The many nuances of the message communicated by multimedia artist Heinrich Nicolaus’ Theatre of More (ToM), will continue to reveal themselves to you after you leave the gallery space—and this is exactly the venture’s goal.  “On view” at White Box through September 13—though “in the works” strikes me as a more accurate description of the exhibition’s ontological status—ToM seems entropic and overwhelms, at first; stop a minute, though, for a think, and the project offers layers of significance which unfurl before you like flower petals opening towards the morning sun.  Described in the press release as an "interdisciplinary multimedia collaborative project," ToM "proposes the communal collaborations" of a wide and varied range of local and international artists, architects, musicians, new media artists, writers and performers of many shades.  Nicolaus takes his inspiration from16th century Italian philosopher Giulio Camillo's Teatro Della Memoria (Theatre of Memory), created in 1528.  Camillo espoused the “eternal element of all things”; he proposed that experience, like an unending spectacle, lives on eternally, archived in our memories and forever accessible, mutable, offering endless potential for interpretation. 

For ToM’s Prologue, which was exhibited in June as a collateral project of the 53^rd Venice Biennale Detournement 2009, Nicolaus created a series of drawings, prototypes and maquettes for a seven-tiered seating platform which he designed directly after the theatre that Camillo built centuries earlier.  Nicolaus’ realization of this wooden structure is now located in the White Box gallery, and functions literally as well as symbolically as the fulcrum of his project.  Just as Camillo’s theatre operated as a metaphor for his principles as well as providing a site for performances which adhered to and therefore demonstrated those very principles, so Nicolaus uses the tribune to represent his conceit both conceptually as well as physically.  Every moment of our daily lives can be, Nicolaus suggests, experienced in the same way we might experience the performances and events of his ToM.  He does not acknowledge an insoluble boundary between real and artificial, actor and audience, past and present, and suggests that as we as viewers watch, look or listen, we are not passive witnesses but rather active participants, living a moment which we will be able to revisit eternally in the “repository” of our memories, enacting, in revisiting, a re-performance of sorts.  This renders all of experience eternally present and available for a new interpretation.  Each ToM art event takes place only once, but remnants, or souvenirs, of its occurence are immediately “archived” in the cubicles which Nicolaus built into the back of his wooden platform.  The platform functions as at once as the physical site of each event as well as the vehicle for storing something that remains from each event; it enables an enactment, on a microcosmic scale, of the dynamic between past and present, artifice and reality, experience and memory, that Nicolaus wishes to demonstrate is also a possibility afforded by the macrocosmic “platform” of our daily lives.

Nicolaus works continually with an ever-expanding "curatorial multidisciplinary advisory team," including lead curators Juan Puntes and Wolf Guenter Thiel, to enlist the participation of collaborators who will all be termed "artists" but whose contributions are expected to run the gamut of creative output.  These will range from the obviously artistic to the economic, to the anthropological, even to the ecological (I was informed that artist Frances Levine, for example, is expected to perform an on-site “greenification” of the exhibition space as her piece).  Some performances are scheduled, some are to-be-determined as the project progresses, develops and defines itself.  The archive, which consists both of the cubbies nestled into the back of the theatre as well as a number of “installations” begun by artists and added to by willing participants as ToM progresses, will grow and fluctuate, as well, as dictated by the events themselves.  One of the few tangible art objects on display from the project’s opening and created in advance by Nicolaus are large sheets of paper, strewn about the gallery floor, bearing printed translations of Camillo’s writings in small, black font.  These have been printed over with large, red, block-lettering (undoubtedly a reference to the manifesto).  An on-site curator explained to me that the red lettering, which spelled out phrases including “Love yourself,” “Beauty is not a luxury,” or “Money is no problem,” expresses Nicolaus’ personal interpretation, or distillation, of Camillo’s ideas.  The exhibition seems to suggest that we are each meant to find our own Manifesto for Life through a process of re-visitation and re-consideration, filtering through our experiences and our memories, of ToM as well as of the performance called Life in which we all participate daily, in order to distill something of worth for ourselves.

As I was leaving the gallery, a flurry of men and women carrying large framed paintings, boxes of fabric, ladders and various sorts of installation equipment, hurried inside; I watched from the sidewalk as they continued to enter and exit, staging and rearranging things in the gallery space while other clients milled around. At first I couldn't discern which "props" were part of the exhibition and which existed as elements of this real-time event preparation to which I had unwittingly become witness.  I soon realized, though, that my desire to make such a distinction misses the point entirely; had I learned nothing?  Suddenly I understood: allowing the “performance” to elide with my experience of the performance is precisely what Nicolaus has in mind.  In the same way that ToM performances are eternally available for reinvestigation by spending a moment in the archive, so do our experiences take their places—always accessible, providing an infinity of potential for discovery of something new—in the “living repository” of our memories.

    
- Emily Nathan

(*Images: ToM Installation view (Photo credit: Doug Todd);  Tribuna/Archivio (2009). Courtesy White Box, NY)