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拍品專文
“The connection with theater arose in part from that idea of the world as a stage,” Kuitca has explained of his longstanding fascination with the theater. “I had formulated for myself some kind of elementary axiom by which nothing was possible in painting while, on the contrary, everything was possible in theater” (in Graciela Speranza, “Conversations with Guillermo Kuitca,” Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, New York, D.A.P., 2009, 76). From the early scenographic space of El mar dulce (1984) to the metaphysical maps and architectural blueprints that followed, he has long probed the phenomenological terrain of human geography, ruminating on the ways in which we position ourselves across space and time. Kuitca’s enduring themes of emotional dislocation and spatial disintegration took root during the 1980s, aided by travel to Germany and his encounter with dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch’s experimental Tanztheater and its unconventional sets, multiple spatial perspectives, and agonistic characters. The psychology of stagecraft, its scene-setting and existential performance, has continued to evolve in his work, taking a conceptual turn in the abstracted auditoria of Puro teatro (1995), in which Kuitca upended theater’s distancing effect by depicting seating plans as seen from the stage.
This spatial inversion was prompted by his notice of the seating plan for the Royal Opera House in London while buying tickets to Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier in 1994. “Before that trip to England, I had done some theater plans, but there I realized that something very special had happened, that my work could take a 180 degree turn,” Kuitca recounted. “I have always had this insistent vision of a kind of big stage, with something of the Baroque idea of the world as a stage. But that vision now turned and placed me—or the audience—on stage, so as to look from the other side" (Ibid., 78)." He immediately purchased The Complete Guide to London West End Theatres and, taking its diagrams as a template, began work on the series Puro teatro, in which seating diagrams and charts are deconstructed, their rows spliced and collapsed in bleeds and collages of color. While the series has since encompassed auditoria around the world, from the Vienna State Opera to New York’s Lincoln Center, most of its works are untitled, their anonymity befitting the placelessness and alienations of the postmodern stage.
The architectural space of the theater dematerializes in a phosphorescent haze of purple and golden yellow in the present Untitled, the tiered boxes and orchestra rows flooded by color. The darkened stage frames the space of the audience, forming a kind of horizon line; the drama unfolds in the inversion of the gaze, displaced from the audience to the actor. “It is a panoptical vision or view where only one person is seen—the famous prison-guard situation—and he is the only one who can see everyone else,” Kuitca observed. “It is also the same in a peepshow" (in Kathryn Hixson, “No Home at All: An Interview with Guillermo Kuitca,” New Art Examiner, February 2000, 43). Figures have been absent from his work since the mid-1980s, and yet their affective presence lingers in the empty seats drowned in color and the voyeuristic estrangement of the all-seeing actor from the world off stage.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
This spatial inversion was prompted by his notice of the seating plan for the Royal Opera House in London while buying tickets to Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier in 1994. “Before that trip to England, I had done some theater plans, but there I realized that something very special had happened, that my work could take a 180 degree turn,” Kuitca recounted. “I have always had this insistent vision of a kind of big stage, with something of the Baroque idea of the world as a stage. But that vision now turned and placed me—or the audience—on stage, so as to look from the other side" (Ibid., 78)." He immediately purchased The Complete Guide to London West End Theatres and, taking its diagrams as a template, began work on the series Puro teatro, in which seating diagrams and charts are deconstructed, their rows spliced and collapsed in bleeds and collages of color. While the series has since encompassed auditoria around the world, from the Vienna State Opera to New York’s Lincoln Center, most of its works are untitled, their anonymity befitting the placelessness and alienations of the postmodern stage.
The architectural space of the theater dematerializes in a phosphorescent haze of purple and golden yellow in the present Untitled, the tiered boxes and orchestra rows flooded by color. The darkened stage frames the space of the audience, forming a kind of horizon line; the drama unfolds in the inversion of the gaze, displaced from the audience to the actor. “It is a panoptical vision or view where only one person is seen—the famous prison-guard situation—and he is the only one who can see everyone else,” Kuitca observed. “It is also the same in a peepshow" (in Kathryn Hixson, “No Home at All: An Interview with Guillermo Kuitca,” New Art Examiner, February 2000, 43). Figures have been absent from his work since the mid-1980s, and yet their affective presence lingers in the empty seats drowned in color and the voyeuristic estrangement of the all-seeing actor from the world off stage.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park