So it’s basically a haircut. Performance art as a goddamn haircut. Niki with scissors, Michael sitting there probably feeling vulnerable and exposed and wondering if this is profound or if he’s just getting a trim in front of an audience that showed up because there was cheap wine and they knew the artists. And you know what? That ambiguity is the whole game. The emperor’s new clothes except everyone’s in on the joke and pretending they’re not.
Ryan building an installation, meaning he moved some objects around a room and called it spatial intervention or whatever the graduate thesis word is. And good for him. At least something’s standing there after the fact, even if it’s just some found materials arranged with intention.
Arianne doing something fun and sexy, which could mean anything from genuinely transgressive work that made people uncomfortable in productive ways, to just wearing something provocative and moving around. The description tells you nothing and everything. “Fun and sexy” is what I say when I can’t quite articulate what happened but I’d like to say something positive.
Here’s the actual truth buried in my admission: it was dull. It was bland. And I went anyway because these are my friends. This is the real story: not seven artists creating boundary-pushing ephemeral experiences, but a bunch of friends gathering in a room to support each other’s half-formed ideas, to drink together, to be in community. The art is almost incidental. The performance is just an excuse for the congregation.
And maybe that’s more honest than any of the grandiose claims performance art usually makes for itself. At least I’m not pretending it changed my life or challenged my perceptions or whatever bullshit I’m supposed to say. I showed up for my friends. They did their thing. It was fine. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got enlightened either.
That’s the real performance: the performance of being a good friend, of showing up, of witnessing even when what I’m witnessing doesn’t particularly move me. Less Artaud, more group therapy. Less ritual transgression, more potluck dinner where someone decided to call it art.
New work by Arianne Foks, Ryan Tacata, Yula Paluy, Jamie Lyons, Niki Ulehla, Derek Phillips and Michael Hunter.
Navigation:
“Sculpture is made with two instruments and some supports and pretty air.” By #9, Gertrude Stein’s describing exactly what we were doing, making something out of almost nothing, held up by hope and hot air and the pretense that this still mattered. The full fourteen-night arc documents how long you can keep building on air alone.
Salon #10 is next. Double digits. Five more after this.
Or go back: Salon #8, when repetition became the lesson.