Theater
Feb 25, 2013 at 1:59 pm
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How 90s of them.
It's mindblowing the first time, interesting the second, slightly annoying the third time, and after that you just want to strangle the lazy asswipe "artist" who abdicated his responsibility as a creator to a machine process.
"Oooh, the cut-up pieces formed a random pattern that I'll ascribe deep meaning to!"
This "art form" was thoroughly explored and abandoned 50 years ago. No respect for the "artist" here.
1. The art world's habit of lauding any art that is boundary-breaking or transgressive or controversial is how you end up with the Charles Krafft debacle, where the same critics who praised him for his edginess are furiously back-pedaling now that it's been revealed that Krafft's edginess may not have been so much a sly commentary on white nationalism as it was a trojan horse for white nationalism. Even now, though, there can be no question his work is edgy. The important question is "is edgy the same as good?"
This is what I think about when I see the headline about this "controversial" performance. Is the "controversy" here merely that some people thought it was crap? If so, generating "controversial" material sounds pretty easy.
2.The kind of meaning you are describing deriving from this is the kind of meaning you might derive from a Rorschach test. This is not to say that your experience wasn't valid, but it does raise the question of whether the artist deserves credit for anything you got out of it.
As a grad school thesis, it would have been successful. As a touring production in front of $25 seats, it was a failure. There was more potential locked up in the idea, and I wish a good editor or mentor had sent them back to the drawing board before sending this show on its way.
While I haven't seen A Piece of Work, it sounds like a show that would make some of our local programming talent cream their pants.
Also, "randomly generated" doesn't really describe what's going on quite accurately. There were 15+ different sections, all with different originating texts and different algorithms to generate the output text. That's where the creativity lies - take a machine, match up input text to suit it, and make sure the output tends to be interesting. I thought the two most successful of these were Scott Shepherd's reading/melding of dialogue between Hamlet and Ophelia and the computerized rendition of Ophelia's last scene. Both were beautiful and heartbreaking. On the other hand, the ones consisting solely of stage directions were more trite and gimmicky - and 40ish minutes of solely computer-performed work was getting really close to sensory overload. I'm predisposed to like it, and it weighed down on me.
And I don't think that "A Piece of Work" was a good show at all, but it was interesting. I even think that watching a piece fail horribly has artistic value. And good for them for trying. There are concepts to the algorithmic rendition that could work. Maybe just need better algorithms, or a bit more heuristic control. Surviving the failure with renewed energy to trying again is how we grow.
In twenty years of reasonably continuous support and attendance at the OTB, this is only the third time I walked out. What do I think about the piece of work? A cute three-minute youtube video resulting from a first-year CompSci homework assignment -- stretched mastrubatorily and without regard to Shakespeare, Markov, human decency or human bladder into eighty minutes of self-congratulatory reiterative absurdity. That about sums it up. Skip.
In twenty years of reasonably continuous support and attendance at the OTB, this is only the third time I walked out. What do I think about the piece of work? A cute three-minute youtube video resulting from a first-year CompSci homework assignment -- stretched mastrubatorily and without regard to Shakespeare, Markov, human decency or human bladder into eighty minutes of self-congratulatory reiterative absurdity. That about sums it up. Skip.