More Articles on Theatre

Posted in #8- 32: Theater of accomplices, Performance, Theater of Accomplices Newspaper | 0 comments

Adorno// Commitment

A Baraka// Slave Ship

Baraka,James Hatch// Afro-American Revolutionary Theater

Brecht// Sports,Epic,et al

J Butler// Performative Acts

H Cruse// Revolutionary Nationalism

Dixon// DigitalPerformance

E Diamond// Intro.Performance, Cultural Politics

F Fanon// Fact of Blackness

Coco Fusco// The Other History of Intercultural Performance

Genet // A Note on Theater

Muller// Hamletmachine

M Pearson// Theatre/ Archaeology

P Phelan// Ontology of Theatre

Roach// Kinship.Performance.NewOrleans

Schechner// Theater and Anthropology

Situationists// SimonFord

Taylor// Performance Archive

Taylor // The art and the repertoire

V Turner //Ritual to Performance

White // Genet Biography

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Artemy Magun and Dmitry Vilensky // Toward the 100th anniversary of Theodor Adorno

Posted in #2 Autonomy Zones | 0 comments

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was born in 1903. He attended the University of Frankfurt where he studied philosophy, sociology, psychology, and music. In 1931Adorno joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Escaping from Nazism, the Institute moved to Zurich in 1934, and Adorno in 1938, rejoined the Institute, which was now located in New York. In 1953, at the age of 50, Adorno left the United States and returned to Frankfurt to take up a position with the Institute In 1959 he became its director following the retirement of Max Horkheimer. In 1969 students occupy the building of the Institute and Adorno calls police to clean the office. After that incident, students, in an aggressive form, of happening, boycotted his lectures. Adorno died in 1969 in Switzerland, after being shocked by the aforementioned events, and while writing what many believe to be his most important work, Aesthetic Theory.

The main works of Adorno: “Dialectics of Enlightnenment” (with M. Horkheimer), 1947, “The philosophy of the new music” (1949), “The negative dialectic” (1966),”The Aesthetic Theory” (1970, published posthumously). Adorno, along with other participants of the so-called Frankfurt School, used Hegelian dialectics for the analysis of the political, ideological, and economic contradictions of the late capitalism. Adorno followed his friend and teacher Walter Benjamin in insisting on a special, irreconcilable form of dialectic, which does not lead to a frozen result and where the negative trumps over the positive. Unlike Hegel, Adorno developed his “negative dialectics” in the constellations of loose aphorisms, never aspiring to a system and avoiding any stabilization of his concepts.

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Anatoly Osmolovsky // Comments on Theodor Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory”

Posted in #2 Autonomy Zones | 0 comments

Art occupies the space that it inhabits because of its lack of function. In art, everything functional (or social) has been volted into chaos; means and ends, superiors and inferiors, owners and staff have been switched. The liberation from functionality is art’s last political task, a task that is refuted by society, political movements, as well as some segments of art itself. By taking its place – as the result of unspeakable efforts – art makes society aware of its own disorganization. In the sociology of art, this place is known as autonomy. The autonomy of art does not mean that art will always be cut off from society’s current problems. In one way or the other, these problems will become the object of artistic reflection, although the result of this reflection has nothing at all in common with ordinary empirical examinations or therapeutic perscriptions. Instead, these problems are understood as signs for universal issues, whose current content is of no importance to art.

Autonomy’s flipside is gradual neutralization. This neutralization gives rise to those structures of the art system that guarantee its autonomy. Vesting an interest in popularization and educational goals, the art system slowly depletes the art-work of its conflicts and its social bite. For this reason, it becomes possible that, upon visiting a museum, we encounter rooms in which radical abstractionism and orthodox Socialist Realism are “natural” neighbours. This neighborly relationship, impossible even 10 years ago, pays testimony to the process of neutralization. In the swampy quagmire of conflict-free coexistence, everything is equalized: Stalinism becomes equal to Nazism, Marxism to liberalism, abstractionism to realism.

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