role of the theatrical in art ignores its more radical function. Using the manifestoes of Antonin Artaud as its role model, it is precisely this radical theatricality with which this exhibition is concerned. |