Category Archives: Art Installation

Revolutionary Art or Vandalism?

In the winter of 2010, graffiti artists used an outside wall of The Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago as a blank canvas upon which to create. This Is Modern Art by Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval, which has taken a journey from Steppenwolf in Chicago (where it was commissioned) to the Kennedy Center, now has its New York premiere at New York Theatre Workshop’s Next Door. Blessed Unrest is producing.

The play investigates two intersecting concerns. The first asks whether the graffiti on the Modern Wing’s wall is an act of revolutionary art or vandalism. The second dramatizes the process by which a work of graffiti art is created. That is a lot weight to place on the slender shoulders of a play with an 85-minute running time. I am happy to report that play and production are more than up to the Herculean task.

The primary issue of the play is whether or not the graffiti on the Modern Wing (or, indeed, any building or structure we may see in an urban space) is art. The play boldly articulates that it is. Art critics such as Tony Bennett, deploying the lens of Michel Foucault, have argued in recent years that cultural spaces such as museums reinforce a stratified class hierarchy favoring the dominant. Though a museum claims to be open to all, how it presents its space often makes it an unwelcoming place to those outside of the neo-liberal hegemony. Culture is a barrier, not a leveler. What Goodwin and Coval convey with a crystal clear clarity is how this particular act of graffiti was about reclaiming a space, about sharing a work of art with the people, all the people. It is truly revolutionary.

If the above sounds a bit too abstract, the second part of This Is Modern Art‘s mission provides the production with a strong propulsive narrative. The play digs deep into the history and practice of graffiti art. The characters know the history of their craft and are inspired by a broad spectrum of artists from Sane and Smith to Basquiat to Caravaggio. Works about artists almost exclusively focus on the inspiration and the perspiration, so the act of creation always comes across as a snap. Not so here. Goodwin and Coval take time well spent to dramatize the collaborative process of developing a tag or piece, gathering the necessary materials, planning the logistics of how and when they are going to bomb, and executing all of the above. It is a harrowing process. One of the great elements of the film Love and Mercy is on the very long and difficult process it took Brian Wilson and The Wrecking Crew to build the Pet Sounds album. The play  taps into the struggle of artistic creation and ably translates that to the medium of graffiti art.

As the three artists, Shakur Tolliver (Seven), Andrew Gonzalez (J.C.), and Landon G. Woodson (Dose) are a tight and nuanced ensemble. Each of their scenes – whether they are breaking the fourth wall or engaged in a moment of naturalism – crackles with the energy of creation, passion, rawness, anger, respect for their craft and one another, and the love of beauty. The story tends to put the spotlight on Seven, we are always aware of how essential J.C. and Dose are to the collaboration. I particularly like J.C.’s mystical engagement with his Muse. They have an absolute commitment to the material. Nancy MacArthur plays Selena, Seven’s girlfriend and lookout for the group. I was unsure of why the role was there at first as she just seemed to be a Girl Friday along quite literally for the ride, but as the play progressed, it became clear the reason for her presence as Seven’s fears began to surface more and more. The most surprising moment of the play belongs to her near the end of the evening, and it is stunning.

This Is Modern Art fully engages in how space in this country is racialized. The art that Seven, J.C., and Dose create is available to all, even the homeless, while the art in The Modern Wing is available to those who can afford it. Seven feels excluded from the society of the art world by his race, economic status, and educational achievement; his exclusion is a tragedy because as play and performance demonstrate over and over again, he is both has a compelling artistic vision and a strong work ethic. As we are increasingly confronted by exclusionary spaces from public parks to Yale common rooms to Starbucks, the play offers an urgent contribution to the conversation.

The Next Door space is a small one, and there is not much room to maneuver. So there needs to be a special mention made of the collaboration between director Jessica Burr and scenic artist KEO XMEN. They recreate the original graffiti in a way that is striking, theatrically exciting, and surprisingly cost effective.

More information about the play can be found by following this link: https://www.nytw.org/show/this-is-modern-art/

Geoff Sobelle = Charlie Chaplin + Spalding Gray

I run hot and cold on performance art, but I found The Object Lesson — Geoff Sobelle’s art installation piece currently playing at New York Theatre Workshop — to be delightful, mostly. The   end result is more a meditation on the place of things in our lives rather than a piece with a clear linear narrative arc.

Which is fine. Different can be good. The audience walks into NYTW’s space — which has had a distinctive look each of the last five times I have visited — and is confronted by what could be best described as Miss Havisham’s attic on steroids. With no clear center as to what the playing area might be, the audience is left to wander and roam a seemingly endless array of boxes, some of which prompt conversation with one’s fellow patrons. Chairs and couches are mixed in with yoga matts and stools. What is perhaps refreshing about Sobelle’s approach is that he does value some objects; this is not an all out attack on material culture. Some items become tokens of memory, of something significant from the past, of something shared.

Sobelle reminded me of two notable, if very different, past performers. On the one hand, when he broke into monologue, he reminded me very much of Spalding Gray. I cannot really say why this should be so. There was nothing Gray-esque necessarily about his focus, but nonetheless, the tone struck a chord that reminded me of that much-missed monologist. On the other hand, there was something clearly Chaplin-esque about the performance. Like his predecessor, Sobelle imbued the inanimate objects about him with life, personality, character. Like Chaplin, Sobelle was confounded and confused by anything representing a technological advance. And like Chaplin, his physicality was extraordinary. His training at École Jacques Lecoq in Paris was very much on display, and it served the performer and his construct well.

Highlights of the performance included two vignettes that make use of circular phone conversations, a monologue about a visit to the French countryside, and a a bit with ice skates and salad (which really has to be experienced rather than described). The ending, however, was something of a let down. The final vignette really did not provide a satisfying coda for all that had transpired up until that point. What was needed was perhaps not some sort of Aristotelian sense of narrative closure — because that is not what The Object Lesson is about — but rather some sort of emotional epiphany that would have made the end of the journey more pointed.

That point of criticism aside, The Object Lesson is very much a worthwhile evening of theatre. If anything, for those of who were there, it brings up fond memories of the kind of work that used to be a staple of the downtown theatre scene. Perhaps it’s time for a large-scale return to that kind of experimentation.