MEDIA: Photo Gallery »

Of All the People in All the World, USA
Through March 3, Zilkha Gallery, Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University, Middletown, (860) 685-3355, wesleyan.edu/cfa, and at other locations in that vicinity

Note: Since Of All the People in All the World, USA is an art gallery installation featuring performers from an acclaimed British experimental-theater company, we sent both theater critic Christopher Arnott and art critic Stephen Kobasa to review it. So they went to Middletown together for the exhibit's opening on Feb. 20.

Rice Up!
By Christopher Arnott

Such restraint! The premise of this show is that one grain of rice equals one person. If I were a small theater company and had come up with the idea of a pile of rice representing humanity, there's no way I wouldn't be kicking up a cloud of the stuff by show's end, or pouring it through huge funnels onto the audience or — an obvious metaphor for a piece whose fresh factoids involve global warming — cooking it up into wet, glutinous hunks of yuck.

But James Yarker, artistic director of Stan's Café — the Birmingham, England-based troupe commissioned by Wesleyan to do a new U.S. version of their long-running conceptual rice concoction in Middletown — says the performers' main motivation is to "keep things neat and tidy." He talks about the piece's innate theatricality — he no longer allows renditions of it to exist solely as gallery exhibits once the players have moved on. He relives the revelations, from when the piece was first performed five years ago, that his numbers-into-rice idea was "robust enough to exist outside a gallery environment" and also that "you could make it funny."

Yet, the resulting show is astonishingly reserved. The titles that accompany each of the piles are basic, succinct and minimally informative — "people per nurse in Nevada," "people who will die today," "people with HIV." The titles don't reveal actual numbers, allowing the significance of the statement to be dramatically conveyed in the displays themselves. Oh! Many more people are born than die each day! A lot of Big Macs get eaten! There are a lot of unmarried millionaires out there (part of a ricey riff on the idea that "money can't buy me love").

With the troupe's blessing, the university has amplified the piece not just with local content but a mountain of eco-friendly statistics solicited by Barry Chernoff from his Intro to Environmental Studies class. There's also a promotional tie-in with Middletown restaurants, who are offering specials on rice dishes while the exhibit's in town. (Yikes! I just ate a portion equivalent to those who perished on the Titanic! Can I stomach dessert?)

Nearly six tons of rice are needed for the Wesleyan version of Of All the People in All the World, which is scaled to the population of the United States. The couple of times when the show has actually tried to represent "all the people in the world" (in Germany a few years ago and at the theater company's new performance space last month) over 20 times that amount was required.

For the first night of the 12-day event, Stan's Café had laid out a few dozen examples, then largely stood back while the unwieldy opening-reception crowd browsed the Zilkha Gallery's jutting, angular space. Occasionally they would brush some rice pile back into its pristine mound format. (A few of the piles are shaped into symbols — the National Mall when the numbers refer to Obama's inaugural, for instance — but mostly they're lumps.) The "performers" will be a bit more active during gallery viewing hours until the installation ends on March 3, creating new rice-reflective statistical statements and wandering around more freely with their clinical notepads and grain scoops. A work table is adorned with old-school scales and balances, furthering the science façade; new numbers about what we value in today's world, stuck in a sterile and stereotype-strewn context.

You can't actually digest Of All the People in All the World too long without it losing its flavor. Too many of its concepts can seem half-baked, uncooked, lacking in color or texture. But that's rice for you. The cool presentation of this show at least makes you respect that white rice can be a more involving method than basic white paper and black ink to convey cold, hard and scary facts about population growth, war deaths and global environmental decay. For some, that's spicy enough.

The Resonance of Rice
By Stephen Vincent Kobasa

In the sunlight, there is a grace to the pale, toy hills that suggests one of Isamu Noguchi's plazas moved indoors. They are abstractions at a distance. But there is an incongruence between their appearance and their function as statistical renderings. These two particular heaps represent, respectively, the population of Iraq and the number of McDonald's customers in this country during a single day.

Why do this?

Stan's Café move through the gallery clad in laboratory coats. There is a spirit of science play theater here: Mr. Wizard for adults. Ample statistics provide an element of authority. From their growing archive of numbers they invent realms of unexpected comparisons. Visual ironies emerge in a side-show collection meant to move its viewers with the shock of small monstrosities.

But the texts here are definitive. All the scatterings — some of a single grain, others of several — require titles for distinction. Though Stan's Cafe requires that each of the numbers they illustrate represents an aggregate of individual human beings and not of, say, carbon molecules, the sense of unique identities disappears only a few feet away from any of the assemblages, even those using a single grain, or few.

In the delicate choreography of moving around the installation, there is something wondrous but empty. It is all fragile, of course (one viewer at the opening was seen to mime kicking a pile into disarray) but this was no surprise, since the rice as medium, being merely convenient, constantly threatens to dehumanize its subjects. The curious nature of the project, its grammar school scale, threatens it with the doom of the charming. If this is all the world, can it really be of that much significance?

Because the implication of waste is so strong, great pains are taken to assure the larger community that the materials will be distributed to local food pantries and soup kitchens at the end of the exhibition's run. But, in a world full of desperate hunger, the sight of so much food used for the (comparatively frivolous-seeming) purposes of art may be the greatest shock the work provides.

The installation extends outside the gallery proper to several other local sites, including a storefront window on Middletown's Main Street. There are the two pieces of rice for those from the city who died in Vietnam, and another heap for the "draft dodgers" — that vilifying phrase — who escaped to Canada. But what it made me remember was a documentary film of that war in which an American patrol was shown burning a farming village; the soldiers throwing the baskets of rice into the fire. That rice told me something.

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