TALK SHOW, Omer Fast, Abrons Art Center. November 11, 2009.

Two middle age men stepped onto the stage; they both looked familiar to me.

“So how did you get into this mess?” one man asked.

The other man proceeded to answer this question. He spoke about life in the 60’s, how teaching led him to political activism, and how Kennedy and Martin Luther King's deaths turned him toward violent measures. He reminisced about falling in love and burst into protest songs twice. The man spoke passionately, nervously and yet seemed a bit rehearsed. He ended his story by describing the accidental explosion at 11th street that killed his girlfriend and collaborator “Diane.”

This was when I realized that the person speaking was Bill Ayers from Weather Underground, and as in most of his interviews about the Underground, he made it clear that while Diane's death changed his entire approach, it also made him more determined to be an activist for the peace movement.

Applause.

Ayers exited the stage, and Lili Taylor took his seat. She asked the man on stage, whom I later found out was actor Tom Noonan, “So how did you get into this mess?” The game of telephone began.

And it was broken right the way. The actor had left out most of the idiosyncratic details in Ayers' narrative. His lifelong ideological struggle quickly evaporated into a tall tale about how loving a young woman led him to violent and regretful political actions. This left very little for Lili to work with. She basically had to start from a fairly generic love story and spin it out into a performance removed from historical context. Despite all, she did manage to captivate the audience with the tone and emotion of her performance.

Four more performers took turns. While I never thought a work by Omer Fast would make me laugh out loud, I was grateful that comedian Dave Hill took charge of the few rather grim narratives and injected some comic relief. By the time we got to the last performer, Rosie Perez, Diane had become a dangerously beautiful queer activist killed in an anti-Iraq-war protest because the protesters were making bombs to one-up each other in a competition for attention.

It was hard to watch Bill Ayers’ story deteriorating into farce with him sitting in the front row. But what did we expect? The performance was meant to be a kind of high-end theatrical experiment. And yet I couldn’t help but compare it to Fast’s other video works, particularly Godville (2005.) My dissatisfaction with the theater piece led me to explore how different performative structures produce and alter meaning, and how the role of forgetting plays out in the artist’s work.

In Talk Show, forgetting is a part of the act, a form of omission based on improvisation and the pressure of telling a story in real time. When something is left out by a player early in the chain, every subsequent player has to construct the narrative without that information.

In Godville, forgetting is the subject matter. The impression of a hole in the narrative is created through repeating and layering multiple interpretations, using jump cuts to compress time. The more we see, the less we feel we know about the actual narrative. In contrast, in the theater version where time is linear, the dissonance comes from the fact that we know more than the performer.

I guess the act of forgetting is much messier in real life. Rather than a kind of metaphorical erosion that we tend to theorize and recreate, forgetting things can be abrupt and arbitrary as a game of telephone.

And how about Bill Ayers? I wonder how many times he has told his story at this point in his life, and how many edits he has gone through in order to present a version of a remembrance that might just be too significant to be broken apart.

-- Annie Shaw

William Kentridge, ‘I AM NOT ME, THE HORSE IS NOT MINE’

Part lit. 102 ‘Russian Authors’, part manifesto, part mission statement, part midnight rambling, part literary history of the fragmented self, part didactic lecture, part comedy routine, part fragments of other parts. . .

. . . it begins as a lecture. Kentridge is on stage describing for us his research into Nicolai Gogol’s short story ‘The Nose’ for an upcoming opera ‘The Nose’ by Shostakovich. He’s an enthusiastic college professor, energized by the profundity of his subject: the fragmented self in the western cannon. He reads aloud from the text, pince-nez on, pince-nez off, on and off, off and on, the artist’s handsome prodigious nose. That nose! Then, of course, Gogol’s nose in the story is gone, off on a career of its own and we follow it, and as we do, Kentridge appears on the stage in the projection behind him. He’s in the Kentridge uniform, his own Chaplin bowler/Beuys vest: white shirt and black pants. The doubled self is pathetic, shuffles on stage, shoulders slumped, trying to hide, a bum, a clown; he’s channeling Kentridge’s failure, the possibility that nothing will align, no point of meaning arrive. He listens, bored, as Kentridge delves deeper into the history of the fragmented self: from Gogol, to Cervantes to Tristam Shandy, self divided against self, stories within stories.

Kentridge lectures on our capacity to make bits of paper into form. The projection becomes hands forming a horse of torn paper: it’s the horse in Cervantes, the horse in the title that appears. It starts with 10 pieces of paper for the horse, then 6 then 3: the limit of our capacity to hold it is reached. Overextended, it becomes paper again. The papers fall off the page and the pathetic double dodges them. He gathers Kentridge’s dropped papers and hurls them in the air, collects them in reverse order. Later he falls asleep on a chair and then he sneaks away silently.

We proceed through a series of fragment and vignettes as Kentridge circles for meaning within the larger project of forming the Opera. He’s kept awake at night in bed (he appears in the projection with his wife sleeping soundly beside him at 4 am) trying to make meaning out of the bits and pieces he’s presented with. He’s searching for parallels with Gogol’s story: ‘Trotsky is the Nose separated from the party . . . no no’ he says, followed by, ‘The Nose is Persephone in the Labyrinth. . .’ and then cruelly berates himself for forgetting his Greek myths. The sleeplessness devolves into a chaos of images, the Nose is diving into a pool over and over again, the Nose appears in a processional, the processional runs mad, flags torn apart, its hands and then puppets and people, Russian avant-garde posters and text.

Towards the end, Stalin’s tribunal meets and a man is on trial: Kentridge reads the text from his ladder while his doppelganger falls asleep behind him: it’s a desperate plea to be allowed to die of his illness, that his crimes against the party don’t warrant the punishment, he’s too weak to speak, and at the end of each short sentence/plea to the tribunal Kentridge reads: ‘in brackets, general laughter in the room.’ Twin telephone cables hum in a gale; it’s the self outside, a tribunal against the self, a utopian impulse that mocks human frailty. The bum sneaks off stage.


This storm of cross-pollinating fecundity is married to Kentridge’s ghost and oldest bugaboo – Felix and Soho – self divided from self. The real Kentridge (we presume) on stage is desperately searching for a whole to draw all these figures into. In its best moments we don’t need the 10 fragments, 6 will make the metaphor hum and even when there are only 3 and the bum/clown is right and the center can’t hold, when the horse disappears – even then, we are left holding the impulse, the desire to see a whole. That alone is worth the price of admission.

Twelve days into Performa 09 and nothing much stands out to write about. However, I have seen some great local, experimental, less-expensive performances in the same twelve days. It is possible that my attraction to one over the other is structural. All the Performa events seem very safe and produced for easy consumption.

Firstly, in celebration of the 100-year anniversary of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s ‘Manifesto of Futurism,’ Performa has integrated the theme of futurism into its programming. The first publication of this text in 1909 (Boccioni’s application of the manifesto to the visual arts came in 1910) is highly problematic in a contemporary space. It is about recklessness without accountability to a community or society, and blatantly misogynistic. There are only eleven points in the document; and Points 9 and 10 state: “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.” and “We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, we will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.” The 1909 manifesto stands revered and celebrated by Performa by renewing its content to a contemporary place without a critical or problematized platform.

Next, Performa is self-defined as a biennial dedicated to performance. However, the Performa Commissions program originates new performances by inviting artists, “many of whom have not worked ‘live’ before” to create work especially for the Performa biennial. This is a decision to promote already-deemed-acceptable artists to be shown yet again, versus taking risks and allowing un-tested emerging artists a larger platform that they rarely have access to. Also, the hand-selected commissioned artists work closely with the Performa production team from conceptualization to presentation. This, I suspect, is my reason for thinking that everything feels safe or tamed, like it has been tested for an uncritical (and paying) audience.

On the other hand, I went to the (non-Performa event) AUNTS Roadshow where I encountered a refreshing destabilizing experience as a viewer. The performances were non-hierarchical and happening everywhere in the space at once. Admission is a barter system, or a contribution to the free boutique/free bar, where everyone shops and drinks for free. It was a chain curation where the performers could do as many performances as they wanted, as long as they negotiated it with other performers in that evening. And, plenty of the works trusted my thinking ability as an spectator and I am still chewing on some in my head.

Granted, I haven’t yet seen many Performa events, I did see some of the Futurist Film programming at the Anthology film Archive and the works were lovely and easy to watch. They confirmed a traditional societal structure and did not make me have many questions as a spectator. Admission: $9

The Tacita Dean piece did not feel challenging either. The feature length film of Merce Cunningham’s dancers rehearsing in a gorgeous warehouse was a profoundly beautiful quotation to the end of his life, but not much else. I am always skeptical of beautiful film subjects (dancers, the warehouse, the Bay and sunlight) fueling a narrative. Watching in-shape bodies perform entertaining gestures is endlessly beautiful. The lack of musical soundtrack was the strongest aspect of the work. The juxtaposition of images of Merce Cunningham with the sounds of dancing feet was moving. Admission $10

Another performance I went to within the last twelve days was Will Rawls’ “Planet Eaters” at the Dance Theatre Workshop. This was not a Performa event, but an exciting model of risk and community. The event was part of the Studio Series; and Rawls used the evening to get feedback from the audience of about 40 people. He shared four movement sequences with us and asked us questions in between. At the end, we all sat in a circle and talked through some of our answers and thought. It was engaging critical dialogue and I appreciated the work that was being asked of me as spectator. Donation: $3

The Performa biennial claims to “build an exciting community of artists and audiences” however, a trusting, critical performance arts community already exists! Talented, questioning, hard-working performance artists are vibrant in this city and challenging the structures of how performance is shared. Performa feels regressive to me because it is pre-ordained and a modern construct for art tourism, based solely on art as entertainment. I was in conflict about writing a blog about Performa, because I did not want to contribute to the bloated attention that the festival is already receiving. Despite my hesitations and disappointments, I will continue to seek and share my observations for the last ten days.

-- Lindsay L Benedict

Hello Readers!

Stay tuned for reviews on Performa 09.