A MASK FOR A PLAY

I first read The Incident at Antioch by Alain Badiou several years ago. It’s a play worth living with. Give it some time and the ideas begin to ferment. Over the past few months/years I created a set of masks for this complex tragedy; using these printed images to investigate my own questions about history, politics, and theatre.

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Theatre in itself is not a goal for Badiou. It is a posture he adopts.“The play is a search for a new politics,” he explains, “but it’s also the embodiment of the idea that something[the traditional model of revolutionary change] is finished.” Kenneth Reinhard, in his introductory essay to the English translation, develops this concept further: “For Badiou theater functions as a kind of laboratory for the experimental production and investigation of new subjectivities, new ideas, and new temporalities.”

I’m deeply sympathetic to the idea of artistic works functioning as “laboratories for thinking”; artworks experimental in a methodological sense not just an aesthetic one. Badiou situates theater at an intersection, “art and politics in solidarity with each other-art offering its experimental resources for political thinking, and politics lending art the possibility of collectivization-but each retaining its own distinctive methods, materials, and kinds of truths.”

Print, like theater, can be understood in this same way. Its multiplicity allows for an engagement with groups of people in ways other media cannot.

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These masks exist as tools for theater, both Badiou’s and your own.

#AMaskForAPlay