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Along my journey I have seen many different forms of theatre, as well as many different forms of visual art. Yet the differences between the two begin to fade when you encounter performance art, and avant guarde theatre, let alone spontaneous public work. So is there really any difference? When you get down to the roots of it, not really.

Art is creative expression. Theatre is a performed narrative. These are the nut-shell definitions.  But these definitions intertwine, and create a grey area. The line between visual art and theatre is painfully thin. In many ways theatre is a form of art. It is creative expression. On the flip side, art also maintains theatricality in production and presentation.

Society is comfortable with classifying things in order to better understand them. Often times visual art is classified as that which is in a gallery, or museum, and theatre is classified as that which is on a stage. However it is not that simple.

Looking back  at the Prague exhibition floor, I remember all the national exhibits, and how they were displaying “theatre”. In reality what they were displaying were photographs, model sculptures, textiles, and various other artifacts. All of these pictures and items were taken out of the context of their story to be presented at the national exhibits, and in this way they became visual art.

Theatre as a whole is a narrative in motion, yet the pieces and parts that make up this narrative are works of art.

This concept is reinforced by the fact that scenic models and costume renderings were on display at the Prague National Modern Art Museum, as works of art.

The concept of the stage also has many pit falls. What is a stage? Is it a frame through which we see a picture? A platform? A venue with an audience? In this regard museums are stages for visual art.

You can take a work of art, and develop it into a narrative, a montage, or a dialogue – in this sense it develops a theatricality about it, which can be classified as theatre.

The narrative does not have to be in motion, it can be in how the audience reacts to it. This is best exemplified in John Cage’s 4’33″, where a musician enters the stage and performs the piece for precisely 4minutes and 33 seconds. While no actual notes are played it is the sounds of the audience that creates the piece. Similarly the reactions to visual art maintain this same sense of theatricality. The narrative and movement are not as obvious as they are in theatre, however a dialogue exists either way.

There is no form of art that breaks the lines of classification as abruptly as public art. True, art is in the name yet it is neither on a stage nor in a frame. The term public art classifies all works of art found outside an established museum, gallery, or theatre. You find it on the streets, in schools, hospitals, parks, abandoned buildings, etc.

Often times public art is commissioned by the government, however today we see a lot of public art that is installed spontaneously by the artist or artists involved. Some may call this graffiti, street theatre, performance art, renegade artists, protests, even advertisements are a form of public art.

Public art responds to a public, either to inform, disturb, critique, or simply to get one to THINK.

No matter how you look at it public art is produced by the public, for the public. It is a direct relation to the population that lives there, usually incorporating site specificity to enhance how rooted this work is to the locale and people that live there.

What I mentioned earlier about John Cage’s 4’33″, is essential to understanding how public art thrives or dies in a society. The way public art responds to an environment impacts the people living there – and the response of that public to the artwork is as important as the artwork itself.

My public theatre piece that was part of Six Acts blends all lines of classification. It was a spectacle, a moving artwork responding to the Fransican Garden. Similarly the public art I saw in both Berlin and Konstanz served to enrich the lives of the people that live there, while giving them a hint of the history the city was founded upon.

Public art, good or bad, shapes a society. It defines locations, such as the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty,  and in smaller venues such as the Astronomical  Clock of Prague, churches have been using public art for years to maintain an identity with saints and angels, the Berlin Wall, and in Konstanz we have our fountains.

Visual art and theatre also come from society, they are created and performed for a society. To enrich lives and open eyes.

While society tries to differentiate visual art and theatre by their context, public art finds its context in society thus creating the synthesis of all art forms – creative communication – straight to the public, whether they want to be impacted by it or not.

Aside from the conference I also visited various museums, galleries, and locations of public art, not only in Prague, but also in Berlin and Konstanz, Germany.

In comparing the visual and public art on display in these select cities of Europe, to those in the United States, there is one large difference I found incredibly exciting. The acknowledgement of process in architectural and theatrical designs.

At the Prague National Museum of Modern Art I discovered that there were plaster models of architecture on display – along with the sketches of the buildings. I found the recognition of architecture as modern art incredibly interesting. The museums I have visited in the States may recognize architecture as an art form, but not to this caliber. The Museum in Prague not only recognized architecture as an art, but the models and sketches that lead to the final product as an art.

On top of architecture there were also costume renderings and numerous model boxes depicting scenic designs. This display of theatrical designs as artwork enthralled me. I found that the term “modern art” encompassed much more than paintings and sculpture in Prague.

I also went into the Alphonse Mucha Museum in Prague as well as the Museum of Decorative Arts. Mucha is one of my all time favorite artists. His line work and depiction of the human form has inspired me for many of my own pieces of art work.  The Museum of Decorative Arts did not allow photography, however the large array of clothing, clocks, glasswork, books, and furniture on display made me understand the concept of art as an all encompassing term for fine art.

While I was in Berlin, I unfortunately unable to go in the Guggenheim, as it was in a period of change-over in exhibits. However I was able to view a lot of different forms of public art, from graffiti, public murals, and sculptures. The graffiti served to enliven the area, and bringing a form of culture and visual interest to the area. Had the neighborhoods I walked been void of graffiti they would have been baren, another strip of tad buildings with small stores trying to survive under them. Many store fronts even had spray painted murals to attract passerby into their businesses.  The public art served as a reflection of the people that lived in the city, an outlet for creative expression.

In Konstanz I found the same thing, that public art served as an extension of culture for the people that lived in Konstanz. Many sculptures illustrating the colorful and quirky life of a shore line city. The galleries in Konstanz reflected the similar quirky life of a small town.

The visual art present in Central Europe not only extends to the elements of theatrical and architectural design,  but also reflects the people that live in those areas.

My personal project will take the form of an installation piece, incorporating puppets, or traveling puppet company.

As I was going through all the exhibits I found myself drawn to all the puppets and puppet imagery. The abstraction of the human form lends itself so well to theatre, one is able to create a character from scratch – without regards to an actors own body.

I am interested in bringing the viewers into a new world, totally immersed in the aesthetic and visual content to this new world. In here they will encounter the puppets, or inhabitants of this world.

This style of theatre and visual art occurred numerous times in the National Exhibition. I loved how the installations surrounding small works of art lent itself to creating a stronger dialogue between the artists and the viewers. The art was no longer behind a frame, or on a stage, instead you entered the world, you were there able to touch, smell, feel, and sometimes even taste the various elements of this created world.  When inside these active installations you felt a part of the piece. You were no longer a viewer, but an active participant.

This type of interactive, environmental theatre is what I am really interested in now, and I very much hope puppetry will come into my next project as an added element.

http://scenofestexchange.com/?p=760

Here’s a documentary on my Six Acts Project, made by the media team at Scenofest 2011.

The never ending question – What do I put in my portfolio?
At the Prague Quadrennial they exhibited various student and professional portfolios, and I took the time to go through them.
Originally I wanted to look through every single one, to figure out what a portfolio was and how I wanted to exhibit myself on paper, but as I started to go through them – it only took three portfolios to tell me everything I needed to know.
Here’s some advice from what I saw.
1. There are no rules, you don’t even have to listen to what I say. Make a portfolio that contains the information YOU value, not what you think other people want to see.
2. No matter what you do, label EVERYTHING, make it consistent and include your NAME.
3. Don’t use crazy colors in your backgrounds – you don’t want to take away from the photos and images that are your work.
4. Be neat and organized – have other people look at your portfolio when you think you’re complete and ask them if the order makes sense, good professors are worth their weight in gold when it comes to this.
5. Don’t have a portfolio that is massive – no one wants to lug that around or take the effort to wrestle with the pages, try and keep the size manageable, but not so small that it diminishes the power of your photos.
Now here comes the true advice – or more or less what I saw and wish to correct in the portfolio world forever.
What did I see in those first three portfolios? Well I saw pretty pictures and nothing more. I saw image after image, nicely cropped, labeled, mounted, and placed in order. All it showed me was that the designer it belonged to would make an excellent photo documentarian.
To be honest I was rather disappointed. THESE are professional portfolios? Picture albums? I probably flipped through at least 13 more portfolios before concluding that what I felt was missing from these portfolios was exactly what I had to put in mine. I saw maybe two portfolios that actually seemed complete to me. But as I said the majority of them were picture albums of production photos –nothing more. There were no renderings, no research images, no process, just product, and it bored me to tears.
I had approached the table eager, and ready to take hundreds of pictures, and quickly realized that there was only a handful of things on that table worth taking a picture of.

I see production photos and all I see is a pretty picture, worthless without the process that went behind it. How do I learn about our designs without taking into account the process behind them? Quite honestly I can’t. I want to see a beginning in order to appreciate an end.

In conclusion that is what I am going to do when I put together my portfolio this summer. I will include snippets of process work, research images, sketches, illustrating how my ideas evolved and became what is inside those production photos. Information that helps the photos mean something to their viewer, and makes me stand out from the sea of photo albums.
Don’t misunderstand me – do NOT make a scrap book. Do NOT make a collaged mess of information that no one can digest. But for every 8×10 production photo have at least 2 smaller images that back them up or inform the viewer where they came from, so they begin to understand you.