Two guys in a bar stood up on stage and took turns telling jokes. The jokes usually started, "Two guys walk into a bar..." they did this for 8 hours. Because it was art, it didn't have to be funny. And mostly it wasn't.
The Art Guys at Notsuoh: Michael Galbreth left and Jack Massing right
The Art Guys are celebrating 30 years of collaboration with a new absurd performance each month. Many of these involve some feat of endurance--walking the length of Houston's longest street or shaking hands for eight hours straight. Or telling jokes for eight hours.
The venue was Notsuoh. The format was a stage with two chairs, where Jack Massing would stand up, tell his "joke," then sit down. Then Michael Galbreth would stand up, tell his "joke," then sit down. Sometimes the jokes were long, sometimes very brief. But always two guys walked into a bar.
Galbreth gestures hypnotically
For a while there felt like real tension. One would stand up and say something like "Two guys walk into a bar and one of them takes a shotgun and shoots the other one in the face." The the next would stand up and say something like "Two guys walk into a bar and one of them chops the other one's head off." This went on for quite a while.
But most of the jokes were fairly benign. Galbreth was more a physical performer, wringing an incredible amount of emotion out of a lengthy dissection of the phrase "Two guys walk into a bar."
Massing did a joke where he combined every element of every "_______ walks into a bar" joke he could think of. He did another where he muttered his joke inaudibly--but at great length.
People wandered into Notsuoh, checked out the act, had a beer or two, left. The jokes never stopped.
Me, I was there for about two hours. Then I had drunk just enough Lone Stars that I could still drive home, so I left.
Joke books on stage.
And when I was about to leave, Notsuoh owner Jim Pirtle came up to me and shook my hand. He was seriously upset. He had just learned that a local performance poet, Al-Gene Pennison III, also known as the Plastic Clown, had died late the previous night. He had been at Notsuoh, went to a friend's place, and then fell off a balcony. Pirtle was quite broken up about it.
As for the Art Guys, well, the death of a Plastic Clown is a hard act to follow.
In the dead center of summer in Houston, Tuesday's are dead. Monday's are even more livelier because it's industry night and you can buy drinks for you favorite bartender and s/he can remind you what a lousy tipper you are and how lame your game looks to the rest of the bar.
In the art world, they're even deader. So, when one of the members of Continuum forwarded a FB invite to Southmorehouse's event Naked Tu-Tu Tuesday #27. I glanced over the invite (excerpted below), reviewed my desolate social calendar, and clicked Join.
This is a ballet themed NT so bring your naked self and your Tutus to Notsuoh on Tuesday July 31st for an evening of ballet, music, and audience participatory performance art featuring Cello Fury from Pittsburg, PA (that does not mean "Prince Albert", folks) and Continuum, a local Houston performance art troupe (who will also lead a movement workshop).
To get such a sweet spot we have already volunteered to do an exhibitionist improv and definitely goofy dance routine while they play. Just kidding - maybe...
The phrase that caught my attention (and inspired my attendance) was "audience participatory performance art featuring Cello Fury." What the hell, I thought. I like Cello Fury's music, and even though I've never participated in a performance art piece before, I figured that I could undulate to the rhythm in a way that would make my white boy ancestors proud or at least play the equivalent of a performance art landscape prop.
I also discounted the theme spelled out in the title due to three facts:
The invitation included the following disclaimer: "...There will be lots of people wearing clothes. Please, no pressure on them. The idea of NT is to make everyone comfortable with whatever their choice of attire."
Although we're not technically in the Bible Belt, we are below it. Even though the dirty south may be on the down low, we don't admit those kind of things or show them in public.
And finally, I took the line "PA (that does not mean 'Prince Albert'...), as an implicit guarantee that come what may, I wouldn't have my frenulum staple-gunned to my thigh. (At a place like Notsuoh, it's a good guarantee to have.)
Tuesday arrived and so did I. The show was on the second floor of Notsouh. I opened the door and raced up the stairs into a re-enactment of Marina Abramović and Ulay's Imponderabilia by two Continuum members. The performance art piece involved a naked (except for a stocking cap) male and a naked female on opposite sides of an entrance. Anyone who wanted to pass through the threshold had to walk between the two naked figures. Because of their presence, the entrant had to turn sideways and face (and come in contact with) either the naked male or the naked female.
Members of Continuum re-enacting "Imponderabilia"
This performance greeted everyone who showed up to the audience participation training. I was perplexed by the choice before. I was also fully aware of the political-social-sexual implications that I was forced to ponder. So rather than make a decision, I made multiple decisions and passed between the performers sometimes facing the male, sometimes facing the female until, like a over indulgent child at a free carnival ride, I was asked to let someone else take a turn.
I was mostly worried about stepping on their toes with my boots.
I could have ridden that ride all night but someone threatened to get out the staple gun.
On the second floor, it was a pretty sparse crowd. Maybe 20 people, half of them naked Southmorehouse regulars wearing more smiles than tutus.
The remnants of the first performance was being cleaned up. It featured Christine Cook fully experiencing her cake and ending in what any foodie (or your id) would enviously label a "foodgasm."
Have your cake and wear it too (photo copied from southmorehouse FaceBook page)
photo by Hilary Scullane
Next on the agenda, Continuum members, Sway Youngston and Jonatan Lopez re-enacted another Abramovic\Ulay performance piece, Light/Dark. This work started with the two artists sitting cross-legged across from each other staring into each other's eyes.
boy sees girl Abramovic-style
They then took turns slapping each other, tit-for-tat or rather whap! for wham! as the blows resonated in the space.
slap and ...
(tongue) tickle
The exchange evolved or devolved into a wrestling embrace. Both performers remained seated, but managed to lock arms and hold-grapple-pull-twist each other climaxing in an embrace-kiss. For the denouement, they then re-established the separation and the slapping until the piece simply ended.
Continuum members varying interpretations of the naked tutu
After pondering that painful performance (a metaphor for relationships? romantic love? the life of an artist? Continuum dues?), the audience drank beer, took photos, and lamented the fact that Texas has 367 miles of coastline and one clothing optional beach, which is Hippie Hollow in Austin. (At this gathering, I observed that naked people talk about being naked and nakedness issues as opposed to the geopolitics such as the war in Syria or the economic crisis in Spain.)
Rosario and Rosalinda plead with artistically inept
Around 9 p.m. instructions for BalletSutra began. I was excited. After all, this piece inspired me to show. Not because it was entirely new (Lopez had previously performed YogaSutra), but because it aspired to make the inartistic (namely the inartistic me), artistic. I figured if they could turn me into a performance artist, who knows what other transformative powers their art might possess.
The piece began with an introduction of our teachers, Rosario and Rosalinda, who apparently hailed from some undisclosed latin american country or a Jorge Luis Borge short story. Rosario explained that we would perform this sutra in front of the band Cello Fury as they played one of their sets. Rosalinda explained that the philosophy of BalletSutra involves a "dominate" and a "submissive," which seemed a more accurate description than just having a lead and a whatever that other person is.
The R's then walked the participants through the 5 movements of BalletSutra. There was twirling, flapping, kneeling, and something like a pirouette. It felt like a cross between tango, two-step, and ballet, but mainly it was slow and deliberate and the intentionality gave it gravitas. We performed the 5 movements until it appeared that either we had mastered it or that if nothing else we were more likely to injury ourselves on an out-of-control spin than a member of Cello Fury.
Beware: BalletSutra in progress
Our instructors congratulated and dismissed us. Then we waited for the band and their fans to arrive. Neither of whom knew that a group of naked tutu-ists, newly schooled in the art of BalletSutra and eager to show off our mad skills, was awaiting them.
They arrived and their presence inspired some to frolic frenetically on stage and ...
all around it. The roadies looked a little flustered. Cello Fury's fans did some jaw dropping, but the stayed and everyone settled in. The opening act started playing and everyone relaxed...or at least relaxed as much as they could if you were at a family gathering and uncle Leo refused to put his pants on.
Then Cello Fury took the stage and began to play. BalletSutra did not commence. Turns out that Notsuoh's upstairs stage is not quite as big as the members of Continuum thought. So out of safety concerns and\or in deference to Cello Fury (who wasn't warned of\invited to\ approved of, or collaborate in the whole BalletSutra thang), Continuum called off the performance leaving several of its supporters dressed in tutus, primed for dominance and/or submission, and without an expressive or creative outlet for their 5 new dance moves.
So Cello Fury jammed on (in a similar fashion to the video but this is not the performance), encouraging audience members to dance, and some did. But, no one BalletSutra'd as they boogied.
Meanwhile, 4 members of Continuum regrouped in a space next to the crowd and performed the "Green Blob." This performance consisted of a constantly moving, changing amorphous mass of green humanity.
Faces, feet, hands, and haunches protruded and then receded from the giant green organism as it slithered, shivered, and undulated across the floor. I was mesmerized as my mind tried to identify the creative anatomies that were limned in green. How could a thumb-nose-hip be in that configuration? And before I could puzzle out the pose another emerged.
The piece lasted for several minutes until the exhausted members emerged to applause. The consensus among those who'd seen it performed at the Texas Contemporary Art Fair and Bar Boheme during Continuum's turn at Cultured Cocktails was that this performance was a 'great' Green Blob.
Continuum members and their supporters. What you looking at Willis?
I left the evening tutu'd, artistically un-transformed, but better for the experience.
I went to my company's Christmas party Friday night. It was downtown, and after I left, I was wandering down Main Street and stopped into Notsuoh. I saw that Jim Pirtle was there, so I introduced myself. I spoke about one of the performances of his that I saw and mentioned that I didn't love the No Zoning Show. Pirtle was a canny conversationalist and arguer. He conceded that it was difficult to bring artistic practices that deliberately existed outside museums--practices that were social or existed in a particular time and space--and make them work inside a museum. He said a lot of what was in the show were traces of the past (especially the photos, but his own installation as well) that lacked context if you hadn't experienced some of it first hand.
In particular, he spoke of the past, and people from the past, as being "ghosts." You have frozen impressions of people and events. Each of the glass cases in his piece were representative of distinct stages in his life; they were pictures of "ghosts" in a way. The big empty box "contained" potential future stages of life.
But one thing he said about No Zoning that made me appreciate it more was about the new director of the CAMH, Bill Arning, and the two curators of the show, Toby Kamps and Meredith Goldsmith. He said of them that they were not from Houston, and there was always a possibility with people who have been brought in from somewhere else that they may feel like showing off. they may see their task as educating the hicks, or feel compelled to make their mark in a big way. Instead, this show, Pirtle felt, was largely about them working hard to understand Houston and really get where art was in Houston and how it got there. Having put together this show and having made an effort to understand what Houston art means would actually improve future shows.
This makes a lot of sense to me, and hearing it from Pirtle increased my anticipation of what we might see in the future at CAMH.
Around this point, a guy named Alex joined us. Pirtle introduced us and the conversation continued. Alex said he saw the show as a kind of vindication of the original Lawndale. But Pirtle disagreed, pointing out that only some of the artists had come through Lawndale. But I recalled what James Surls said--that Lawndale was the catalyst that permitted other institutions to take the step--Diverse Works, the Core Program, etc.
Pirtle saw the Core program as the key. He said the key was a simple structural aspect of the Core. It brought people in for two years. If you go someplace for a year, you don't necessarily feel attached to the place. But after two years, you will have made friends, connections. There will be reasons to stay--and thats what has happened over the years. And those that stayed really enriched Houston's art scene.
Then Alex and I started talking about Sig Byrd and the history of Houston. Pirtle had effectively engineered our conversation--all in line with his whole concept of Notsuoh as a social sculpture. He would drop in and add something every now and then, but for the most part he let us chat.
If you look at old articles in the Houston Press, it seems like Notsuoh has had its ups and downs. Pirtle bought the building for $20,000, and it is now worth a lot more than that--possibly enough for him to retire on. The taxes on it must be substantial. But he keeps it going. That stage of his life is not done yet.
