Stuart Sherman (Artist-in-Residence)

Stuart Sherman’s residency inaugurates a new series of Artist Residencies in the Reference Gallery that begins with the establishment of the List Visual Arts Center and the opening of the Wiesner building. 

A performance artist, sculptor, theater director, writer, and filmmaker, Sherman is a singular artist occupying the space between avant-garde theater and conceptual art. Influenced by his work in the 1960s with Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company in Greenwich Village, the artist’s performance-installations inject sculptural and playful mise-en-scènes with an absurdist mysticism, exploring the potential for unity between thoughts, objects, and language.

Sherman’s residency centers on the development and performance of a new theatrical piece titled Chekhov. The first in a trilogy—to be followed by Strindberg and Brecht—Sherman’s latest work distills a portrait of the nineteenth-century Russian playwright into a twelve-minute vignette. Sherman takes on Chekhov’s notorious preoccupation with dialogue as a framework for his own explorations of the materiality of language. “Certainly, in Chekhov’s world, language dominates,” Sherman says. “People talk and never do anything. They even talk about only talking and never doing anything.” The playwright’s scripts extend to the set pieces of Sherman’s new performance, with excerpts of Chekhov’s major works printed onto the surfaces of a cartoonishly rendered cardboard orchard. The artist will assemble the stage sets in the gallery over the course of three weeks, inviting the MIT community and passersby alike to see the work in progress. He will also cast MIT students as actors through auditions held during the List Center’s opening events.

Sherman’s culminating exhibition, Chekhov Plus, includes sculptures, videotapes, and films, as well as the creation of a second new work: Inside an Outsider’s View of MIT. For this Institute-inspired piece, Sherman performs solo inside an environment of his own design dubbed a “light bulb garden.” After screwing and unscrewing the bulbs around him, Sherman mock-electrocutes himself (or, in the artist’s words, “gains illumination”) by biting into an “electric candy bar.” The performance is accompanied by a video work depicting different spaces at MIT (including the well-known “infinite corridor”) spliced together with shots of a light bulb on a plate.

 A screening of Sherman’s films will take place in the Reference Gallery, followed by a discussion of their relationship to his sculptures and performances on view.