GREAT THEATRE OF THE WORLD 2002 Taipei Biennial

INTRODUCTION

Great Theatre of the World is a visual play in the form of an exhibition, designed to highlight the relevance of theatricality in the arts of our time. While the influences of theatre in the visual arts can be traced back to the beginning of the 20th century, and back to long before this, it is the recent past that this project is really concerned with. The American theorist Michael Fried condemned the idea of theatricality in relation to minimal art, which seemed to impose on the spectator an incapacity to react. More than three decades later, we can see that art and artists do not reject “the theatrical,” but that this notion constitutes the centre of activity and debate.

The exhibition doesn’t pretend to reach conclusions or to be an exhaustive account of cases on the subject. It proposes an introduction to those aspects of art where the sensitivity of the spectator becomes the leading character in an epic, which evolves from inert objects to dramatic events. The two prominent elements in the exhibition will be, on the one hand, the mechanical devices, which create expectation and, on the other, the narrative aspect of dramatic action; that is, waiting for action to happen, and the passage of a specific period of time.

In Great Theatre of the World the mechanisms or instruments that take part in the construction of the traditional dramatic apparatus will be approached; that is, the amphitheatre where the audience is seated, the stage and screen, and the play. Above all, the works in the exhibition will emphasize the importance of narrative structures as subject matter for art. The actual elements involved in a dramatic performance will play an important part, in its theatrical, acoustic, or cinematic aspects: the leading and supporting actors, the stage set, the sound and light effects, etc.. Special attention will be paid to the impact of new technologies on the conception and execution of performances and on the psychological transformations that are played on the spectator’s perception.

Great Theatre of the World underlines the fact that the most important innovations in artistic movements in the 20th to 21st centuries have taken place in the field of sculpture, when sculpture has been transfused with theatrical action, photography, cinematographic and digital methods, especially video. Today, sculpture is in fact a hybrid whose boundaries coincide with those of other closely related disciplines such as architecture or engineering on one hand, and others such as dance and literature.

reat Theatre of the World will give priority to those moments of intimacy and the direct and exclusive relationship of the spectator with works conceived as “units of action.” The works and installations will be placed in such a way as to organize them into a route through the halls of the museum. The spectator should feel that he/she is going through a scaled down version of the famous comedy The Great Theatre of the World (1633-35), a major work by Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681), considered by some as the “theologian of theatre.”

MAIN SECTIONS OF THE EXHIBITION

Stages / Space in narratives & storytelling.

The section dedicated to mise-en-scene will emphasize the practice of sculpture has lead to the demarcation of an architecturally organized territory. The objective is to visualize theatre as a site, as a podium or “other world” which has a material base. From its legibility, sculpture directs the spectators’ attention towards a specific area where an action or a drama takes place. In the absence of real action, the spectator becomes the protagonist. Since the time of the Greeks, the technique of building theatres in the open air has brought about considerable advances through their excellent visual and acoustic techniques. Modern times, with the invention of the cinema, provide us with obvious examples of qualitative jumps as regards to the relationship of spectator-environment-action. Mass media coverage of everyday events brings us back to an almost private relationship with such events

Screens / Curtains.

Theatre and Perception. The world of show business, of scenic arts, has never been the same after the invention of cinema and radio. Cinema and radio, and their resultant hybrid, television, have revolutionized how we gain access to events and performances. The French thinker and activist Guy Debord voices his discontent as regards the transformation of the individual’s reality into a media event subject to the laws of capitalism in his supreme work Society of the Spectacle (1967). This section will be dedicated to showing how the uses of the screen and the curtain are principal elements in sculpture movements in our times. It will as well include a reference to the effects of the theatrical devices on the psychological transformations of the illusionistic principle in cinema.

Events. Presentation / Representation.

The use of cinema, and, later, of video as a way of recording unique or ephemeral events opened up a whole new world to artists in the 20th century. The ephemeral action is put in opposition to the explosion of hyper-realistic modes of representation in panting and photography, which complicates the nature of “the real.” Images that can be described are combined here with events that can only be told inside a narrative. The static, three-dimensional, pictorial representation will face the dynamic, time-based story, where time is used as a representational device.

As an option

As an option, new models of theatricality could introduce the latest innovations in building techniques and materials for theatre, music and cinema. Very particular typologies with their very different traditions, in modern times new technical methods and methods of distribution have appeared causing a changeover from cinemascope to FilmaX for the return to small screen theatres. Television and its influence on the consumption of images and audio-visual products relentlessly threatens the end of cinema.

Great Theatre of the World intends to echo universal interrogations on the construction of the cultural web inside which individuals operate in distinct societies while coexisting in time. From phenomena of collective catharsis to intimate universes of the pleasurable, the frightening and the dreamt, the exhibition tends to map the imagined geography of a better world.