Images of the Greek theatre

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Linda Hutcheon

Working through the issue of representation, in art forms from fiction to photography, the author sets out postmodernism's political challenge to the dominant ideologies of the western world.

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Jean Kennedy

"Although modern African literature and music have become well known in the West, through the contributions of such famous authors as Chinua Achebe and Bessie Head and such popular musicians as King Sunny Ade and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the continent's vast body of modern visual arts has been little explored." "In New Currents, Ancient Rivers Jean Kennedy surveys African art of the last fifty years, offering an expansive perspective on the visual arts of the continent. Just as ancient rivers flow through the modern African landscape, so too do the rituals and traditions of the past run deeply through modern African art. The past is able to coexist in vibrant synthesis with the present largely because of a critical constant in African culture, the acceptance of change." "The culmination of twenty years' research, New Currents, Ancient Rivers is the largest survey of contemporary African art, presenting nearly 150 artists of sub-Saharan Africa, primarily from Nigeria, Senegal, Ethiopia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and South Africa--painters, sculptors, fiber artists, printmakers, and filmmakers. As Kennedy examines their artistic development, she shows the many ways the artists meld elements from modern life, the legacy of colonialism, foreign technology, the natural world, and the past to create art that may be divorced from the original purposes of ritual but that still embraces traditional rhythms. The author also briefly discusses the influence of the oral and literary traditions on the visual arts." "New Currents, Ancient Rivers is a tribute to the vitality and diversity of a continent and its peoples. This progressive book recognizes individual artists, many of whom are virtually unknown in Europe and the United States."--Jacket.

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Geoff Pywell

The last half century has witnessed a profound confrontation with representation, the problem of the "real," and theater has provided much of the energy for this investigation. This is hardly surprising. No other medium has as its most apparent force the unsettling of perceptual realities; it is these experiences that form the core of Staging Real Things. When the real is placed alongside the apparently real each is charged by the other and the frames of experience that distinguish actual from aesthetic reality are broken down. The fracturing of apprehension is seen in the figure of the actor who is suddenly visibly astride worlds, and in the supposedly ordinary scenic elements employed in certain plays that refuse to be fully absorbed by either reality or aesthetics. This work concentrates on the actual and the aesthetic cohabiting on the special province of the stage without undue fuss but with tremendous force. Within such moments lies true theater, the tension between seeming and being stretched to a point of "cruelty.". Works discussed achieve their startling effects independent of any thematic or stylistic connection. They include, for example, a chapter on David Storey's The Contractor. Take a real tent and erect it on stage and suddenly the surface naturalism is jeopardized by the work beyond the acting that the actors have to perform. The enclosure of the fiction that naturalism aims for is here reopened without overt display. Theater then is the location where art most fruitfully rubs up against life, because life is the last thing that we expect to witness there, where the ironical, the maintenance of constant doubt and true ignorance, is given the most room. Some of the more modern experiments that deal with the mimetic contract in ways that herald a renewed sense of the possibilities of the stage are by Spalding Gray who, through his monologues, has come to typify what may be termed the speculative actor. He has managed to create a theatrical persona that enacts the basic philosophical attitude of disinterested wonder and then grafts it onto the self that playwrights like Beckett, for instance, have given up for lost. The modernist disenchantment so evident in plays like Not I re-emerges in this peculiar interstice between real and real into new illumination through actors like Gray who find positive enrichment in the performance of self that is more real than the self to whom original experience occurs. This is a beguiling ironic presence; the most vital "ghostliness" that fits acting best. . Also discussed are the experiments of the avant-garde group Squat, who challenged representation through constant redefinition of real behavior, and Kroetz's Request Concert, wherein the apparently uneventful and mundane becomes riveting through our human engagement with private, undramatic, but perceptually "real" human actions.

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Joshua Shannon

A revealing look at the irrevocable change in art during the 1960s and its relationship to the modern culture of fact This refreshing and erudite book offers a new understanding of the transformation of photography and the visual arts around 1968. Author Joshua Shannon reveals an oddly stringent realism in the period, tracing artists' rejection of essential truths in favor of surface appearances. Dubbing this tendency factualism, Shannon illuminates not only the Cold War's preoccupation with data but also the rise of a pervasive culture of fact. Focusing on the United States and West Germany, where photodocumentary traditions intersected with 1960s politics, Shannon investigates a broad variety of art, ranging from conceptual photography and earthworks to photorealist painting and abstraction. He looks closely at art by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Bechtle, Vija Celmins, Douglas Huebler, Gerhard Richter, and others. These artists explored fact's role as a modern paradigm for talking, thinking, and knowing. Their art, Shannon concludes, helps to explain both the ambivalent anti-humanism of today's avant-garde art and our own culture of fact.