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Performance Theatre, this is the title of the exhibition which has opened the museum season of the new Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery (Gam) in Turin, curated by Danilo Eccher. The museum space has reopened its doors to show itself with an entirely innovative appearance and to display, until 31st January 2010, an event centred on performance research. An extraordinary artistic journey that concentrates on the work of those masters who, since the Fifties, have expressed themselves through the generating force of an action.
Peter Brook, one of the main theorists of contemporary theatre, claimed that if a man walks across empty space, around that action, as small as it may be, the energy of the theatre is articulated into power The exhibition at the Gam intends to present and analyse spaces, shapes and objects moulded by that passage, modelled by the action of art and never deserted by it, even after the performance has been carried out.
The Performance Theatre is not an exhibition of documentation, it does not concentrate on the registration of the act, but on the scene of its taking place. It intends to present the architecture and physicality of the theatre where the action takes place, it wants to pause on the scenic structure created by the artist, on the space conceived for the performance to take place and often created or modified by the performance itself, built by the accumulation of traces deriving from acts, words and objects on the scene. The exhibition presents works by some of the main representatives of performance research between the end of the Fifties and today. Each of these authors has “built” the scene and the architecture of their works with a different aptitude.
If the origin of performance art can be traced back to Jackson Pollock, whose heredity according to Allan Kaprow was the action, the freed gesture, the moving of the artist’s body in a space made of paintings that were traces of that dance between canvases and colours, the exhibition at the Gam is proposing works by Kazuo Shiraga, Hermann Nitsch, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gilbert & George, Marina Abramović, Paul McCarthy and John Bock.
The collective event identifies distinct protagonists of different artistic itineraries tracing, in accordance with studies on the subject, a map of performance arts. However, particular attention is paid to Turin, centre which had an essential role in the history of performance arts at international level: to the Gutai group, active in the city in 1959; to Shiraga, who displayed his first personal exhibition in 1962; to Gilbert & George, protagonists at the Gam in 1970; to Michelangelo Pistoletto.
The presentation of the most erupted approach, which belonged to the Gutai Group, through the work of Katsuo Shiraga, will make immediately visible the strong relation between the season of Action painting and the use of the whole body energy in an extreme form of painting that models the space around the artist’s movement.
The energy of the matter typical of the Gutai Group explodes in Paul McCarthy in provocative acts of violence of sexual matrix of which the exhibition will present the places, the architectures, sometimes domestic sometimes visionary, of the consumed event. Hermann Nitsch, instead, stands out for his work on the space of rituals, for the ceremonial system of his performances. Among the founders of Viennese Actionism, the Austrian artist emerges as a Dionysiac priest of rituals which entail the spreading of animal blood and collective ecstasies. In Turin Nitsch displays what he calls “relicts” (tunics, stretchers, sheets) of these macabre rituals.
The attention for the arrangement of the scene and the “backcloth” of the performance action of Gilbert & George is presented through some drawings of the General Jungle series. The works by Marina Abramović instead represent the occasion to observe the power to modulate the scenic space innate in the performer’s voice, a sort of sound architecture which takes shape by action of the tone, of the emotional resonances, of the words which make up chains of images and have the strength to create spaces in which thoughts can pause.
A particular space is dedicated to Michelangelo Pistoletto who at the Gam is presenting his Grande sfera di giornali (Great sphere of newspapers) and the work Orchestra di stracci (Orchestra of rags), a presence which is also a tribute to one of the most fascinating artistic seasons in Turin, the one of Poor Art.
Furthermore, the exhibition is presenting some works by John Bock whose performance aptitude not only prepares a scene for his action but is realised as an actual construction of worlds. Bock is one of the most interesting examples of a performance aptitude which reached its maturation in the last years when the relation between action and scenic space, which the exhibition intends to investigate, seems to break down definitely in an increasingly dense construction of sets which become the actual framing of the works, in which the scene structures mutate without a solution of continuity into installation works.
Until 31st January 2010
IL TEATRO DELLA PERFORMANCE (PERFORMANCE THEATRE)
GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
Via Magenta 31 – 10128 Turin
Tel. 0114429518
Email: gam@fondazionetorinomusei.it
Web: www.gamtorino.it
Opening times: from Tuesday to Sunday from 10 am to 6 pm; Thursday from 10 am to 10 pm
Entrance: Full 7.50 euros; Reduced 6 euros.
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