The Wooster Group

02/03/20 • 51 min

Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk of The Wooster Group speak with Peter Scott of Carriage Trade Gallery.

The exhibition mentioned in this episode, The Wooster Group at Carriage Trade Gallery, is on view in New York through February 16, 2020. The exhibition features archival material, props, and performance documentation emphasizing the group’s significant contribution to both performative and visual culture over the last four and a half decades.

The production mentioned, A PINK CHAIR (in place of a fake antique) was at NYU Skirball Center for Performing Arts through February 2, 2020. A PINK CHAIR (In Place of a Fake Antique) references one of Polish stage director Tadeusz Kantor's (1915–90) manifestos. It describes a theater that gives the simplest, everyday objects—chairs—hallucinatory power to summon up forgotten history and memory.

The Wooster Group (originating in 1975) is a company of artists who make work for theater, dance, and media at The Performing Garage at 33 Wooster Street in New York. Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk are founding and original members of the group along with Spalding Gray (1941–2004), Jim Clayburgh, Ron Vawter (1948–94), Willem Dafoe, and Peyton Smith. Elizabeth LeCompte is director.

Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk of The Wooster Group speak with Peter Scott of Carriage Trade Gallery.

Previous Episode

Goldin+Senneby: Insurgency of Life

Live recording from the opening of Goldin+Senneby’s exhibition, Insurgency of Life, at e-flux. The exhibition is on view until February 8, 2020.

Goldin+Senneby is a Stockholm-based artist subject. Since 2004 their work has explored the structural correspondence between conceptual art and finance capital, drawn to its (il)logical conclusions. Recent works include a ghostwritten detective novel about an offshore company on the Bahamas (2007–15), a magic trick for the financial markets (2016), and a proposal for an eternal employment at a train station (2026–). Currently their practice is mutating: Drawing on bodily experiences of an autoimmune disease, they are staging a fiction with an “autoimmune tree” as the main protagonist.

Next Episode

The role of ideology in institutions: iLiana Fokianaki and Laura Raicovich

e-flux journal editor Brian Kuan Wood speaks to iLiana Fokianaki and Laura Raicovich on the occasion of Rojava Film Commune: Forms of Freedom at e-flux. The exhibition is curated by Fokianaki and on view through April 4, 2020.

iLiana Fokianaki is a Greek curator, researcher and writer based in Athens and Rotterdam. She is the founder and director of State of Concept, Athens, cofounder, with Antonia Alampi, of the research platform Future Climates, and lecturer at the Dutch Art Institute. Read her text, “Narcissistic Authoritarian Statism, Part 1: The Eso and Exo Axis of Contemporary Forms of Power,” in e-flux journal issue 103 (October 2019).

Laura Raicovich is a curator and writer dedicated to art and artistic production that relies on complexity, poetics, and care to create a more engaged and equitable civic realm. She is currently working on a book about museums, cultural institutions, and the myth of neutrality (Verso, 2020), and is the recipient of both the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship and the inaugural Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators at Hyperallergic.

Until early 2018, she served as President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum where she oversaw an inviting and vital commons for art, ideas, and engagement. Prior to the Queens Museum, Raicovich inaugurated Creative Time’s Global Initiatives, launched Creative Time Reports, and directed the Creative Time Summit. She arrived there after a decade at Dia Art Foundation, where she served as deputy director.