Stuart Sherman Screening + Discussion
Electronic Arts Intermix
This event has ended.
A special evening devoted to the work of Stuart Sherman, featuring a conversation between playwright and director Richard Foreman and artist Paul Chan, moderated by Jay Sanders.
The discussion will be preceded by a short screening program surveying Sherman's work in film, video, audio, and performance, introduced by Andrew Lampert of Anthology Film Archives.
Stuart Sherman was an iconoclastic artist whose influential practice defies classification. This event will launch the distribution of Sherman titles previously unavailable on video, preserved in collaboration with the Fales Library & Special Collections, NYU.
Remaining outside of any one artistic identity, Sherman considered his work to be performative and visual but with a "literary bent—(I) consider everything I do a form of writing." Sherman's art combined the influences of writing, avant-garde theater and conceptual art, as well as his admiration of pop culture figures such as the television talk show host Joe Franklin. Beginning in the late 1970s, Sherman developed a unique performance style that characteristically took the form of Spectacles, as he called them. These performances were usually short in duration—a matter of seconds or minutes—and involved a deadpan manipulation of simple everyday objects, often over a folding table. The effect was a purposeful transformation of these objects into rhetorical questions.
On the occasion of Sherman's death in 2001, Richard Foreman wrote: "Stuart Sherman was like no other artist I've ever known. A sweet and gentle man whose art was nevertheless honed with a rigor and discipline that was almost frightening in its iron-clad integrity. Because instead of being shaped by the hurricane winds of the world, the minute and pure crystals of Stuart's art were able to proliferate in a thousand scattered locales—their diamond-like glitter being the manner in which such detailed miniaturization testified to a defiance of received opinion and accepted artistic styles."
Stuart Sherman was born in Providence, R.I., in 1946. He arrived in New York City's Greenwich Village in the 1960s, where he was a performer with Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company and Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater Company, before launching his independent art career.
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Schedule
December 08, 2009 from 18:30