Saturday, May 29, 2010

Opening Reception for Temporary Toy Theater Museum and Greatest Smallest Parade

GSW TTF poster

The Great Small Works
Ninth International Toy Theater Festival

opens the

Temporary Toy Theater Museum

with a

Reception & Parade!

Come to St. Ann's Warehouse and see the finest examples of historical and contemporary Toy Theaters, with works by collectors and
visual artists reinterpreting the Toy Theater form, including a group of
classic Spanish stages. (FREE!)

Greatest Smallest Parade • 3:00pm
The Opening Reception will be heralded by the first-ever Greatest
Smallest Parade! Tiny floats accompanied by a full-force marching
brass band will wind through the sidewalks of DUMBO and finish at the
Warehouse, where all the shoebox-sized rolling masterpieces will be
displayed. (FREE!)

Reception • 4:00 to 7:00pm
Meet the artists and view the expansive exhibition!

Sunday, May 30th, 2010
3-7pm
St. Ann's Warehouse
DUMBO, Brooklyn
www.stannswarehouse.org
www.greatsmallworks.org

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Great Small Works performs at Queens Museum of Art

On June 6th Great Small Works will perform a brand new episode of their signature photomontage news serial, The Toy Theater of Terror as Usual (their first since 2002).  The performances will take place at the Queens Museum of Art as part of their “First Sunday” event.  The live shows are part of a “Terror As Usual” retrospective included in the Curse of Bigness Show currently running at the QMA.

    An extra special attraction of the premier will be a co-performance with a team from The High School For Arts and Business in South Corona Queens.  The students have been working with Great Small Works teaching artists all spring to devise their own news based, montage, toy theater shows. 

     The Terror As Usual series began in the fall of 1990, during the countdown to the first Gulf War, as a way to respond to the everyday terror of reading about current events in the newspaper. Come out on June 6th 2010 to see how 3 generations of politically engaged artists turn the news of the day into prismatic useful and entertaining spectacle.  Get inspired to re-mix the images and tell your own story! 

Great Small Works will perform at 1:00 and 3:30.

 

Great Small Works Toy Theater Festival in the Schools and at the Queens Museum of Art

 

During the Spring of 2010 fifty five students from The High School for Arts and Business in South Corona Queens began working with Great Small Works teaching artists to create photo montage news based toy theater shows.  The project was inspired by a retrospective Great Small Works was asked to create by Larissa Harris as part of the Curse of Bigness Show at the Queens Museum of Art.  While preparing the 13 stages that would be installed around the Panorama of New York City at the museum, and by looking at old video footage and piecing together an historic timeline we remembered how useful these mysterious little news shows actually were for collective thought.  In the twilight of the newspaper era we thought it would be very cool to share the tools we had learned for responding to the news with a younger generation of artists. 

   

We are grateful to Robert Tomlin, the students, and the principal of the High School for Arts and Business for dedicating classroom time to critical thinking and writing about the news.  Also, for allowing messy processes like puppet building, rehearsing and the collaborative work that goes along with this art form to take over for a while.

  

Schedule:

Great Small Works, and students from the High School for Arts and Business will present three premier  Toy Theater of Terror As Usual shows during the Festival.  We hope you will attend!  

 

June 6th Queens Museum of Art

1:00pm--Great Small Works and students

3:30 PM-- Great Small Works 

 

June 6th 8PM St Ann’s Warehouse 

Toy Theater Festival Cabaret--Great Small Works 

 

June 8th 5:30 PM at St Ann’s Warehouse

with students 

 

GSW Teaching artists: Jenny Romaine, Laura Ayers, Stephen Kaplin, John Bell and Sam Wilson

Faculty partner at High School for Arts and Business: Robert Tomlin

Special Thanks: to the staff of the Queens Museum of Art--Laura Groskinsky and the education department, Larissa Harris, and many others. Also to the Emily David and Joseph S. Kornfeld Foundation for their generous support of this project.  

 

 

Opening Reception for Temporary Toy Theater Museum and Greatest Smallest Parade

GSW TTF poster

The Great Small Works 
Ninth International Toy Theater Festival 

opens the 

Temporary Toy Theater Museum 

with a 

Reception & Parade!

Come to St. Ann's Warehouse and see the finest examples of historical and contemporary Toy Theaters, with works by collectors and
visual artists reinterpreting the Toy Theater form, including a group of 
classic Spanish stages. (FREE!)

Greatest Smallest Parade • 3:00pm
The Opening Reception will be heralded by the first-ever Greatest 
Smallest Parade! Tiny floats accompanied by a full-force marching 
brass band will wind through the sidewalks of DUMBO and finish at the
Warehouse, where all the shoebox-sized rolling masterpieces will be 
displayed. (FREE!)

Reception • 4:00 to 7:00pm
Meet the artists and view the expansive exhibition!

Sunday, May 30th, 2010
3-7pm
St. Ann's Warehouse
DUMBO, Brooklyn
www.stannswarehouse.org
www.greatsmallworks.org

Sunday, May 9, 2010

"Toy Theater of Terror as Usual" at Queens Museum of Art

In the mid-19th century, home entertainment often involved toy theater: a mass-produced proscenium theater performed on a living room table with flat cut-out characters and scripts based on the popular hits of the day.  The tradition thrived in Europe and the United States until it was superseded by film and television (a different kind of box that sits on the living room table). In the early 1990s, an experimental theater group now known as Great Small Works rediscovered the medium as a tool to address major contemporary events shaping New York City and the world. Using excerpted philosophical works and cut-out images from newspapers and magazines glued to stiff backing, moved expressively and given voice by five visible puppeteers hovering around a tabletop proscenium stage, The Toy Theater of Terror as Usual (1991- 2002) satirized with Dada-inspired photomontage the run-up to the first Gulf War, the L.A. riots, and intersections of art, AIDS, and real estate that characterized New York in the Bush Sr. and Clinton years. For the Curse of Bigness, the group restages selected scenes as tableaux in 13 rudimentary theaters installed on the walkway surrounding the Panorama of the City of New York, in a dramatic juxtaposition of miniature spectacles. Recreated scenes include a moment from Episode 7: Metro Section, in which Olympic athletes soar above a two-level backdrop of New York City's skyline while at ground level a recumbent skeleton marks the 1991 discovery of the African Burial Ground and the final scene from Episode 9: Doom, which illustrates an urban utopia as described by downtown artist and visionary Jack Smith, with a chorus of Greek women atop an old Bronx bank building rebuilt as a cultural center; a gaggle of naked babies and yellow baby chicks; two giant hands with crossed fingers for luck framing the top of the stage opening; and a herd of cows draped with dollar bills. "I can imagine a million ways," Smith writes, "for the world to be completely different."

Although most New Yorkers now associate the word terror with the September 11th attacks, the majority of these works were created before that date.  The title and content of the series were inspired by anthropologist Michael Taussig’s essay “Terror As Usual,” which drew on Walter Benjamin’s 1940s idea that “‘the state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule."  Great Small Works combined this concept with the group's own perception of the media complicity in the run-up to the first Gulf War, and discovered that re-using images and texts from the daily news on a toy theater stage allowed them to articulate and communicate their own sense of what was taking place all around them.

Video footage of performances at venues such as P.S.122, the Bread and Puppet Museum, the Henson International Puppet Festival, and 1991 anti-war events will also be on view. The group’s reinvention of the toy theater form spurred a world-wide revival, which Great Small Works showcases bi-annually with an International Toy Theater Festival, the ninth iteration of which will take place at St. Ann’s Warehouse from May 30 – June 13th 2010. Great Small Works will create first new episode of the Toy Theater of Terror as Usual since 2002, to be performed at both QMA and St. Ann's Warehouse on June 6th.

Larissa Harris
Curator
Queens Museum of Art