Deep & Shallow 2004 — Laresa Kosloff

Deep & shallow 2004
Video, 4:00 duration

An excerpt from the catalogue essay by Lily Hibberd

“ A little bit of humour goes a long way and Kosloff articulates this well with her use of ridiculous movements and props. The shoes and the garbage bags are not employed purely for their appearances, it’s the movements and characterisations of the (amateur) actors that imbues them with (non)sense. This goes right back to the 1920s where an apparition of performance art can be identified in the formation of a physical, non-verbal theatre as envisaged by Antonin Artaud, whose scripts were not properly realised until after World War Two by protagonists of the ‘Poor Theatre’ such as Jerzy Grotowsky. In this latter movement the notion of the performer being freed from naturalistic representations was paramount. The actor is transformative, not reliant on conventional period costumes or props. This notion of appropriated objects being at once symbolic and bizarre was also a crucial component of the Dada movement, exemplified by the work (and life) of Marcel Duchamp, a movement which is defined as, “... a deliberate courting of the anti-rational, negative gesture; and a commitment to social or political action”.

Click here to read the full essay by Lilly Hibberd

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