Stuart Sherman’s Spectacles: De-Eroticizing the Object

Last year the Kitchen Center mounted a retrospective of the works of Stuart Sherman . Normally, such retrospectives are given to artists of considerable stature and a substantive body of work or else serve to commemorate anniversaries. In Sherman's case (and I don't mean this pejoratively), neither instance could possibly have initiated such a celebration. It may well be true that for a pre-eminently downtown and solo artist he has a "large" body of work, but so do many other avant-garde artists. And as to his stature in the public eye, he was and is no more or less accepted than a host ofother names from the performance world. Should the "Sherman retrospective" then not have taken place? I, for one, was glad it did because it allowed for the opportunity not only to see what Sherman's work amounts to as a whole, place he is about to depict, or else pulls out a card from his shirt pocket as if to recall the proper sequence of the acts he is about to execute. All this activity is completed with an awkward precision and an aloofness on Sherman's part. Furthermore, each action is done rapidly, making it nearly impossible for the audience to recapture the images that transpire before one's eyes. Since each action is replaced just as quickly by a subsequent action, it seems that Sherman fervently plays against the possibility of any accretion of memory to distract the viewing subject. Finally, and most importantly , these actions bear little if any referentiality to either the exterior world, causality, or logical structure, thereby aligning Sherman's enterprise to Dada and Surrealist antics, although occasionally a visual pun or a recognizable disruption of cause-and-effect patterns elicits a humorous response from the audience, breaking through the opacity and objective "coolness" of Sherman's art. A one-time performer in Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Sherman apparently learned enough from the ontological component ofthat company to feed his artistic vision. It was the idea of theater as presence-as opposed to the hysteric (hence psychological) aspect of Foreman's theater-that Sherman made the solid underpinning of his own work. Theater as presence was only possible if the theatrical or performative encounter existed wholly in a spatial dimension. Time, which has the potentiality of generating narrative and psychological layering, was eschewed. Of course, Sherman realized but also to place his ongoing experimentation within an evolving cultural spectrum that has dominated the contemporary scene in the name of "performance art.'' Sherman's work, referred to by the generic title "Spectacles," is always qualified by a subtitle that lends specificity to each individual spectacle-'"The Erotic,'' "Language," "Names and Places," etc. Equipped with an assortment of props and items, and locating himself behind a foldaway table, Sherman manipulates the objects and himself on occasion within short two-minute segments. At times he prefaces each act with the name of the person or 36 that an image in space could, given an adequate context, generate narrative complexity , and it then became his strategy to nullify these contexts-namely, the temporal , the mnemonic, the referential, and the denotative. Sherman works with objects that are of such common usage (akin to Warhol's use of the Campbell soup can) that they are drained of any significant meaning. His rose is indeed a rose as are all the other objects . Sherman's objects were to be seen as objects, as presences, nothing more or less. And taking this analogy further, no Object STUA RT SHERMAN'SSPECTA CLES was to be thought into existence through the manipulation of other objects. Objects in the Sherman canon exist prior to thought, and in their manipulation they do not affirm another "meaningful" object (even if that "object" is a thought)-they only result in another opaque object, impervious to meaning and/or thought. However, it seems highly improbable that any external object will fail irrevocably to elicit thought or meaning on the part of a perceiving subject. The failure to do so is perhaps what Sherman has called an exercise in "retinal thinking" (analogous to D.H. Lawrence's phrase "image thinking"). But I...