Felix Bernstein & Gabe Rubin

Vomitorium is a tragicomic reflection on the history of metatheatre from religious ritual to livestreaming. As in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, where the protagonist listens to old recordings of himself, Felix Bernstein and Gabe Rubin replay their own digitally mediated grief on loop, risking banality and injury. Transitioning between genre, gender, and age, they play through multiple tropes, eras, and personae—juxtaposing baroque complexity with the currently fashionable metaphysics of presence, transparency, and immersion.

In this video installation, the “vomitorium” is traced from its origin as the Greek theater’s entryway to today’s socially reflexive architecture built for Instagram selfie-stories—in both, people watch each other watching each other binge and purge media. The enduring wish for a 360-degree vantage marks both panoptic social media and counter-surveillance tactics; normative and queer gazes. Likewise, the digital emphasis on comment, fandom, remake, labels, and frames is traced back to ancient theatre via the chorus and religion via illuminated commentary.

Bernstein plays Onkos. Named after the tumorous masks of Greek tragedy, Onkos narrates and annotates performance documentation in a degenerative feedback loop. He mirrors the navel-gazing of a culture that constantly re-views and revues—where preview precedes essence. Rubin plays the Erotes (Eros, Anteros, Anti-Eros, Seraphim); these sparring Caravaggisti angels demonstrate a rivalrous split in love between cruelty and tenderness, virtue and vice. They climactically destroy Big Brother as the locus of subjectivity, revealing instead a vacant Ejectivity: automated watching without interest.

Bernstein and Rubin work across theater, film, poetry, and digital media, often playing fictional and anachronous characters. Vomitorium is part of their ongoing analysis of madness and mimesis in drag and trans performance. They began developing these personae for Bernstein’s performance Bieber Bathos Elegy at the Whitney Museum in 2016 and in Folie à Deux at David Lewis Gallery in 2018.

Curated by Tim Griffin and Matthew Lyons