Turning Theatre Into Art

The word “theatre” during the past fifty years has often been used in the art world to denote something detestable, to be avoided at all cost. In the performance art tradition in particular, theatre was condemned because of its base and politically suspect narrative inclination and its inauthenticity. Theatre meant rehearsing, repeat performances, and the use of trained actors, while performance prided itself on the rigorous focus on the identity and the “live” and “present” body of the performer/artist as the hallmark of its truth. As Marina Abramović once said, “The spontaneity, which is an important factor in our work, comes about because we do not rehearse or repeat a performance.” Now, however, some visual artists are using theatre in flagrant disregard of the reigning ideology. They employ the processes of theatre in the creation of their work and even as its conceptual end product. They are unafraid of the dramaturgical idea of character, the written text, professionally trained performers, and rehearsal. On April 20, 2011, Pablo Helguera, Ohad Meromi, and Xaviera Simmons joined moderator Paul David Young for a public discussion at Location One in New York City to discuss the engagement in their work with the idea of theatre and the evolution of the performance aesthetic.

Pablo Helguera, born in Mexico City, is a New York-based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance. Most of Helguera’s projects explore the relationship between verbal and visual narratives, often relying on historical archives and oral history. In his The School of Panamerican Unrest, a nomadic think tank traveled from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Helguera has exhibited or performed at MoMA, New York; Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; ICA Boston; RCA London; Eighth Havana Biennial; PERFORMA 05; Shedhalle, Zurich; Brooklyn Museum; HAU, Berlin; The Kitchen, New York; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum; MALBA, Buenos Aires; and Ex-Teresa, Mexico City. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Creative Capital Grant. In 2011 he won the International Award of Participatory Art of the region Emilia-Romagna in Italy.

Born in Israel, Ohad Meromi currently lives and works in New York City. Meromi’s work combines sculpture, architecture, installation, and performance. He graduated from Bezalel Academy and received his MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. He has exhibited at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Tel Aviv Museum of Contemporary Art; CCS Bard, New York; Serpentine Gallery, London; the 2007 Lyon Biennial; Magasin 3, Stockholm; De Appel Museum, Amsterdam; the fourteenth Sculpture Biennial, Carrara; Sculpture Center, New York; and MoMA PS1, New York. Meromi has received scholarships and awards from such organizations as Percent for Art, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Fund for Video and Experimental Film, Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation, and Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli Art Prize.

Xaviera Simmons was born in New York City and lives and works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She produces photographic, audio, performative, sculptural, installation, and video works. Xaviera received a BFA in photography from Bard College in 2004 after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage with Buddhist monks retracing the transatlantic slave trade. She completed the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art and a two-year actor-training conserva-tory with the Maggie Flanigan Studio. Major exhibitions and performances include MoMA, New York; the Studio Museum, New York; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Sculpture Center, New York; Zacheta National Art Gallery, Warsaw; and Art in General, New York. In 2011 Simmons had works at On View at the Bronx Museum, ICA Boston, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.

YOUNG:

I have noticed a trend recently, that there are people in the visual art world, who, contrary to my understanding of the performance art tradition in the late twentieth century, are employing theatre in the traditional sense, that is, referring to theatre or using theatrical practices, using theatrical texts, employing actors. The division between theatre and the visual arts is strong and persistent. I recently went to a panel at Performa called “Staging Language.” I expected that theatre...