Most of this is complete bullshit. Not because the artists are frauds, though some are, but because they’re trying. They’re performing performing. They’ve got this idea in their heads about what transgressive looks like, what experimental sounds like, what matters, and they’re executing that idea with all the spontaneity of a tax return.
And then someone like Megan Dunn gets up there and just… sings.
No concept. No framework. Just her voice and a room full of people and the understanding that this moment is what it is and nothing more. That’s the radical act nobody talks about: presence without pretense. Being there without the safety net of irony or the armor of intellectualization.
The rest of that night, Martin Schwartz doing his thing, Michael Hunter with his “large-scale hair choreo-poem” (fuck, even the description is exhausting), they’re operating in that space where art becomes a barrier between the artist and the audience. Look at me being strange! Look at me being brave! Look at me subverting your expectations! It’s performance about performance, critique dressed up as creation, and everybody in the room knows the game well enough to nod appreciatively while they’re secretly wondering when they can leave.
But Dunn? She bypassed all that horseshit and went straight to the vein. No mediation. No translation required. Just the raw fact of a human being making sound for other human beings in a shared space and time that will never happen again in exactly that way. That’s it. That’s the whole impossible miracle we keep trying to capture with all our theoretical frameworks and provocations and interventions.
The honesty is in the not trying. Or maybe it’s in trying to do only the one thing: be here, make this sound, let it land where it lands. Everything else that night was an elaborate negotiation with the audience’s expectations. Dunn just showed up and sang.
That’s rarer than you’d think. Harder too.
A piece by Martin Shwartz, a live music set by Meghan Dunn, and a large-scale hair choreo-poem by Michael Hunter.
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“Silent gratitude isn’t very much to anyone.” Gertrude fucking Stein again. By #6 we were deep enough in that silence had become its own problem, all the things we weren’t saying to each other, all the cracks we were pretending weren’t there. If you want to see how it all played out across fourteen nights, knock yourself out.
Salon #7 is next. We were past the halfway point. Still going.
Or go back: Salon #5, the one about friendship fading.