Robert Grosvenor's show left me thinking of early Edward Albee, being about theater without quite being theater, the interests in both cases being structure. His works are like seemingly offhand but very sophisticated beach architecture: the sculpture of the precise arrangement of what's laying around. And the Albee play I'm thinking of is The Sandbox.



Banks Violette's interests manifest as theater full on. His shows have become viscerally terrifying descriptions of the imagination of addiction (or of one form of addiction). It's the nightmare architecture of a mind filled with broken glass. And of course it indulges the nightmare by glamorizing it.

On contemporary architecture, theater, and glass: more here


and here.

Grosvenor and Albee are close enough in age that they're both from the generation that was trying to come to terms with the end of an ideal and of an ideal art, but with the fact of perception and therefore subjectivity still kept at a distance. "Here we have an object... man... event/word... metaphor... story/ emotion." It's a form of diffidence, and diffidence is a also a form of indulgence.