Postdramatic Theatre and Form by Boyle Michael Shane;Cornish Matt;Woolf Brandon;

Author:Boyle, Michael Shane;Cornish, Matt;Woolf, Brandon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350043176
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2018-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

9

Galleries: Resituating the Postdramatic Real

Ryan Anthony Hatch

So Bad, It’s Good

Good art equals bad theatre. According to interdisciplinary artist David Levine, this equation functions as an important doxa across an array of contemporary visual arts practices, particularly those that involve the performing body. In his important 2006 text ‘Bad Art and Objecthood’, Levine observes, not without wonder, the extent to which contemporary art delimits itself by way of an attitude of widespread antipathy toward the theatrical medium.1 Granted, hatred of the theatre (of something about theatre) is nothing new. On the contrary, as is well known, antitheatricality is a ‘red thread’ that reaches back to Plato.2 What is new here, and what Levine is right to have us wonder at, are the specific means by which a significant number of contemporary artists express what Levine identifies as their ‘horror’ of theatre: namely, by making bad theatre. From Mike Kelley to the collaborations of Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, from Jibz Cameron to Jaimie Warren (to name just a few key examples from the United States), this antipathy finds its precise form in works made out of conspicuously poor, intentionally unconvincing performances. In such works, ‘characters’ so inconsistent and ‘plots’ so incoherent that they threaten to fall apart altogether find themselves set against shoddily constructed sets and among derelict props that combine to heighten the sense of generic failure. A consensus about theatrical form is thus borne out in practices that, by bringing the elements of theatre out of their native darkness and into the foreign and typically unforgiving conditions of visibility proper to modernist gallery space, take their object of critique from bad to worse. Bad theatre, it would seem, makes for good art.

Why should this be the case? There is, we should note, nothing natural in the leap from hatred or horror of the theatre to an aesthetic strategy that engages with the ‘stuff’ of theatre primarily in order to out-under-perform it. One does not, after all, express distaste for French cooking by preparing and serving a purposefully unpalatable coq au vin. Clearly, something more ambivalent and interesting than mere negation is at play here; the sense of this strategy needs to be accounted for, and so Levine asks, ‘how did good art become a repository for bad performance’?3 Probably the more precise question to pose at this juncture would be: what specific ‘good’, proper to or constitutive of the domain of contemporary visual arts practices, does ill-made theatrical performance permit the artist to access? Here, good must of course be taken in all three of its senses: what is in question here is at once an ethical, aesthetic and market value.

If theatre at its worst is today so highly prized, this is, Levine wagers, because it represents, or seems to represent, the royal road to the real; realness is the good to which theatre’s failure would promise a unique access. In making this wager, Levine draws a line from the ethos of the current situation back to the sensibility that governed an earlier generation of performance artists.

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