Tagged — Jamie Lyons
So there was this place. The Performance Art Institute... PAI... Three addresses in five years, each one a deeper descent into whatever circle of hell Marina Abramović definitely never authorized her name to be attached to. The first iteration had the balls to call itself the Marina Abramović Performance Art Institute, because nothing says "legitimate arts organization" like potentially hijacking a world-famous performance artist's identity without, you know, asking.
That first space wasn't completely terrible. The Grotowski workcenter showed up and did their thing, all that serious European body-as-instrument work, the kind of performance that makes you wonder if you've wasted your entire life on comfortable furniture. There was still a veneer of respectability, the pretense that this was about art.
Then came location number two, and holy Christ, the mask slipped hard. We did Princess Ivona there, and Angrette's Building Score 101B, Astrid did some work there, and Niki did too.
Picture this: a cavernous warehouse where someone decided the best use of space was constructing a fucking shantytown indoors. Five, maybe six people living in this ramshackle village, fifty-some electrical cords spider-webbing overhead like some demented Christmas decoration powering hot plates, TVs, heaters, lights, a fire marshal's nightmare achieving consciousness. The aesthetic was early apocalypse meets performance art squat, and on days when nothing was scheduled? Yeah, the smart money said meth lab. The energy was pure desperation masquerading as transgressive avant-garde.
But wait, the Performance Art Institute had a third act.
Out by the wharfs, the upstairs part of a DHL warehouse, and somehow things got weirder. By this point, whatever theoretical framework justified calling this operation an "institute" had dissolved completely. This wasn't about Grotowski's poor theatre anymore. This was something else entirely, performance art as alibi, as cover story, as the thing you tell the cops when they eventually show up asking questions.
The whole trajectory tells you everything: from borrowed credibility to barely-controlled chaos to whatever the hell happens when the insurance runs out and the only people left are the ones with nowhere else to go.
Industries 2013
“Our job may be to open up a temporary utopian/distopian space, a de-militarized zone in which meaningful “radical” behavior and progressive thought are hopefully allowed to take place, even if only for the duration of the piece. In this imaginary zone, both artist and audience members are given permission to assume multiple and ever changing […]
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Collusion 2013
You walk into the Performance Art Institute expecting some precious meditation on process, maybe a little performative navel gazing with power tools as props. What you get instead is Angrette dropping a fucking bomb on the whole polite machinery of artistic intention, and she does it with hammers, two by fours, the San Francisco Building […]
ReadEngineering 2013
So Tonyanna gets it. She always gets it. You can see it in these frames, she’s not performing silence, she’s weaponizing it. That’s the difference between theater kids playing dress-up and someone who understands that Ivona’s muteness is an act of violence against everyone who needs her to participate in their charade. She’s making them […]
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