Art

by Yazmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton

In Performance: 13^th – 20^th January 2007

Yasmina Reza studied in Paris both at the University and at the Jacques Lecoq Drama School before becoming an actress and appearing in many plays in France. Her first play as a writer, in 1987, won the prestigious Molière award. Several plays later Art won the 1994 triple Molière awards for best author, best play and best production. The London production won the 1996 Comedy of the Year award.

At Tate Modern recently I dared to slide down the stainless steel tubes that have been installed in the Turbine Hall as the current exhibition in that space. The snaky tubes themselves have a certain visual appeal but in the moments it took to ride down I was asking myself, “But is it art?” It is the most involving of art experiences – if art is what it was! Something of this participant dilemma challenges the audiences of Art.

The questions hit the London Theatre scene when the play opened at Wyndham’s Theatre in 1996 and over 2,000 performances and six years later the 27^th cast played the final performance at the Whitehall Theatre. It divided the London critics just as it did in New York. Jack Kroll in Newsweek wrote:

"It's an actor's dream, a nonstop cross-fire of crackling language, serious issues of life and art expressed in outbursts that sound like Don Rickles with a degree from the Sorbonne. Brilliantly translated by Christopher Hampton, Art takes that yawny old bore, the play of ideas, and jolts it to life".

Richard Zoglin in Time magazine countered: "Unfortunately, Art is an overrated trifle: one of those small, schematic finger exercises that seem to win critical praise in direct proportion to their lack of ambition. The characters are all too easy to parse: Serge is a modernist but really a dilettante; Marc, a classicist who's a snob underneath; Yvan, an art-naif who goes whichever way the wind blows."

The casting was probably the clue to its popularity because it was changed more regularly than catwalk models change their clothes. Good actors can sniff out good parts and our production has three GWT heavyweights, so it promises a good time for all. As John Stokes said in the Times Literary Supplement: "Art may not exactly coincide with one's own idea of men behaving naturally, but it certainly allows for a demonstration of shared skills that moves and impresses, leaving you at the curtain-call with the unusual sight of three grown-up chaps holding hands."

Serge has bought a painting which he thinks is fantastic because of the reputation of its creator. Marc hates the painting and is absolutely aghast at the fact that a friend of his could not only perceive such an object as art, but would willingly pay 200,000 francs for it. Through his attempts to placate both sides, their mutual friend Yvan gets drawn into the argument, which escalates to a point where it threatens to shatter the friendship altogether.

If your friendship is based on a tacit mutual agreement, what happens when one of you does something completely unexpected? Is this really just an argument about what does and does not constitute a work of art, or has the painting provided a catalyst for other issues that have been glossed over for years?

These questions, and many more are explored through scintillating dialogue that evokes feelings of drama, tension and bittersweet humour.

The above title is taken from an article in Empire magazine from the 1990s, about David Cronenberg’s highly controversial film version of JG Ballard’s novel Crash, about a set of people who get their kicks from staging car crashes. (The answer to the question, in this case, was most definitely ‘@rse!’ in the opinion of most people who saw it).

Review sections of the newspapers routinely bemoan the death of the novel, the dearth of good modern playwrights, the hideous state of ‘serious’ music. And, of course, what would the papers and the chattering classes do this time of year without the Turner Prize?

New art, in every form, attracts hype and loathing in equal measure. On the one hand, no-one wants to be the person who in a century’s time, is dragged out and made a figure of fun for criticizing an artist whose work is by then regarded as classic. On the other hand, we have those who stick by the contention that visual art ought to show an image of something recognizable, music ought to follow the diatonic system and have a melody, novels must tell a linear story, etc.

Both of these extremes miss the point. It’s impossible to tell what’s going to be classic in 50 or 100 years, because we don’t know what life will be like then, and what people are going to appreciate. It’s pretty hard to predict history. As for those who demand pictures, story, melody, etc, well don’t blame the modern artists, writers, etc. Blame Picasso, T.S. Eliot, Schoenberg, Joyce and the other early 20^th century revolutionaries. Oh, and while you’re at it, go back a bit and blame Wagner, Thomas Hardy, Turner, Goya, Raphael. In fact, blame everybody who pushed at the boundaries of what their art ought to do, and decided it should do something different and new, and were castigated for it.

Modern art’s there to be enjoyed, criticized, talked over, debated, for what it is, not second-guessed for what it ought to be, or might be in the future. If you think it’s “sh*t”, as Marc puts it in Art, fair enough; it might well be. If you love it, so be it. Either way, you’re not going to be around to know if you were ‘right’.

When Beethoven played his fifth symphony to a new acquaintance, the listener burst into a not entirely complimentary tirade about the piece’s relentless and obsessive rhythmic pulse, unheard of in western symphonic music. That acquaintance was Goethe. If he can get it wrong, we all can.