I. OVERVIEW Stuart Sherman, who die...

I. OVERVIEW

Stuart Sherman, who died 14 September 2001 at the age of 55 was chiefly often called a miniaturist because he appeared forward stage, particularly in his "Spectacles," in ordinary clothing, with solitary a rickety stand (like those waiters use for serving food) a small sample case (not unlike that of a traveling salesman) settle upon it, and a fix of cue cards in the pouch of his (often flannel) shirt, to which he referr almost haphazardly for guidance.1 In at least single in kind "Spectacle" (Yes andNoh, 1993) they were blank playing cards. However, in his "Eighteenth Spectacle" (The Spaghetti Works, also 1993) his script/scenario sheets numbered 22 and were establish out in meticulous detail, suggesting that the suffer cards might well often be genuine and his absent-minded handling of them a deliberate distraction. The sample case itself contained a miscellany of objects- mainly cheap (often plastic), some institute or chanced upon, some modified for any arcane "coherence" either in themselves or with other purposes (minidramas within a mini-drama), ofttimes subsumed under thematic subtitles like Time, The Erotic, The Spaghetti Works, that wryly engage large fundamental parameters. The butt; goals when their stage life was through (a matter of seconds), were either dropp or thrown negligently back into the sample case, creating the ne for "rummaging" for later "events" or "scenes" or discarded forward the stage floor, creating a cosmic disarray (for it is a world we are talking about, a universe, even) Finally, Sherman's "skits" were performed deadpan a Ia Buster Keaton. There was no emotive hint from the world you inserted the theater with and later (mentally) staggered back to. Or if there was (occasionally), it happened in the merest blink of an judgment that one found disorienting. This lack of emotive make easy was not a neo-Brechtian distancing for the (ultimate) end of seeing and constructive political engagement and action, nevertheless rather the bleak nothingness of Beckett's landscapes, the frozen examine of futility and resignation, the certainty of doom in a world without foundation, without validated direction or guide places where game theory might well equal theology. When it was all across there was the merest indication of "end" Indeed, "end" was not an applicable word; if we had been attentive, we had been mov beyond "end" and all other consoling boundarys A pro forma bow and somewhat awkward exit complet the evening. We were left with the unmasked stage and its fulcrums (our lives, in other times if you like).

So what exactly constituted a "Spectacle" for Sherman? Absolutely anything and everything, particularly what was hidden, forgotten, edited from, or beneath our notice. Sherman's dramatic terrain was profoundly not comfortable.

Now, of course, the space of time "miniaturist" must be qualified. The writer to whom Sherman is mostly often compared is Richard Foreman (of the Ontological-Hysteric theater - his have for more than 30 years), who might be described as a maximalist, however in the same line of philosophical-dramatic work. one as well as the other use an abundance of supports but whereas Sherman's are confined to a small suitcase, Foreman's are spread across a normal stage, a put And although they share a Dada-Surreal dimension in their fulcrums and much the same derivation (detritus, inventions, amalgamations), their use of them is fundamentally different. They are onward different sides of the epistemological/ontological wall. Foreman's entire dramaturgy of pins including the geometry of his strings, tricks of perspective, religious pronunciamentos, shocking noises, verbal conundrum disorienting tempi, his neatness, and in the same manner on, are all intended as an assault forward the fmitude of unknowingness, or human inability to break end that wall to a raw be excited of truth, reality, what is. They delineate, as do the performers (who are braces also), an agent that has neither reprieve nor resolution. Sherman is forward the other side of that wall and does not view anything there except contingency, impermanence, disconnected and unreal bits and pieces, no foundational meaning, no grand vistas. The individual is late modernist, the other postmodernist. Foreman agonizes, again and again, brilliantly. Sherman "plays," lives dangerously, creating a devastating drama without of nothingness. In the fall of the curtain the terms minimalist and maximalist might well be reversed

Minimalist in the Sherman understanding might also well include other collectors of shards, scraps, fragments, quotations for the sake of uncovering or discovering (breaking through) like Walter Benjamin, Walter Walser, Nietzsche, EM Cioran, and Wittgenstein, whose collection strategies become end-run around the constructions of formal, traditional, rational exegesis of "reality." Hannah Arendt, in her introduction to Benjamin's Illuminations, is provocative forward the strategy of collecting:

Tradition lays the past in order, not just chronologically yet first of all systematically in that it separates the positive from the negative, the orthodox from the heretical, and [that] which is obligatory and relevant from the mass of irrelevant or only interesting opinions and data. The collector's passion in succession the other hand is not single unsystematic but borders on the chaotic...something that defies classification.