This book by Claire Bishop came out the day after my birthday. It takes a look at 20th– and 21st-century art and its increasing sense of theatre. Besides the many tangential experiences it describes, it is interesting to see that someone has finally traced the history of art in parallel to the history of the performing arts, which have been strangely ignored in many accounts despite playing a major role in artists’ work. Here we can find not only Artaud, Brecht and Beckett as the inspiration for many of the artistic adventures of the last century, but also names like Augusto Boal, the Judson Dance Theater and the Théâtre du Soleil, which make it possible to understand dematerialised art where the relationship with the audience becomes an object.
As an example:
I want to work out an alternative to this lazy, lousy ‘democratic’ and demagogic term ‘Participation’. I am not for ‘Participative-art’, it’s so stupid because every old painting makes you more ‘participating’ than today’s ‘Participative-art’, because first of all real participation is the participation of thinking! Participation is only another word for ‘Consumption’! Thomas Hirschhorn