The first five days of the jam-packed Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival have passed, and I’ve survived, albeit barely. Since Thursday, it seems like I’ve spent a lot of time driving to the farthest reaches of Greater Los Angeles to watch stuff get blown up, lit up, and shot at. Crowd-pleasing spectacles have definitely dominated the game.

On Saturday, hundreds of people came out to Pomona College to see a trio of “performances” (the pieces by Judy Chicago and James Turrell would be more accurately described as temporary public art installations) that took place at strategic locations on campus. They were all nice, although not exactly mind-blowing. I didn’t quite see what was so nifty about John White’s Preparation F, which made a spectacle out of college football players getting dressed and scrimmaging; modern dance works have done this sort of thing better. Chicago’s ejaculatory fireworks in A Butterfly for Pomona were certainly entertaining, and Turrell’s Burning Bridges was a nostalgic and humorous evocation of his then-developing interest in light and the framing of environments. The most remarkable thing about the whole event, however, was seeing so many people turn out for performance—the most I’ve ever seen in one sitting.

Crowds rush to check out Richard
Jackson's paint plane wreckage.

Likewise, Richard Jackson’s Accidents in Abstract Painting brought a huge, family-oriented crowd out to a field in Pasadena to watch a model airplane filled with paint crash into a wall. The plane had a couple of false starts and took a long time to get off the ground. One kid behind me was quite the heckler, at one point screaming, “I wish the plane would crash already!” When it finally did get airborne, it made two circles before zeroing in on its target for a perfect, paint-splattering crash. Seeing the colorful crash was pretty satisfying, but in the end, it was just another bit of art-flavored entertainment.

The only large-scale happening that really got me excited was Tirs: Reloaded, a group tribute to, and recreation of, Niki de Saint Phalle’s infamous shooting paintings. I was supposed to live-tweet from that event for ForYourArt, but because it took place at a remote shooting range in the Angeles Forest, I couldn’t get cell reception. I will, however, write a longer piece about that event as soon as I get some more brain cells back. For now, you can check out the photo documentation on PST’s website.

Other than the sublime Tirs: Reloaded, the more memorable performances of the past several days have been, for me, the more intimate ones.

Paul Waddell, Quick start camping trip urbane sim revision: a system for showing results

The first took place on Saturday morning, an unlikely time, at an unlikely location: the Art Los Angeles Contemporary Fair at Barker Hangar. In the tiny Ruskin Theater, Paul Waddell performed a new work, titled Quick start camping trip urbane sim revision: a system for showing results. The piece saw Waddell fiddling with a small tent, which he attempted to set up before sharing its billowing mass with the gamely laughing audience. He also made comical use of the small theater stage, entering and exiting the fake doors and getting caught in them. He even involved an audience member, who joined him for a short spell of aggression, beating a small box with a stick while he flailed around inside his tent. He wound the piece down quietly with extended stares at the audience, inserting tools into his socks, and deflating his tent.

Like his performance at Human Resources last year, Quick start camping trip was absurdist but not without a strong sense of internal logic and narrative. It touched on survival anxieties and the comic futility of human actions, which of course had special resonance for artists in an art fair environment. I was also struck again by Waddell’s powerful ability to create and hold an engaging performative atmosphere using his own energy, direct confrontation with his audience, and a specific collection of objects. It’s like watching a well-resolved sculptural installation emerge out of thin air.

Emily Mast's Birdbrain, presented at
Liz Glynn's Black Box

On Sunday Night, Emily Mast kicked off Black Box festivities early with Birdbrain, an ensemble work that she wrote and directed. The program that was handed out before the show told the story of Alex, an African grey parrot who was the subject of a 30-year language experiment. An animal psychologist set out to prove that birds can reason and use words creatively, claiming that Alex could identify objects, understand concepts, express emotions, etc. The study was controversial, as skeptics dismissed Alex’s “intelligence” as nothing more than mimicry. Birdbrain took Alex’s story as inspiration for a series of abstract skits that explored human beings’ mastery, mimicry, and fetishization of language and gestures, questioning where the lines are amongst the three.

In one skit, a woman repeated a series of random words over and over, with increasing speed, while another woman attempted to sign the words and a little boy, dressed in a bird suit, attempted to transcribe them on a chalkboard. Thus, “fetishization, fetishization, fetishization… hot dog, hot dog, hot dog… meow, meow, meow….,” etc. gradually devolved into frustration as the signer grew increasingly tired and the writer’s scribbles became unintelligible. In another skit, a burly actor sat and acted out a series of emotions while the other actors gathered around him and murmured judgments about how “real” his emotions were. In moments like that, Birdbrain became a piece of theater about theater, adeptly using theatrical conventions to question the workings of human intelligence and the meaning of human “mastery.”

Emily Mast's Birdbrain

Mast, who started using child actors last year in her adaptation of Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience, again used them to great effect in this piece. In addition to the bird/jester figure, the Birdbrain ensemble also included an adorable little girl in a tutu. She got a solo spotlight in a skit that had her wandering around the colorful set ruminating deeply on very adult concepts of spiritual despair and nothingness. Alex the parrot was said to understand the concept of zero, and here we wondered how much this poised, articulate child really understood of existential angst.

Finally, last night I dragged my tired self out of the house for the singular purpose of catching Andrea Fraser’s Men on the Line, KPFK, 1972, presented by West of Rome at the National Center for the Preservation for Democracy. I’m happy to say that it was worth the effort. I believe it was the artist’s first new performance in a long time, and it was a stunner. Fraser took a transcript of a 1972 KPFK radio talk amongst a group of men who were sympathetic to the feminist movement and trying to explore their feelings and thoughts around it. She memorized an edited version of the transcript and inhabited and performed each of the roles.

Andrea Fraser re-performing May I Help You?
at the MAK Center, May 2011

The presentation was daringly minimal. At the bottom of a narrow, high, amphitheater-style arena, Fraser—dressed mannishly in boots, pants, and a brown sweater over a white button-down shirt—sat by herself in a chair, the lone focus of a rapt, sold-out audience. She performed each of the roles meticulously, adopting particular mannerisms and voice registers for each man. With seriousness and concentration, she re-enacted a dialogue in which men expressed solidarity with the feminist movement and lauded it as a movement for humanity, not just women. They also, however, expressed nostalgia for a time when “I was the king and I had a slave” and fear over the conviction that women spent all their time in separatist meetings “talking about me.”

There were of course many chortles from the audience at the “MCP” (male chauvinist pig) comments, but overall, Fraser’s performance conveyed a sympathy towards these earnest, progressive men struggling to accommodate a new social paradigm. As in her classic May I Help You? performance, which was adapted for the MAK Center last year, Men on the Line was a piece that skillfully used the distance of theater at the same time that it poignantly inscribed the artist’s body with the challenging viewpoints of other social groups, conflating a variety of agendas to tease out a more complex examination of where feminism was then, and where we are now.

Niki de Saint Phalle

The art world has gotten off to an uncharacteristically early and eager start this year. I’ve barely had time to catch my breath since getting off the plane from my vacation—and that was on New Year’s Eve.

As I write this, we’re only a couple of hours away from the official launch of the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival. Like all things PST, the festival, which runs through January 29 (with a few events continuing past that date), seeks to overwhelm. During a preview event at SoHo House last month, organizers Glenn Phillips and Lauri Firstenberg even said that they purposely overloaded the program so that people would have to choose between amazing events that conflict with each other. Evil, I tell you! Luckily the hardworking folks at ForYourArt have thoughtfully organized a team of correspondents, including yours truly, to report on the festival as it happens. This will include blog posts, reviews, live tweets, and so on.

I’ve already done a practice run of live tweeting to make sure I can actually use my new smartphone (yes I know, I was really late to that table). Check out my coverage of Tuesday night’s Kim Jones / Barbara Smith talk at LAXART, complete with photos, on my Twitter page. Last night I even downloaded Twitvid so that I can post videos of some events as they happen, woo!

There are a lot of great events coming up, but probably the one I’m most excited about is Tirs: Reloaded, a recreation of Niki de Saint Phalle’s shooting paintings organized by Yael Lipschutz. In 1962, Virginia Dwan invited de Saint Phalle to Los Angeles to create the first Tirs series outside of Europe. Enacted in Malibu and the Sunset Strip, the LA Tirs performances, which involved many artists and even Jane Fonda, were popular and emphasized the social and communal aspects of the piece.

Set design for William Leavitt's The Particles (of White Naugahyde)

Tirs: Reloaded will also be a very communal affair, assembling a terrific group of LA artists to reinterpret de Saint Phalle’s shooting paintings. How cool will it be to see Lara Schnitger, Matthew Monahan, Liz Craft and others shoot stuff up?? The event will also have nice elements of family lineage—Noah Kienholz, whose father Ed was de Saint Phalle’s gun handler, will handle the guns for this event, and Lipschutz’s own father Jeff, who is a terrific painter about to move back to his native Southern California, will be one of the shooters.

Due to the risky nature of this event, admittance is by invitation only. But don’t worry, I’m going and I will document the hell out of it. There will also be lots of “official” documentation that will be posted through PST. Other events I’m especially looking forward to: Brody Condon’s group therapy continued, William Leavitt’s NASA play, Liz Glynn’s nightly speakeasy, Richard Jackson’s plane crash, and a whole bunch of shit getting blown up at Pomona on Saturday. Follow me on Twitter for photos, videos, and commentary on stuff as it happens!

CamLab occupies the steps of City Hall, October 2011.
Courtesy of CamLab.

In between spending time with family and friends over the holidays, I had the distinct pleasure of working on #OccupyArt21, a two-week guest stint on the Art21 blog that began this past Monday and continues through next Friday. Ten LA-based artists/writers—ARLA (Elana Mann & Juliana Snapper), Teresa Carmody, myself, Dorit Cypis, Mikal Czech, Robby Herbst, Anna Mayer, Christy Roberts, Mathew Timmons, and Matias Viegener—each contribute a post a day that reflects on and embodies the Occupy movement, which we all support. The works are amazingly brilliant, reflecting the deep well of talent that thrives in Los Angeles. Of all the art projects I’ve worked on to date, I have to say this is the one that I am the most proud of.

I am also excited that CamLab, a performance collective for whom I’ve always had a special fondness, begins its MOCA Engagement Party residency this Thursday night at 7pm, at the Grand Avenue location. CamLab’s work blends visual and social engagement in provocative explorations of language, embodiment, and intimacy. Two more events are scheduled for February 2 and March 1.

Following on the heels of a highly successful public forum addressing the controversy stirred up by Marina Abramović and Yvonne Rainer around the 2011 MOCA Gala, Jennifer Doyle is organizing a three-part Feminist Seminar on Politics and Performance, taking place over three Sundays beginning this Sunday, 1-4pm, at Human Resources in Chinatown. Doyle, along with Dino Dinco and Matias Viegener, did a fantastic job of moderating the forum at LACE, keeping things on track while also providing provocative theoretical overlays to the discussion. The Feminist Seminar will definitely be a Don’t Miss event.

Ilene Segalove, right, with her mom Elaine

The Orange County Museum of Art was abuzz with history this past Saturday. After an excellent tour of the State of Mind exhibition, in which curator Karen Moss neatly relayed the story of California conceptualism in just under 45 minutes, two special Pacific Standard Time programs dynamically connected history with the present day.

First, almost all of Ilene Segalove’s The Mom Tapes (1974–78) were screened in the museum’s auditorium; they were introduced by Segalove herself and followed by a Q&A with the artist and her mom, Elaine. The Mom Tapes are on view in the galleries as part of State of Mind, but it was great to be able to sit down and focus my attention on this body of work, created over a period of four years. The episodic tapes, which are really charming and funny, capture aspects of Segalove’s relationship to her mom as well as their upper-middle class family life in a posh Beverly Hills house—it’s a classic instance of the personal playing into a larger political concern of valuing women’s daily contributions.

Here’s a short snippet of Segalove’s introduction to The Mom Tapes:

“I always knew that real life was material for art. I always was kind of a spy in my own life. I would spend hours leaning against the door to my parents’ bedroom, overhearing their loud conversations. And sometimes I would turn them into cartoons and entertain my younger brother with illustrations of what they said, and how they said it. My brother later became a psychiatrist. I don’t know if there’s a connection, it’s possible.”

The opportunity to engage with Segalove and her mom following the screening was priceless. As Segalove pointed out, she is now approximately the same age her mom was when they made the tapes. Among the comments made were the following:

Elaine (asked if she thought the tapes were successful): “I liked them very much. I thought they were well done. It would do a lot of mothers good to listen to something like that. Usually when a child is that grown up, they don’t want to be bothered with mother, they’ve had it. I learned an awful lot when she did that program.”

Ilene: “I was trying to capture the most banal stuff and kind of turn it into the most sublime stuff. Like asking my mom where to buy steak, it seems like so, who cares? But so much of girls’ lives seemed to be, who cares. At school, the stories we read weren’t about girls, they were about boys having adventures. If you watched me in my bedroom, it didn’t look like much was going on, I might have been tracing a ballerina book, but that actually was a significant moment for me. So one of the reasons I made the tapes was to recognize the poignancy of these moments.”

Susan Mogul in performance

Susan Mogul then did a hilarious performance, well it was more of a scripted shtick or mock slide lecture really, addressing the strangeness of her newfound status as a “historic feminist artist from the 70s.” If you read that awesome article that ran in the LA Weekly several weeks ago, you know that Mogul did a guerrilla intervention on the obnoxious sexism of the PST ads featuring Anthony Kiedis celebrating Ed Ruscha, and Jason Schwartzman celebrating John Baldessari. Frustrated by the repeated use of overexposed white male artists, Mogul made her own promotional poster, in which “Mogul Celebrates Mogul.” The poster, full of a self-deprecating humor sorely lacking in the official ads, exhorted viewers to “celebrate the artist who continues to inspire herself.”

The performance was a satirical recounting of the art community’s increasing fetishization of Mogul as a “vintage artist.” She told of how a young art historian spied her at a dance party and squealed, “Oh it’s Susan Mogul from the 70s!” Then a local art dealer called her up and asked to show her old work—but only her old work, nothing new. “The 70s are back!” he declared. “Mogul, I’m going to revive you!” Finally big cheese curators from local museums called her up, eagerly looking to populate their upcoming PST shows with rare work. Zeroing in on these people’s trendy worship of the 70s, Mogul declares that she’s found a “new vintage genre,” which she labeled “feminist shmatik.”

Mogul asks, what does it mean to be celebrated in 2011 for artwork that was made 40 years ago? In another story that may or may not have been real, she told of a museum that asked her to re-perform her video work Dressing Up (1973), but without the nudity, because the donors wouldn’t like that, and after all, it really isn’t the 70s anymore. How to reconcile past with present? The solution of course was the PST ad spoof. After showing images of them in situ, Mogul concluded, “One woman, one artist, before her time, ahead of her time, frozen in time, just in time, isn’t it about time? It’s Susan Mogul time.”

All the Arms We Need…A Dinner Party in Three Acts, following close on the heels of the controversial Marina Abramović gala dinner at MOCA, was a fitting end to Liz Glynn’s Engagement Party residency in a few different ways. A celebratory affair, it invited favorable comparisons to the ostentatious Abramović event: the food and wine were exquisite, probably comparable to what was served at the gala, and yet this dinner was entirely free of charge to guests. More importantly, the concepts at work in Glynn’s piece were subtle and unfolding instead of over-ripe and overdone; the work offered an ironic, yet generous, conclusion to Glynn’s inquiries into the functions of the museum.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about the Abramović debacle, and I’ve listened to a lot of comments from people who were there. After cycling through a variety of possible responses, I’ve settled on the conclusion that Abramović was basically continuing her depressing trajectory of self-canonization and complicity with establishment forces at the expense of her own work, which was at one time daring and thrilling. The New York Times, while obeying the unspoken dictum of focusing on the glittery, gossipy aspects of the evening, did let out a brief critical comment: “…at times the whole event seemed like an involuntarily comedic medley of the greatest hits of her own life as a performance artist.” That pretty much summed it all up for me.

In contrast to Abramović, Glynn is a long way from jumping the shark, thank god. While you can’t ignore the fact that big, fancy, sit-down dinners are inherently about consumption, spectacle, and a degree of privilege, the experience of it can be modulated into more thoughtful realms—and it was this that Glynn accomplished with a large degree of success. Her trademark bookish, introverted approach turned out to be the perfect antidote to the fancy dinner trap.

The first thing we were asked to do before sitting down to the meal was to answer three questions: What do you have? What do you desire? What do you need? We wrote our answers down on individual cards and placed them into the designated jars. During the course of the evening, as food and drink were served, readers would get up in front of us and read aloud all of our answers. These made for a lovely psychological accompaniment to the physical act of feeding and nourishing oneself, as well as putting a deeply personal touch on a large-scale event involving a lot of strangers.

“What do you have?” elicited a range of responses from the ridiculous “I have a towel” to the flippant “I have a free dinner” to more typical meditations on family, jobs, and happiness. “What do you need?” brought a laundry list of items like change, water, cookies, cash, a long healthy life, success, security, and car keys. “What do you desire?” was probably the question that opened people up the most—answers ranged from the shallow (“I want that girl at the coffee shop”) to the clever (“I want more of what I need”) to the mysteriously ambitious (“I want to advise worldwide…”).

In place of a head table where the bride and groom would normally sit at a wedding reception, Glynn set up a butcher’s table with a large mirror overhead. In place of ceremony, this kept the path from farm to table in full view of diners. A fresh, skinned lamb was brought out and an expert butcher proceeded to take it apart, explaining what parts of the lamb went into certain dishes. This was followed by a delicious course of lamb’s heart pastrami, and the presentation of the lamb’s raw, skinned head on a platter, which was passed around for everyone to look at and take pictures with. At every turn, Glynn countered spectacle and hierarchy with close reflections on the actions before us.

Lamb's heart pastrami is served.

Midway through the meal, a woman dressed in a medieval knight’s costume got up and walked on top of the banquet tables, doing a strip tease as she went, taking off the plastic pieces of her costume and passing them to guests. I wound up with red wine spilled on my companion and an epaulet in my lap. I’m still fairly mystified as to what the presence of this knight was supposed to signify. Perhaps it was a humorous reference to Medieval Times? At any rate, the fake knight’s stampede across our dining surface served to tamp down any reverential banquet mood that might have inadvertently arisen.

The evening ended with a great anti-flourish when frequent Glynn collaborator Corey Fogel got up on the tables and pulled the tablecloths up with him as he walked down their entire length, with a sheepish look on his face the whole time. Plates, glasses, and the remnants of any food went flying to the ground as guests scrambled to get up and avoid being splattered. Everyone kind of broke into relaxed laughter when he was done, and many got into the spirit and broke even more plates on the ground. It was funny, festive, and a perfect cancellation of high-brow pretension, merrily crashing the evening’s whole armature to the ground.

Sara Wookey performing "Trio A"
(1966) by Yvonne Rainer at VIVA! Performance Festival in Montreal.
Photo: Guy L'Heureux.

I participated in an audition on November 7th for performance artist Marina Abramović’s production for the annual gala of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. I auditioned because I wanted to participate in the project of an artist whose work I have followed with interest for many years and because it was affiliated with MOCA, an institution that I have a connection with as a Los Angeles-based artist. Out of approximately eight hundred applicants, I was one of two hundred selected to audition. Ultimately, I was offered the role of one of six nude females to re-enact Abramović’s signature work, Nude with Skeleton (2002), at the center of tables with seats priced at up to $100,000 each. For reasons I detail here—reasons that I strongly believe need to be made public—I turned it down.

I am writing to address three main points: One, to add my voice to the discourse around this event as an artist who was critical of the experience and decided to walk away, a voice which I feel has been absent thus far in the LA Times and New York Times coverage; Two, to clarify my identity as the informant about the conditions being asked of artists and make clear why I chose, up till now, to be anonymous in regards to my email to Yvonne Rainer; And three, to prompt a shift of thinking of cultural workers to consider, when either accepting or rejecting work of any kind, the short- and long-term impact of our personal choices on the entire field. Each point is to support my overriding interest in organizing and forming a union that secures labor standards and fair wages for fine and performing artists in Los Angeles and beyond.

I refused to participate as a performer because what I anticipated would be a few hours of creative labor, a meal, and the chance to network with like-minded colleagues turned out to be an unfairly remunerated job. I was expected to lie naked and speechless on a slowly rotating table, starting from before guests arrived and lasting until after they left (a total of nearly four hours). I was expected to ignore (by staying in what Abramović refers to as “performance mode”) any potential physical or verbal harassment while performing. I was expected to commit to fifteen hours of rehearsal time, and sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement stating that if I spoke to anyone about what happened in the audition I was liable for being sued by Bounce Events, Marketing, Inc., the event’s producer, for a sum of $1 million dollars plus attorney fees.

I was to be paid $150. During the audition, there was no mention of safeguards, signs, or signals for performers in distress, and when I asked about what protection would be provided I was told it could not be guaranteed. What I experienced as an auditionee for this work was extremely problematic, exploitative, and potentially abusive.

I am a professional dancer and choreographer with 16 years of experience working in the United States, Canada and Europe, and I hold a Master of Fine Arts degree in Dance from the University of California, Los Angeles. As a professional artist working towards earning a middle class living in Los Angeles, I am outraged that there are no official or even unofficial standard practice measures for working conditions, compensation, and benefits for artists and performers, or for relations between creator, performer, presenting venue and production company in regard to such highly respected and professionalized individuals and institutions such as Abramović and MOCA. In Europe I produced over a dozen performance works involving casts of up to 15 to 20 artists. When I hired dancers, I was obliged to follow a national union pay scale agreement based on each artist’s number of years of experience. In Canada, where I recently performed a work by another artist, I was paid $350 for one performance that lasted 15 minutes, not including rehearsal time that was supported by another fee for up to 35 hours, in accordance with the standards set by CARFAC (Canadian Artists Representation/Le Front Des Artistes Canadiens) established in 1968.

If my call for labor standards for artists seems out of bounds, think of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG, established 1933), the American Federation of Musicians (AFM, founded 1896), or the umbrella organization the Associated Actors and Artistes of America (the 4A’s, founded in 1919), which hold the film, theater and music industries to regulatory and best practice standards for commercial working artists and entertainers. If there is any group of cultural workers that deserves basic standards of labor, it is us performers working in museums, whose medium is our own bodies and deserve humane treatment and respect. Artists of all disciplines deserve fair and equal treatment and can organize if we care enough to put the effort into it. I would rather be the face of the outspoken artist than the silenced, slowly rotating head (or, worse, “centerpiece”) at the table. I want a voice, loud and clear.

Abramović’s call for artists was, as the LA Times quoted, for “strong, silent types.” I am certainly strong but I am not comfortable with silence in this situation. I refuse to be a silent artist regarding issues that affect my livelihood and the culture of my practice. There are issues too important to be silenced and I just happen to be the one to speak out, to break that silence. I spoke out in response to ethics, not artistic material or content, and I know that I am not the only one who feels the way I do.

I rejected the offer to work with Abramović and MOCA—to participate in perpetuating unethical, exploitative and discriminatory labor practices—with my community in mind. It has moved me to work towards the establishment of ethical standards, labor rights and equal pay for artists, especially dancers, who tend to be some of the lowest paid artists.

The time has come for artists in Los Angeles and elsewhere to unite, organize, and work toward changing the degenerate discrepancies between the wealthy and powerful funders of art and the artists, mainly poor, who are at its service and are expected to provide so-called avant-garde, prescient content or “entertainment,” as is increasingly the case—that is nonetheless merchandise in the service of money. We must do this not because of what happened at MOCA but in response to a greater need (painfully demonstrated by the events at MOCA) for equity and justice for cultural workers.

I am not judging my colleagues who accepted their roles in this work and I, too, am vulnerable to the cult of charisma surrounding celebrity artists. I am judging, rather, the current social, cultural, and economic conditions that have rendered the exploitation of cultural workers commonplace, natural, and even horrifically banal, whether its perpetrated by entities such as MOCA and Abramović or self-imposed by the artists themselves.

I want to suggest another mode of thinking: When we, as artists, accept or reject work, when we participate in the making of a work, even (or perhaps especially) when it is not our own, we contribute to the establishment of standards and precedents for our cohorts and all who will come after us.

To conclude, I am grateful to Rainer for utilizing her position (without a request from me) of cultural authority and respect to make these issues public for the sake of launching a debate that has been overlooked for too long. Jeffrey Deitch, director of MOCA, was quoted in the LA Times as saying, in response to receiving my anonymous email and Rainer’s letter, “Art is about dialogue.” While I agree, Deitch’s idea of dialogue here is only a palliative. It obscures a situation of injustice in which both artist and institution have proven irresponsible in their unwillingness to recognize that art is not immune to ethical standards. Let’s have a new discourse that begins on this thought.

Sara Wookey
www.sarawookey.com

I am happy, however, to see that Carrie McIlwain, one of the artists who participated in the gala, has stepped forward and provided a thoughtful, detailed account of her experiences, via Geoff Tuck’s Notes on Looking blog. This is a huge breath of fresh air after the deluge of shallow, celebrity-oriented coverage from the mainstream media. McIlwain is also brave enough to cut through a lot of the bullshit behind Yvonne Rainer’s protest.

Some highlights:

“Having experienced sexual harassment and emotional and physical abuse in more than one art studio work place, I took Rainer’s allegations very seriously, wondering if my history of abuse from employers made it impossible for me to recognize the conditions that foster abuse. Ultimately I concluded that a group of educated, willing performers do not need to be spoken for; we need to be spoken with.”

“Though I did not recognize any of the people dining at my table, I commend them now for the respectful and intelligent art patrons they revealed themselves to be. Callousness can come from any class, but I truly believe it is important to offer people the opportunity to reveal their nature.”

“If the aim of Rainer’s critique sought to discredit the museum system of funding it was sloppy and hollow. In the end it was an attack on the proposed work of a single artist.”

Although McIlwain had a positive experience at her table, she does not discount the fact that others did not have such a great time with their guests, and gives substantial air time to their stories as well. Throughout, her commentary is clear, well-reasoned, and most important, free of the hysteria and sometimes ungrounded rhetoric that was generated by the pre-gala “scandal.”

ADDENDUM: I’ve now been made aware of this very earnest tale from E.J.Hill, this deliciously bitchy account from Dorian Wood, and this full-blown Facebook pow-wow started by Macklin Kowal.

Micol Hebron refills her crystal vagina

Just when you thought vagina art had been exhausted, Micol Hebron, the undisputed queen of the genre, steps up and takes it to yet another level. Her new show at Jancar Gallery—titled Sisterhood is Powerful and partially done in collaboration with her sisters Siobhan and Tiernan—is all vaginas, all the time, all in your in face.

There are exquisite vagina portraits in the front gallery and glittery vagina drawings in the basement. There is even one genius painting that repurposes Jackson Pollock’s and Lucio Fontana’s iconic gestures to create an AbEx-Spatialist vagina canvas. But the centerpiece, a true showstopper, was a huge crystal vagina grotto that secreted a steady stream of delicious (and quite strong) piña colada, which guests were invited to help themselves to. I had two cups, garnished with cherries and orange slices, and was buzzed for the rest of the evening. This, on top of the retro-feminist high of hilarity that I always get from Hebron’s cheeky, cheery, and totally unapologetic paeans to the beauty and power of vaginas. Go sisters! (You can read Hebron’s own detailed commentary on this show here.)

Jenna Westra and friend help themselves to a tasty cocktail

It really was a family affair; celebratory vagina pastries were made by Hebron's dad (!).

A couple of doors down at Charlie James, the poignantly named Dreadful Sorry Clementine presents a roomful of new works by Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor, whose raggedy large-scale constructions are always saturated with a deep, funny pathos. Walking around amidst these sad creatures, I felt like a visitor in an errant corner of Alice in Wonderland.

Sculptural works by Elisabeth Higgins O'Connor

Over at Human Resources, Darin Klein and Friends held a one-night release party for Box of Books Vol. IV, a project in which artists create small “books” out of ingeniously folded paper. These are then collected in boxes and sold in a limited edition of 100.

I bought a box (#80/100) for only $20, and I can attest that it’s filled with many and sundry delights—such as Julia Ozwonkoski’s “What’s Also California Funk?” list, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly’s score for an Occupy performance, Johanna Jackson’s dot composition, Francesca Mirabella’s exquisite enveloped artwork, and Davy Rothbart’s memorable Sticky Pete story, among other lovely pieces. During the reception, the box’s inventively multifarious quality spilled over into the physical realm through short films and an interactive performance by a few of the books’ authors.

To Know End, an interactive performance
by Zac Monday

Samuel White at LACE

I always love Samuel White’s works. He puts so much of himself into them. From naked conversations with visitors, to wrestling matches with romantic partners, to riding the mechanized bulls of Los Angeles, White always puts his psyche and his flesh on the line, as he probes the boundaries between self and other.

In response to my questions, White sent a description of his LACE performance that is so beautiful, I’m just going to paste it here: “i love LA. this was the inspiration for piece in a sense. this city is so mechanical in way yet controlled by people. as much as the bull is sensual and erotic, it’s still mechanical. and so i thought the LA industrial background would highlight this. a bull ride in the LA sunset. what can be more romantic and real than a physical whirlwind in such a beautiful place. LA has everything this performance did. a sensual ride if chosen, or a crazy spin. the situation is both set-up by the performer yet controlled by the audience. similar to everyone’s experience here in Los Angeles. you can only choose to place your selfhere. the struggle is staying on top op it, often seemingly controlled by outside forces. i say seemingly because in he end, you realize how much control you actually have had the entire journey…”

Brian Getnick was joined by Claire Cronin and Corey Fogel in a sort of musical puppet play that was catchy, surprising, and moving. The magic of Getnick’s work resides in his costumes, which have a singular style and conjure a shabbily spectacular imaginary universe. Faces and limbs come alive as though emerging out of a child’s primordial brain stew. That a fetching and poetic tune was part of the mix only iced the cake.

Somebody needs to explain Alejandra Beatriz Herrera Silva’s work to me. I watched the YouTube video of her performance at Human Resources, and I sat through probably all of the iterations of her LACE performance. The language of her work remains oblique to me—literally as well as figuratively. Large chunks of key text are in Spanish, and the work is laden with symbolism that I’m sure relates to Chilean history and politics somehow. The symbolism seemed a bit heavy-handed, but perhaps that is appropriate to her subject matter?? I don’t know… I’m tabling this one for further investigation.

The above image captures one of my favorite things in Free Clinic #2, a suite of three performances by women artists curated by The Action Bureau. It’s the “score” that Karen Adelman worked from as she improvised primal screaming noises to accompany the ongoing OCD hoarding adventures of Dawn Kasper, while musician Tara Jane ONeil worked a drum set, a noise machine, and various objects.

In a sharp departure from her recent series focusing on popular song, Adelman channeled Diamanda Galás and Yoko Ono as she ventured fearlessly into the world of operatic noise. The work, titled Meditations in a Fucked Up Emergency, began powerfully in the dark with Adelman letting out several prolonged shrieks from the outer rungs of hell to announce the start of the piece. ONeil devised mysterious percussive and ambient noises in the background as Adelman continued her wordless sonic venturing, reaching for booming highs as well as moody, irregular lows.

L to R: Karen Adelman, Tara Jane ONeil, and Dawn Kasper. Image courtesy of The Action Bureau.

As the noise was going, Kasper rounded up large amounts of random objects and piled them into the performance space. She sometimes reminded me of a character from an old Warner Bros. cartoon as she kept pulling in comically larger objects, culminating with a roll cart loaded with folding tables. She stopped three times to read what sounded like poignant excerpts from literature or poetry.

The event was reminiscent of Kasper’s recent collaboration with Street Buddy, also a noise band; this time though, instead of an epic jam, we were treated to an interesting juxtaposition/opposition amongst Kasper, Adelman, and ONeil, three very strong artists with very distinct practices. Adelman soared sensuously while Kasper scuttled nervously; ONeil, while being a sonic provocateur in her own right, was also the necessary glue that held these two disparate personalities together.

Alejandra Herrera. Image courtesy of
The Action Bureau.

My experiences of the other two performances that night were interestingly mediated. I only caught the tail end of Alejandra Herrera’s Sagrado y Profano so I can’t really speak to it; there is, however, a YouTube video so you can watch it for yourself. I was present for Marilyn Arsem’s Dissolution but couldn’t withstand the boredom and apparent predictability of it; she took her time to slowly and thoroughly strip all the leaves off a healthy ficus plant. Like many people, I gave up about 10–15 minutes in, thinking the performance would just end when the plant was stripped, and I’d feel cheated of my time.

Marilyn Arsem. Image courtesy of
The Action Bureau.

In the days since then, however, I’ve spoken to a few artists who made it all the way through Arsem’s performance, and the accounts they gave me changed, if not my own experience, then at least my perception of the possibilities inherent in the work.

According to Karen Adelman, after de-leafing the plant, Arsem got out a pair of shears and went at the branches (at this point, Adelman groaned and thought she was going to be there all night). She then broke into the planter to get at the roots of the plant, and finally she grabbed the whole thing and slammed it down on the ground. From Adelman’s description, it sounded like an epic battle to completely wipe out the life of the plant. Tricia Lawless Murray also commented that while the performance seemed boring going in, the ending was truly shocking, which was unusual, and she appreciated it for that.

It should also be noted that site specificity is important to Arsem, and in a nod to the Chinatown theater setting we were in, her mise en scène included fish sauce that seeped on the ground, Ben Wa balls that rolled through the sauce, and dry ice. The ficus plant is also native to South Asia. Make of all that what you will.

There is plenty of documentation of all these performances on The Action Bureau’s tumblr site.