Mirror Mirror On The Wall, This is ‘The Theatre’

All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it. True expression hides what it makes manifest…This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.––Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

As Cortney Connolly walked me through The Theatre, I wrote notes on the blank title page to Aurther Danto’s The Artworld, balanced on a copy of Guy Debord’s Society of The Spectacle. I will attempt to continue past this irony as if this isn’t all already said with it.

These unintentional materials were almost too apt for the work I was covering, titled and inspired after Antonin Artaud’s infamous “Theater of Cruelty” manifestos outlined in The Theater and its Double, a collection published in 1938, but compiled since 1931. These years matter––his world was on the brink of a war. A crisis is felt before it is named.

History is defined in retrospect. Until then, it can only ever be lived. An environment like what birthed Artaud’s constructions is not new, but it is very much now.

Driven by deconstruction and a condemnation of capitalism, Connolly has composed an idea through the hallways of an empty “ex-hype-beast retailer” in the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 158 Rivington Street. LUmkA, the nomadic love child of Connelly’s creation, is installed again in another basement. I followed along as she gave me the guided tour.

Connolly and her collaborators have woven a thread with a thoughtful hand. I want to unravel it with mine. Let me try to tie a bow.

Lights blink a warning for the show’s impending start. This is The Theatre:

Entrance to “The Theatre.” Photo: Mila Rae Mancuso. Courtesy of LUmkA, NYC.

To begin with words from the expert who is not me:

“The spectacle will be extended, by elimination of the stage, to the entire hall of the theater and will scale the walls from the ground up on light catwalks, will physically envelop the spectator and immerse him in a constant bath of light, images, movements, and noises. The set will consist of the characters themselves, enlarged to the stature of gigantic manikins, and of landscapes of moving lights playing on objects and masks in perpetual interchange. And just as there will be no unoccupied point in space, there will be neither respite nor vacancy in the spectator’s mind or sensibility.

That is, between life and the theater there will be no distinct division, but instead a continuity.”––Antonin Artaud, The Theater of Cruelty (Second Manifesto), 1933

In “cruelty,” Artaud didn’t mean violence, though his propositions certainly include it (see the Spurt of Blood). Rather, it is the intensity incited by complete and bodily immersion that surpasses words, and therefore, a definition.

However, one thing is clear: In this theater, the spectator is surrounded by the spectacle, insofar as he is included in it, as per Artaud’s request. Superiority of the image is put to the test. How steadfast can one hold ground?

This is not “immersive art” like we’ve perhaps seen before. Walk inside and step onto the stage.

Marianna Rothen has decorated the foyer of the space like a log cabin in a patriarchal hellscape––a scene not so far from those I’ve seen in life. Five male mannequins congregate over checkerboard, crushed cans, and smoked cigarettes. Her film, Mail Order, plays on repeat. In these mediums, men turn into plastic and are positioned to pose. Performing her performance, she may still be a body, but at least it moves on her own volition. I stare into her close-up smile in the mirror across the wall until I’m forced to see mine.

Past this set is a disguised door to a dressing room. The wall-to-wall mirrors in the 3×4 room are pasted over with diaristic and photographic mementos from the remnants of her modeling days: “He told me I looked like Kate Moss!” reads one of the shards.

I wish!

Something moves between the cracks of pictures and script. Was that my I or yours?

Penmanship is a type of painting. Strokes are therefore a sort of language. Though Artaud pushes past any words inscribed with a brush, instead urging “a unique language halfway between gesture and thought.”

But the show doesn’t include any traditional paintings. The closest thing may be Anna Ting Möller’s kombucha scoby, a sort of amniotic yeast, stretched over wood frames which resemble skin or stone more than they do a canvas. This is the same material wrapped in stitches around porcelain bones resting on green velvet under fluorescent lights as if a coroner worked a night at the museum.

Memory can be equally as surreal as a dream.

The path to the basement invites us through Luca Rekosh’s memories of Romania. There’s a bridge he can’t completely remember but I walked across until it faded under my feet. I’m reminded of The Bridge to Nowhere, a local monument in the town I grew up in––the stuff of legends, who’s origin or ending no one knows. Truth is just another story. Anyone who’s ever remembered anything knows.

Do we hold a mirror up to nature or does it hold a mirror up to us?

If Hamlet did have a mirror in hand, he showed us that art reveals us to ourselves. Except recently, living feels like an ouroboros spinning between walls lined in silver––I keep catching my eye on every bite.

The last stop to the tour is Miles Scharff’s satellite who’s form is only built out of function. The object picks up electromagnetic frequencies of everything which surrounds it, translates it, and plays it back as noise. No cell phone, sneeze, whisper, or breath in proximity is safe from its perception. An echo is answered by a foreign and indiscernible voice in this game of call and response. The relationship between observed and observer is symbiotic. They’re both feeding off of something, and neither know what.

But there’s a conversation happening. The viewer is an active participant––without any consent.

I don’t know if Artaud’s proposition is possible outside of its written manifesto (he may argue me with Balinese). In most examples of his title’s resurrection, the rejection of the thing has decidedly become it.

To be a spectator surrounded by spectacle, the subject becomes a spectacle in and for itself. All alone, there’s just a body and the work. Anything else, and it’s just representation.

Ideology has no feet to put on the ground. If you have to tell me what something is doing, is it doing it?

Perhaps, one can only start by blaming “the formal screen which we interpose between ourselves and the masses,” the technology which has transcended what Artaud once called a “new form of idolatry.” It may not be “on the stage that one must look for truth today, but in the street,” and at least that’s a start.

Stop by Rivington Street, or wherever LUmkA finds itself next, which is probably somewhere in London after this fall.

The Theatre featuring work by Anna Ting Möller, Luca Rekosh, Marianna Rothen, and Miles Scharff is on view at LUmkA, 158 Rivington Street, NYC, NY, through 30 May 2025.

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