To an Imagined Theatre by Lisa Gilardino and Eva Neklyaeva, or their revelations in “the Glossary of Magical Practices, Places, and Creatures,” a mirror:
Carol Rama, anti-fascist theatre
“In my dream world, in my world of play, there’s always an animal. It’s a fantasy animal, and loving: when I was little […] grass snakes were objects of desire for me, and I put one in my drawings…. I’ve always loved objects and situations that were rejected. When I was about six I used to sleep with a frog that clung on to me. When my uncle explained to me that it clung on because it was a cold-blooded animal, I cried all day long because I thought it was an amorous relationship.” [1]
Carol Rama (1918–2015) was a self-developed artist who lived her life in Turin, a city well known for its witches. Rumors of magical triangles and covert pentagrams appear in its travel guidebooks. Rituals and magic are considered everyday, perhaps circling or emanating from a drain in the center of town. Black voids and impure holes appear in her collage works, staring back with disembodied eyes. The autonomy of her world — incarnated by her studio that, like a portal, opened an inter-dimensional fold and granted access to the immensity of her two-dimensional imaginary — brings into being the fundamental structure of her unmeasurable powers, her uncontainable obsessions.
Her earliest representational watercolor works began in the late 1930s and debuted in a moment when fascism was spreading throughout Europe, although Mussolini had been in power in Italy for decades prior. Rama’s first exhibition was quickly censored as obscene in 1945, curtailing her pursuit of figurative painting. For Rama, figuration consisted of many watercolor paintings populated by prosthetic-like body parts, stylish shoes, missing limbs, outstretched tongues, animated stoles, floral/laurel auras, razors, shit, fake teeth, wheelchairs, make-up, flaccid penises, snakes and eels protruding mainly from vaginas, psychiatric hospital restraints, group masturbation, etc. Rama’s work of this period is frequently described as delinquent,
Charlotte Salomon, “Life? or Theatre?”
Made between 1941 and 1942 while hiding in France, Charlotte Salomon’s suite of 784 diaristic gouache paintings with transparent text, dialogue, and musical overlays — an operatic drama based on Charlotte Salomon’s life overrun with familial abuse and suicide — also disappeared for two decades following Salomon’s death at the age of 26 in Auschwitz. In her book Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory, Griselda Pollock describes “narration as a political act,” stating that: “Leben? oder Theater? in the form it takes as a painting — spatialization and visualization — performs narration visually (and is not just a narrative)…. There is a relay between the profound undoneness of a subjective namelessness experienced by the artist who undertook her artworking to find a name by telling stories and what I am identifying as the theatre of memory that was produced to do this very thing. The work was invented to enact such a theatre of memory that would play out before the subject whom its creator might become through its making in the imagined presence of others.”[2]
Reza Abdoh, giving birth
In his spoken introduction to the Museum of Modern Art, New York screening of film and video works by Reza Abdoh, Ron Athey condensed his remarks to a contextual description of the Los Angeles club scene in which the two artists overlapped and of the scene of cosmic rage and prolific death from which Abdoh’s work emerged. Elsewhere, as described by writer James Hannaham, Abdoh “blazed through the performance world like a comet — his career was brief, bright, mysterious, and intense. The theatre director’s major works — with his company, Dar A Luz — all appeared between 1990 and 1995, when Abdoh died of AIDS.” Hannaham goes on to describe the “theatre director/ringmaster/auteur’s” work as characterized by “actors attacking scripts that dealt audaciously, even pornographically, with vital issues like racism, homophobia, and AIDS… [with] a relentless feverishness and physical risk onstage that was often frightening….”[3] I think Athey used the word “shouting,” as if to emphasize the sheer appropriateness of urgency expressed by Abdoh’s high volumes and intensities. The film and video works Abdoh unleashed made total sense in that world — something that historicization of his work, and of others of this generation, has perhaps forgotten.
Constantina Zavitsanos, “you and me and astrology”
“…that this world has things that double not halve, that the cut is such a smooth criminal, that love’s holographic, that touch is impossible but we do it anyway, that a bunch of things operate at our incapacity beyond translation, that capacity is so overrated, that desire is abundant — that desire is abundance, sharing doubles, that some things get bigger the more you take away like holes, debt, dependency…” [4]
Using access as a primary material, Constantina Zavitsanos’ exhibition L&D Motel featured an installation of infrasonic sound built into the architecture of the gallery, alongside open captions and a series of transmission holograms. Based on a score that was experienced inaudibly (through the vibrations of a ramp and video projection of open captions), L&D Motel leveled abilities to make a theatre of abundance. Zavitsanos spent a month in residence in the space leading up to it, making work but also in conversation about modes of working, temporality, bureaucracy, as well as unstructured time as a form of attending. It closed with an installment of Constantine and Tourmaline’s Weekly Weather astrological forecast, consulting the stars, together.
How to make abundant theatre, narrate politics, shout history? Maybe we should ask the witches.
[1] Carol Rama, cited in a wall label in Antibodies, curated by Helga Christoffersen and Massimiliano Gioni, New Museum, NY, 2017.
[2] Griselda Pollock, “Introduction,” Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory, Yale University Press, 2008.
[3] James Hannaham, “Reza Abdoh,” 4Columns, June 29, 2018.
[4] Constantina Zavitsanos, L&D Motel, 2019, project notes.