My Barbarian “The Audience is Always Right”
The New Museum of Contemporary Art
[Image: Illustration by Alexandro Segade for My Barbarian, 2015–16. Courtesy the artists and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.]
This event has ended.
Working at the intersection of theater, visual arts, and critical practice, the collective My Barbarian (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade) uses performance to theatricalize social problems and imagine ways of being together. The group’s New Museum exhibition and residency, The Audience is Always Right, are organized as part of the Department of Education and Public Engagement’s R&D Season: DEMOCRACY. The exhibition illustrates the history and international tour of the Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT), an eight-year project first initiated at the New Museum in 2008. For The Audience is Always Right, My Barbarian presents an installation documenting the PoLAAT’s various performances and many participants—professional and amateur alike—by means of an archive of ephemera and props, an 80-minute single-channel video, and a large-scale mural that nods to such strategies as those utilized by the visionary Chicano art collective Asco as well as artists employed by the WPA under the New Deal in the 1930s and ‘40s. The residency also includes a series of workshops, performances, and public programs.
Composed of five techniques—Estrangement, Indistinction, Suspension of Beliefs, Mandate to Participate, and Inspirational Critique—the PoLAAT methodology responds to historic theatrical models that attempted to create social change, including Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s antiteater, and Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre. The project addresses these and other methods, often buried or overlooked, of critical and revolutionary theater from the 1960s and later, while situating its own enactment in (and against) the seemingly antirevolutionary contemporary moment. The PoLAAT occupies the space between memory and history, joke and laugh, and commentary and critique: it is the theater that happens after an experience but before action is taken. It is a rehearsal.
This exhibition is curated by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement; Travis Chamberlain, Associate Curator of Performance and Manager of Public Programs; and Sara O’Keeffe, Assistant Curator. The project is co-presented with the French Institute Alliance Française as part of the Crossing the Line Festival 2016.
Media
Schedule
from September 28, 2016 to January 08, 2017