The images themselves are gorgeous in that way that makes me suspicious. Too composed, too deliberate. This first shot with the bodies arranged like they’re performing an autopsy on performance itself.
And that Gertrude Stein quote stuck at the bottom like a fortune cookie aphorism: “This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.” Yeah, no shit, Gertie.
That’s what’s happening here, isn’t it? The eight hundredth iteration of the same impulse, people in a room trying to crack the code of what it means to be present, to be witnessed, to matter for ninety minutes before everyone goes home and forgets it ever happened. Performance art is the ultimate disposable medium masquerading as the ultimate permanent revolution.
The thing that makes it interesting despite itself: we’re doing it anyway. Salon number eight. Not number one, where enthusiasm might excuse the pretension. Number eight. That’s commitment or delusion or both, which from where I’m sitting amounts to the same holy idiocy. We’ve built a church and they’re showing up for mass even though God stopped returning their calls around salon number four.
The documentation is all there is now, stills that turn whatever happened into myth, into aesthetic distance, into something I can file under “Collusion” and tag with “Collected Works” as if that somehow preserves what was essentially a controlled bonfire of ego and earnestness.
And maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s the joke. The repetition is the lesson, and we’re teaching it to ourselves over and over in empty rooms in San Francisco, which has always been America’s most beautiful laboratory for enthusiastic failure.
Showcased new work from Karen Penley, Niki Ulehla, and Nicholas Berger as well as a live musical set from Meredith Axelrod.