If you have the misfortune of reading these posts regularly, you may have noticed the frequency with which I refer to propism, a term I do not think I have ever defined. The following is a deliberately crude and short essay that sets out to do so. As the “prop” in the term would indicate, this revolves around notions borrowed from the logic of the theatrical medium.
Probably the most canonical discussion of theatricality in visual art comes from Michael Fried. 1967’s still highly controversial “Art and Objecthood” sought to delineate what he took to be two warring sensibilities, one that he associated with Modernist painting and sculpture and the other with the grey area between art and non-art that he associated with literalist (or more commonly termed Minimalist) art. He took literalism as defining itself as a position taken against Modernism. At bottom, this was a war of sensibilities and experience more than one of any deep ideological convictions. It was an opposition between what Fried designated as the pictorial and the theatrical.
While “theatre” can be taken in a broad sense of the term, it is usually taken in the more limited sense of twentieth-century avant-garde theatre (Brecht, Artaud, Beckett, etc.). A historian might argue that theatre has less to do with all the concerns that became associated with the term than architecture. The most basic aspects at play are extraordinarily resonant with strains of Brutalist architecture (both in theory and practice) from the decade or more leading up to Fried’s article.
Fried identified literalists with the theatrical. According to him, they recognized in the pictorial a reduction to conventionality and illusion. These two aspects could then be broken down into component elements (shape, support, colour, etc.). Elements sat in “relation” to one another and this was one of the key terms of concern. The relation was ultimately less about the objects or materials commonly associated with art than the presence of the viewer (and, by extension, artist) to the (non)art object. Stress on colour and shape was also a stress on the object’s hollowness; it was something to be filled up by the presence of the viewer and their projection of mysterious qualities onto the object as they took an “interest” in it. [Fried, 156]
Literalists saw everything as theatre. Modernism was no longer compelling to them because it seemed to be theatre without presence. [Fried, 161] Modernist artists understood art historically; their work was to be judged and evaluated as part of history. Literalists were much more whimsical. It was whatever the artist thought of as interesting, whether anyone else thought so or not. Interest could be a colour, a texture, a shape, or a material. It was assumed that it was just objectively there. The interest was in its identity and identity was largely a matter of its sameness; its ability to be reiterated or repeated or go on seemingly endlessly. [Fried, 165] This tied the work, and in a way, defined it, in terms of duration. It was a kind of absolute present to coincide with the presence of the work which only seemed to exist as animated by the presence of the viewer. [Fried, 166] The experience of the work could last a moment or years, it does not make any real difference as long as interest is held. The Modernist work, by contrast, suggested no duration. The literalist work was hollow and its hollowness seemed infinite. The Modernist work was instantaneous, but deep and full. The instant was the moment of “conviction.” Or, to put it differently, its duration is a sameness where no aspect will ever dawn. As such, it “defeats theatre.” [Fried, 167]
There is an important historical difference between the appearance of “theatricality” in 1967 and what it seems to be doing now. At the time of Fried’s article, he could describe the emergence of this literalism as something new, and, he stressed (and despite genealogical claims the artists he was analyzing made), as something unprecedented. This was a dominant ingredient in its theatricality. Clearly, this is no longer the case. If this was the case at all, it had likely ceased to be so even by the time Fried was writing his article. Even by then it was another convention, another framing device, albeit one very different from Modernism (at least as Fried understood it).
Literalists tended to be on the fence about whether they were making art if they did not outright reject the notion that this was what they did. This certainly is not the case now among theatricalists when, as Fried would have mournfully put it, the individuality of the arts has been mostly annihilated and what remains is “theatre” (the tangential arousal of “interest” by whatever means functions to do so).
“Theatricality” was one of the keywords employed, from the beginning, around what came to be termed “installation art.” To its opponents, skeptics, and even some of its advocates, this new art (it remains an open question about whether that is even the best term for it) signalled the death of art’s autonomy, that defining feature that theory and criticism (usually branded as Modernist) understood it as possessing. Some historians and critics even equate this moment as a leap from art to post-art or postmodernism.
An apologist for installation art such as Rebentisch would insist that all art in all the art of history is theatrical; that is, it is ontologically constituted by the encounter between object and beholder. Given her disposition to phenomenology, this was an inevitable conclusion. The “object” only exists as a finite phenomena in history, a finitude that still points to the possible “infinity” of the work precisely because of its historicity (which, apparently, consists of a plenum of possible significations). This is what gives the object its autonomy, but it is the kind of autonomy that Kant might have associated with art and Fried would not. [Rebentisch, 57-58]
Rebentisch’s is an interpretive position that can only make sense if you take for granted both the credibility of phenomenology (however sophisticated) as a model of “experience” and that the subject of experience is a socio-cultural subject. [See, in particular, Rebentisch, 263-275] In other words, by naturalizing -- rendering transparent -- the normative definition of the human instituted by the state. By “history,” what is implied in such a reading is not only a context (or ground) of relations and structures, but what that context is, and this is where such analysis goes wrong because it mistakes a theatrical effect for a cause or structure of experience and imports a set of metanarrative claims as though they are not artifacts. It is not as though an appeal to socio-cultural-situatedness is that different from the appeal to “contentism” that Rebentisch rightly denigrates as being anathema to art. It is a technical rather than a substantive difference.
By the 1970s, as installation art had become more widespread, it frequently became (accurately and not) implicated in forms of institutional critique which may have been more or less aesthetically or politically motivated. In either instance, what installation was (sometimes unintentionally) said to highlight was the unnaturalness of conventions of display and the situatedness of the appearance of the work of art. While Rebentisch notes that much of installation art tends to “degenerat[e]” into decor, she argues that the experience might potentially salvaged primarily by an appeal to the subject (as “identity” both empirical and social) as a means to question the stakes of “interest.” [Rebentisch, 268]
These display tendencies were in keeping with broader intellectual trends in academia. Most of the work associated with what scholarly branding termed “new historicism” or “cultural materialism,” for instance, sought to make evident the ideological and cultural condition of objects and texts and weave them into narratives about what they were and what they meant. Basically, they repeated what Aristotle had done to theatre, reactively battling against the autonomization of scenography by repressing furniture and decor into the props of (meta)narrative (see below). This is unsurprising given the political commitments of those involved in such historiographic genres where the deployment of such tactics is proudly identified as “praxis.” This is also, albeit somewhat more subtly, along the lines by which state funding for research (and “culture”) tends to be allocated. However, such tactics were themselves predicated on largely ahistorical (and often absurd) hypostases (the social, culture, power, and violence). In the end, attempts at illumination were forms of obfuscation that indexed the contingency of funded ideological fantasy. The general history of installation as “institutional critique” is one example of this, with its purported “making evident” the medium of the site and the social-situatedness of the beholder.
Weber points out that, “theater has the same etymology as the term theory, from the Greek word Thea, designating a place from which to observe or to see.” [Weber, 3] Each term implies both distance and exteriority. By implication, you can have an operating theatre or a theatre of war and these are no more metaphorical uses of the term than its application to staged drama. According to Weber, theatre “marks the spot” where the opacity of media becomes the most evident, something which has elicited both positive and negative evaluations for millennia.
Theatre is a medium insofar as it is what cannot be reduced to a neutral site for the occurrence of events. “Out of the dislocations of its repetitions emerges nothing more or less than the singularity of the theatrical event.” [Weber, 7] Singularity does not designate self-identity but a rupture in the illusion of continuity (whether that is of a personal or collective identity). The theatrical violates the credibility of identity and any reduction to intentional meaningfulness. Theatricalization can be a kind of noise. To put it in somewhat different terms than Weber’s, singularity is a peculiar type of irredeemable excess.
Weber draws out a useful contrast between theatricality and performance. By “performance” he is referring to J.L. Austin’s theory of performative speech acts. Weber interprets Austin as understanding these as those ordinary acts that construct normativity in use. Performativity fails to result in normativity if it is theatricalized; it would cease to be self-identical or transparent and become an opaque medium. Theatricality is, in Austin’s words, “parasitic” and “hollow or void.” It is divorced from the ordinary, depersonalized into a role, and into a set of alien relationships that mock identities with their (essentially moral) definition as self-enclosure, intentionality, and goals. Theatricality voids the viability of appeals to identity and intention. [Weber, 9-10]
Another crucial aspect of theatricality is that it is reiterative, something that leaves it “open” since it is never really complete. The theatrical act is always before and after itself. It is always pre-senting itself “in the etymological sense of being placed before itself.” [Weber, 15] It is pre-sent and, ultimately, a going nowhere, like the perpetually reiterated pirouette of a ballerina separated from the narrative enframing of performance. [Weber, 16] To extend this, one could add that theatre is presentation not representation and it is presentation that is obscured by performance.
Aristotle’s attempt to redeem theatre largely had to do with denigrating its scenographic dimension for the sake of “plot” or “mythos,” for the sake of meaning-making as it seemed to link action (praxis) to life (bios). This link was achieved through recognition (the creation of unity and identity). The medium (scenography) is relegated to a means to join things together so that mimesis can take place. [Weber, 99-101] In the process, it was expected that the medium would be a sort of support, something nearly transparent, or, if you prefer, repressed by narrative and character.
While the theatrical medium is opaque and hollow, it is also, Weber insists, not something self-contained or self-regulating due to its status as an “in-between” space. “Rather, it is relational and situational, depending decisively on alien or extraneous instances that, in the case of theater, are generally identified with the spectators or audiences.” [Weber, 43] Theatre occurs within the hollow of this relationality, and, at the same time, “Theatrical deployment is a response to such hollow-ness.” [Weber, 27] It is worth noting that, according to Weber, the situation does not necessarily or definitively rely on the existence of spectators or beholders. What makes something decisively theatrical is its alien quality or discontinuity.
To complicate this picture, we should point out that the hollowness of the theatrical medium can be interpreted as much as evacuation or emptying as filling, and even as just emptiness. Even if it is never neutral, it is also, as Peter Brooke might put it, the empty place. If it is not self-contained, it is also not contained by what it tangentially comes in relation with. Theatre is a spatiality or opacity that can occur almost anywhere as befits its parasitic status. The medium is not the relation but the site that makes the relation possible as appearance or alien effect. It is not reducible to a phenomenal relation or appearance.
While Rebentisch can chide Fried for (somewhat surreptitiously) dragging a philosophy of history into aesthetics, she is doing something even more questionable by framing the site (and historicity itself) as necessarily operating in a phenomenal register, however convoluted and fraught that register may be. Nor is there much reason to retain the subject-object relation that is central to most analysis of theatre, whether it is evaluating it in positive or negative terms. You can object, and many have, that the model of theatre as relation reeks of a temporal bias (and a fairly conservative one problematically inherited from Aristotle) that naturalizes the processual when it is unclear that any such thing has happened at all. It is a historicity that relies on an ahistorical conception of time that is illusory, fallaciously mistaking an appearance for an ontological structure (this is essentially the definition of phenomenology, even if its adherents tend to project this definition on whatever they consider to be not phenomenological enough).
Artist Mel Bochner, in perhaps the greatest essay on Minimal (or what he terms serial) art, stresses that while it is an art of appearance, that appearance is predicated on its basic irreconcilability (or indifference) to meaning. Attempts to criticize or describe art tend to be inadequate to the task because they are only transpositions that rely on metaphor (art as “research”), impression (reception and response), and history (narratives of evolution). Bochner, by contrast, advocated for approaching materials themselves. Space is the primary medium and art is the “intrusion” of unnatural rupturing of space. By intrusion, he primarily implied ordering. [Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (1968), 93] To the degree that art was concerned with phenomenology, it was “the phenomenology of rooms,” that is, their unnatural ordering for the production of something like a Brechtian alienation effect. [Ibid., 99-100] What this foregrounded was the unnaturalness of experience, its impersonality. What serial artists made was solipsistic, without references; they did not even make things so much as “things-in-the-world.”
The prop takes on the role of signifying in their use by the actor and in the relation between the spectacle and the audience as it unfolds in duration, a relation that Sofer refers to as the “temporal contract.” [Sofer, 14] Whatever is signified is ultimately contingent on the temporal definitions of the performance (including the mood of the audience). [Sofer, 16] But this temporal contract nonetheless is delimited by its unidirectionality. One of the unique features of theatre is that, however reiterative it may be, it remains defined by only going one way.
While running through an inventory of the different ways that props are employed and the integrating function that they serve in meaning production, Sofer hits a snag. Although he notes that the distinction between furniture and prop is fuzzy (furniture can always become a prop after all), there are also instances where props do not do what they normally do. In these instances, found in the work of people like Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman, props begin “signifying” indifferently to the actor that animates them. He notes that such props, like the appearance of props in museum settings, sever them from “stage-world,” divorcing them from narrative and making them closer to decor. The prop ceases to be a sign and registers as a shape, colour, texture, etc. [Sofer, 24, 26] In other words, the prop becomes more like the object in Minimalism which is closer to decor or scenography than it is to myth and its theatricality may be at odds with performance.
Sofer’s work is useful primarily as a means of contrasting how a theatrical prop and a prop in a gallery work. While supplemental texts for art displays (galleries, museums, etc.) tend to enframe artworks as though they are theatrical props in Sofer’s sense, the extent to which their presentation is theatrical in Weber’s sense, clearly complicates and at times undermines the animation of the prop. Support frames and discursive frames do not work the same way, but they are both means (or actors) in making the artwork (however solid, slimy, or diaphanous it might be) into a prop.
To speak of the specific historicity of visual art in this city, this also points to the basic fact that the beholder is not as important as the institution. The institution is the situation of Contemporary Art. Contemporary Art is only Contemporary Art to the extent that it is staged as such. There is no Contemporary Art beyond this conventionality. The primary audience and patron of the work of Contemporary Art in Canada is the state. It does not see the work so much as hosts it, something which opens the possibility of a very different sort of relational model than that of theatre.
On the political level, in Montréal (and Canada more broadly), the historicity of Contemporary Art means that its medium is the state. “Cultural workers” are state and para-state actors. “Culture” is the phantasm or “theatrical effect” of this context, not the actual context. As Daniel A. Siedell argued in his account of Contemporary Art God in the Gallery (2008), the function of Contemporary Art is basically liturgical, and this is far more convincingly the case in Canada than elsewhere. This ties directly into what Clive Robertson argued was the essentially pastoral function of the Contemporary Art industry in the country, especially in its artist-run enclaves.
That said, and as I (perhaps obnoxiously) repeat in my reviews, an exhibition rarely works the way it has been designed or intended to, let alone as it has been advertised. This is not simply a matter of polysemy (and/or incompetence) but seems to have as much or more to do with blindness. Contemporary Art, I would argue, is performative, not theatrical. It is primarily concerned with a fetish for normalization and so hyper-conventionalized that its severe artistic conservatism tends to be invisible. Contemporary Art is generally not literalist, but literary and illustrative. The use of props is extraordinarily limited and conservative. Their status can occasionally be as gadgets that a beholder may interact with directly, or they could be set up in a way so they need to be interacted with in the manner of a frame. Generally, these are not the case and they have an orthodox function as something animated by actors but separate from tactile contact.
From the earlier discussion, we can extract the following. There are two very different types of theatricality: one which is more scenographic or close to decor, and one which is more performative. While props play some role in each, they play a far less ambiguous and more instrumental role in the second which, if anything, is more commonplace. An exhibition might be theatrically scenographic but not very performative or prop-oriented. Conversely, it might not be very theatrical at all but highly performative and prop-oriented. The prop, unlike the “object” in Minimalism, is not a hyle but an illusion.
The scenic aspect cannot be reduced to representation, in fact and effect, it may even disrupt or subvert representation. This raises all sorts of interpretive problems, and not only for art and aesthetics. Linguistics and information theory have been perpetually troubled by the clear fact that meaningful information and language tend to be material non-sequiturs and have looked for all sorts of convoluted reasons to sidestep this. Hermeneutic paradigms consist largely of suppressing or ignoring these problems to manufacture recipes for “discovering” signification. Psychoanalysis would be one of the key examples. It did not help that one of their primary means for attempting to harvest meaning (or symptoms) relied on looking at dreams given that dreams are not narrative but scenic. Oedipus is a useful figuration of this, both for psychoanalysis and for theatre, since the myth presents a narrative about the paradoxes of blindness and the blindness of interpretation.
Without an actor of some sort, there is no mimesis, only scenography. It is the policing of scenography and its institutional overcoding as performance rather than as theatre that produces mimetic illusion. This is one of the defining features of the city’s Contemporary Art. To take a “symptomatic” example, just look at the thematic statement released for the upcoming Momenta Biennale, seventy percent of which seems to have been copypasted from previous thematic statements for the event, so I will just highlight the introductory paragraph.
In a world saturated with images, some, strangely, are lacking. This edition of MOMENTA seeks to situate these lacunae in a historical perspective. Ever since the invention of photography and film, and their proliferation during the colonial expansion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an ideological link was formed between these media and the construction of dominant narratives. This connection has been particularly evident in the production of figures of alterity – geographic, cultural, racial, economic – and in certain resulting historical blind spots. Narratives that fell outside this frame were swept away, and these stories have been either truncated or simply disappeared. With a focus on what is beyond our view – the silences and breaches in individual and collective memory – In Praise of the Missing Image will explore both contemporary challenges in relation to the image and the current consequences of the complex dynamics involved in constructing narratives. Which stories are told, how, and by whom?
As with most other iterations of Momenta, it concerns a highly moralized and politicized panic about the degree to which images escape from being suppressed and exploited as narrative content and normalized as authorized performances of identity. And, if this year’s iteration proves to be anything like those previously, it will ironically demonstrate both the autonomy of art from performance (its singularity) and that the attempt to theatrically situate an image through curation ends up rupturing the continuity of performance.
Performativity is largely concerned with recognition (“empathetic” illusion) but theatricality with singularization. To borrow from film theory, theatricality is exhibitionistic and demonstrative, much as a great deal of early or “primitive” cinema was, the way slapstick is, and the way pornography generally remains. In demonstrative art, an illusion is presented but simultaneously the mechanics that make it possible are presented. The encounter with the work is a kind of disenchantment process where the image is re-presented through duration. Most Contemporary Art when performing as such is not like this. Instead, to return to the comparison to film, it is more like Hollywood filmmaking, at least as Adorno and Horkheimer understood it. Their description of the culture industry applies far more convincingly to the work that appears in the city’s museums, galleries, and cultural centres than it did to the factory of old Hollywood.
Duration and encounter do not necessarily imply a filling up with meaning and a perpetuation of projection. The opposite can happen just as readily. The encounter with an artwork can be a process of dissolution where the original “image” gradually becomes less the more that its appearance is subjected to perception. The beholder can sort out the apparent complexity (or simplicity) of the artwork and come to realize there is less to it than initially meets the eye.
Scenography may still be illusion, but it is a different kind of illusion than performance. When scenography is theatricalized, it (at least potentially) ceases to be illusion and becomes something else. Theatricalization, therefore, potentially could designate the objectification of phenomenality, if objectification is understood in this instance to designate the making opaque of phenomena-as-appearance and the denial of the presumed immediacy of experience. For instance, Gilles Tarabiscuité’s Réalité dés/augmentée 2.0 currently on at Art Mûr does something like this. The exhibition
…showcases a replica of a 1970s kitchen enveloped in a monochromatic yellow and placed within a large rectangular box within the gallery. The artist first dismantles an actual kitchen from a Quebecois chalet that was set for demolition. The original kitchen space is then reinstalled in the artist’s living-room studio. Next, all of the furniture, alongside the carefully selected objects, are rendered into the virtual world with 3D modelling. Tarabiscuité reconstructs these same components as physical facsimiles using wood, plastic, glass, and other materials, and paints them all the same bright yellow. He then recreates the kitchen using its fabricated, or “fake,” counterparts into a maneuverable space. Once in the gallery, visitors access both the physical space, conveyed through the monochromatic replicas, and a virtual immersive space, that reveals the original kitchen in 3D, through Virtual Reality (VR) headsets.
