Stuart Sherman
Stuart Sherman's influential art practice defies easy classification. Celebrated as an avant-garde performer, he also worked in film, video, and other visual arts, in addition to writing plays and poems. Sherman was an iconoclastic builder and manipulator of mass-produced bric-a-brac; he used an intuitive logic to purposefully transform objects into rhetorical questions. He developed these manipulations into an idiosyncratic performance style that was quick-paced and conceptually witty. The culminating tableaux, featuring Sherman and disassembled or repurposed objects, evoke Rene Magritte, Buster Keaton, and Samuel Beckett. Sherman settled in New York City's Greenwich Village in the 1960s, where he was a performer with Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company and Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater Company. Beginning in the late 1970s, Sherman developed a unique performance style that combined the influence of avant-garde theater and conceptual art practices. Remaining outside of any one artistic identity, Sherman considered his work to be performative and visual but with a "literary bent — (I) consider everything I do a form of writing." One summer in the 1960'…
Films