No More Masterpieces: Modern Art After Artaud

Abstract

tualisation of viewer responses to scripted reality shows such as The Hills (2006–10). Hunter argues here that the uncertainty produced between the ‘staged and the spontaneous’ (77) in these programmes is one of the pleasures of engagement for viewers, because appreciation of their co-presence suggests that ‘illusion and reality might not be the distinct and opposed categories received knowledge suggests them to be’ (78). Hunter makes a comparison between this and the Wooster Group’s intermedial performance of Hamlet (2007), which staged and disrupted the footage of Richard Burton’s Hamlet, directed by John Gielgud, initially broadcast live and once only from Broadway to cinemas across the US in 1964. Hunter argues that the central conceit of the Wooster Group’s production is in the similar pleasurable apprehension of different levels of authenticity in performance, although this is achieved through its blurring of the supposed ontological distinctions between the live and the recorded. The Burton-Gielgud Electronovision experiment also provides a useful comparison for an examination of the claims to liveness central to the productions broadcast to cinemas by NT Live and the RSC’s Live from Stratford-upon-Avon. The growth in live theatre broadcasting to cinemas is almost matched by the growth in academic scholarship, with several books on the subject published in the last four years, and Hunter does not say much that is new about this now established practice. Rather, she reframes the question to look at how producers’ insistence on the distinctness and ‘realness’ of the experience of watching these plays in the cinema (in which liveness is often invoked) operates more to reify certain qualities as necessary to preserve theatre as theatre, or in other words, ‘a mediatization that does not endanger the ontological “core” of theatrical experience’ (12). Again, she makes fascinating parallels between these institutional framings of the event and Burton’s pronouncements 50 years earlier on how the Electronovision live cast was more than a recording because it preserved the precarity of the actor’s live performance. The chapters on gaming further explore how the actual is produced, whilst not entirely effacing the methods of construction and how (following on from Jane McGonigal’s formulation) participants segue between ‘believing and playing at belief’ (98). Hunter’s analysis of the alternate reality game (ARG), World Without Oil, clearly demonstrates the useful consequences of access to this theatrical space for gamers in being able to play out the effects of a drastic real-world global shortage of oil in a computer-generated scenario. In all of these examples, Hunter teases out the implications of the troubling of boundaries between actual and imagined with admirable intellectual rigour. Whilst I applaud the use of the term ‘mischief’ throughout the book as productive in this respect, I did sometimes wonder when reading from a post-Trump perspective if the term did not in some ways elide consideration of the more ethical consequences of this blurring of boundaries. Put bluntly, ‘mischief’ seems an inadequate response to the MAGA insurgents who stormed the Capitol buildings in January 2021, leaving four people dead. Emerging fully formed from the ‘alternative facts’ of the Trump universe and looking for all the world, in furry hat and horns, like they had escaped from a computer simulation, the players in this event spoke to the more heinous consequences of confusing fact and fiction. Fortunately, Hunter provides a more up-to-date conclusion that acknowledges how the questions she asks might be reframed post-Trump (and postCOVID) but still, rightly, insists on the necessity of interrogating how and why the real is presented through ever proliferating forms of mimetic media.