| Drama Queens |
| Tuesday, 12 June 2007 | |
|
Michael and Ingar proposed to make a performance without actors, in which a group of famous Twentieth Century sculptures hang out on stage and chat (via performers on voiceover) - making some small talk, boasting about their respective places in art history and bickering about their possible worth at auction. They invited me to write the text which by now is finalised and recorded. As we've worked on it the piece has developed into a preposterous object-drama in which (amongst other things) Jeff Koons' Rabbit falls out with Giacometti's Walking Man, Hans Arp's Cloud Shepherd falls in love with Barbara Hepworth's Elegy III, and the whole scene is observed with conceptualist wit from Sol Lewitt's Four Cubes and with outspoken rage from Ulrich Rukreim's Untitled (Granite). There's a great sense of fun in the piece but at heart it's pretty sad too. Maybe there's always something melancholic about objects that start to talk.
Initially E&D planned that stage-hands dressed in black would shunt
the sculptures around the stage as they talked but in the final event
the sculptures (slightly larger than life, and replicas of course) will
be motorised and radio controlled from the wings.
Rabbit: They said I was a nothing, an empty gesture, a
superficial if kind of clever decoration. Others said that I embodied a
devastating critique of the economy of the superficial. They said that
from the tips of my ears to the ends of my feet I was a dazzling attack
on a whole culture’s obsession with wealth, glitz and easy pleasures.
Still others thought that I was genuinely charming, that I showed a
real and honest sense of fun – a kind of joy without irony that has all
but vanished from the world.
Elegy III: And, what’s your own opinion? Permalink |
Notebook:
|
|
|
| Archives | ||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|