NEWARTTHEATRE
Evolutions of the Performance Aesthetic
John Kelly, Liz Magic Laser, David Levine,
and Alix Pearlstein
in conversation with Paul David Young
On October 14, 2010, John Kelly, Liz Magic Laser, David Levine, and Alix
Pearlstein joined moderator Paul David Young at the apexart gallery space in
New York to discuss the engagement in their work with the idea of theatre
and the evolution of the performance aesthetic. The use of theatre within the art
world raises a host of questions about the identity and body of the performer, IL
relationship of performance to the written text, the institutional and social conditions
of performance, the relevance of the history of theatre and theatre criticism, and the
political nature of art. The discussion continued by e-mail after that evening; these
later questions and answers are appended at the end of the conversation.
John Kelly is a performance and visual artist, who has received numerous awards
including two Obies, two Bessies, and a CalArts Alpert Award. Fellowships and
residencies include the American Academy in Rome, Guggenheim Foundation,
Radcliffe Institute, Civitella Ranieri, and the Sundance Theatre Lab. His visual art
has been exhibited at Alexander Gray Associates, ICA Philadelphia, MIT List Visual
Arts Center, and The New Museum for Contemporary Art. He recently starred in The
Clerk’s Tale, directed by James Franco. A revival of his work based on the Viennese
Expressionist Egon Schiele, Pass The Blutwurst, Bitte, was performed at La MaMa
E.T.C. in December 2010. He is currently an Armory Artist in Residence at the
Park Avenue Armory.
Liz Magic Laser lives and works in New York City. She attended the Whitney Museum
Independent Study Program and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC)
Workspace residency program. Her 2010 solo show at Derek Eller Gallery (NYC)
was chase. Laser’s work is currently included in Greater New York 2010 at MoMA
PS1 where her performance Flight also debuted. She is continuing to develop Flight
with the award of a Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art grant. Her work has
been shown at New York venues including Southfirst, Sue Scott, Smack Mellon, E
The Art Production Fund. Laser has also exhibited internationally at NT art gallery
(Bologna), Karlin Hall for the Prague Biennale 4, the Center for Contemporary Art
Tel Aviv, and the Georgian National Museum for Artisterium 2009 (Tbilisi).
© 2011 Paul David Young
PAJ 98 (2011), pag. 1–17. 1
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Left to right: Paul David Young, Alix Pearlstein, David Levine, Liz Magic Laser, and John Kelly at apexart,
New York, ottobre 14, 2010. Photo: Courtesy apexart.
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2 PAJ 98
David Levine’s work examines the conditions of spectacle and spectatorship across
a range of media. His performance work has been seen at MoMA, Documenta XII,
GBE@Passerby, PS 122, the Watermill Center, and HAU2 Berlin, and his non-
performance work at Cabinet Magazine’s exhibition space, Townhouse Gallery (Cairo),
and Galerie Feinkost (Berlin). As a theatre director, he has directed premieres at The
Atlantic, The Vineyard, and Primary Stages Theatres, and developed new work at
the Sundance Theatre Lab. He lives in New York and Berlin, where he is director
of the Studio Programme at the European College of Liberal Arts.
Alix Pearlstein’s work in video and performance has been widely exhibited. Selected
solo exhibitions include On Stellar Rays( New York), Contemporary Art Museum
(St. Louis), The Kitchen (New York), MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge),
Salon 94 (New York), Lugar Commun (Lisbon), The Museum of Contemporary
Arte (Chicago), and Postmasters Gallery, New York. Selected group exhibitions and
screenings include MoBY (Tel Aviv), Internationale D’Art De Quebec (Quebec City),
EV+A (Limerick), BAM/PFA (Berkeley), SMAK (Ghent), The Whitney Museum
of American Art (New York), Biennale de Lyon, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden (Washington D.C.), and The Museum of Modern Art (New York). Pearlstein
lives and works in New York.
YOUNG: I’d like to thank apexart for agreeing to host tonight’s panel and PAJ: UN
Journal of Performance and Art, under whose auspices the panel is occurring. IL
beginning point for this panel was the reference to traditional theatre by visual
artists, which in my reading of art history is something that was largely excluded
from the idea of performance art since the 1960s. There was Michael Fried’s famous
condemnation of theatre as the negation or perversion of art, on the one hand,
in his discussion of the aesthetics of minimalism, and on the other hand you had
performance artists like people at the Judson Memorial Church who were develop-
ing a kind of aesthetic that was in opposition to traditional theatre as a rehearsed
performance that involved a written text, the so-called literary theatre, as it’s often
disparaged. I saw visual artists who, despite these condemnations and resistances
within the art world, were engaging with theatre, and I found that very strange.
Theatre is often regarded as a dead art form, one that can be excruciating. I was
reading Steve Dixon’s Digital Performance which summarized the reaction of many
people to traditional theatre. He wrote: “We have all experienced nights of crush-
ing, excruciating boredom at the theatre where despite the live presence of a dozen
gesticulating bodies on stage, we discern no interesting presence at all and pray for
the thing to end.” Contrary to that, I think that the work that is being produced
by the artists I’ve assembled here tonight is a fascinating use of theatre.
Let me begin with Alix Pearlstein. I’m sure many of you know Alix’s work. She’s
a video artist. She had a recent rave-reviewed show at The Kitchen and an equally
ecstatically received show at the Lower East Side gallery On Stellar Rays. Her work,
insofar as it’s being presented here tonight, engages with theatre but it’s being presented
as art video. It engages, Tuttavia, with a model of performance that looks like theatre
and seems to have a sort of script involved. Alix uses what I would call real actors
KELLY, MAGIC LASER, LEVINE, PEARLSTEIN / newarttheatre 3
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or trained actors. I found her work to be a very beautiful and smart adaptation of
the idea of theatre. In the most recent work there is a double or triple reference to
the idea of theatre, in that she has adapted in part the idea from the film A Chorus
Line, which is in turn an adaptation of the stage version, which is in turn a refer-
ence to theatrical practices that one may see every day in the theatre. “Theatrical
ephemera,” is the way I would describe it. I’m not going to impute those words to
you but it’s the way that it occurs to me. And I don’t mean to diminish it in any
modo. I think it’s astonishing the way you’ve taken these quiet moments that are not
normally considered integral to the theatre experience and created another kind of
art out of them. Alix, could you begin by talking about why you chose to engage
in theatre in a number of works over the past several years?
PEARLSTEIN: For me it comes more from working with actors in an art context
than from thinking about theatre per se. I started making sculpture and installation
and then I, like many artists, started working with video using myself as a performer.
I have some background in dance so that I came to performance from the point
of view of choreography. And after a while I started incorporating some friends
who also perform in my work, and along the way came some friends who happen
to be professional actors. I recognized something so different in the way that they
approached performance in the context of what I was doing, so it marked a big shift
in how I worked, and I started working exclusively with professional actors. For
me that’s been more the thing that has drawn me to some references to things that
are related to theatre. The difference between what performance is and what acting
is—that’s more where my engagement is in questions about theatre.
YOUNG: Could I just follow up quickly and ask you what you mean by that
distinction?
PEARLSTEIN: When I say acting, I mean that there is sort of a motivation and a
back story or a psychology beyond the actor that you see. Performance—you were
referring earlier to Judson Dance Theater—by that I would mean that there is a sense
that the performer is not pretending, that the performer or the artist is themselves
doing a task. I’m interested really in both but particularly a strange place between
them and what happens when you actually have a professional actor navigating the
bell curve between those two poles.
YOUNG: Let me introduce the other members of the panel. David Levine, whose
work has also dealt with what I would term “theatrical ephemera,” has a piece called
Hopeful that has to do with the tragic landscape created by the actor’s headshot
and the kind of longing that is expressed through that. In your Bauerntheater or
“Farmer’s Play,” based on the Heiner Müller play, Die Umsiedlerin, the play itself
has been eliminated from the performance. Could you tell us why you’re engaged
in theatre? You come from a theatre background and have directed plays in profes-
sional theatres.
4 PAJ 98
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LEVINE: I was a professional theatre director for about five or six years in New
York, and over the course of that I realized what I was much more interested in,
especially with American realism being what it is, was in the ways that people try
to turn themselves into somebody else. I got more and more interested in theatre
and the ephemera of theatre as tracking that. So I became less interested in theatre
as something to do than theatre as a way of tracking or talking about these ideas of
self-transformation. But you can’t talk about those questions in an auditorium. It
would be like trying to ride a wheelbarrow when you’re sitting in it. If you want to
focus on this, you have to look at it in a different context. That’s pretty much how
that all shifted for me, except that I still really loved rehearsing but I hated going
to theatre, so I liked making it but I hated going. I sort of had to work that one
fuori. The performance-based work let me do both. It let me do traditional theatre
rehearsal without having to set foot in an actual theatre but I got to do all the rest
of it. [In Bauerntheater] we basically rehearsed this play with the actor and then I
shipped him out to a little land art center where the play is based and I asked him
to be in character for ten hours a day for a month, five days a week, which basically
entailed just planting potatoes by hand but doing this manual labor as somebody
else. He could stop working but he couldn’t stop acting.
YOUNG: That has a tie to one of your other pieces which is called Actors at Work,
Credo.
LEVINE: This is another piece of theatrical ephemera. There’s this union called Actors’
Equity that actors all belong to, and you have to belong to it. It supposedly protects
you but most actors don’t make enough money, they have to get day jobs. I filed
Equity contracts for actors to just go to their day jobs, so legally their work space
became theatre and legally their work became a performance. Then I sent someone
over to shoot production stills while the contract was in force, and so legally they
were in plays with titles like Word Processor or Free Lance Editor 2.
YOUNG: I recall that for Bauerntheater the rehearsals took place in New York and
you filled a room with dirt.
LEVINE: Yeah, because it was a test of method acting too, which I’m kind of
fascinated by. It’s a really American thing, I mean this idea that you can become
somebody totally different. That is a kind of endurance art. All these legends about
method actors come pretty close to the kind of performance work that was being
done in the sixties. I got soil samples from Germany and in the studio I built a
two-ton dirt field so the actor could really prepare the role. We taught him German.
He went basically as far as you could go with method acting with a super minimal
task. He had to experience it all. Technically he was doing totally realistic acting.
It’s just everything around it was gone.
YOUNG: I read that some of the local farmers criticized his farming techniques.
KELLY, MAGIC LASER, LEVINE, PEARLSTEIN / newarttheatre 5
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LEVINE: Every farmer has his own idea of how you should do it. I had a dramaturg
who was a farming major. [The actor] did it right according to one group of farm-
ers but he fucked up his wrist halfway through and he had to switch to a second
equally valid historical approach. But the weird thing was he hadn’t rehearsed that
one, which shouldn’t make any difference because it’s just planting potatoes. Nel
end all the potatoes he planted after the switch barely grew and the ones that he
had this really well-rehearsed technique with, the ones that he could be in character
con, grew fine. Which is just strange, Ma, NO, we were accurate.
YOUNG: Our next panelist is Liz Magic Laser. She comes out of a photography
background. Your recent pieces have a theatrical quality to them and the work you
presented this year at Derek Eller Gallery was an enactment of a Brecht play, Man is
Man, only it was done at various ATMs around New York, and filmed and spliced
together. What caused you to take up this play? It closed after six performances and
the reviews were terrible. Even Brecht couldn’t pull this off.
LASER: It opened at two places at once, Düsseldorf and Darmstadt, and it was a
total flop in Düsseldorf but it was a huge success in Darmstadt.
YOUNG: Peter Lorre was roundly criticized for his performance, and that led to
Brecht’s famous defense of him.
LASER: That was the later performance. It was originally written in 1926 and even-
tually Brecht was able to produce and direct it himself in 1931, when Brecht came
out in defense of Lorre’s acting, which was supposedly the first time he proclaimed
his alienation technique, what the intention of that was. But just to explain, I cast
this play and worked with each actor separately so the entire narrative was stitched
back together eventually and a complete version of the narrative plays out in actu-
ally two-and-a-half hours.
YOUNG: Why did you do this?
LASER: I’d actually done a series of interventions. I kept coming back to that space
of the bank vestibule, around the spring of the two years before. Each spring I would
come back and do a smaller kind of intervention. The first one I tried to act in
myself and I wrote a short script where I acted out a fraught relationship with the
ATM, and that was shelved. The next year I came back and deposited prosciutto
in my account and took a photograph of it. It disabled the machine so it was also
then shelved. I kept considering this space. Such a variety of people pass through.
It’s a really diverse community that passes through that space but there is a strict
code of privacy where you do not interact. I also started thinking about how the
surveillance cameras in that space represent the spread of repercussions, and that I
knew bringing my camera into that space was felt as a threat to other people’s privacy
and sense of security. So it felt like a space where this kind of activity would bring
out the social conditions that you gloss over because it’s kind of anaesthetized space
where you wouldn’t normally think of anything. There is elevator music playing and
it makes you a little bit of a zombie.
6 PAJ 98
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YOUNG: Our last panelist is John Kelly. He’s performed in every conceivable venue,
including the Belasco Theatre on Broadway. He’s danced, he’s sung, he’s done it all.
But he’s also very active in the visual art world through drawings and paintings that
are related to these performances. John, maybe you’d like to tell us a little about
this piece. It’s based on the life of Egon Schiele and you’re reviving it at La MaMa
in December.
KELLY: Yes, Egon Schiele was a Viennese Expressionist painter who died in 1918
at the age of 28. He was imprisoned as a pornographer. It was a kind of benchmark
piece for me in my career. I did it initially in 1986 and again in 1995, and it really
was a chance for me to merge my training as a dancer and my training as a visual
artist, literally. In relation to theatre, especially early on, there was not a single spo-
ken word in any of my work, although I sing and I’ve used song in my work a lot.
But character and role playing may be what I most have in common with theatre.
Generally most of my pieces are a character of some sort. It’s hard for me to be me
on stage, even if I’m singing a song. A song for me is a little play. And I use theatri-
cal techniques and elements. The work is pretty theatrical.
YOUNG: I invited you because you are a marvelous performer but also because you
are a refutation in a way of the argument that we’re seeing something new here. You’re
a person who has been engaged in visual art and theatre and you’ve been doing so
since about 1980. There’s nothing new about this for you. Is that true?
KELLY: Yes. I quit art school and in the East Village I started performing in clubs.
I made my debut at The Anvil lip-synching a Maria Callas recording in punk drag.
So it was a way for me to get back on stage. I realized I wanted to perform again. IO
was doing a lot of self-portraits. But I was kind of itching for my body to be in the
mondo, to be in the work. My school was the clubs, Club 57, Danceteria, and I just
formulated a vocabulary. In the ’80s the other spaces beckoned, like PS 122 and The
Kitchen. I wanted to be in those spaces but I never really aimed to be in traditional
theatre. I went kicking and screaming into theatre. I do acting now occasionally.
But the thing I least felt comfortable doing was speaking. I’m a storyteller with my
body and with visuals. That’s really been what I have loved. But now I do speak.
That’s the last thing that I’ve added to my arsenal.
YOUNG: You touched on the idea of the body, which is central to what we are
talking about here, whether or not this engagement with theatre affects the perfor-
mance aesthetic and particularly as it relates to ideas the politics of the body. For
you I think it is important that you are the performer and that it is your body on
stage and your identification with these characters that you are portraying.
KELLY: Some of the works are solo and some have fourteen people in them. Ma
definitely I usually play the primary: I give myself the best role. That’s the luxury of
writing a work, so I can do what I want. Only twice have I done work on somebody
else’s body. I’ve been choreographing dances on people, taking a piece that I was in
initially and doing it with someone else in it. That only happened twice and it was
only because I couldn’t be in two places at once.
KELLY, MAGIC LASER, LEVINE, PEARLSTEIN / newarttheatre 7
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YOUNG: I’d like to have the other panelists address this question. Liz, you’re
approaching theatre in a very different way from the way John is. Could you respond
in relation to your own work?
LASER: This is a really stimulating question to think through for me, the question
of why art is appropriating theatre right now, because it made me realize that I came
into it because theatre was appropriating video art. A director asked me a few years
ago to collaborate on the set for his play. It was a production at HERE Art Center
and somehow I found myself in the tech booth, a complete fish out of water. IO
worked with all the actors in that production, and I developed a relationship with
one of them and continued working with her. I think that probably he asked me
because of what was already happening in theatre with William Kentridge’s work
and Ivo van Hove’s work and the incorporation of video art into theatre. Also, my
mom’s a choreographer, and so I grew up around dance, and as her dancers became
choreographers I would photograph them. My background is totally in photography,
and so this issue of how performance can expand its temporality through photography
was present for me, and it precipitated that shift towards working in performance.
YOUNG: You don’t normally appear personally in the videos you create.
LASER: I started out that way and then had these experiences of collaborating with
dancers and theatre directors and that furthered the shift.
YOUNG: Now you would regard yourself as a director in the production mode?
LASER: No, I definitely consider myself an artist. I’m using theatre in quotes as a
material substance.
YOUNG: David, this is kind of a complicated question for you. How would you
talk about your personal presence within your work?
LEVINE: Do you want to talk about bodies or personal presence in the work?
YOUNG: Wherever you would like to start.
LEVINE: I was a theatre director who read a lot in art and went to see a lot of art.
I was super galled that theatre was constantly getting dissed by the artists of the
’60s trying to draw a distinction to performance art. The theatre was too clueless
as an institution to even know that it was getting dissed. But if you come from
theatre what really bothered me was this sort of cult of authenticity, which is to say
that it’s really happening because it’s happening on your body. If you come from
theatre you really don’t find that all that persuasive. So when I started working on
the farming thing, everyone was like, so you’re the one farming, right? I remember
having conversations with really established performance artists and they were like,
you’re the one farming, and I’m like, NO, I’m using an actor. One thing I really
wanted to do was short-circuit this distinction. The actor is clearly working his ass
off. It’s clearly authentic. But he’s also pretending. And there’s some sense if you’re
8 PAJ 98
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getting cut for a public or you’re setting yourself on fire for a public it’s really hap-
pening, but it’s not necessarily authentic. I mean, it’s for the sake of spectacle. So
for me using actors and not using myself is a way of getting the sentimentality out
of it. You’ve got to reckon with the fact that it’s a spectacle. It will no longer derive
value from the fact that it’s really happening except that a lot of the performance
work I do is super durational but it’s durational acting so you start thinking about
acting as a kind of physical work and not just a really easy means of representation.
Obviously, if most of your work is about somebody trying to become a convincing
other person then it’s going to be biographical to an extent one way or the other. IO
mean, this was partially about me moving to Berlin and trying to pass as a German
in some way.
PEARLSTEIN: The point of authenticity is an important one and integral to this
whole conversation about incorporating actors into an art context. When I say that,
I tend to mean that it’s a conceptual framework. I think the art world has a resis-
tance to a performer when it is not the artist, when it is a conceptual framework,
and actually that resistance I find really interesting. I often get asked why I’m not
in my work anymore, and it’s like I can only do so much. There are certain things
I can do but an actor can do all these other things. I’ve been getting my feet wet a
little bit in testing that by casting myself as the director, or as an extra who is the
director, or kind of bystander. The sense that there is a subject of authenticity to
the artist, that the artist as the performer is more real, and yet the translation to an
actor with the same authenticity as a performer who might be negotiating the space
between their character and themselves—there’s a bit of a wall to that.
YOUNG: You went through a similar transition as Liz did. You appeared in some of
your earlier video work, and there is a piece, Two Women, where you are off-screen
as this director voice giving direction to an actor. After that, you disappear from
the screen, is that right?
PEARLSTEIN: Yes, so lately I wonder what happens if I insert myself as these sec-
ondary or background personalities. It has been interesting to get responses to that.
What I have found is that this issue of authenticity comes up. There is a comfort
zone around the artist being present in the work.
YOUNG: Within the art world.
PEARLSTEIN: Within the art world. I’m still trying to understand that. That’s
something I’m thinking about lately.
LEVINE: Now you can use outsourced performance.
PEARLSTEIN: Or real people.
LEVINE: What fascinates me is, it cannot be narrative. It cannot be realistic.
There’s a sense that maybe you can use really good video tech, maybe it can look
really awesome, like a Stan Douglas piece, but for god’s sake, it can’t be narrative,
KELLY, MAGIC LASER, LEVINE, PEARLSTEIN / newarttheatre 9
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you’ve got to frame it. There’s this thing, and most other visual art has got beyond
Esso: it’s got to have a signature on it. It’s got to be made somehow. It can’t just pass
through. There’s a sense that really good conventional theatre with a narrative and
an arc and emotional manipulations and all those things professionally done just
wouldn’t fly because it’s too corporate, there’s too much of a sheen on it. It would
be like a minimalist object, a pop object, like, there’s no signature, there’s no gap,
there’s no flaw. It’s too persuasive. It’s not Brechtian enough.
YOUNG: You mentioned narrative, which relates to the question of your relation-
ship to the written text and the literary theatre. I believe it’s true for all of you in
your current work that you for the most part reject the written text. There isn’t a
performance of the play, as it were. You mentioned, John, that you didn’t really
speak in performance until 1992, and haven’t really spoken that much since. In Liz’s
piece, although the text is used it seems to take a very secondary position to the
other elements that are appearing. David, in the Bauerntheater piece you’ve gotten
rid of the written text. You have the actor performing and there’s nothing left of
the text. Alix, your pieces are largely silent. Please feel free to disagree, but I think
it’s an element that joins all of you in certain ways.
LASER: I feel pretty concerned with scripts and often that is the starting point. IO
often feel like I’m trying to loosen a script from the context that it’s meant to be
in and apply it to another context, in this case the bank, where it can operate on
that space in a way that will expose how things are being structured there. I’ve done
some other pieces that look at the scripts for home security alarm systems. Types of
language are usually pretty central for me.
YOUNG: Right, but for the Man is Man piece, you used the text for purposes that
are?
LASER: It was not about allegiance to the text, but I was trying to use each line in
a twofold manner such that it could both convey its general meaning, its original
Senso, but also make sense in the immediate context of the bank. For instance,
one of the key narrative devices in that play (it’s about a British soldier stationed
in colonial India) is a pay book, basically the soldier’s identity document, his debit
card. There is a lot of direct reference to money, cash, and greed, so much of the
language had direct implications in that context.
YOUNG: Alix, I’d like to hear you talk about this. There’s very little dialogue in
your videos.
PEARLSTEIN: It’s funny because for me the dialogue is really important. It is just
intermittent. Most of it is scripted, even if it is just a word, sometimes there are
parameters around how an actor can work with things they might say. Sometimes
the dialogue is overlapping so it is more about the texture that there is a dialogue
going on. But it never comes from a text. It comes from other elements.
10 PAJ 98
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YOUNG: Do you develop the text that you use through improvisation with the
actors, or is it something that you write in advance? As performed, it has an air of
improvisation about it. The substance of the video is related to improvisation.
PEARLSTEIN: It is usually written in advance and it changes through some rehearsal.
With the piece that you may be referring to, there is some dialogue that is scripted
and some that is improvised around a set of parameters that are particular choices
of things they might say and some direction about tone.
YOUNG: Why are you so sparing with language?
PEARLSTEIN: Yes, that’s the better question. I definitely get more in pieces and it
just gets cut down because it seems unnecessary. It’s something I want to use more.
It’s been an ongoing interest to incorporate more language. But I’m also not a writer
in that sense. Maybe I will become one.
LASER: It seems like there is an intense gestural script in your work though. I know
that that veers away from the use of words.
PEARLSTEIN: Yes, that’s more what I know, and so I’m interested in using words
more, but in a particular way.
KELLY: In theatre a script is words. I’ve done storyboards. I’ve done stick figures. IO
just sang John Cage stuff. We would go with these squiggles. A score is a map for
something that is going to be done once or more than once. There is a big argument
in the art world about a word that I have a big problem with. It’s not a graceful
word—“reperforming” or “reperformer.” I think it’s a really awkward word. For some
people in the art world, a performance should be done only once, and never again.
That’s one idea. There are other ideas, equally valid. There are so many things in
my head right now. In theatre, there can be such focus on the play’s the thing, E
everything else is secondary, such as the production values. I see it all as options. IO
see sound as an option, whether it is words or noise or song. The visuals are going
to be there whether you like it or not. Why not have some control or say in how
they are going to register. Movement, unless someone is completely still, but even
that person is going to breathe and his eyes are going to blink, so movement will
invariably occur. I like David’s use of the word spectacle instead of performance.
I use spectacle, I use performance, I use event, dance theatre, Qualunque cosa: it’s all the
same thing. It is a thing that occurs with maybe one other body in whatever room.
A combination of these things, the visual, the kinetic, the aural, the textural, winds
up having some kind of effect. How much do you want to have control over that
effect? There are different ways of doing it. There are traditional techniques. There’s
chance, there’s happenstance, and if it’s going to be done more than once, there
maybe has to be some kind of map or sense of how to arrive at those things in a
replicable way, and a way that is grounded in something other than just the menac-
ing energy of a room in a given moment.
KELLY, MAGIC LASER, LEVINE, PEARLSTEIN / newarttheatre 11
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YOUNG: I’d like to address that energy in the room question by asking you to com-
ment on what I would call the social conditions of performance. It’s a big question
I’m asking. I’m talking about the way in which we perceive your art, not only the
venue but also the physical circumstances, the economics that are attendant upon
Quello, not only the participation or entrance of the audience, but also the artists,
including the actors and technicians that may be involved in your work. Would you
like to comment on that issue?
LEVINE: This goes with the script question as well. I like scripts. In Bauerntheater,
the character had to be generated off of the script. We translated it. It was the first
translation ever. We adapted it within an inch of its life. Because of the way this
approach works, you have to generate the character from the script. So in order to
really test it, we couldn’t change a word. For the piece I’m doing next, I actually
commissioned a realistic play that is set in a ranch house. Two guys, one woman,
love, money, drugs, gun play, buried secret in the past, betrayal. Utterly standard,
not pastichey, but it is set in a ranch house. I’m building a functioning ranch house,
and they are going to perform it on a loop all day long, so it is rehearsed as theatre
with all the theatrical script analysis stuff. But it is not staged, so that their needs
as people start to overlap with their needs as characters, their boredom as actors. So
if they’re hungry they eat, if they’re dirty they wash, if they want to play Nintendo
they can play Nintendo, if they want to run off to the next room they can run off
to the next room. But they cannot change the script. The way it is set up is that
spectators can walk around the outside of the house and look in the windows but
they can’t get in. It’s a real house. If Alix and I were playing a scene and we had a
big fight and I decide I want to run off to the bedroom this time, if you want to
see what I’m doing in the bedroom, you’ve got to run around the outside and look
in the bedroom, in the window.
That idea came from trying to find out what would happen if you subjected theatre
to the viewing conditions of an art gallery, which is to say, like, the conditions of a
video loop. So, you don’t pay admission, it only happens during the day, Non c'è
schedule around any of it. It is a sculptural object that is just available to you all day
long, because I think for me the big question is really ninety-five percent of what
makes theatre theatre and what makes art art are determined by the institutional
conventions of the spectatorship. A lot of these things that I do are just experiments
with what happens if you transpose it in one direction or the other. Does it auto-
matically become art if it loops and it’s sculptural? Or is it still theatre because they
are sticking to a script? The thing I hate about theatre is I hate the architecture. IO
get sleepy as soon as I buy a ticket. It is just once a night. It’s so sort of enervating.
There’s so much pressure on you to enjoy it, whereas the nice thing about a gallery
is it just completely leaves you alone. You come in and you leave. What the fuck
ever. It is really relaxing, whereas theatre you might as well not go, you’re sort of so
burdened by it before you even get there. For me the special context makes a lot of
difference even in what the object is.
YOUNG: Alix?
12 PAJ 98
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PEARLSTEIN: If I’m in a theatre, I’m immediately uncomfortable, if it’s a theatre
for live performance. Let me make that distinction: not a movie theatre. I always
feel so aware of the walls and no matter what has been done to try to subvert the
conventions of conventional theatre, if I am in that space, I feel really restless, really
fidgety. So that has been a real impetus behind my work in the last few years, E
I think particularly the piece I did at The Kitchen, which I filmed in the black box
theatre. Just thinking about the black box as a shooting location brought the whole
burden of the history of the experimental theatre space to bear, and I was thinking
about theatre in the round, and so through a very complicated camera choreography
I tried to invert the conditions of theatre in the round. So for me it is about working
with cinematic approaches. I am trying to get the thing I do like about live perfor-
mance, coming more from an interest in performance art and some experimental
theatre, which is the contingency, just the sense that it is never quite the same and
that it is never perfect. Bringing the illusion of a cinematic experience to bear on
that and then to a context that you can enter and leave. I think David’s work really
pressures the context in a really severe way and I’m getting interested in pressuring
the viewer. I hate to even say this word but I’m thinking about participation in some
ways that may not be so horrendous as that might sound.
YOUNG: The dreaded participatory theatre. Liz?
LASER: Well, going back to your question about the social conditions of perfor-
mance, as I started to say before, working with this director James Dacre was really
pivotal for me in seeing a theatre director operate and seeing the collaborative nature
of that endeavor. I feel like it influenced me intensely. It provided a model that is
much more interactive and provided the stage, the platform, Piuttosto, for intense
interaction and not only that, but antagonistic interaction. There was this almost
social contract to agreeing to this endeavor together, everyone involved, the actors,
everyone involved in the performance. There was also this expectation that it be a
mutually generative experience for everyone.
YOUNG: John, you’ve performed in all kinds of settings. I recall you performing
on top of the bar at the Pyramid Club.
KELLY: Well, yeah, initially it was the ballet and modern dance, which is the rectangle,
and then it went to the bar of the Pyramid Club, and the floor of the Pyramid Club,
going through the crowd and really infiltrating and warping space. But eventually it
went back into the rectangle, so to speak, and I do conceive things that way. Maybe
I share that with Robert Wilson to a degree in that I see pictures in my head or in
my heart. I like production values. I like having control over the visuals, and that’s
something that production values tethered to a specific space can provide, although
I also do like warping the space. I was just at Marfa and that beautiful Donald Judd
army barracks; it was incredible. I just had to start singing and the acoustic was also
really good, and all the guards were like, “Whoah! What’s that?” I would love to do
a piece just kind of walking through there, making noise. It’d be beautiful. I like
the rectangle as well, and within that I try to warp, but it is shackled with a lot of
history and a lot of baggage and a lot of “You are stuck in the seat.”
KELLY, MAGIC LASER, LEVINE, PEARLSTEIN / newarttheatre 13
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LEVINE: Alix was saying, it doesn’t matter how you tart it up, I mean, you can do
it environmentally, you can do it outside, you can have a million video monitors in
the background, but somehow as soon as it is organized as theatre, as soon as you
have to show up at a certain time, it’s happening once a night, you know, there is
this kind of repeatable spectacle, you always carry the theatre in your head with
you. No matter where you are, you watch it the same way.
KELLY: I’d like to think the work trumps that. I hope that can happen, but it can
be tough.
PEARLSTEIN: I always go back to this one William Forsythe piece, Kammer/
Kammer. I don’t know if any of you know that piece. It’s the best use I’d seen of
video in theatre, and then again it was more theatre than dance, but he’s really a
choreographer. I thought he really got it right. I saw something by Jay Scheib [Bel-
lona, Destroyer of Cities] recently at The Kitchen that I thought got it pretty right,
pure. He was doing something interesting with sound. They weren’t “talking to the
audience.” You could barely hear it and yet it was really audible, so it was like people
having a conversation amongst themselves, and it created an actual intimacy that I
think is often attempted but . . .
LASER: I don’t think theatre is dead at all. I’ve seen some things in the last month. IO
saw Orlando last night. I saw the Anne Bogart Macbeth, a production called Under-
neath My Bed [by Florenzia Lozano] and all of those had an element of being in a
traditional theatre setting or black box setting.
LEVINE: I totally think it’s dead.
LASER: I think we want to be apocalyptic.
PEARLSTEIN: I think I just want to see it in another place. I don’t know if it’s
dead, but I don’t like it.
YOUNG: I have half a theory that the reputed mortality of theatre may be one
reason that it is being taken up by visual artists because it is this art form that has
fallen into disuse. It’s so archaic that it can be grasped and reused. It is open to reuse
because it’s dead or vilified.
LASER: It doesn’t have the social reach it once had, so I guess that’s what we’re
saying. Is that what we’re saying?
LEVINE: Back when they were inventing performance and happenings, you know,
also back when Fried was writing, it was a real threat to all kinds of things, and I
think now that the dog is super old and has lost its teeth, you don’t have to distin-
guish yourself from it, and then you can start pulling elements back because it’s not
a threat to your own self-definition.
14 PAJ 98
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YOUNG: I wonder if your use of theatre in your conception of it is something that
you would consider political or an intervention of some kind, that there’s a reason
that you’re using theatre, because it is a social medium and has always been a social
medium. Does that have any validity for any of you?
LEVINE: Only to the extent that if you feel you have to make aesthetic points, you
feel in some sense that they’re ethical points as well. For me, NO, no politics.
YOUNG: Liz?
LASER: I suppose that’s what we were just getting at. I’d like to think that there’s
some urge right now to grasp at the historical avant-garde’s use of theatre and
agitational propaganda, that there is potentially a useful nostalgia for, harkening
back or grasping for a time when that kind of direct effect or unabashed political
engagement was possible.
LEVINE: What’s useful about second-order political engagement? What’s useful
about nostalgia?
LASER: The nostalgia is not that useful but what it started to make me think of
was how the use of photomontage has been theorized, and it’s not just nostalgic.
When I mentioned my interest in agit-prop strategies I was mistaken in using the
word “nostalgia.” I think some of us are looking back to Soviet theatre’s capacity
to express social struggles and influence emancipatory movements. Tuttavia, I am
not advocating a nostalgic retreat to an outmoded model of activism. Theatre’s
prior ability to influence and provoke people seems relevant right now and I think
theatrical methods are now being taken up and expressed differently. I’m looking
for the scenarios in which I can bring social conditions into high relief by apply-
ing a new script. The bank is a site that brings up a number of fears and anxieties,
classed behavior, and concerns about what you do or do not have to protect. I try
to use performance as an instrument that can disrupt these everyday situations that
coordinate our complicity with the systems that regulate us. We used Brecht’s script
to treat bank clients as if they were interlopers in our space, implicating them in
our intervention. So yes, my use of theatre is intended to have a decidedly political
dimension.
YOUNG: Alix, is theatre something political for you?
PEARLSTEIN: I wouldn’t say political, NO. There are always people in my work. IO
am interested in what happens when you have people in art, and I think often in my
work there is a question of morality though I’m not imposing some morality. È
more of a concept in my use of narrative, as a way to agitate a narrative. I wouldn’t
say it is political, more sociological.
LEVINE: I should correct myself a little bit, I mean, to the extent that it’s about
lavoro, because the contracts and work fascinate me so much, it does become about
KELLY, MAGIC LASER, LEVINE, PEARLSTEIN / newarttheatre 15
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like having a job or the ways in which you work would take over your life or become
a role or vice versa. Or the ways in which people who represent or do representation
for a living, that actually can be really grinding labor, so I’ll take it back a little bit.
It’s mildly political.
YOUNG: How do you think we should evaluate the success of your use of theatre
in an art context? Should we apply solely visual arts standards and precedents, or is
the history of theatre and its critical reception relevant?1
LASER: The level of cross-disciplinarity in the arts seems ever increasing, so I’d be
hard-pressed to tease out what the current standards are in the visual arts or the
theatre. Though I do think the precedents set by the practices of the Soviet avant-
garde, Brecht, the Living Theatre, the Wooster Group, and Boal’s theatre of the
oppressed are relevant to the critical reception of the work I’m doing.
LEVINE: I try to distill things so thoroughly that the same piece signifies differently
in different institutional contexts. Looked at from an art perspective, I’m talking
about performance art and its relationship to authenticity, narrative, and fiction.
Looked at from a theatre perspective, I’m talking about futility, the history of acting,
and how much the conventions that surround theatregoing—tickets, the illusion
of a unique event, the auditorium—really determine your experience. But as far as
I’m concerned, art critics don’t need to know the theatre end to evaluate my work
properly; and neither do theatre critics need to know the art end.
PEARLSTEIN: I think context determines the reception and criticality. Any other
histories that you bring will be very interesting to consider, but they may not hold
su.
YOUNG: How, if at all, do you think the use of theatre affects the aesthetics of
performance as it has developed since the 1960s?
PEARLSTEIN: Dramatically, most often demonstrated as a form of rejection or
aberration.
LASER: Theatre aims to represent our social life together and its socially engaged form
seems to have crossbred with practices in art and psychology. I’m not as interested
in the traditional model of theatre where audience and actors are separated, so I’m
more familiar with theatre practices that facilitate confrontation between audience
and performers, like Augusto Boal’s forum theatre. I’ve been looking at his work
recently and thinking about how it must have affected relational aesthetics models
of performance. Though I don’t know whether or not the art world practitioners
are directly aware of the precedents set by Boal’s work.
LEVINE: I don’t. I think there is a big wave of referring to theatre in contemporary
performance; but I don’t really think it’s had much of an effect. I think you can
detect a kind of grim restraint in my work or in Alix’s, but for the most part using
playscripts, or references to the auditorium doesn’t really change anything. Liz’s ATM
16 PAJ 98
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piece, in all its willed choppiness and willed overacting, could have been something
of Eleanor Antin’s. “Theatre,” in its conventional sense, implies a degree of polish
and repeatability (think of Donald Judd’s industrial finishes), that performance
art continues to avoid in favor of spontaneity and expression (think of AbEx). If
anything theatre (think Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, Radiohole, or NTUSA) ha
been influenced by the aesthetics of performance art.
YOUNG: How does the context in which your art will be received affect your use
of theatre?
LASER: I see the art context as the stage for the work I’m producing, so this con-
text has a broad constitutive effect on my representation of theatre as a method for
social engagement.
LEVINE: When I’m working in theatres, I try to be as unprepared as possible (per esempio.,
arty). When I’m working in art spaces, I try to be prepared as possible (e.g. theatrey).
I’m convinced that half your experience of spectacle is determined by institutional
conventions of spectatorship. The only way to generate a fresh experience is to short-
circuit those conventions. That short-circuiting matters even more than the actual
piece you’re presenting. In my case, I hope, the short-circuiting is the piece.
PEARLSTEIN: The resistance between the contexts of contemporary art and theatre
is what informs my use of theatre and acting. I’m interested in a generative mismatch
particularly between minimalism and emotionalism.
NOTE
1. The conversation, in response to the final three questions, continued via e-mail.
A video of the discussion is available at http://apexart.org/events/newarttheatre.htm
This conversation is the first in a planned three-part exploration in PAJ of artists exploring
the increasing crossovers of theatre and visual art in contemporary performance.
PAUL DAVID YOUNG’s Balcony Scene 2010 was performed at MoMA
PS1 September 2010, as part of the museum’s Greater New York exhibition.
In 2009, he won the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and
was a finalist for the Kendeda Fellowship of the Alliance Theatre of Atlanta.
He was a Djerassi resident artist in October/November 2010. In 2008,
Young co-curated with Franklin Evans the apexart exhibition Perverted by
Theatre.
KELLY, MAGIC LASER, LEVINE, PEARLSTEIN / newarttheatre 17
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