Idiom

Even when I was little I can even remember doing somewhat provocative things. One episode comes to mind that certainly wasn’t filmed but was definitely a performance, though I guess a more site-specific, ephemeral one. My 8th grade class went on a field trip to an alligator river to go canoeing and I found a way to jump or fall into the water. I’m still not really sure which it was. I think it was pretend to fall but jump. There were alligators – not sure why 8th graders were canoeing in water with alligators but whatever – and it was such a big to-do. I then inspired many other people to jump into the water and it was mayhem. I don’t remember exactly what happened. It was like the work spread and on different field trips everyone was jumping out of their canoe.

The arrival of widespread interest in performance amongst contemporary artists has not immediately translated into an expanded interdisciplinary interest in that other, classically time-based medium, the theater. Nor has the theater, broadly speaking, seen fit to expand its categories to correspond with the sudden promiscuity of its traditional methodology. What is the nature of this reciprocal ignorance? Is it simply a question of incompatible constituencies? No doubt there is a deep divide in each community’s respective method of production – but are we so determined? This panel aims to examine the recent history of performance as it relates to current patterns of production and dissemination, with special consideration given to the divide between contemporary art and theater.

I read Catcher In the Rye around the time when postwar coming-of-age novels were required elementary school reading (possibly 6th grade?) and I remember being struck by Caulfield’s off-kilter slang and vaguely psychopathic tendencies—as well as being shocked by the fact he could simply run away without fear of parental reproach. But even as I admired the novel, it never really resonated, and until college I dismissed many of its advocates as teenage fanboys happy to find a justification for hating their daddies in one of literature’s most overexposed rebels.

Paper Monster relaunches, artists taking over historic buildings in Hamburg, Nancy Spero RIP, and more links from around the web.