SUPPORTICO LOPEZ

From Morn’ Till Midnight is the title of a painting dated 1946 by Julian Beck (*1925, died 1985), founder of the Living Theatre, abstract expressionist and poet. Alongside Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Yves Kline his lively paintings were exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim’s groundbreaking gallery “Art of this Century”. Although inspired by this prominent group of abstract expressionist painters he turned the act of painting into a live gesture which involved the whole body, making the picture and the painter a single entity. Along with his wife, actress Judith Malina, he was the original engine of the avant-garde performance group “The Living Theatre” established in 1947. This is where he would fuel his artistic fervour until the end of his life, promoting ideas of anarcho-pacifism and liberalism throughout Europe, South America and the US.

From Morn’ Till Midnight tries to translate his idea of living acts into the concept of possibilities and time. Imagining the time lapse of a day as representation of a life-time-action, the space is conceived as stage for creation, destruction and poetry. The artists involved share the common trait of a demand for confrontation with action, voiced by dynamic gestures, opposing time that elapses passively but provoking change though active participation.

The central visionnaire installation by Tobias Madison and Flavio Merlo is an in-situ work that uses water to amplify sound. The work is intended as a play activated and performed by the computers, the gallery itself through its water and workers as an actual Frankenstein. The recording of the performance Frankenstein by the Living Theatre held in Berlin in 1965 is filtered, edited and sent back through the help of water; a swimming pool and sculpture of a stage that recovers the idea of action and freedom.