GENERAL HOSPITAL guest star James Franco has written an article for Friday's Wall Street Journal titled, "A Star, a Soap and the Meaning of Art: Why an appearance on GENERAL HOSPITAL qualifies as performance art."
The folks at GENERAL HOSPITAL informed me that in three days of filming we backlogged enough material for 23 episodes. There will be one more step. After all of the Franco episodes are aired, my character's storyline will be advanced in a special episode filmed in a "legitimate" New York gallery. One more layer will be added to this already layer-heavy experiment. If all goes according to plan, it will definitely be weird. But is it art?
Franco also writes about his obsession with performance art in general.
I have been obsessed with performance art for over a decade—ever since the Mexican performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña came to visit my class at Cal Arts summer school. I finally took the plunge and experimented with the form myself when I signed on to appear on 20 episodes of GENERAL HOSPITAL as the bad-boy artist "Franco, just Franco." I disrupted the audience's suspension of disbelief, because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn't belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world. In performance art, the outcome is uncertain—and this was no exception. My hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate. Whether they did was out of my hands.
Read the full article at WSJ.com.
I can't tell if James Franco is a genius or a nut but I still wanna have his babies.
ReplyDeleteCan we take a moment to celebrate soaps being discussed in the Wall Street Journal?
ReplyDeleteSoap fans are forever agonizing about the lack of soap exposure in other media, this is a pretty big deal. Today WSJ, tomorrow there may be a GH commercial during primetime.