Aspects of a New Dramaturgy of the Spectator

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ We could draw the parallels with the Living Newspaper (1935–9) which was organized in the USA as part of the Federal Theatre Project to ease unemployment in both the theatre and newspaper professions. But unlike the Rimini Protokoll project, the Living Newspaper dealt exclusively with the social, economic and political concerns of the day. Through the use of fact and documentation, it attempted to energize citizens to interest them in the socioeconomic and political problems of the times ‘with the aim of inspiring them to individual and group action’ (see Camigliano 1995: 17–18).

² As Jacques Derrida indicates in Limited inc.: Abc (1977), the formulation of the binary opposition fiction/nonfiction produces a ‘hierarchical axiology’ that presupposes and valorizes an original (the fiction), held to be intact, normal and pure, while it excludes or depreciates the other (the nonfiction). Deconstruction reverses this hierarchy that has perpetuated the repressive dualisms of Western metaphysical categories.

³ According to Walter Benjamin the aura of a work of art is destroyed by its mechanical reproduction which led to the ‘liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage’ provoking changes of perception (Benjamin 1969[1936] : 31).

⁴ Rejecting the theatricality of minimal art, Michael Fried claims in his seminal essay ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) that the success of modernist art (painting and sculpture) depends on its ability to defeat theatre. Fried defines theatre as a particular relation between the beholder as subject and the work as object, a relation that has a potentially infinite duration in time.

⁵ On Art and Language and the failure of linguistic or analytic conceptual art in the late 1970s and early 1980s, see Roberts (1997).