The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is not a squat, not a nightclub, not someone’s living room where furniture gets shoved against the walls and something unrepeatable happens at 3:12 AM. It’s a museum. White walls, institutional lighting, the whole architecture of cultural legitimacy. And somehow, impossibly, the Workcenter agreed to bring Electric Party Songs here.
This should not work. On paper, this is a disaster waiting to happen, taking something born in the friction of unconventional spaces and dropping it into one of the most conventional spaces imaginable. A museum. Where art goes to be preserved, catalogued, explained. Where you’re not supposed to touch anything.
But SFMOMA… it’s hungry. The institution is always hungry for the thing it can’t quite contain, the work that refuses to behave. And the Workcenter? They don’t compromise. They don’t water it down for the museum crowd. They walk in and do what they’ve always done, create an event, not a show. An encounter, not a presentation.
I Am America is what they’re calling this iteration. Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, not read, not recited, but embodied, torn open, mixed with calls and shouts and traditional songs from the American South. The whole thing is a collision, a calculated wreck of high culture and raw American voice. Ginsberg understood this country’s contradictions, its violence and its tenderness, and the Workcenter understands Ginsberg understood it.
Mario Biagini has spent years developing this work. It started as experiments at parties, friends gathered, someone had an idea about making Ginsberg’s words physical, about finding what happens when poetry becomes action becomes presence. They took it to nightclubs, to squats. Now it’s here at SFMOMA, presented in collaboration with Stanford University and the Performance Art Institute, this whole institutional apparatus supporting something that was designed to exist outside institutions.
The performers, all of them, they’re not actors playing parts. They’re practitioners of a very specific discipline, something Grotowski spent his life articulating and they’ve spent their lives embodying. This isn’t theater as you know it. It’s not performance art as the museum usually understands it. It’s something older and newer at the same time, something that only exists in the doing, in the presence of bodies and voices making something happen in real time.
Here’s the tension: SFMOMA is giving the Workcenter legitimacy they don’t particularly need while simultaneously trying to capture something that can’t be captured. The museum wants to present the work, to frame it, to make it accessible to its audience. But the work resists presentation. It demands participation, even if that participation is just the act of being present, of witnessing, of allowing yourself to be affected.
The West Coast premiere, they’re calling it. Like this is a movie opening or a product launch. But there’s no second showing identical to the first. There’s no recording that captures what happens. Each performance is its own thing, shaped by the space, by who’s there, by what’s happening in the world that particular night.
The fact that SFMOMA attempted this, that they brought in work designed for basements and back rooms and let it happen in their galleries, says something about what museums can be when they stop trying to preserve things and start trying to host things. The Workcenter didn’t come here to be archived. They came to make something happen, to test whether their work could survive in this context, whether the “electric” in Electric Party Songs could still spark in an environment designed to protect art from direct contact.
Ginsberg would have appreciated the contradiction. He spent his life pushing against institutions while simultaneously being canonized by them, his howl becoming required reading in the same academic structures he railed against. Now his words are being shouted and sung in a museum by performers who trained in Italy under a Polish theater revolutionary’s methods, mixing his Jewish New York sensibility with southern American traditional songs, all of it happening in San Francisco where Ginsberg lived and wrote and where the counterculture he helped create got commodified and sanitized and turned into tourist attractions.
The work survives the irony because it’s not really about preservation or presentation. It’s about now. This moment. These bodies. This space. You, standing there, trying to figure out what you’re witnessing.