Re: [-empyre-] Theatre and the Bureau

[helen varley jamieson <helen@creative-catalyst.com>]

hamlet?

i don't think so.

h : )



>There's mass performance online. Mass audiences. Theatre
>has an obligation to occur among these audiences
>and articulate their worlds.
>
>The problem is that art has become bureacratised. The
>grant writing precedes the writing of the work, networking
>with the middle managers of meaning (educators and art
>managers) precedent over consideration of the audience to
>be formed around the work. Hence curators make art:
>Lucy Kimbell in the UK (I am responsible for putting her online
>in 1996-mistake!) and Sarah Diamond in Canada are great examples,
>the logical outcome of the bureaucratisation
>of art: The grant proposal is the work of art!
>
>Mass drama happens on Internet, mass performativity. The
>opportunities for mass audience for drama and theatre
>have scarcely been touched upon. Of course, your local
>theatre company won't like online theatre because they
>have been used to a few hundred theatre goers and heavily
>subsidised production. Its a perennial in artistic or critical
>work online that the university, gallery, or theatre doesn't
>like that sort of thing. It doesn't make administrative sense,
>it tramples all over carefully won and protected institutional
>territory and excites remarkable piratical response by
>colleagues and institution, as well as colleagues who overidentify
>with their institution or fetishize their identity with it.
>
>There's nothing to be done about it, really, other than
>to suggest that if you really want to make art, and I assume
>that artists can't help but make art, in what is the
>greatest potential forum for aesthetic adventure then
>you should go ahead and make it. If art is one way our
>societies and cultures articulate those things for which
>there is no ready-made expression, ie to make a language
>and to make a discourse to articulate the world and our
>places in it. For some this is a bureacratic affair,
>an administrative matter, for others it is a need to
>make known ones relationship to others.
>
>I was interested in Valerie's assumption that the contexts
>of presentation of internet based art are similar to the
>contexts of reception of video. This is not so, though
>obviously there had to be some place to discuss the issues
>Internet raised, and obviously 'technology' or representation
>has a history in film and video studies.
>
>The distribution, numbers, diversity of the 'audience' for
>online art (txt, image, moving image, and performance) are
>very much greater than audiences in gallery contexts.
>There may have been a time, up to c. 1998 when the audience
>for online work was greater in its gallery context, but surely
>not since then. We still seem to have very great difficulty with
>the idea that there are a couple of hundred million people
>online whose composition is changing daily to become the
>most culturally diverse 'audience' one can imagine, while
>the discourses that govern their online world are still
>narrow minded and North American.
>
>There's nothing to say that internetworked art doesn't involve
>bodies together in place.
>
>Looking forward to your Hamlet.
>
>
>Lachlan
>
>


____________________________________________________________
helen varley jamieson: creative catalyst
helen@creative-catalyst.com
http://www.creative-catalyst.com
http://www.avatarbodycollision.org
http://www.writerfind.com/hjamieson.htm
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