PERFORMA 09 in review: Part 1

RoseLee Goldberg – the critic, art historian and writer who founded Performa in 2005 – tapped at her BlackBerry through most of Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners. It was annoying, but I’ll forgive her indiscretion. The evening’s compositions, after all, were scored almost a century ago for a newly silence-less world clattering with engines and aeroplanes. So why shouldn’t a centennial restaging be accompanied by the faint clack of mobile messaging? And Goldberg undoubtedly had lots to address on her backlit screen. For the third edition of this visual arts performance biennial last month, she and her staff presented well over 100 events, at 80 locations around New York City. I saw a healthy handful. Below are a few of the OMGs, an LOL or two, and one that was nothing to text home about.

Luciano Chessa: Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners

PERFORMA 09 marked the 100th anniversary of Futurism, and a number of events strove to move forward, while looking back at a few Italian forebears, though nothing that I saw accomplished this as marvelously as Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners at Town Hall. Luciano Chessa, who conducted the lion’s share of the programme, oversaw the reconstruction of 16 crate-encased, crank-and-lever-operated intonarumori (noise intoners) designed by Luigi Russolo in 1913.

Chessa assembled an impressive batch of composers and performers to play the instruments, including Joan La Barbara, Mike Patton, Tony Conrad and the gayageum artist RaMi Seo, among many others. The mechanical twangs, metallic aches, and spring-loaded groans that partnered with silence, song, spoken word, and what sounded like a field of tin-legged crickets were as musical as they were mysterious. ‘What’s making those boxes tick?’ was never far from my mind, and the night’s sounds haven’t been since.

William Kentridge: I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine

William Kentridge’s I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine stayed with me too, not as a sound, but as a secret sense, like the smell of a shadow puppet. The performance, which started with the artist on stage, retelling Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose (1836) in front of a white screen, soon became its own investigation into untrustworthy narration. A spectral Kentridge appeared projected alongside the real one, as the text he was reading aloud started to spin into the unstable universe of stories-inside-stories.

Before the audience could grasp at the questions of meta-fiction being fired off like pop rockets during a summer holiday, Kentridge was on to Miguel de Cervantes, Tristram Shandy (1759–69) and Vladimir Lenin along with sleepless nights, his wife, his dogs and a slideshow of silly home photographs. Joining the chuckles and digressions were inquiries about inspiration, intention and meaning-making that never got too heavy for his buoyant jokes and the whimsical drawings, which played on the projection screen behind him. It was an epic examination or a quirky little story − or both depending on how you looked. In any case, it was masterful.

Omer Fast: Talk Show

Omer Fast took a very different approach to retelling in his whisper-down-the-lane-inspired Talk Show. On a small stage designed to look like a television studio’s interview set, Bill Ayers told a story to an interlocutor about his romance with another 1960s revolutionary, Diana Oughton. When it was over Ayers unceremoniously stood and left the stage. A woman replaced him, and the man who was his interviewer began to retell Ayers’ story. The new Ayers didn’t know the narrative as well: dates changed, colours faded, the account became shorter, the pauses longer. Soon, Diana was nameless, and what they’d protested together wasn’t Vietnam, but the second Iraq War. The swaps and retellings continued until a kind of narrative-powered uncertainty principal proved itself. It’s a fascinating theme that Fast explored in The Casting (2007), his award-winning contribution to the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Although the same hypothesis was whispered-down-the-lane to this performance, its details were just as crisp as the first time, even if its execution wasn’t quite as alluring.

Emily Mast: Everything, Nothing, Something, Always (Walla!)

In Everything, Nothing, Something, Always (Walla!) at X-Initiative, Emily Mast put on a rambling stage show using characters that were more like ideas than individuals. They screamed, sang, stamped and cried their particular rhetorical stance in front of an artificial audience that served as a Greek chorus, an orchestra and a peanut gallery. Occasionally the actors pulled tight into charming tableaux or started a musical number, but for the most part it felt fairly directionless, obvious, afraid and too similar to what my next-door neighbour must imagine when I say ‘I’m going to see some performance art.’

Lucy Raven: This Is Only A Test

For This Is Only A Test, the audience was given the special treat of staying home and simply flipping on the television. One of Manhattan’s public-access channels had given Lucy Raven five half-hour slots that she used to riff on the US’s now-defunct Emergency Broadcast System testing protocol. Instead of the familiar 20-second transmission tone and the assurance that ‘This is only a test…’, Raven played a recording of Tony Conrad and Faust’s 28-minute Minimalist groove From the Side of Man and Womankind (1972) while showing long dramatic shots of a toy fire engine bathed in different coloured light. It was a hypnotically boring music video that she infused with the energy of live performance. Each day Raven made the piece again, and each day it seemed to confirm new results to whatever it was she was testing.

Mike Kelley: Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #32, Plus

Mike Kelley’s Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #32, Plus was one of the last things I saw in my biennial binge of performance art, and I couldn’t have asked for a better one to end with. Based on ‘Day is Done’, his 2005 exhibition at Gagosian in Chelsea, Kelley’s hour-long dance explosion was an upbeat, odd and entertaining trip to a stranger-than-strange fiction high school experience filled with rock and roll, basketball, marching bands, muscular naked men, and lots and lots of Mike Kelley.

Fittingly set in a grimy gymnasium beneath the Judson Memorial Church, the piece wasn’t prim or proper or even that practiced – in the closing moments a sweaty-handed Kelley accidentally fired a hand bell that he was swinging in to the audience – but it was a party, a loud, outrageous one, the kind you’re happy enough to leave, then wonder about while tucked safley in bed. Good night.