Stuart Sherman is a seminal figure in the performing arts world; his work has been honored by museums throughout Europe and the U.S., including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Dubbed by critics “the shaman of the mundane” and “the magician of Soho,” Sherman has created thirteen “spectacles” in which he manipulates mundane objects in brief, precise series of movements, each demonstrating a complex idea. Since 1977, Sherman has completed 18 films--shot by Babette Mangolte and others--in which he utilizes the language of his “spectacles"--a precise series of images taken from the natural environment, depicting common scenes and actions in unusual contexts. Sherman has also transplanted this vocabulary to the medium of sound in short sound pieces, each based on a collage of found material.
Village Voice critic J. Hoberman writes, “There is a touch of Keaton in Sherman's stolid, off-handed persona,” and Soho News critic Noell Carroll considers that Sherman's work “reveals the basis of magic in our earliest and most submerged ways of thinking, eschewing illusionism to acknowledge the motive behind it.”
Tonight's presentation includes 4 short sound pieces; 30 minutes of short films (titles include Tree Film, Camera/Cage, Baseball/TV, Fountain/Car, etc.); and, in performance, three “table-top” or “briefcase” spectacles selected from Stuart Sherman's Eleventh Spectacle (The Erotic), Twelfth Spectacle (Language), and Thirteenth Spectacle (Time).