Word: artaud
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There are times when you feel that if you hear the words elitist or subvert just once more, you'll barf. So when MOMA's Margit Rowell, who in the past has curated some intelligent shows on Constructivist sculpture, Brancusi, Antonin Artaud's drawings and other topics, affirms that Polke's vernacular has "regenerate[d] the language and meaning of Western artistic experience," and suggests that he is the Hieronymus Bosch of our day, you sigh. Polke has never shown a smidgen of the aesthetic intensity, the absorption in religious and moral experience or the staggering completeness of Bosch...
Making subtle references to such theater big-wigs as Antonin Artaud and David Merrick throughout, Levin, like Altman, adds a certain element of inside humor to his work. Picking up on and, more importantly, understanding Levin's allusions allows audience members a most gratifying sense of satisfaction. This "I know something you don't know" component somehow compensates for the feeling that Levin otherwise seems to be out to trick...
...novel is good, but it's not Sontag at her best. Though she shuns it, the temptation to contrast Volcano Lover with her earlier work is irresistible. Sontag--the same woman who was influenced by the novels and plays of Batille and Artaud and the philosophy of Sartre, Camus, Lukacs, Barthes and Canetti--has turned her back on the present by ignoring the history of her work...
...there was a six-foot long hand of God that spewed liquid although she took notes on it with rapt attention for a good quarter of the performance--all through the sequence where one cast member is naked (she doesn't) mention the nudity). Ms. S. doesn't like Artaud very much, although she obviously hasn't read the play...
...comments about acting and plot, when applied to a surrealist play, carry about as much weight as complaints about the temperature when reviewing an art show. Ms. S. had the opportunity to read the play and comment on how Gammons successfully or unsatisfactorally handled the demands of the script Artaud called "unstageable." Then maybe she could think of how and why such a "meaningless" show caught the fancy of the Harvard theatergoers last weekend, seating over 100 people in three nights...