Augusto Boal, RIP

Augusto Boal, inventor and most noted expositor of the technique known as Theater of the Oppressed, died this past Saturday at 78:

TO was used by peasants and workers; later, by teachers and students; now, also by artists, social workers, psychotherapists, NGOs… At first, in small, almost clandestine places. Now in the streets, schools, churches, trade-unions, regular theatres, prisons…

Theatre of the Oppressed is the Game of Dialogue: we play and learn together. All kinds of Games must have Discipline - clear rules that we must follow. At the same time, Games have absolute need of creativity and Freedom. TO is the perfect synthesis between the antithetic Discipline and Freedom. Without Discipline, there is no Social Life; without Freedom, there is no Life.

The Discipline of our Game is our belief that we that we must re-establish the right of everyone to exist in dignity. We believe that all of us are more, and much better, than what we think we are. We believe in solidarity.

Our Freedom is to invent ways to help to humanize Humanity, freely invading all fields of human activities: social, pedagogical, political, artistic… Theatre is a Language and so it can be used to speak about all human concerns, not to be limited to theatre itself.

Here’s a Democracy Now interview from back in 2005.

 

Invisible car!

It would be rad if cars actually did vanish, but this is still pretty sweet. (via nigel parry)

 

Controversial album covers

30 of them. I wish they’d included my all-time favorite. (via crazymonk)

 

Just had to …

Impossible art: Li-Wei’s acrobatic photographs. (via crazymonk)

 

Paperback chair

Via BoingBoing.

 

I spent several days in L.A. last week, and had the opportunity to check out this Allan Kaprow exhibit. I have to say it was about as much fun as I’ve ever had playing with typewriters and throwing confetti at friends in a museum.

Kaprow is an interesting figure about whom I didn’t know much. This quote encapsulates a lot:

“The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.”

 

The Tate Britain’s summer exhibition — “The Lure of the East” — features several 19th c. British painters fixated on “the Orient,” including works by Richard Dadd:

In 1842, Richard Dadd, a popular and gifted artist of 24, set off from London on a Grand Tour of Europe and the Middle East with Sir Thomas Phillips, a former mayor of Newport, who had employed him to document their journey in drawings and paintings. Within a year, however, Dadd had returned to England in the throes of madness. Living solely on ale and eggs and hearing voices, he murdered his father because, he declared, Osiris, the Egyptian god of life, death and fertility, had commanded him to do so.

Dadd was committed to Bedlam, where he continued to paint until his death. “The Halt in the Desert,” one of his works featured in the Tate exhibition, had an additionally curious journey. Lost for a century, it turned up on the BBC program “Antiques Roadshow:”

The one that stands out for me is a picture we found in Barnstable in north Devon in 1987. We had had a disappointing day, until, at 2pm, a couple came in with a painting. The irony is that they wouldn’t have come in at all had it not been for their dog, whose favourite walk was through the park that our hall backed on to. So, anyway, they took the dog for a walk, and while they were out, they thought they might as well take this painting, which they didn’t particularly like, into the Roadshow.

Our expert, Peter Nahum, couldn’t believe what he had seen. He knew of the existence of the painting – The Halt in the Desert, by Richard Dadd – and he knew it had been missing for 100 years or more. This couple in Barnstable had no idea what they had. They also had no idea what had happened to the painting in the intervening 100 years, because it had been given to them by someone’s mother-in-law. Unusually for us, we didn’t value the painting on the spot – we took it away to be authenticated. It was valued at £100,000.

 

Artist Robert Rauschenberg died today at the age of 82.

In an age of copyright battles and increasingly fluid notions of authorship and influence, I thought this was kind of fascinating:

He met Jasper Johns in 1954. He and the younger artist, both destined to become world famous, became lovers and influenced each other’s work. According to the book “Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists,” Rauschenberg told biographer Calvin Tomkins that “Jasper and I literally traded ideas. He would say, `I’ve got a terrific idea for you,’ and then I’d have to find one for him.”

 

Kottke has the latest on “The Wire,” along with some fascinating snippets from Nick Hornby’s interview of David Simon in the August issue of The Believer. My favorite from the Simon ruminations provided:

Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearian as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood — two shows that I do admire — offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of their central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearingen). Much of our modern theatre seems rooted in the Shakespearian discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct — the Greeks — lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality.

I’m the only person in America who doesn’t know shit about “The Sopranos,” but the “Deadwood” contrast seems spot-on.