Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Stuart Sherman: Object Ritual

1979; The MIT Press; Volume: 8; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/778226

1536-013X

Bérénice Reynaud, Thomas Repensek,

Public Spaces through Art

Since 1974 Sherman has been giving performances, usually unaccompanied, sometimes with other participants, in the lofts of lower Manhattan and on the street in various locations around the city. He has completed his Eleventh Spectacle as well as two other presentations that have not been numbered. Most of his performances, executed in silence with an almost religious concentration, consist of the manipulation, generally on a fragile little folding table, of different kinds of objects, usually plastic toys, but also bars of soap, kitchen utensils, and other objects manufactured in assembly-line imitations of one another, that cost little, and are easily obtainable,' It is Sherman's manipulation of objects that makes his performances resemble a magic show, but magic without tricks, suggesting that the point of his activity is something other than what it seems to be, that it is not the transformation of objects that is important, but, as Noel Carroll has observed, the order that is imposed on them.2 Some of the performances have titles, for example, the different sequences of Ninth Spectacle (Portraits of People): Bill Ives, Nancy Tobin, Sam Sherman, Richard Needle, Richard Foreman, Stefan Brecht, Kate Manheim, Charles Ludlam, Stuart Sherman, and so on. But the use of titles should not mislead us. Sherman's performances do not depict anything; they have no representational content. In the Tenth Spectacle, for example, the sequence of manipulations called Paris is not a signifying chain whose referent is Paris;