Eleventh Spectacle (The Erotic) by Stuart Sherman (review)

is more a formalist while Rose seems to follow mythopoeic interests. In this respect he shares a kinship with Spalding Gray and Elizabeth Le Compte's work, particularly Nayatt School which has the same kind of uncontrollable rage, and interest in personal imagery. Rose is a very young man. As someone remarked to me upon reading his bio note in the Kitchen program, "is it possible to have been born in 1955?" I look forward to following Peter Rose's development as a performer /thinker. Bonnie Marranca Stuart Sherman, Eleventh Spectacle (The Erotic). 56 Lispenard Street (January). Stuart Sherman's latest work takes a deeper step into his dense and abstract performance concerns. He has discarded the notion of portraits for this title and replaced it with a resounding "The," the definite article, and rather than locating his subject in the noun, people or places, he has taken on the adjective , namely, "The Erotic." He still works with a number of short pieces, in this case twenty, each about two minutes long, but in the Eleventh Spectacle they are all the Erotic, for none have specific names. He now performs from a fixed spot using smaller objects, and although this restricts his potential for exploring large spatial qualities, it allows him to increase his all important speed. His props are a black foldaway table, which he stands behind and performs upon, a black fold-away stool, by the side of the table, and a black case, which sits on the stool and contains a carefully chosen and astounding variety of objects. It is not by accident that Stuart appears to complete his lists, for he is a master at exhausting the possibilities for the potential of the object. During his performance, for instance , they are shaken, squeezed, pierced, broken, dropped, thrown, torn, cut, wrapped, twisted, crumpled, rolled, slid, jerked, held, released, flicked, marked, drawn, read, painted, rung, blown, tapped, rubbed, played, brushed, combed, swept, worn, drunk from, THE EROTIC tickled, scored, wiped, smelled, looked at and listened to, pulled and pushed, folded and unfolded , taped down and pealed off, magnetized together and pulled apart, clipped and unclipped, laid out and gathered up, balanced precariously or easily, rested on each other, put upside down, the rigt way up, on their sides and anthropomorphized, all with a clear sense of describing, forward, back and side, circles and spirals, verticals and horizontals, over, under, in, out, around, through, above and below, his gestures being large, small, frozen, repetitive, changing chameleon-like, additive, subtractive, formal, relaxed, smooth, jerky, mechanical, slow and fast. You name it, he could offer to pay those who come up with categories that he hasn't considered, without fear of losing any more than small change. These, however, are the formal constituent elements of the work, for he is not concerned with offerring a potpourri of possibilities or a formal category of characteristics, but rather a dynamic aesthetic, and his poetic inspiration is expressed in the construction of the individual two minute pieces. These extended motifs are similar to movements in a symphony but are koan-like in their explosiveness . Each has its own individuality where a predominant theme is recognizable, such as inside and out, movement and stillness, attraction and repulsion and opaqueness and translucency, as well as subplots of color, weight, number, size, etc. It is here that these terms are questioned, for he pulls them apart and destroys expectations and attempts at fixed meanings. In dealing with inside and out for example, not only does he illustrate a startling interchangeability , but he will set up and then demolish the boundaries and thresholds of these phenomena until the whole thing seemingly flickers and vibrates with its discourse. After 20 such pieces and 40 minutes of this 40 I abundant and joyful play, one is left with a certain perception-fatigue. As much as Stuart is the operator he is also the operated upon. His mouth, nose, ears, eyes, shoulder, hands, stomach and feet are all objects to be dealt with in his scheme, as are the sounds of a word, an imitation of a machine, an exclamation, a breath and an expression of pain or pleasure. There are...