by Ben Spatz
Fool Art is the wonderful idea that art is a community project. This idea is embodied in Bread & Puppet's statements that art must be like bread. Everybody bakes the bread together and everybody eats the bread together, and the bread comes to represent the community. B&P have a whole wonderful ART IS CHEAP manifesto about how art must be accessible to everyone. When I went to see them in Vermont, there was this theater-type guy who went over to Peter Schumann (who created B&P) and said something like "How does a person get involve with this?" It was the kind of question you might ask the director of any theatrical group, and you usually get an answer that has to do with internships, applications for administrative positions, or open auditions for actors. But Peter Schumann just said: "Come at 5 on a Friday to be in the show at 8." It was that simple. Those were the terms in which he thought about participation in theater. You come at five, you do the show at eight. No commitment, no pay, no long-term ambition. Yet Bread & Puppet is world-famous.
Mage Art is the equally wonderful idea that art is a sacred project, separate from the general community. This idea is embodied in the work of Odin Teatret and all the other followers of Grotowski. The assumption here is that training to be an artist should never be less difficult than training to be a samurai. These crafts require dedication, discipline, seclusion, and training. These warriors and priests of art place the artistic medium outside the community, someplace almost metaphysical. Here, the audience is less important than the action itself. This gives rise to those amazing shows that are so powerful to watch even (or especially) when they are in a foreign language. These people are not just people doing art, they are "artists" in some deeper sense of the word. Richard Schechner says that Grotowski was never part of the theatrical tradition that runs from Stanislavsky to Brook, because Grotowski's work was in the service of something beyond the medium of theater. Calling what Grotowski did "theater" is like calling the Egyptian pyramids "architecture."