Page 197 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

ever since Allan Kaprow’s first happenings, and especially Bruce Nauman’s studio performances. Substituting a collective for the individual sculptor, and replacing the studio with a park, a disused warehouse or a waste ground, we come closer to X-Ville’s sculptural field.
Mimesis of work
Vous avez déjà vu dans la rue des chantiers se faire. On installe une simple petite palissade et on peut passer à côté d’un trou, d’un tuyau ou d’un arbre, mais lorsqu’il s’agit d’un bâtiment, on ne peut pas y entrer, alors que c’est pourtant le même travail. Tout chantier devrait être ouvert au public et ce n’est pas plus dangereux que de passer dans une rue où un pot de fleurs est posé sur une fenêtre, où la vitre armée d’un carreau de fenêtre qui claque peut éventuellement faire tomber des éclats de verre sur les gens (...) Il est donc honteux d’interdire d’aller sur les chantiers.41
We’ve all seen how such construction works are carried out: a simple hole, some planks, and some drilling tool may suffice. We’ve also seen stage sets put together with the barest possible means: a carpet, a chair, an empty corner – not to mention those films that, as Godard once said, only need a girl and a gun to get going. Actually, only a small group of organized people is required to move things around and build something that may be made to endure indefinitely through time. Displacing objects or spilling water constitute what we might call an abstract drama.
The term drama derives from the Greek δραν: to do. “If one thinks of theatre as drama and as imitation, then action presents itself automatically as the actual object and kernel of this imitation. And before the emergence of film indeed no artistic practice other than theatre could so plausibly monopolize this dimension: the mimetic imitation of human action represented by real actors.”42 This mimetic action represented by “real actors” is certainly strange. Cinematic cameras allow us to find action anywhere, landing us in medias res at some location that might be an old warehouse or a studio set made to look like one. The conventions of documentary or fiction also allow us to distinguish actions that have been pre-arranged to be seen onscreen from those
41 Jacques Kébadian
and Patrick Bouchan, “Construire autrement”, in Architecture et cinéma, Paris: École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Paris- Malaquais, 2015, p. 53.
42 Hans Thies-Lehmann, Post-Dramatic Theater, London and New York: Routledge, 2006, p. 36.
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