LETTER: The Blockbuster Effect (Spring 2010)

The Blockbuster Effect feature story was published in Spring 2010.<.

Thank you for your intelligent, well-considered article The Blockbuster Effect (Spring 2010). However, having created the Warhol performance at the Glenbow for its 2002 Pop Revolution exhibition, and expanding upon it for both the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2004 and for The Factory Project in Montreal in 2008, I must point out that this program involved far more than simply playing a “mascot.” The structured theatre performance I developed helped to contextualize Warhol’s life within a narrative I would like to think was engaging, accessible and creative for museum visitors, as well as enhancing their ability to understand the works in the exhibition. Improvised performances — from group tours to talking one on one with everyone from small children to senior citizens, led to incredibly rich conversations about art, sexuality, politics and media that I doubt would have been otherwise possible. To interface with an actor playing Andy, especially when it was presented as pure artifice, was somehow far less threatening for visitors than to engage with a guide.

The process engendered a sense of play that was critical to understanding the era, and a process that was highly memorable for those who took part in it. My incarnation of Warhol led a school program where students investigated the role of media in the 1960s, interviewed me in the role, honed critical questioning techniques, and generated some particularly exciting discussions on censorship within the arts.

I would like to say that every museum theatre program at the Glenbow had this ambition, but sadly, something went terribly wrong with the program starting in 2005, culminating in a truly embarrassing turn during the Edwin Holgate exhibition. A farcical piece entitled The Complete History of Canadian Art with a lecherous Tom Thomson and a babbling, incoherent Emily Carr — became the iceberg that sunk the museum theatre program at the Glenbow, which is truly unfortunate.

My personal belief, as a professional actor and art / museum educator, is that one discipline of the arts can so richly inform another. Granted, there is much danger in turning the experience into a Disneyesque folly. But done correctly, cross-disciplinary expressions between art and performance are brimming with richness and possibility. I hope that I have planted somewhat of a seed in convincing you that there was more at play than an actor in a funny wig with this project, and that you might take a closer look next time you encounter something like this.

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