"Performance art can involve the audience with taste, smell and sounds not available with electronic media and not practical with conventional theater. This is due to the usually small audience"
About this Quote
Bowman is selling intimacy as an artistic technology. By pointing to taste and smell, he’s not just listing sensory gimmicks; he’s drawing a boundary line between bodies in a room and everything that gets flattened when art is routed through screens and speakers. Electronic media can simulate a lot, but it can’t make you share air, or feel the social pressure of being physically present. Performance art, in his framing, wins by being stubbornly analog.
The phrasing carries a quiet dig at both film/TV and traditional theater. Electronic media lacks the full palette; conventional theater has the palette but can’t practically deploy it without turning the house into a theme park. Performance art, though, gets to break etiquette: it can invade personal space, ask you to ingest something, put an odor where you can’t ignore it. That’s not sensory indulgence so much as a way of collapsing distance, making “audience” less a demographic than a participant.
The kicker is the last line: “This is due to the usually small audience.” It reads like a logistical footnote, but it’s the real thesis. Smallness isn’t a limitation; it’s the enabling condition. A tiny crowd makes risk manageable, consent negotiable, and attention inescapable. It also hints at the economics and politics of the form: performance art often lives outside mass-market scalability, which is precisely why it can afford to be strange, confrontational, even invasive. Bowman’s subtext: if you want art that actually touches you, it can’t be built for everyone at once.
The phrasing carries a quiet dig at both film/TV and traditional theater. Electronic media lacks the full palette; conventional theater has the palette but can’t practically deploy it without turning the house into a theme park. Performance art, though, gets to break etiquette: it can invade personal space, ask you to ingest something, put an odor where you can’t ignore it. That’s not sensory indulgence so much as a way of collapsing distance, making “audience” less a demographic than a participant.
The kicker is the last line: “This is due to the usually small audience.” It reads like a logistical footnote, but it’s the real thesis. Smallness isn’t a limitation; it’s the enabling condition. A tiny crowd makes risk manageable, consent negotiable, and attention inescapable. It also hints at the economics and politics of the form: performance art often lives outside mass-market scalability, which is precisely why it can afford to be strange, confrontational, even invasive. Bowman’s subtext: if you want art that actually touches you, it can’t be built for everyone at once.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by Jack
Add to List
