What I did at the Lone Star Explosion Biennale: Day 2

Dean Liscum

I'm going to categorize Day 2's theme as dicks and death. This day's performances took place at Avant Garden. It had rained like it was the second great flood. I was late (I can't stand the rain...or blame it, but I will) and stomped through the rain to an almost empty Avant Garden with a wall size projection of chocolate-smothered penises and breasts and a group of people singing "we shall over come." I stopped in the middle of the bar and waited for Woody Allen dressed as Noah to step out of the bathroom with two sheep in his and hers leather corsets. It didn't happen.

Later, I watched the video of the performance, Brown, later. It's an interesting piece on religious and racial prejudice. And although, I like nudity and I like rants against prejudice of all types I couldn't fully integrate  Jonatan Lopez's monologue with the chocolate cake painting or the nude artists. Perhaps, it was just the chosen sexual metaphor. If I get to choose my sexual metaphors--and I don't--I prefer women and savor substances with my sex. In my opinion, Trix and super-sweet chocolate syrup are for kids...or maybe just dicks.

The video projection ended and everyone came down from the second floor where the performance took place. Next, the video switched on to a live performance by Marcus Vinicius from Brazil. He stood with his arms bound in a contorted framing of his head and held a burning candle that slowly dripped wax on his back and down his shoulder.

Marcus Vinicius in *streaming

My first impression made me think of the prisoners of Guantanamo. Then my art consciousness kicked in and I had an Abramovic moment. If I morph the two together in the recess of my brain, I get a realistic portrait of Dick Cheney as a demon child. I'm not sure that's the visual impression Vinicius was aiming for, but I'm confident it was the political one.

After the approximate 10 minute streaming video performance, Non Grata took us outside for a Texas history lesson. I'd like say I got brave and participated, but actually I just got coerced. A member of Non Grata put a cone shaped plastic bag on my head and pushed me into the garden with the other audience member-lemmings.

Me as an artistic medium

My fellow art media

And then Non Grata members began to burn things: a plastic army man to symbolize the military and war, a tablet of the last supper to purify us from religion (which was taking a beating this evening along with dicks and death), and food, which symbolized either "food" or the entire industrial, commodified food supply and distribution network. The proselytizing was a little pedantic and obvious, but in times like these, sometimes the obvious needs to be stated and underscored with pyrotechnics.

I would have made at least a C- if my history teacher
had used a homemade flame thrower as a visual aid.

The pyrotechnics were awesome. Sometimes, I just can't help enjoying a good burning. 

Somewhere in here there was an intermission. I spilled someone's drink and then got a glimpse of the pending Apocalypse, Hello Kitty with a pitch fork.

I always suspected Hello Kitty was a bad seed.

After the fires were extinguished, the audience moved upstairs for Elena Nestorova's performance. She began seated on the floor playing a very small, tinny-sounding harp-like instrument (hows that for musical approximations). After a while, a man with his head wound in cloth emerged from the audience and crawled to her. He then rose and she took the end of the cloth. He slowly began to turn in circles unwinding the cloth from his head while moving among the audience. Deliberately. Precariously.

A portion of the cloth read "...Don't make us..."

Then Elena and her male performer wrapped the cloth around the eyes of some of the audience members in the style of a blind fold.

After the blindfolding, Elena and her co-performer went onto the balcony where an inflated balloon with an LED inside was secured to the railing. They untied the balloon and released it into the overcast sky. The audience watched the glowing orb disappear among the clouds.

It sounds simplistic. It was. It was also elegiac.

After Elena's performance, I went downstairs to the bar and watched the Free Radicals set up for the after party until someone started wandering through the crowd shouting something along the lines of go upstairs if you want to touch death. I flashed back to Monty Python's bring out your dead scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Having already worn a plastic prophylactic on my head in the name of artistic participation, I thought, why the fuck not? I queued up. An assistant guarded the door and let us go up in groups of five to the 3rd floor of Avant Garden, the attic. There, we confronted death.

Sneaking up on death from the backside

Death in this instance was wearing it's Egyptian guise, appearing as Anubis, the god associated with mummification and the afterlife.

Full frontal death

Audience members were encouraged to touch, caress, kiss, and confide in Death. Given this directive, I struggled with my inner catholic nun. To touch or not to touch. I'd approached the attic in a Monty Python-esque mood, but shifted to a more somber one almost immediately upon entering. Let me just say that what happened between me and death stays between me and death...and of course five other people who were brave or drunk enough to join me in my experience of this performance. However, I will admit to lighting a candle. Then I got my black mark that proved I'd touched death and joined the living down below at the bar for a drink that was strong enough to pickle my innards even if it wasn't strong enough to fortify me against death.

What I did at the Lone Star Explosion Biennale: Day 1

Dean Liscum. Photos by Steve Patlan

First, let me be totally honest. I don't know much about performance art. I attend local performance sporadically and read about/follow the discipline even less frequently. That being said, here's what I saw\heard\felt\did at the Lone Star Explosion Performance Art Biennale 2012.

I arrived after things were well under way. According to a few people that I talked to (and who will remain nameless to protect their reputations from the fact that they talked to me) I missed a great show by Jill Pangallo. I have no idea what it was about but any time you can get someone (Dennis Nance in this case) to dress up in kitty-cat suit, it gets my applause.


Dennis Nance (left) and Jill Pangallo (right)

When I showed up, everyone was filing out of the theater and into DiverseWorks parking lot. A man wearing homemade, European (skin tight with smaller, slimmer ears) version of a Mickey Mouse mask. This was the performance Force Majeure by Non Grata.


Non Grata member

I wasn't sure what he was saying, but I don't think he has to worry about a copy right infringement lawsuit from Joel Osteen. Another member of Non Grata, did a hot little dance on the roof of car (donated by KPFT).


Non Grata member in Force Majeure

After the dance, one of the members of Non Grata took a sledge hammer to the car. All this while a DJ played some heavy trance music.


A disgruntled member of Euro-Disney expresses his angst

Then the Non Grata members handed the sledgehammer to members of the crowd and let them get busy with it.


Robert Boyd exploring the "art blog mightier than the sledgehammer" correlative

The crowd went this way with it, (out of frustration? anger? pent-up malaise? too much sparkling white wine?) and then they set it on fire at which point someone extinguished the fire.


 I think the point of the piece is actually to see if a cab will come to DiverseWorks within 24 hours.

Distorted metal and pyrotechnics aside, what struck me about this piece was that what passes for mere entertainment/art here is the stuff of political struggle in the rest of the world. 

Next, (I think...and yes you can take points off for incorrect ordering) John Gregory Boehme performed a piece about understanding and the human condition. (double-off for not catching the title, but he wasn't listed on the bill for Thursday). It was actually very moving. May be it was the slow, deliberate movement of his hand as he picked up each sheet of paper. May be it was the way he wrote people's names as he sucked the paper to his face.


John Gregory Boehme tries to write a name on a piece of paper held up by mouth suction

May be it was the rhythm of his voice as he repeated his name and then interspersed members of the audience names. 


It's easier to just give your friends money

May be it was the way in which he unabashedly approached people and asked to carry them and then did or may be it was the way he deposited them back in their seats and very plainly stated the fact, "friend".  I'm not sure why. To paraphrase the artist Eric A. (a.k.a Dominguez), Boehme made "the paper seem heavy but the people seem light."Regardless (or fuck it), it worked.

Gim Gwang Cheol actually preceded Boehme.  His piece started with him silently reading from a large book, which could have been a bible, which could have been an almanac, and tearing out a page, crumpling it up, and tossing it on to the stage. This took awhile. Next, he produced an elastic red string, and in mime-like fashion, he anchored it to the floor and then strained to pull it across portions of the stage and anchor it to the floor. Then he covered an eye with double stick tape, and proceeded in a slow motion pantomimed run, to move about the stage gathering up some of the crumpled sheets of paper and adhering them to his face.

Gim Gwang Cheol running in slow motion

He extended a retractable, metal tape measure, looping it into arm long segments like a lasso and then tossed it out over the audience. Before the tape landed on anyone, the tension in the metal tape and the retraction mechanism caught and the metallic lasso snapped into the tape holder. (It was magical. I hope there's a video of it.) Finally, in a metaphorical post-coital moment (after all he had reunited all the pages on his face), he smoked.


Gim Gwang Cheol getting his nicotine on

Again, quiet and deliberate, and it captivated my imagination.

The final act of the night was Rodney Dickson's Fucked Up Queen Bee Houston, and it lived up to its title. It started with the audience being invited\coerced to join the artist on stage. Then, it began in earnest. A keyboard was smashed. Rose petals were cooked with onions. A couple people were reading poetry. A group of nude models was either modeling or having sex or modeling having sex. An artist was attempting to draw the nudes doing whatever they were doing. A hefty Jesus with a crown of thorns was wandering the stage with a rather diminutive cross. An extra from Mad Max was dragging chains and metal behind him and shouting into a mega phone. An artist was cutting up a board with a power saw.


Yes, Virginia it was as loud and as chaotic as it looks... and no art bloggers were injured in the performance of this piece.

It was orgiastic. The problem that I have with orgies (and probably more generally, all art/experiences that I don't understand) is that if I'm not in it, experiencing the immediacy and the energy first hand, I feel like the detached, analytical observer that I am. And from that perspective (armed with the knowledge that this type of performance was done in the 60's and 70's), it looks frenetic and contrived, which of course in a general sense it is. May be I would have felt different had I been naked or carrying a cross.

All photos are copyright (c) Steve Patlan, who had a much steadier hand than I did through the whole evening.