Soho’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme: Douglas Davis

SOHO'S B DOUGLAS DAVIS Bonie Marruica he art world has always had an ambivalent, even sneering, attitude towards theater. Just fourteen years ago Michael Fried was proclaiming in Artforum that presence, duration, and acknowledgement of the spectator obscured one's perception of the art work because they embraced the theatrical experience. This obsessive purist went so far as to claim that "the success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theater." I think the larger, unarticulated question has finally to do with property: who owns aesthetic space-the spectator or the art work? Fried's project for saving modernism, now so dated, so High Art-infested in its trembling good intentions, was turned upside down in the last decade when artists embraced both "low art" (as he would have called it) and the theatrical. Enter Douglas Davis, again in Artforum, writing a ''post-performancism' manifesto, telling everyone it's alright to do theater, to mix high and low art, to be someone other than yourself. "To hell with medium-as-medium, structure-asstructure , New Wave-as-thenext -thing. . . . Let us have instead a reliable verbal umbrella: 'PostPerformancism ."' I wouldn't trust that patchwork umbrella on a rainy opening night. Wherever he looks Davis finds "performance-film-television-radio, sources in the popular as well as the visual arts." He's like Moliere's upwardly mobile "bourgeois gentilhomme" (Davis is fond of alluding to Moliere in his article (who is startled to learn that he has been speaking prose all his life. In Davis's recognition scene he discovers that the arts influence and feed into each other, and that the theatrical, in particular, absorbs all temporal arts. Davis is not alone in his sudden acceptance of an expanded notion of performance. The art world in general has little by little become more accepting of theatrical experience . It was inevitable that this should happen because art and art theory cannot sustain artists' prolonged inquiries into the nature of performance and audience. Likewise, as performance art moves toward theater, dance moves toward narration and emotional content, painting toward representation, the installation toward setting , -photography toward drama, and theater toward opera. The arts are moving #* am aftm N Z 0 30 Z 30 M Z 1"* 8*m, -%m a - - "' -. k4 - - "a 't_.... ..... , Porpoise Opera, _ aft wAlan Siegel 00 %4 N% 4eso 4%am.Im* ~ % toward the exploration of ime or narra- *4 tion, after many years of an obsession with space. The mistake of the art world was to believe in the first place that performance is 4 % an art form when in fact it is a theatricalform 1 with its own set of imperatives. One cannot circumscribe performance within modernist doctrine which, as Davis relates, de- Performances have been referred to N44 nounced revivalism and objectified all "sculpture action," "events," "actions," V% phenomena (surface-as-surface, "happenings, " "non-static art," and "art self-as-self). The theatrical impulse lives its performance," among other things. own aesthetic cycle outside of faddish art Everything but theater. Artists have always talk. And if "performance art" is to have exhibited an anti-theatrical impulse, from an ongoing life, it will have to be saved by the classical avant-garde movements of theater. I think many artists and critics dada, futurism, et al., up to the present. now realize this. Even in the last decade or so, visual artists 23 I have moved closer to performance while trying to avoid theater. They haven't fully taken into account the elements inherent in using a form that evolves in time and before an audience, a form that is really not about the use of materials, autobiography, or getting out of the gallery system, as artists have wrongly supposed. And theyve ignored the matter of skill which theater is based on. If artists accept anything as a "performance" then anyone can be a performance artist, but not everyone can be in the theater because every "act" is not theatrical. Davis's article, one of a growing list of inane pieces on performance that Artforum is known for publishing, demonstrates to what extent art critics, in this case...