#stuart sherman

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Stuart SHERMAN

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Stuart Sherman

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CONTEXT: Artistic influences for Kathryn Elkin’s Mutatis Mutandis

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Stuart Sherman  blowing   my   mind   awayyy    

[amif2013]

AMIF IN CONVERSATION: Kathryn Elkin and Alexander Storey Gordon discuss the work of Stuart Sherman

Kathryn Elkin works mostly with performance, video and writing. Citing a source – such as an artwork, artist, writer or performer – she applies her own personal methods of translation, transcription and representation to realize the work.

    From: Kathryn Elkin

Date: Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 11:06 AM

  Alexander – a thought. Maybe we could do a bit of to-ing and fro-ing via writing to each other? Maybe that could make the content for the website? It would be very nice to meet, but shall we see if we can get this going via email? Here are some great pieces of writing by Sherman that I got from Anthology Film Archive. I wonder if we could use some of them on the website? For me, his work is perhaps about a simultaneous horror of writing and love of it – so it will be interesting to write about that!

  Places: http://www.mediafire.com/?377wg3yia57in9i

McCullers: http://www.mediafire.com/?6442h25mx1g7829

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  From: Alexander Storey Gordon

Date: Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 3:28 PM

  Kathryn - I had wanted to meet you first but I was going to suggest something similar. When I was writing out questions for the interview it seemed to box Stuart Sherman into some sort of historical art archive, the kind often marked ‘mythologized dead artist’. I wanted to avoid this, to be able to have a conversation beyond the context of the film festival. Given your experimentation with the idea of interview, it seemed strange to limit the conversation to the formality of a straightforward interview.

  This idea of the simultaneous love and terror of writing is fascinating. Is this something you keenly feel yourself when writing? It brings to mind two of my favorite writers, Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot. Bataille famously claimed that literature is evil. Here’s an extract from an interview with him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WiwNekNJGA

  Blanchot is a lot more in depth in his book, An Infinite Conversation. It’s a lot of essays disrupted by really interesting extracts of a conversation between Bataille and Blanchot. Blanchot seems to suggest that writing is a form of unnatural violence; I think the idea of disruption or interruption that’s in Blanchot's texts is also interesting when thinking about Stuart Sherman's performances.

  Looking forward to reading the texts and continuing the conversation.

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From: Alexander Storey Gordon

Date: Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 9:00 PM

  Hello Kathryn,

  The texts you sent me are really thought provoking and insightful.

What seems really interesting, and it’s something that I think you can perhaps only understand after reading works like Places or McCullers, is the connection between Sherman’s performances and film. I feel in an abstract way his performances bear striking similarities to film; for the most part film animates the inanimate and is also to a lesser extent about manipulating and focusing our attention from micro to macro, from the whole scene to the object: cigarette ash that is being blown red hot, or a man’s suited legs being crossed.

  Sherman’s gestures seem to pull our vision around in a similar way – a pencil, a sharpener, a tack inside a black balloon – only to bring us out into the whole scene in the theatre or lecture hall as he begins a rendition of Singing in the Rain or directs a rhetorical question towards the audience.

  There is a beautiful description in Places, where Sherman addresses cinema directly. Holding a bit of paper, he slowly turns one media to another, swapping the vertical written page for the horizontal cinema screen. But he seems to be outlining more than that it’s not just about formal similarities. It’s like it’s his theory of art. He says: "Actually seeing a film doesn’t matter so much as appointing the hour at which to see such and such a film at such and such a place with such and such a person (or alone, in which case, you're such and such)."

  I feel like he is saying that art is in fact very normal, it’s not an elevated plane of experience or even very intellectual, it is just time set aside in the day to spend with such and such, be that with yourself and the spectacle or you and such and such.

  Art is magic without magic, Sherman might say?

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From: Kathryn Elkin

Date: Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 5:10 PM

  Hi A!

  I'm not sure I agree about the strength of the relationship the Spectacles have to 'filmic' properties. I know I said I thought that it was interesting when we spoke before – it's still interesting that you think that, of course, but I don't agree now! For me, film is just another means for him to present the Spectacles, but the thing at stake in the Spectacles is not 'filmic'. It's funny you mention that analogy about the piece of paper in Places being like a cinema screen – I didn't really dig that. I wonder if it's something to do with the differences in our interests? I think the Spectacles are about immediacy and presence first and foremost – presence of body and presence of mind – and the fluidity and movement of all that, which is something I try to work with too. That isn't something that film can do – or not in the same way. I think Sherman's interest in film is better represented in his 'film' works, rather than the Spectacles.

  The Spectacles are about contrasting biological time with conceptual time, I think. But I agree that there is something awkward about the films/videos that document the Spectacles – that they can almost function as films rather than an expedient tool to demonstrate the scope of the live work. I like awkward things – that's why I chose to show films of the Spectacles rather than Sherman's video works, which I don't like so much. I also like the poignancy of knowing that you aren't really 'getting' the work in those documenting videos, that the videos are just the idea of the work; the work eludes you, because these films are not film works. That totally floats my boat.

  I really agree with your idea that Sherman wanted to show something of the art of thinking in the Spectacles, and made art that sought to demonstrate the artistry and sophistication that goes into our daily encounters with the world.

  I'll stop and catch my breath, more soon,

  K x

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  From: Alexander Storey Gordon

Date: Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 10:19 PM

  Out of reading breath... do you find that your reading voice sometimes falters?

  I’d agree with your critique of my interpretation, just like when we discussed that awful review of Stuart Sherman in October, which tried to tie his work to a strange academic artistic discourse. I think unfortunately we can only translate through our interests. But what I was saying was not that the work was about film, that would make it so one dimensional and academic. The Spectacles themselves are certainly not transcribing film, but they play at a related game. It’s an analogy rather than an interpretation, and I agree not one I’m sure Sherman would recognize.

  His work for me is actually much more about a frenetic presence, where the hand acts out the idea, making thoughts physical and the physical action as fleeting and instantaneous as the thoughts – they mimic each other in a way.

  In some ways Sherman reminds me of a balloon sculptor; there seem to be a lot of references to street theatre or simply just being in public throughout the Spectacles. There is one performance where Sherman does a pea in the cup trick, but the cups are transparent – that really made me laugh out load! But his performance also reminds me of medieval alchemy, when alchemists would try and create gold from seemingly arbitrary objects. In a similar way to Sherman, what's actually important in alchemy doesn't actually seem to be chemistry but a ritualized performance of an idea or folly.  

  That led me to the magic quote again. It seems to me that Sherman’s Spectacles aren’t so much magic without magic; they’re more like magic without illusion. In a way your work perhaps plays with that same idea. I feel like your performances are comedy without the illusion of comedy, which actually makes them a lot more absurd, funny and more closely related to tragedy.  In the same way, Sherman’s performances actually become a lot more magic than magic because they remain awkward and elusive. They are elusion rather than an illusion.

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  From: Kathryn Elkin

Date: Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 11:33 AM

  Reading/writing breath - I think that's true! Sometimes it feels like that, that you can run out of air. I went for a run after I wrote to you and got out of breath in the other way. That's funny, now I think of it! Sort of Shermanesque.

  I really agree about the elusion, rather than illusion! I'm of course very into that comedy/tragedy thing.

  Have you read Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic? There is a summary of some of the ideas here and you can download from Project Guttenberg. Not that I'm saying read it now if you haven't – just think you'd dig it.

  I'm going to talk about the way Sherman uses ACHOO in the Spectacles in the presentation. I think it's really important. The phonetic articulation of the involuntary bodily response, transcribed into a word – which Sherman utters voluntarily. The way that he likes to use 'hallo' and likes to sing the alphabet is really important too. For me that is really interesting – you can remember something as abstract as sound, melody, much more easily than a set of ordered symbols. I think the first time I was made a fuss over for performing something as a child was for singing the alphabet at nursery school. The teacher stood me up on a table and I sang it to everyone. I found it hard to write, but I could sing the alphabet!

  Sorry – rushing off to work but wanted to keep this alight. X

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  From: Alexander Storey Gordon

Date: Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 6:49 PM

  Yes, I definitely think Shermanesque could be described as acting out the metaphor of something physical, so the idea of the brain being tired or you running out of breath when you’re reading in your head… sort of natural psychological metaphors. Perhaps ACHOO fits into that in some way. I also think the earnest nature of Sherman's performances are really important; they’re incredibly generous to the audience, or rather perhaps just he is. They’re really committed performances. That’s not to say that they lack humor or that they are solemn or serious, more that they are determined or wholehearted.

  I found this as well which I thought you might find interesting, it’s supposedly Sherman’s last ever performance: The Passion of Robert Beck: https://vimeo.com/2767866 In the text below the film it refers to 'perfilmances' (what Sherman seems to term the spectacles performed between his films). This idea seemed really interesting, it reminded me about the start of film screenings, something Bergson talks about a lot in Endless Night, when film and performance were much more tightly bound. So for example, both Man Ray’s film Entr’acte and Ballet Mecanique by Fernand Leger where first screened as interludes for theatre and ballet. I like how playful Sherman is with his own work in this way, that he creates interludes to his own films and they flow into and take off from each other. But they also have this theme which is totally outside the films, that creates more of an idea that the films are there to break up or disturb the performance – that he is just orchestrating or creating interruptions.

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  From: Kathryn Elkin

Date: Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 10:35 PM

  I think I'm going to be breaking up and disturbing Sherman's films with my presentation! Wrong way round! Going to cut the first Spectacle short I think. Hope that's not sacrilegious! I'm obsessed with the ACHOO in the Spectacles. I think it's one of those elements in the work that is shorthand for a key set of ideas. I think maybe one thing Sherman is interested in is economy – of scale, of time, of expression – and this practice of expressing things economically is language forming really. I'm going to be doing some ACHOOing in the presentation.

  Do you remember the bit in the Carson McCullers writing where he mentions her singing the Greyhound Bus jingle?

Kx

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  From: Alexander Storey Gordon

Date: Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 7:05 PM

  Disturbing Sherman’s work is good, I think artists’ works should never really be left alone, especially when they’re not around to disturb their own works themselves. It stops the straight writing of history that often canonizes artists, and in the process keeps things a bit more alive. The ideas stick around rather than the images. That’s perhaps where ACHOO comes in; it’s an involuntary action and utterance. Sneezing is so theatrical in that way, it disturbs the flow of everyday life and its performance – it might even in a way shock us or remind us of our own corporality.

  I think the same is true for Sherman’s use of ACHOO in his Spectacles – it breaks the illusion of performance and disrupts the idea that everything performed is intentional or within a framework of the 'non intentional’. An ACHOO breaks things up, it’s like, the random, coma added, to, a sentence.

  The other thing I can think of is hiccups, which perhaps have a more obvious semantic resonance with the idea of disruption, but is again an involuntary act. But unlike the burp or fart, the hiccup and sneeze are not treated as rude, but as uncontrollable, even dangerous, to try and stop. Both ACHOO and HICCUP are cured with superstitious remedy and excess easy sympathy.

  If someone sneezes we say bless you, in an attempt to save their souls from escaping. Hiccups bring out the most ridiculous array of superstitious cures; head back, head forward, drink upside down, from the wrong end of the cup. NO! Hold your nose and then your throat. Thirteen seconds, now tickle your feet while jumping on one leg, then BANG!!! Reaaaaalllllly!!! scare them. There is so much performance and exceptional everyday spectacle in just a simple ACHOO or HICCUP.

[amif2013]

CONTEXT: KATHRYN ELKIN: Andrew Lampert on Stuart Sherman

Stuart Sherman (1945-2001) is widely considered one of the most significant progenitors of performance art to have emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, Sherman attended Antioch College before eventually landing in Manhattan. Always interested in literature and intrigued by the emerging conceptual art movement of that era, Sherman began a lifelong practice that integrated various forms of writing, drawing and sculpture. It was as an actor and performer however that the naturally shy artist made his greatest impact. Sherman first appeared in small roles in off-off Broadway productions by theatrical avant-gardists Charles Ludlam and Richard Foreman, but by the mid-70s he had developed his own highly unique style of solo performance in a series of short pieces called “Spectacles”.

  Writing on Sherman in the journal October, Berenice Reynaud commented that:

“Most of his performances, executed in silence with an almost religious concentration, consist of the manipulation, generally on a fragile little folding table, of different kinds of objects, usually plastic toys, but also bars of soap, kitchen utensils, and other objects manufactured in assembly-line imitations of one another, that are easily obtainable. It is Sherman’s manipulation of objects that make his performances resemble a magic show, but magic without tricks, suggesting that the point of his activity is something other than what it seems to be, that it is not the transformation of objects that is important, but, as Noel Carroll has observed, the order that is imposed on them.”

  A crowd pleaser whose intimate, seemingly simple works actually hinged on very complex ideas related to semiotics and language, Sherman’s witty performances were layered with stream-of-consciousness associations and film montage-like juxtapositions. He used his tiny props to create imaginative, abstract portraits of places, or charming and intimate portraits of friends. These fast, mesmerizing productions were presented in theaters, festivals and even on the street, where he often performed for passersby (and hand outs). Discussing the physical limitations of theater with author Trudy Scott in The Drama Review, Sherman explained that he eventually turned to filmmaking to further extend his exploration/investigation of time, scale and the object:

“I realized there were a lot of tangible objects that I couldn’t ever use…because they were too large to get into a performance space. I couldn’t get them into the room…like the ocean, the sky, the rooftop. I wanted to use those things.”

  Between 1977 and 1993 Sherman produced approximately 30 short films, the longest of which is 12 minutes. Most of the movies are under three minutes, with a few clocking in at less than a minute. The films were exhibited in a wide variety of contexts in the United States and abroad, with a number of titles screening in the 1979 Whitney Biennial. J. Hoberman celebrated Sherman as an “ingenious editor” in Artforum and also noted “the movies resemble his one-man shows in their suggestive, rebus-like juxtaposition of gestures and props. There’s the same deadpan whimsy, but a greater degree of imagistic freedom.” Sherman distributed the films on a few different compilation reels through the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Canyon Cinema and the London Film-Makers’ Cooperative, but the movies were regularly presented as interludes in the context of an evening of performances. While based in New York, Sherman spent much of his time traveling and performing to much acclaim throughout the US, Europe and Asia.

  Mostly black and white and silent (although the color/sound works are equally as enthralling), Sherman’s shorts have a dreamlike quality very much associated with one of his major influences, Belgian painter Rene Magritte. One also senses Sherman’s deep affinity with The Great Stone Face, Buster Keaton, who shares a similar penchant for manipulating objects for comedic and revelatory purposes. In many cases the films are conceptually “about” the subject identified in the title, and typically employ parallel action to compare/contrast two separate actions.

  Critic Sally Banes, writing in Millennium Film Journal, states that:

“The magic of Sherman’s films is not unprecedented. Indeed, they fit into the genre of trick films that preoccupied the earliest filmmakers, most notable Méliès. But they are striking and delightful precisely because they locate magic and mystery in the everyday world. The tangible deliberateness of the composition of Sherman’s films and the economy of his juxtapositions are worked out in a gesture of concision. Through the simplicity, clarity and brevity of the images an acute sense of elegance and rightness is created. Like riddles, jokes, koans and paradoxes, Sherman’s films operate on the edge of sense, in a world of wonder.”

  The last few years have seen a significant reappraisal of Sherman’s wide body of boundary breaking work. He was the recent subject of two shows in New York City, one a sizable multi-media retrospective at NYU’s 80WSE gallery, the other staged at venerated alternative art space Participant Inc. Reviewing these exhibitions in the New York Times, art critic Holland Cotter astutely noted that in Sherman’s films “the act of thinking, rather than the completed thought, was always Sherman’s subject.”

  This text is republished with kind permission from Andrew Lampert.

[amif2013]

CONTEXT: KATHRYN ELKIN: Stuart Sherman on Carson McCullers

It was a bus that took me to Carson, and it was a bus that took me away. And what sort of bus was this? Just an average Rockland County oversized vehicular transport – two pairs of wheels in front, two pairs of wheels behind, and how many pairs of wheels in between I don't recall, if, indeed, I ever really knew.

Going up on the bus I wore sunglasses whose lenses were the color of roses (this is true, believe me!) and six months later, coming back, in the same seat, on the same bus, I wore no glasses at all (this is true, believe me!).

The bus' windows, by the way, were tinted dark green.

Often, in the midst of anything (yours or hers), catching abruptness by surprise, her sleeping right arm (a stringless stick-thin extremity) starts to wake and begins to rise, mesmerically controlled by a dreaming mistress. Risen and ordered to halt, the arm obeys, but spontaneously turns the palm of its hand flat out, parallel to your flattened face, and to the flat wall behind you and to the outside view pressed flat to the outside wall. Then the hand's fingers stretch themselves into a skin-tight, skin-colored glove. Luxuriating in the glove's sheer protection, the hand safely opens wide in sheer amazement: at anything (yours or hers).

The mask, adjudged to be Tragic, pretended – as masks of course will – to accept judgement stoically, furtively consoling itself by introducing into its mouth-like aperture drop after drop of that physician-forbidden but God-approved libation, "Old Grand Dad: borne to lip-like lips in no common cup or glass, but by means of a silver goblet, a veritable chalice, whose imperious inscribed monogram, "C.McC.," legitimized its function, dictated its use.

No surprise, then – to physician-as-God or God-as-physician – that on sunless days and moonless nights the grimace of Tragedy would gradually transform itself – by a simple inversionary process – into the grin of Comedy. (On all ordinarily illumined days and nights, one was kindly requested to divert one's eyes to the averted eyes of Old Grand Dad himself, "Old Grand Dad," indeed!)

"I like to be read to." Preferably the same books and stories, her favorites since forever: Anna Karenina,The Red and the Black, The Possessed, Gone With the Wind, [sic], Tonio Kröger, Chekhov's "The Privy Councilor," Waugh's A Handful of Dust, Joyce's "The Dead." She leaves the room as I read – but I pretend not to notice. After all, if she feels like transporting herself all the way to St. Petersburg and throwing herself in front of an oncoming train alongside Anna (Mrs. Vershinin), or getting her knuckles stepped on as she clambers up the rungs of the social ladder under the heels of Julien Sorel – that's her business. So long as she's back in time for Ida's service of the midday meal (otherwise I'd be accused of kidnapping and alienation of affection), I'll say nary a word save those printed ones I continue to read aloud.

But sometimes the books I read – at her request – are new to her: Memories of A Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy (which she respects but doesn't like, hinting at similar feelings towards the author), Everything That Rises Must Converge (she cries openly at the end of one of the stories, but then declares that O'Connor has all of Faulkner's faults and none of his virtues), The Years With Ross (she compares herself to Harold Ross, saying, "He's like me – stupid but a genius.")

New books or old, read to or reading, Carson lives in, by, of, and for words, words in books. There is no time when, upon entering her room, I do not see her with a book in her hands. If she is asleep there is a book lying open near her pillow. If she is awake and reading (and if she's awake, she is reading), she hands me the book and asks to be read to.

"Escape and transcendence," "escape and transcendence," these thoughts disguised as words, these words disguised as thoughts, invade my consciousness, and I struggle to cast them out, disgusted by my own small mindedness and limited vocabulary. (I've read too much.)

I watch as Carson McCullers blows her nose, and I think, "That is how a great writer blows her nose. If I can learn to blow my nose like that, then, I, too, can become a great writer."

I listen to Carson as she sings the jingle from the Greyhound radio ad: "Go Greyhound, and leave the driving to us." And I think, "If I can learn to sing the Greyhound jingle like Carson, then, I, too..." etc.

I try to blow my nose like Carson, sing the Greyhound jingle like Carson, sit on the screened-in back porch like Carson, but it's no use. Despite diligent and prolonged effort, I do not become a great writer. Finally, I convince myself that these attempts are futile and I abandon them.

But even now– even today, at this very moment – I nervously wonder: Did I give up too soon? If I'd kept on practicing, would I have become a great writer? Who knows? Who knows?

Read more of Stuart Sherman's text from Bomb Magazine, Fall 1990 via the Gay & Lesbian Reading Group, of which he was a member.

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