Sculpture, Theater and Art Performance: Notes on the Convergence of the Arts

Abstract

The author articulates some tentative distinctions between recent sculpture, art performance and theater proper. A comparison of works in several media suggests a convergence of expansionist sculpture and reductionist theater. He identifies several factors that must be considered in attempting to formulate distinctions between these genre. I. REDUCTION AND EXPANSION Within the twentieth century one can identify both reductionist and expansionist currents within the various arts. Reductionists attempt to clarify the essential characteristics of their medium and work within strict limits defined by those characteristics. Expansionists tend to be antipurist, freely creating eclectic works. They are not concerned about 'violating' their medium or borrowing from the other arts. In the visual arts Mondrian and the later hard-edged abstractionists were reductionists. The tradition of collage, extended in the combines of Robert Rauschenberg and culminating in happenings and art performance, represents the expansionist tendency. In theater Jerzy Grotowski expressed a Purist sentiment in his 1964 statement that only one actor and one spectator are required to make a performance [1]. The idea of theater as a synthesis of the arts is present in the work of Brecht (who advocated dissonance among the various representational systems employed as a means of maximizing aesthetic distance) as well as in most contemporary theater, both commercial and noncommercial. Given this situation, it is not surprising that the past quarter-century has witnessed a number of convergences of the arts. In her book Performance, Live Art 1909 to the Present, RoseLee Goldberg surveys the history of art performance, tracing its development through and its significance within the major movements of modern art: Italian and Russian Futurism, Constructivism, Dadaism, Surrealism, the German Bauhaus, the Bauhausinspired activities at Black Mountain Fig. 1. George Segal, Alice Listening to Her Poetry and Music, plaster, wood, glass and tape recorder, 96 x 96 x 33 inches, 1970. (Photo: E.E. Nelson, Courtesy Sidney Janis Gallery, NY) Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich. This work of sculpture, which incorporated a recording of Notely reading her poetry, is clearly in the expansionist, synthetic tradition of modern art. Silvio Gaggi (educator), Department of Humanities, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, U.S.A. Received 18 June 1984. College in the United States, and Abstract Expressionism and Happenings. She concludes with discussions of recent performance activities by such as Joan Jonas, Laurie Anderson, Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman. Goldberg emphasizes that artists have always turned to live performance as one means