Proto-Immersive Discourse and the ‘Theatrical Condition’

Abstract

This chapter historically situates the contemporary yen for enveloping aesthetics as contiguous with the concern of reconciling a departure that art critic Michael Fried had identified between the absorptive and theatrical artworks in Art and Objecthood (1967). Fried’s writing on theatricality has been a common reference point for debates on liveness and duration in performance art. But I argue that Fried’s polemic should be re-read as proto-immersive discourse. The defining features of theatres of mislocalized sensation are consonant with a phenomenon that Fried had opposed—namely the ‘theatrical condition’. Admixtures of artistic/scientific form are encompassing the ‘theatrical condition’, affording new spaces for open-ended performance forms that seek to alter a beholder’s way of perceiving and transition the focus from what an artwork ‘says’, to what it ‘does’. With this shift, I examine the role of doubt, perplexity and ‘sense uncertainty’ in the gallery-based works of Catherine Richards, Carsten Höller and Lundahl & Seitl that call into question our body parts as ‘inalienable entities’.