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Transcultural Translations of Performance in Wunderbaum’s Looking for Paul

Teresa Kovacs (University of Michigan) & Katharina Pewny (Ghent University)

Looking for Paul is a production by the Dutch theatre collective Wunderbaum. Premiering in 2010, it attempts a collective approach to the conflictual work of Los Angeles-based visual artist Paul McCarthy. Looking for Paul reaches out to the West: it stages a journey of the theatre collective from Rotterdam to Los Angeles. Simultaneously, it focuses on travel from the opposite direction: Paul McCarthy’s sculpture Santa Claus travels from his working space in L.A. to Rotterdam. Travelling processes from Europe to the U.S. and vice versa inform the performance on the textual level, through the use of different media, and in the acting.

This article thus starts from the hypothesis that travelling in the sense of “transfer” is the key concept of Looking for Paul. This concept allows the Wunderbaum collective to discuss how to find one’s “own” position in comparison to theatre and performance tradition, to explore the specifics of Netherland’s, Europe’s and U.S.’s theatre and performance tradition, and to reflect on cultural transfer between Europe and the United States. At first glance it seems as Wunderbaum is staging the search for an artistic position in relation to the work of McCarthy. However, a closer look reveals that McCarthy functions as a variable. It is not a work about one specific artist, but about U.S.- and European theatre-, art- and performance tradition and their mutual perception. Looking for Paul questions the expectations of artists and art in both cultures by referring to different works from performances and drama-based theatre, as well to films, cartoons, and music. In the performance they allude to William Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, David Lynch, Lady Gaga, and Andy Warhol, as well as to Frank Castorf, Pina Bausch, Johan Simons, and Lars von Trier, before ultimately returning to Walt Disney and Hollywood. “Travelling” is further connected to economic transfer and to questions of cultural funding. Wunderbaum is interested in the debate surrounding the shortage of government funding of the arts, following the example of the U.S., which was implemented in the Netherlands in 2010.

This article will follow the different forms of travelling that are implemented in Looking for Paul. We will first focus on how McCarthy’s performances and sculptural art travels into and through the performance. Secondly, we will discuss how the concept of travelling gives a formative principle to the performance. In so doing, we not only attempt to describe the transcultural translations of performance in Wunderbaum’s Looking for Paul, but also propose adjusting Mieke Bal’s travelling concepts to think about transcultural theatre.1

What is the starting point of the different travel processes in this performance? Wunderbaum places Looking for Paul within the controversy around the public exhibition of Paul McCarthy’s sculpture Santa Claus in the Dutch city of Rotterdam. McCarthy’s so-called “butt plug gnome” was produced between 2001 and 2005 on behalf of the city of Rotterdam. In 2008, it was moved to its permanent “home” on Eendrachtsplein after repeated protests concerning its former locations. Eendrachtsplein is located in the center of Rotterdam, between the old town and the downtown areas and on the border of the city’s museum quarter. What is of interest for this article is that McCarthy’s work was—because of the protests and problems with finding a place where the sculpture could be presented to the public following the purchase of the sculpture by the City of Rotterdam in 2002—received as kind of a “travelling” sculpture. Different newspapers, art magazines, and websites highlighted the fact that no one really wanted this sculpture. Hence, its fate was to “wander” from place to place in Rotterdam before ultimately finding a permanent site.2 Wunderbaum both reenacts McCarthy’s works while simultaneously remediating the travelling of McCarthy’s sculpture and, in a broader reading, the travelling of art and culture.

This article presents a new theoretical and methodological approach in the field of transcultural theatre by discussing it through the lens of “travelling”. We bring Mieke Bal’s understanding of travelling concepts into conversation with re-enactment, a characteristic method of postdramatic theatre forms. Travelling concepts and reenactment interact in a very productive way. Both are connected to process and seriality and deny final determination—similar to McCarthy’s pre-2008 Santa Claus.