ABSTRACT
As noted in earlier chapters-and by Falguières-one of the most to the term “theatre” in visual art discourse. For many, this suspicion is a legacy of Modernist art criticism and its preoccupation with medium specificity. For Clement Greenberg, painting’s spatiality was nondurational and highly circumscribed by the essentially flat medium of the canvas-that “ineluctable flatness of the support that remained most fundamental in the processes by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism.”3 Indeed, it was this critical preoccupation that underpinned Michael Fried’s polemic against what he called “theatri - cality” in Minimalist art, a theatricality that he associated with medium impurity, cross-media mixing, literality, and a scandalizingly explicit audience relationship.4 Fried’s decision to align Minimalism’s “literalism” with “theatricality” came from his sense of its concern with the “actual circumstances” of encounter, “a situation” that “includes the beholder,” even “the beholder’s body.”5 For Fried, “theatre” was the degraded term for an encroaching intermediality that needed to be avoided and evaded at all costs. At the same time, it was the extension of what constituted the “actual circumstances” of the art event that spawned a “dramaturgy of unveiling” that we now call “institutional critique,” one that used a varied array of theatrical gestures to expose institutional structures.
