"THE AGE OF TOMATO: Tomato paste", audaciously borrows formal properties by Richard Serra’s “Molten Led” series. Here, instead of steel or lead, I work with tomato paste: a seasonal, and regional temporal substance that shifts between the edible, the sculptural, and the abject.
In contemporary public life, social theatre is increasingly pervasive; we are positioned not as spectators alone, but as active participants within systems of continuous response. Looking back to the vaudeville stage, the audience was never passive. The stage functioned as a field in which the collective body tested the actors on stage through material and vocal reactions. Depending on class, context, and performance, the thrown object oscillated between affirmation and refusal—flowers or coins offered as fleeting gestures of approval in amateur contexts, or decaying produce, tomatoes, bottles, and discarded objects deployed as forms of dissent.
Historical accounts describe audiences stamping, hissing, roaring, and whistling, sometimes groaning in rhythmic unison, while projecting matter toward the stage. Response was immediate and embodied.
Nineteenth-century theatre thus operated as a densely social and often unruly space, where attention was dispersed and porous. Contemporary “social theatre” extends this condition into a more open and continuous field of exchange, where gestures of approval and disapproval circulate instantaneously. This raises questions of temporality and agency: what is seasonal—the act, the incident, or its reception? And who, ultimately, is coming of age—the performer on stage, or the audience fully embedded within the act of witnessing?
By the end of the nineteenth century, this sonic and spatial excess was gradually disciplined into silence, yet its residue persists as a history of participation, excess, and embodied spectatorship—continuing to shape how we understand the politics of looking and being looked at.
The social fabric of our world is thus gradually stained and pictorially leaves an indelible imprint – serving both as a reminder and a warning. Is this a testament to rejection, or a metaphor for the everyday condition itself? In which direction, then, should the throw be aimed—this fleeting, ephemeral cast?
I await your directions!
Ongoing thread. More from Georgia Kotretsos to follow.
