The Triumph of Crowds

By Brigid McLeer

Art by Ashley Lamb

$15.00

Details
Publisher
Litmus Press
Original Language(s)
English
Additional Credits
Original Collage by Ashley Lamb
Design by Mark Addison Smith
Genre(s)
Drama
Edition, Year
First Edition, 2019
ISBN
978-1-933959-39-9
Pages
90
Format
Paperback
Availability
In Print

Winner of the 2016 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers

The Triumph of Crowds is a lecture as performance, or performance as lecture, distributed between the voices and gestures of ten performers. Written in conversation with Nicholas Poussin’s painting The Triumph of David (1631), The Triumph of Crowds asks the question “What does it mean to appear politically?” In McLeer’s invented form of the “distributed performance lecture,” the author undertakes an aesthetic experiment in leveling the structured spaces in which political discourse and actions occur. Triumph unfolds in the space of a “pause” and scatters its performance “across so many bodies, images, objects, voices and sounds” to explore the politics of public assembly, protest, and becoming “us.”

Brigid McLeer
Brigid Mc Leer is an Irish artist based in London. She trained in Fine Art at NCAD, Dublin, University of Ulster, Belfast and Slade School of Art, London. She recently completed a PhD by practice in Fine Art at the ... Read More
Ashley Lamb
Ashley Lamb is an artist and educator currently living in Chicago. Her work has been featured on books of poems, at galleries, a fish warehouse, beside the beach, a slaughterhouse, during a parade, between floorboards, and other such ... Read More

Into this pause is scattered the performance, which
across all its distributions of people, images, actions,
activities, silences, speeches, readings, gestures, sounds, reminders, echoes and repetitions, continually asks the question “What does it mean to appear politically?” And then answers, “It means this…” “And this…” “Perhaps this…”

—Brigid McLeer, from the Introduction

 

Praise for The Triumph of Crowds

The Triumph of Crowds is a layered work, weaving art history, film and the contemporary politics and poetics of community. It opens up the space of performance into a time that is both meditative and urgent.

— Fiona Templeton

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