#long riting

[riting]

Samara Kaplan on congrats and condolences by Barnett Cohen

Samara Kaplan writes about the development of congrats and condolences, a piece by Barnett Cohen that she curated to be performed at the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences. Performances are April 27 and 28, at 6:15 PM. More information and tickets can be found here. 

INTRODUCTION

I am writing from somewhere in the middle of the process. The initial ideas have materialized into a script, the actors have become a cast, the costume design is nearing complete. We are now in the thick of the collaborative and unpredictable work of performance.

I have compiled this piece from conversations with Barnett and text and images from his collaborators to shed light on what this piece is about and why it’s being made.

As Curator, I have woven in my own perspective of the work as I’ve observed and contributed to its development.

Richard Neutra’s iconic VDL Studio and Residence sits on a lush and winding street across from a meadow overlooking the Silver Lake Reservoir. I drove past it for years without noticing it - a testament to its harmony within the surrounding landscape and the persisting style it has bred into the neighborhood.

Neutra VDL Studio and Residence, Silver Lake

I first went to the house a couple years ago to work on a homeLA performance. What I learned while being inside rehearsing for many hours over many days are the particular ways in which the home opens and closes to its inhabitants. With its iconic glass walls and moveable interior dividers, there is a sense of porosity between each space, inside and out. For better or worse, you can see into the bathroom from the balcony, you can hear a conversation in the courtyard from upstairs, you might happen to look up when standing at the bottom of the stairwell and catch your reflection in a discreet, built-in mirror. You find a retractable curtain, instead of a wall, dividing the living room from the dining room. You are both the onlooker and the displayed, even from within.

Images of living room to dining room (above) and kitchen to dining room (below), by Samara Kaplan

The endless possibilities for surprising and multiple perspectives make this site appealing for performance. In my experience, the house can even be a catalyst for audience members who may not have an entry into experimental performance because it so effectively encourages a sense of curiosity.

congrats and condolences is a site-specific work, meaning Barnett created the piece specifically for the Neutra House. In discussing his previous work developed in response to architecture, Barnett explains:

Earlier this year, I organized a series of performances at the House of the Book in Simi Valley in/around my friend Dan Levenson's installation of paintings. There was something magical about presenting work within a very particular architectural space; the House of the Book is this weird Brutalist building that has been featured in many music videos and sci-fi films. I wanted to attempt again and so I began working on a piece for the VDL House.

So, why VDL? Barnett began his process by exploring the relationship between himself and the house. From the very inception of this piece, Barnett situated his own artistic inquiries in relation to Neutra’s architecture:

Coherence is a strange demand. We tell ourselves stories about ourselves to ensure we remain who we tell ourselves to be. For example, like Richard Neutra, I am Jewish and an immigrant, and the platitudinous narratives embedded within and about these identities affect my thinking and behavior. Perhaps, as a Jew, I am neurotic and anxious. Perhaps, as an immigrant, I work hard at achieving the mythic American dream. Stories about the Self keep us whole, keep us coherent, prevent us from fracturing. Yet they are entirely fantastical. They are fictions. The intersection between our collective performance of the Self and our interiority is where these tropes often collide and rupture. The topography of the mind is without narrative or structure as raw thought forms are fundamentally chaotic in their arrival, pacing, and departure. How we present or perform publicly, however, often falsely communicates, even if temporarily, a unity of Self. Neutra’s use of theatrical curtains and floor-to-ceiling windows simultaneously nod to separation and presentation, that we at once live hidden from and directly in front of others. 

The site is not just a stage for his performance but a framework for excavating ideas of public and private space, both physically and philosophically. For Barnett, the challenge is to draw out the private, interior, unmasked self that only he experiences. Practicing non-judgement, he attempts to see his thoughts through the daily practice of stream-of-consciousness writing.

Excerpts from Barnett’s daily writing practice

Interview Question #1: TECHNIQUE

SAMARA: We’ve discussed stream-of-consciousness writing as your process for generating material. Despite being unedited, your writing sounds remarkably articulate and poignant. You showed me notebooks full of texts that read nothing like a diary or what one might associate with stream-of-consciousness.

For someone like myself, whose first drafts of writing often sound jumbled or overly simplistic, your ability to translate thought and feeling so immediately to the paper is a unique talent in and of itself.

Can you give a glimpse into what you feel is the relationship between spontaneity and technique (and perhaps even the cultivation of personal style) as it is exists for you as an artist across mediums?

BARNETT: Technique, as I understand it, is about repetition; it's about achieving an unconscious competence for something, an informed intuition. The relationship to being informed is a difficult one I suppose. Knowing too much or letting that knowledge infiltrate the work is dangerous. I decidedly and defiantly turn off history when I am writing, in the studio, or making performances. By virtue of being curious and trusting my body, I have confidence that my work will lead me to who or what I need to know. I am careful about when I ingest new ideas or information because the mixing of work and pleasure can create blocks. I therefore attempt to be spontaneous in my writing (and even in my paintings), to not plan too much and to get out of the way of the work. At some point, whether I am making a performance or amassing stickers to create a piece–I am currently making a series of paintings or pieces composed entirely of found stickers–I cease to be in control of the work. Instead it begins to carry me along and I have to submit to it.

My performances originate out of a daily-practice of free writing wherein I compose stream of consciousness verse in non-sequential volumes. What this looks like is me sitting down at my desk and writing whatever comes to mind: lists, ideas, unfinished phrases, images. And not only am I trying to get out of the way, I am trying to reserve judgement. My aim is to see my thoughts, not as connected to a false identity (i.e. me) but as objects, as forms, as content, that the machine in my head generates 24/7/365. And I want to experience the felt sense that accompanies these thought forms. Their auras, as it were. I read a book called Mating in Captivity by the famed sex therapist Esther Perel, wherein she attempts to reconcile the domestic and the erotic (anybody in a relationship over a year surely has experienced that disconnect) and she laughs off the idea of sex being spontaneous, that couples who live together should just spontaneously fuck. She suggests that sex needs to be planned, needs to be on a calendar somewhere. In other words, we have to create the conditions for spontaneity, which I suppose devalues spontaneity as a valid concept. I attempt to do that in my work. I have built my life around achieving spontaneity in my work, creating the conditions for le petit mort or a loss of self. Perhaps there is some technique in that.

Interview Question #2: CASTING

SAMARA: 'Creating conditions for spontaneity'... certainly relates to your process with actors as well. You plan to collaborate with them in the studio and on site to flesh out the performance, but you even played with spontaneity or improvisation in your casting sessions by giving actors one read-through as they had rehearsed it themselves and an additional one with completely different directions, forcing them to take a leap and not knowing where they'd land.

In your casting call, you (wonderfully!) required that the actors be "weirdos." Of course, I can imagine this correlating to someone's exterior look - but can you elaborate further on what kind of personality/skillset is needed to participate in a performance like this? One that originates from your own stream of consciousness but also one that asks actors to contribute collaboratively? ... Basically, why did you choose the actors you chose?

BARNETT: Referring back to your question about technique, I was not interested in finding good actors with good technique who could execute an action on a particular line. I was looking for an open energy and a willingness to play. Auditions are the worst (I know because I worked as an actor for a number of years.) It's difficult to not be nervous and that nervous energy can misrepresent itself as the energy, what the actor brings to the script. That's why I gave everyone a second chance to play, the space to try something different, to venture a bit into the unknown. In congrats and condolences, there are no roles or characters. It's just people performing words. And whatever energy they have, you know, life energy, what life has given them is what they bring. And it's also what they ate the night before. So much of our world is contrived. Not in an adolescent moaning sort of way. Not like, "you guys, everything is literally contrived." But in every way...I spend most days performing for people, performing a role. And the only time I stop performing is when I am lying on the floor on my apartment every morning by myself. What I am trying to do with my performance work, or at least with this performance, is to remove hindrances to remove it all away away. So when the performance happens, it will not be narrative or other such contrivances. It will be real in the epic sense. In the way that Brecht saw theater. I know I am setting up a false dichotomy between narrative and non-narrative but narrative is a gigantic block to self-understanding and the more we do away with it, the better. Basically, I cast people who have the ability to be honest with themselves.

Once the actors are cast, Barnett refers back to his stream-of-consciousness texts to craft a script specifically with the actors and house in mind. For the first read-through, Barnett hands out a 35 page script complete with stage directions and assigned lines.

An excerpt from the original script by Barnett Cohen

When reciting their fragmented, non-linear lines, the actors seem to exist together but are not necessarily communicating with each other. Maybe they share the same space but not the same time, sometimes seeing each other and other times looking past. Like the imagined inhabitants of a domestic space over time, the actors portray fragmented realities converging, overlapping, and butting up against each other.

At our next rehearsal at the Neutra House I start to see how important it was that Barnett cast actors who would bring a certain “weirdness” to the table – abstract lines are given lightness, drama or humor based on the range of expressions the actors can draw from. When I sat in on the casting process, Barnett encouraged each performer to switch characters and accents wherever they saw fit and what resulted was so vulnerable and funny. Celina, one of the actors, told me how Barnett first and foremost wanted everyone to be human. No dead eyes staring blankly, no Postmodern robots.

Rehearsal at the Neutra VDL Studio and Residence, taken by Samara Kaplan

Interview Question #3: DESIGN

SAMARA: Do you have any thoughts on how the costumes play into the discussion about bringing honesty and personal life experience into the work?

In the initial fittings, I saw draped fabrics (somewhat gender neutral although leaning toward the feminine) and neutral tones. I saw a timeless and cultural-less human who could be from the 1600s or the 3000s. Does this neutral outfitting better allow for the actors to express personality without visual distraction?

BARNETT: When I approached Eric (House of 950), I told him he could do pretty much do whatever he wanted with moderate input from me about the particularities of each outfit. You know, if there was something I could not handle or an outfit that simply did not work. My thinking about the outfits for the performers is that I wanted to prevent from them being misread. I did not want the audience distracted by more symbols than necessary. And I am only slightly-interested in the theatrics of performance. The outfits achieve multiple aims simultaneously. Firstly, they ritualize the performance. They remind the audience that the performance is a performance. They enhance the aura of its originality or rather its temporal quality. The people in front of you have put on these outfits to remind you that this a performance. If the actors performed in their everyday wear, I think that would diminish the aura. Maybe not for every performance but for this one for sure. Secondly, by aiming for gender-neutral clothing, my hope is to circumvent a gendered reading of the work or the actors. I am not interested in the actors, who are already performing gender publicly in their own lives, having to double down and perform a gendered role in a performance and in clothing that is not their own. That seems particularly onerous.

Lea in a fitting with Eric, taken by Barnett Cohen

I have been writing/rewriting the script and I absolutely love writing after casting and after having a sense of the outfits and with the space in mind. In other words, I am creating a unique piece for the performers as people as individuals and not necessarily as actors. Maybe my process is backward, traditionally speaking, but my aim is to create this piece that is strange yet approachable while remaining slightly confrontational but fundamentally honest. Not a play. Not a piece of theater. Not a performance. But something between all those three concepts. I do not have a word for it but I know what it is. Eric and his designs, his sense of color and form, both enhance and cement what I am trying to do.

ERIC (HOUSE OF 950):

In making the clothing I was focusing on the two main ideas, the physical space, of the house: the look, the detailing, the architecture, and Neutra’s theory of therapeutic space. I felt there was a connection through time between my ethos as a designer. I focus largely on how clothing affects the wearer, and the reaction between the two. Clothing can make you feel comfortable, chic, doughty. Neutra’s exploration of therapeutic spaces resonated with me and it was a natural jumping off point. I created layers of transparency to speak to the endless glass, comforting details in unexpected places, and natural color detailing in small doses to create a natural movement of the eye. In collaboration with Barnett, we created the clothing to be unknowable, something that is not instantly understandable, almost to conceal the personality of the wearer to differentiate them from the familiar of the mind.

Andres in a fitting with Eric, taken by Barnett Cohen

Barnett, Eric and each of the performers work with a tension between the real and the heightened, the familiar and the unknown to accomplish that special aura of performance while pushing the audience into a state of awareness. We are guided through the home with an opportunity to discover the details of the setting and their subtle influence on the actors, designers, writer. Intermediated by the artists’ study of and absorption in the unique spaces, we ultimately have a deeper experience of Neutra’s architectural masterpiece.

Barnett enhances Neutra’s physiological sensitivity to design through his staging and consideration of the audience. The actors are placed in surprising areas of the home such that the audience is asked to search in odd directions and absorb strange sounds. Daphne gives a monologue on a balcony overhead, Nikki and Celina moan from an inaccessible room, everyone has mysterious entrances and exits obscured by curtains or trees or reflections on the glass. These constant directional and textual shifts encourage the audience to remain alert.

Andres and Lea in rehearsal, taken by Samara Kaplan

Celina and Daphne in rehearsal, taken by Samara Kaplan

Early on in the process, Barnett sent me an email with subject line “congrats and condolences.” I didn’t yet know this was the title of the piece so I had assumed he was directing the congrats and condolences at me. The opposition of feeling at once excited and worried made me question my own situation and I opened the email immediately. I laughed once I realized it wasn’t just about me, it applied to everyone.

When I asked Barnett about the title, he responded:

congrats and condolences stems from a Jungian understanding of wakefulness or consciousness. When a person begins to see, truly see, then the world appears at once awful (because it is) and amazing (because it is as well).

congrats and condolences is a new performance work by Barnett Cohen in collaboration with Celina Bernstein, Nikki Bohm, Dan Bruinooge, Daphne Gabriel, Lea Madda, Andres Paul Ramacho, and Cary Thompson. Looks by Eric Holbreich of House of 950. Program Design by Tanya Rubbak (Summer Office).

Samara Kaplan is an LA based performance curator with a PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism from UC San Diego. While pursuing her studies, she was Curatorial Assistant at LAXART (2010-11), Curatorial Fellow at The Kitchen (2013), NYU Tisch Research Fellow (2013) and Curator of Performance at The Mistake Room (2015-16). She currently works at Phillips in Los Angeles, where she is expanding her breadth in contemporary art. Most recently, Samara co-curated multiple site-specific performances for homeLA, include One House Twice at Neutra VDL, and completed her dissertation on the choreographer's embodied approach to spreading utopian ideals. Both her curatorial work and academic research focus in on artists who - through the intimacy of site-specific performance or the connectivity of ritual - attempt to make the world a better place.

Barnett Cohen originally received formal theatrical training, with an emphasis on breath and vocal work, at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. He then embarked upon a career as a visual artist with an interest in multiple disciplines, employing a wide-range of media—sculpture, painting, video, installation, and performance–-that collectively serve as meditations on the space between thought and the self and between the self and the body. His work has been exhibited at such venues as Pieter (Los Angeles), House of the Book (Los Angeles), 356 Mission (Los Angeles), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), City Limits (Oakland), The International Center for Photography (New York), and La Galerie SEE Studio (Paris.) In 2019, he will present new work at Mast on Fig in Los Ángeles and JDJ in Garrison, New York. He received a BA in English literature from Vassar College, an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and has been in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the MacDowell Colony.

[riting]

Dynasty Handbag: Shell of a Woman by Jibz Cameron

Other Animals on Shell of a Woman

“Is this a painting?,” Jackson Pollock once asked the painter Lee Krasner, of a canvas still wet with drips. Krasner and Pollock were married, standing in a studio in Long Island. Her response is never included in the story. But recent research by Dynasty Handbag has illuminated more of this historical moment. We can now see, from beneath a pile of old potatoes and rotting wool jackets and crusty brushes, a Professor Bags lurching forward, screaming, “NO!!!!”

Here, now, stands Professor Bags, limbs akimbo, searing holes in the audience with her stare, her massive brocade trench coat partially eclipsing the PowerPoint projected on a screen behind her. In this LA premiere of Handbag’s latest show, Shell of a Woman, she concerns herself with the 10 Greatest Works of Art ever, according to the Internet. Those in the audience consider her first on that list. PeeWee Herman is here, sitting demurely in the third row, in bifocals. Hannah Gadsby is here, with a handsome fade. The comic illustrator Nicole Georges perches next to Gadsby

, as attentive as a disciple. We would all trade next to anything to watch this lesbian Venus emerge from her scallop shell on loop, the gay world’s most sacred gif.

While Dynasty Handbag’s work doesn’t appear on the Internet’s greatest hits list, here onstage at Dynasty Typewriter (no relation), she crouches atop it, a gargoyle in shoulder pads, lipstick freshly smeared from her kill. It’s fun to watch her woopsy daisy destroy the greats like she’s knocking down a Jenga tower. Irreverent is too golf-clappy a word; Professor Bags is out for blood, even if just to smear an F in front of the word Art with her own tampon. It’s deeply satisfying to fumble along with her Braille for Beginners description of revered works of art – a sort of way-finding around a painting that dispenses with assessment or valuation. Here, a blob, there, a long sandwich or maybe a yellow finger. And here, a large rock with one breast. Thank you, next.

In an alternate dimension, where The Guerrilla Girls never aped around in front of MoMA and La Barbe was just a Parisian secretary, Professor Bags lectures for her undergrads – PeeWee, Hannah and Nicole – with what little is left of art history in the aftermath of broadband patriarchal apocalypse, the ruins reeking of turpentine and strewn with legendary dismembered ears. Bags née Handbag panics, revels and screeches her way through the lowest brows of Art, flashing her teeth at acres of beige male flesh and rote recitations of time-worn accolades, collapsing the soufflé of every Famous Art Man one by one, execution style.

Because she can, she sings, intermittently changing costume on stage, struggling with the projector remote, and draping herself over a stool or lectern to finish a long, howling crescendo. Ending on a seasonal note, Handbag takes the mic from Professor Bags to deliver the world’s most disturbing, slinky, elf-pitched rendition of Santa Baby.

I wish this was the Internet. Would like to feed every Wikipedia page and Bing.com search result through this filter. Want to stay here and watch forever. Only the Bags dynasty can make sense of it all.

Other Animals is Valentine Freeman who writes and overestimates herself from Los Angeles, California.

From E.S.P. TV Presents: Merry Christmas, Mary Boom! Taped live to VHS at Clemente Soto Velez, Flamboyan Theater, NYC, Dec. 15, 2012 by Scott Kiernan and Victoria Keddie.

Amanda Horowitz on Shell of a Woman

Dynasty Handbag is the shell that performer Jibz Cameron constantly slips into, providing discombobulated and hilarious slip-ups for her devoted audience. I’ve seen Dynasty Handbag perform a lot, mostly as a host in her monthly Weirdo Night! variety shows, but also in these smorgasbord theater pieces in which she trolls the formal qualities of comedy, cabaret, and solo-performance art. Dynasty Handbag has absorbed the horror and embarrassment of performance into a method of her own. I love the moments when she stops “performing” and putters out, totally exhausted or mortified by what she is doing. She meanders into anxious self-reflection, descends into wordless baby-talk-babble, and makes herself laugh at the depths of her own character’s absurdity. In these moments, there is an experience of second-hand embarrassment, and I realize just how weird it is to watch someone perform. Entertainment flips inside out, like the banana peel she alludes to at the top of “Shell of a Woman”: it no longer looks like the comedy, song, and dance she was giving us, but instead becomes the excessive, anxious, shedding of an entertainer. This shedding is latent in most performance, and for a reason, it is deeply uncomfortable to know just how desperate our performer/actor is. Dynasty Handbag prods just how far she can go down with the shame-train, teetering between a campy intensification of character and a cringey self-awareness. This is why it’s so hard to accurately describe exactly who/what Dynasty Handbag is; at times she’s abject and revolting, absurdly solipsistic, but her shell-like persona defies internalization of these things. Shame is less a tenant of her character and more a transient force within any performance.

When camp becomes cringey, it creates what my collaborator and I, in our own theater projects, have termed as “cramp.” We began using the term to speak about a particular tone of camp inadvertently performed in viral videos. In cramp, all the inward shivers of vicarious humiliation are brought on by the deep embarrassment of watching someone commit to artifice with total unawareness. Cramp combines camp’s (as noted by Susan Sontag) “glorification of character” with all the shades of othering that is platformed online. Campy performance, with its roots in cabaret, drag, and experimental theater, has long been a way for outsiders to perform their subjectivity to a simpatico audience. But, when these tenants go viral, everyone takes up performance as a way to declaim and defend their otherness. Schools of the unaware perform for each other in vacuums of jingoism, and in the end, no matter what camp you’ve come to represent there’s a cringey moment somewhere for you to watch or to be a part of. 

Throughout “Shell of a Woman,” Dynasty Handbag lectures her creative adjacent audience on the ten best artworks in history. She parodies a bourgeois art historian who, with cramp in hand, infantilizes the male-centric history of art through a performed innocence, making observations such as “Jackson Pollock's painting is a picture of spaghetti and beans,” and pronouncing Picasso as “Pick-A-Sew.” A particularly crampy moment in Dynasty Handbag’s performance occurred during the encore rendition of Santa Baby. She came back on stage in a tight red bodysuit and over-sized furry slippers to sing the Christmas carol as an adult baby. She whines and screams the Crampus number, humiliating and perverting the camp of Christmas cheer. Dynasty Handbag’s cramp also turns up monthly at her Weirdo Night! comedy shows. She’s become a routine nasty pain in the Los Angeles performance-art scene’s core, the lesbian cousin to the belly laugh.

Early on in the show, Dynasty Handbag claimed that “Shell of a Woman” is a lesbian show with nothing inside. It was one of my favorite ongoing jokes. Her continual claiming of the show’s “lesbian content” is entirely uncool. A more fashionable contemporary performer would have traded in the term for queer by now. But Dynasty Handbag claims her lesbian content hard, and with folly. As a shell of a woman she can talk back to herself and be entirely uncool and uncouth, as there is no inside to return to. Thus, she is able to reflect our own cringe worthy fears of being the incorrect thing, or claiming the wrong way to express otherness, which just creates yet another subcategory of alienation and ignominy.

Theater is inherently an embarrassing medium. It can be awfully excruciating to watch live bodies grab for emotions, especially those of campy and melodramatic size. And what’s more, you are stuck there, and the possibility of leaving, while available, would be public, you might trip over your neighbors’ feet, it could be a worst-case-social-situation. So, as a platform for cramp performance, theater seems far more risky and effective than that of the computer or television. In cramp theater, the audience has to confront embarrassment, and they are not cushioned by the safety and distancing of the screen. The inward shiver it produces could be a sort of collective erotics, a place to experience disgrace as a group feeling, rather than one of individual or virtual perjury. In a culture in which shame is used to control one’s body and one’s experiences as good or bad, diving further into the inward shiver could be a good place to start in detangling the anxieties that keep us separated and in fear of each other. 

Amanda Horowitz’s work exists between written language and live address, sculpture and getting dressed, personal soliloquy and satirical declamations from fictional characters.

Shell of a Woman happened at Dynasty Typewriter on December 16, 2018.

Jibz Cameron is a performance/video artist and actor living in Los Angeles. Her multi-media performance work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag has spanned 15 years. In addition to her work as Dynasty Handbag she has also been seen acting in films, theater and television. She works as a professor of performance and comedy related subjects as well as lecturing and teaching workshops. Jibz also produces and hosts Weirdo Night!, a monthly comedy and performance event in Los Angeles.

Photos by Charlie Gross.

[riting]

Ana Briz on Noé Olivas: a la Calle

Santee Alley, a bustling, historical mercado in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles’ Fashion District, was the backdrop for a celebratory performance put on by several artists, designers, and nightlife personalities as part of Rafa Esparza’s project at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Entitled a la Calle (to the Street), the performance played off the title of Esparza’s Project Room exhibition de la Calle (of the Street) that was on view from April 22 to July 15, 2018. Produced as a collaboration between various individual artists and collectives, the invited artists in a la Calle focused on creating work that could be worn or shown-off in the processional performance as a culmination of the first half of the project. The garments produced for the performance were later exhibited in the Project Room space till the end of the show’s run.

In a la Calle, you saw toy dogs chillando, blinged out garments, quinceañera dresses, Virgén motifs, red and blue demonions, and an abundance of Nike Cortezes throughout. For many of the artists involved, Santee Alley is a staple location where they shop for looks. It’s the place where their parents and grandparents for decades have gone shopping for clothes, jewelry, and everything in between. For others, the location of the performance allowed them to extend their engagement with the public by being in continuous dialogue with folk from their own working-class community—such was the case for Southern California-based artist Noé Olivas.

The unannounced performance began in the early morning of June 16, 2018 in the workroom project space that spilled out onto the lobby of the ICA. In preparation for the performance, I helped Olivas with his hair and makeup. Like good researchers but also excitable teenagers, we watched plenty of hair tutorials and quinceañera footage on YouTube. This re-introduction to quinceañera culture in my mid-twenties allowed me  to live vicariously as someone who never had the chance to wear a big dress. As we prepared for his big day, I was overjoyed to see Olivas transition into this newfound role as a performance artist.

This project was months in the making. Olivas spent weeks going back and forth across the border to directly work with dressmakers in Tijuana who specialize in wedding and quinceañera ball gowns. “Viviann” is a family-owned business by dressmakers Rosario Romero and Francisco Agustin that Olivas has collaborated with in the past on another dress project, a quinceañera dress made out of burlap fabric and lace. Similar to the past project, they collaborated on the design of the dress, but this time around the dress was made to fit Olivas, requiring several fittings. The outcome was a Cinderella-esque ball gown with a halter neck top (en moda for quinceañeras according to Romero and Agustin) made out of a Dickies work shirt and a skirt fashioned out of blue mop heads. The marriage between the blue hues associated with the rags to riches fairytale and the blue-collar work Olivas is used to resulted in the perfect fit for a princess, one that would flounce and sway as Olivas danced through the crowded streets.

It was a bright and busy Saturday, and as the performers trickled into the Santee Alley, heads began to turn. I spent most of my time following Olivas whose performance was meant to close off the fashion show. By the time he began to walk through the mercado, many of the vendors and families doing their weekend shopping already knew something was up. 

The event by nature was mysterious and secretive as the performance was not widely publicized, choosing to focus on the already-present audience in Santee Alley rather than replacing those same families with people who would not typically frequent the alley in the first place. The result was a mix of shock, wonder, confusion, celebration, and disgust. As Hammer curator Erin Christovale mentioned in an artnet news write up, a la Calle was reminiscent of the performative interventions Chicanx group Asco would stage in the streets of East Los Angeles in the 1970s. 

Asco’s performances like Stations of the Cross (1971) or Walking Mural (1972) speak directly to the heart of the performance staged by this group of collaborators. In the case of Stations of the Cross and Walking Mural, Asco put together these performative actions with a socio-political aim to challenge hegemonic narratives in the art world as well as within their own community. 

With a la calle, the performative intervention took shape as a desfile of fashions and characters not all too dissimilar from the ones already present in the alley. It queered the mundane into something full of wonder and fantasy. In many ways, the fashions, installations, and performances created were representative of a specifically Los Angeles queer culture of color as seen through the eyes of the artists in the show. 

It was as if Olivas was saying, “Here, this is what I see.” It was a quinceañera, barely fifteen, and yet already a woman. It was the poetics of labor in blue-collar work. It was the fantasy of it all, and it was the reality of the grueling work. As Olivas hauled the 50+ lbs dress across six blocks, the corset in the bodice of the dress cutting into his ribs and the sun beating down his back, children yanked on their mother’s hands for a better look and everyone snapped pics. 

Many turned away, disgusted with these locos. But others turned their attention towards the performers, focusing on the acts being performed and hurling out statements that encouraged them, like how one clothing vendor egged Olivas on by yelling out, “Mop that shit, boy! Clean that shit good!” as he swayed through the crowd, his mop skirt picking up all the dirt and LA grime on the ground. Another vendor more cleverly came up with the name of limpiezañera, joining the Spanish word for cleaning (limpieza) and the obvious quinceañera. At a large crossing, I had a security guard ask me what was going on. He exclaimed, “I don’t know what is happening! I think it’s a freakshow!” 

He was right.

a la Calle happened on June 16, 2018 as part of de la Calle at ICA LA.

Ana Cristina Briz is a writer, curator, and art historian. Originally from Guayaquil, Ecuador, she lives in Los Angeles, California.

Noé Olivas is a Southern California-based artist that investigates the poetics of labor through printmaking, sculpture, and performance.

Photos by Ana Briz.

[riting]

Johanna Hedva and Lucas Wrench on the durational performance of Machine Project

When Machine Project closed a year ago, on January 13, 2018, we wondered: what if what just ended was a show that was fifteen years long? Perhaps a bunch of artists had visited there as unwitting collaborators in, and audience to, an ongoing performance disguised as discrete events? We asked a couple Machine regulars to write about the show and reflect on how it might help them think about issues specific to performance.

Johanna Hedva: If Machine Project wasn’t a big ol’ performance, what was it?

Was it a science-fiction movie? It had (was) an imaginative concept that foregrounded innovation and exciting technologies, and was entirely populated by extraterrestrials.

Was it a catering service? When I worked there, every day we’d scoot the tables together and squinch our IKEA folding chairs in close and eat the takeout lunch Mark Allen had bought for us out of company funds, and this is the number one reason, of so many reasons, why it’s still the best job I’ve ever had, and I imagine I can speak for my fellow colleagues in saying that it’s one of the best jobs they’ve ever had, simply because eating together day in and day out for several years builds community and trust and friendship like nothing else.

Figure 1: Claire Kohne as Kalypso the vengeful sorceress who chases after Odysseus as he is being rescued in the VONS parking lot. From Odyssey Odyssey (2013).

Was it a really long Vine? ‘Twas a zany goofball slapstick premise exceptionally executed in an unfathomably pinched amount of time, and also served as a vessel for cultural criticism and commentary, while birthing a zillion trends.

Was it a tabletop role-playing game? Maybe not exactly, but in essence it was a bunch of people who could be called players rather than competitors, creating their own characters who participate in a collective narrative within an agreed-upon (fictional or non) setting, which follows guidelines and rules of that agreed-upon world, but which is not necessarily and probably quite different from the rest of the world, and which is great fun and probably addicting. Also, once they got that great website, they sort of became a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game), because of those brilliant animated avatars (drawn by Tiffanie Tran) of an octopus (representing the artist), a cactus with a beret (poets), and a pineapple with a mustache (representing the public).

Was it a Hollywood blockbuster? Because it pretty much fits film critic Tom Shone’s definition of a blockbuster being “a fast-paced, exciting entertainment, inspiring interest and conversation beyond the theatre (which would later be called ‘buzz’), and repeated viewings,” and, for a nonprofit, it was pretty damn financially successful.

Was it a book of aphorisms? Fits the Online Etymology Dictionary’s definition for aphorism as “a concise, terse, laconic, and/or memorable expression of a general truth or principle,” and it would be more than just one aphorism, more like a book of them, a very long book, because there were way more than just a few.

Figure 2: Joe Seely as Clay, an old bitch who's been waiting in the desert for 100 years to see the symbol of her desire again. From Ancient Monuments to What (2015).

Speaking of books! Was it a cookbook? Chock full of recipes that simultaneously include careful measurements and room for error, for how to make various dishes, from soupy liquids to layered cakes to multi-plated entrees?

Was it an example of magical realism? Political critique folded into phantasmagorical otherworldly otherworlds, with intricate metaphors, animals, witches, forests, and shipwrecks, and strange objects and doorways that may or may not take you to another dimensional realm that may or may not be 100 years from now or in the past.

Was it a PhD thesis on how certain forms of sociality feel better than others, but strangely it’s hard to articulate why?

Was it an attempt at utopia? Isn’t utopia inherently a failure? Then, but, so, didn’t it succeed?

Was it a puzzle that refused to be solved?

Figure 3: Nickels Sunshine as Yama-uba, a crone with mouths under her hair who feeds on young girls. From Ancient Monuments to What (2015).

Was it a distant island that we tried to voyage to, but alas, our ship ran aground and our beards grew wildly and became entangled in the rigging and, thin with scurvy, we watched the sun go down as the skies roared with thunder and some of us howled at the future while others listened to the wind?

Was it a petition or a vow?

Was it a love letter? It loved me. I loved it. Am I the only one, I don’t think so.

Should these questions be answered? Can they? But why would we want to?

Was it a promise covered in tiny musical notes that when all played together made the big, resounding chord of curious joy?

Was it a dream? It was one of the best dreams.

Johanna Hedva is a fourth-generation Los Angelena on their mother’s side and, on their father’s side, the grandchild of a woman who escaped from North Korea. Hedva is the author of the novel, On Hell (2018, Sator Press). Their fiction, essays, and poems have appeared in Triple Canopy, The White Review, Black Warrior Review, Entropy, Mask, 3:AM, Asian American Literary Review, The Journal Petra, DREGINALD, and Two Serious Ladies. Their works of performance, design, and sound have been shown at Human Resources LA, PAM, the Getty’s 2013 Pacific Standard Time, the LA Architecture and Design Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon. Most of their performances in Los Angeles were hosted by Machine Project, including The Cave series and Odyssey Odyssey, their adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, which was performed in a Honda Odyssey being driven down the freeway. 

Lucas Wrench: Notes on Vermin

The Machine Project Mystery Theater was originally built in 2013 for Chris Weisbart’s Alvarado Caverns project - which transformed Machine Project’s storefront into an amalgamation of a 99 cent store, gas station bathroom, hologram-laden indoor cave, and a faux-victorian seventeen seat basement theater, replete with velvet curtains, gold foam molding, and clamshell stage lights. Most importantly, Machine Project’s Mystery Theater featured a drop-tile foam ceiling, painted gold, leaving a ten inch gap between Machine Project’s rapidly deteriorating ground level floorboards and the precariously adhered foamcore below. Due to Machine Project’s penchant for spontaneous trapdoor construction, by the time I arrived in the summer of 2014, this once benign buffer zone had transformed into a kind of snack graveyard, home to pretzel crumbs, gummy bears, stray popcorn, spilled Tecate, and several bags of chips.

I’d like to examine the multi-year rat infestation that followed through the lens of what our founder refers to in donor presentations as “grass roots porosity”. It’s the philosophy that a small, nimble art space like Machine Project can be host, partner, and collaborator with a wide range of fellow art spaces, community groups, and institutions, creating a network that’s arguably more generative than those of better funded, but less porous institutions.

Figure 1: “Pro-Porosity / Grass Roots Culture”

Porosity is a liability for museums. While Machine Project’s vermin offerings were limited to Snyder’s pretzel rods and various gas station snacks, the sustenance provided by collecting institutions is far more valuable. Anthropological materials offer a protein rich food source, full of keratin, wood proteins, and plant matter. Works on paper can be considered simple sugars - easily digestible starches beloved by louse and silverfish. Painting offers a mixed diet - glues and varnish, wood and canvas. In anticipation of these threats, the borders of the institution are vigilantly policed. Giant freezers inoculate unseen intruders. Inspections and traps hunt for “visitors” like lady bugs and house flies, that can indicate a breach in security and become food for more malevolent vermin. Black lights scan for eggs and insect trails that warn of pending invasions.

Figure 2: Document Freezer at the Gilcrease Museum - Tulsa, OK

Figure 3: Insect trap collection at Gilcrease Museum - Tulsa, OK

To be clear, i’m not advocating for more rat-infested art spaces. Machine Project’s infestation was traumatizing. It demanded weekly visits from Karl The Exterminator to remove glue traps from the drop ceiling. I had a rat chew its way through the secret trapdoor in the upstairs apartment and fall some sixteen feet into the storefront. I saw rat tails dip low between the foamcore tiles, nearly brushing the heads of unsuspecting audience members below. Mice crawled over my feet as I attempted to run sound from the back of the theater. More traumatizing still was the constant, audible scurrying, the threat that at any moment the flimsy tiles would fall, unleashing the barely contained plague above.  

Figure 4: Diagram of Machine Project Rat Migration

But with a year and a half of distance between me and the rats, I recognize that the conditions that enabled this gnawing torment are the same conditions that made Machine Project such a valuable resource for artists. It was a space where you could cut a trapdoor in the ceiling without hesitance, and install gold foam tiling without concern for the ensuing trash accumulation. Where a temporary basement theater could stay up for a few more years so other artists can use it. Where the solution to a three year rat infestation was removing the floor of the storefront entirely, then reinstalling it at a 30 degree angle to present a play.

I’m now living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, working at a museum with a giant freezer and insect traps, in an office that requires key-cards to access, where no food is allowed, and the trash is dutifully removed every night.  I am protected here - a beneficiary of the museum’s commitment to preserve their collection in perpetuity, and a casualty of the fact that crumbs in my office could spell disaster for some Xth century manuscript stored a floor below. But from a public programming perspective, tasked with bringing the outside in, I can’t help wondering what it would look like to create some space here where a bit of infestation is tolerable. The only problem is how to keep it from spreading.

Lucas Wrench is a 2019 Tulsa Artist Fellow. He was Machine Project’s operations manager (2014-2017) and associate curator (2015-2017).

Machine Project was a place for artists to do fun experiments, together with the public, in ways that influenced culture. It happened at 1200 D North Alvarado, Los Angeles, CA 90026, and elsewhere, from 2003-2018.

Photos by Laure Joliet and provided by the artists.

[riting]

Kestrel Leah on Brigette Dunn-Korpela

Market Value 2.0 and Ear to Earth happened on November 30th, 2018 as part of “It’s Not About Pretty”--a collaborative performance project uniting three LA based female choreographers of color and alumni of past BlakTina concerts at the Bootleg Theater. Other participating artists were Mallory Fabian & Vannia Ibargüen.

Market Value 2.0

These faces are not from the pages of Vogue. These bodies on display neither sell, nor are they being sold. They are stoically gawking-repellent but this only makes me aware that a gaze asks no permission. I am looking at two canvases, available to projection, or critique; vessels of obligation, bearers of moral weight, on behalf of otherness (Other? I mean African-Americanness. But the diminutive other is, darkly, the word I feel.) In futuristic Civil-War-era silhouettes decorated with athletic under armor and black-and-white images of newsworthy and noteworthy faces of four centuries of African American diaspora—music makers, black-faced minstrels, civil rights activists; homages, reminders, warnings—the models play roles I can’t decipher, but I know they embody a past and a present, and it is the future that hangs in the space between us.

I move from the lobby and discover the playing space strewn with dirt. Real, earth-smelling dirt. A male dancer is moving a white plinth across the stage in a way that makes me grit my teeth, then continues in a seemingly self-imposed discomfort, now negotiating two of them in endless configurations, as if this is his fate, or as if he is searching for a way to rest but does not have permission to do so. The magnificently golden yellow Civil War dress has just entered and is being slowly dismantled—layers of skin peeled back and a snake-like black whip is shed. A loaded gun gone limp.

Ear to Earth

The dancers are listening not with their ears but with their whole bodies. I imagine stories, or even messages, being relayed through their most vulnerable crevices—crotch, armpit, neck, nostrils—as each one is opened like a book. And the stories are violent, and tender, and the bodies pulse and thrust like pumping arteries then quiver like paper at the mercy of an unpredictable breeze.

This is extreme. Huge gasps erupt from—yes—the dancers’ mouths, from the depths of their bellies, and they are pure tragedy and awe. Their faces are dilated as in masks, in a kind of expressiveness rarely seen in dance but which Dunn-Korpela doesn’t shy away from. I know this choreographer, and she is so passionate about technique that it could easily be an end in itself. But instead what I see is her obsessively searching all possible angles and orifices of the body for the thing that must, must, must, be said.

One circling female performer feels like a buffer between me and these corporeal upheavals. Not that she is there to protect me, but she gives me permission to witness because she is watching, too. She enshrouds the whole thing in ritual, scattering dirt from a clay urn, and saves the others from hysteria, seemingly, propping and steadying them when what’s surging through them throws them off balance. One dancer keeps uncomfortably trying on versions of pumped up maleness. When the swelling strings that have been under all this suddenly drop out to leave us with the sound of thrashing, tired bodies, the tension is broken with some girlish banter and clapping games. Yet something is still working on the male performers, and the giddiness feels like feverishness unleashed through the action of playing.

Dunn-Korpela also does not resist symbolism, nor symbolic action, nor characters, nor the every day. But in her heightened world, theatricality only further reveals the dance. This surely can only be possible with dancers who must share a strong enough desire to say something that they don’t shy away from anything that is being asked of them. Appropriately, the final act of removing their clothes is not a yielding but an act of ownership and self-determination.

Kestrel Leah is a British actor and director working internationally across stage and screen. She often collaborates across music, film, dance and visual art, and is co-founder of PHYSICAL PLASTIC theater project with Cypriot composer and sound artist Yiannis Christofides.

photos by Will Haraldson

[riting]

Neha Choksi: Voids / Memorial / Mon Élue Noire

Right before going to see 74-year old Germain Acogny dance in Olivier Dubois’ “Mon Élue Noire—Sacre #2,” I went to the memorial service for my beloved professor, held at her home. She would have turned 76 that day. First her son read from the Dao De Jing, chapter 11, about the structuring centrality of the void, how the hollowness of a clay vessel provides the function, how the punched-out door and window create a room, about the absence that organizes purpose. Towards the end, her friend, an architect who had built the room we were sitting in, remarked on her complete curiosity, her constant learning, her all-round precision. He rightly marveled at her embracing of so many passions within a single life—classics, architecture, dance, feminist theories, calligraphy, and more. He called her childlike. My mind cross-braided those two remarks, and when I spoke I said that as my Greek professor, she had once told me to listen to the silences, to the blanks, which, of course, is a practical piece of advice for a classicist, but also an immensely philosophical one, and perfectly encapsulates for me her constantly living within a void-shaped unknowing. She lived, much like children in this slant way, as an expert at unknowing. For me, having embarked on a project attending elementary school as a kindergarten student, I have given some thought to what a child’s mind makes possible. I think she was, like a child, an expert at unknowing, at being able to sit with the lack of expertise and still want to learn and know. In the end, everyone attested to her incessant querying, her willingness to revise her point of view, allowing for a life not oriented toward goals but interested in the pursuits, in their delight, in eros, in desire. Her absence allowed us to share her.

Choreographed by a Frenchman and performed by a Senegalese woman, “Mon Élue Noire” was entirely presented within a tall rectangle of a space, created by black scrim, and about as wide as Acogny is tall. That volume was shot through with chiaroscuro, with dark and bright, black and white, in light and paint, each vying for supremacy in a work over-freighted with the history of colonization and haunted evocatively at moments by visual losses. I want to speak to those moments. Those losses resonated in the wake of the memorial service, since the dance itself is a double homage—to Aimé Césaire’s idea that colonizers turn into savages when they treat others thus, and to the pagan source for Stravinsky/Nijinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”

Moment 1. In the opening moments, featuring a handheld light flickering and extinguishing in one spot and then appearing in another, I catch myself thinking about the movements that take place in darkness. It feels like there is a parallel dance full of action that I am not getting to see in favor of the edited stillness. Soon after, when the harsh strip-lighting outlining the interior edges of the box comes on, the effect repeats. Acogny holds multiple stances in the light, posing like a diva or stony idol, and then when the light goes off, moves into another position in the darkness, only to be revealed motionless by the light again. I have the uncanny feeling that I should be listening to the silences, to the movements in darkness between the frozen poses. The ensuing frenzy shatters that illusion soon enough.

Moment 2. Later, in the dim light, Acogny slowly slices the scrim horizontally, and I expect her to spring free. But it is just her finger tracing that line, in my head converted into the idea that she could escape the cage somehow. Astonishingly her very next move initially negates that anticipated liberation that her action has lodged in my head. Instead of leaping to free herself physically, she takes the black cloth attached to her midsection covering her groin and wraps it over her head, blackness eating her face, while she moves possessed, free and freed in ways any cage would never understand.

Moment 3. The black box is not always well lit, nor is it evenly lit. I see her clearly now though, and then, slowly, she tips her torso and head forward into the front plane of the scrim, slowly moving her face out of the light while her body is fully lit. The headless torso is horrifying.

Moment 4. The box fills with fog, the body is obscured but she is still dancing, moving, shapeshifting. The longing to see the movement is never appeased while the fog spews. The fog relents once though, unfortunately, for another frenzy of movement, and to allow her to paint on whiteface. Then it resumes, the gas chamber keeps on filling, and keeps on leaking out over the audience. It is too clearly and too meaningfully implicating.

Some things are best left to speak in silence.

Neha Choksi is an artist living in Los Angeles and Mumbai.

“Mon Élue Noire--Sacre #2″ was presented by the Center for Art and Performance at UCLA and happened at Kauffman Hall October 5-7, 2018. You can read more about other performances of the work here, here, here and here.

Photos by Neha Choksi and Francois Stemmer.

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[riting]

Jmy James Kidd on Meg Foley: THE UNDERGIRD

In advance of the LAX Festival we asked twelve artists to profile the twelve pieces in the festival. Meg’s piece, The undergird, opens on October 18th, 2018, at Think Tank Gallery in the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival and runs till October 19th. Details can be found here.

Radical Eulogy

The thing about words is that they will never be the Thing, they surround the Thing and try and get as close to it as (humanly) possible. This body, this person, in this time -- Meg Foley -- encircles grief, isolation, anger, confusion in her solo work The undergird. During our video conference interview I ask her if she considers this piece a performance and she tells me that it is not not a performance. She tells me she wants to be in the same Room with the people present and together, with every being, she wants to find the/a door to the unknown.

She wants and needs connection to other humans. Throughout the run of her solo (improvisation, dance, conjuring) in her studio, in a room in a house in Philly that she created for her work, that she has been working in for 3 years, in a Zoom meeting, she looks directly at me. She speaks. One moment she talks about my ankle which she can't see, she speaks of touching my ankle and I feel my face flush, I feel the warmth of connection.

Meg's dad passed away in 2010, six weeks after a diagnosis. She gets a call that he is gone, she goes to him and places her hands on his chest, she feels the warmth still in the body. She leaves the room for a bit and when she comes back and touches the body it is cold.

My father passed away in 2015, a month and a day after he called me to tell me he had a month to live. That time until he died was the time I felt the closest to him. He was open, he was scared, he was sweet, he was cranky, he was thoughtful and he was dying. The spirits started filling the room. The night before he died the hospice person told me over the phone he thought my dad was going soon because he had just taken a massive BM and that is what the body does right before it loses its warmth, it clears itself out.

The Body Knows How to Die.

In 2015 Meg was still grieving, she was still dancing. In the middle of a dancing session, she put her arm up and felt her Dad there with her. Since that encounter she has been setting up dances, scores, work of her body that invites her Dad to be there. She knows when he is with her.

Meg is Now still grieving, she is Now still feeling the loss, she is Now still living. She wonders about the purpose of her dancing: why is she doing this? Every day I wonder this same thing about my own work. The undergird has been a group work, a social therapy. In this solo version she holds the group in her body. She doesn't feel like she has anything to lean on. She feels like the mission of her work is shifting and she is not sure what the pivot point is. She desires a Radical Eulogy Movement.

I realized when my father died that Death and Dying is not something many people in my version of American Culture talk about or want to talk about or have experience talking about or have any deep traditions regarding dying and grieving. Funerals didn't suffice. What does? Grief, the loss, the memories are endless really, they live in the living body.

The living body is Warm. What is that Warmth? That Warmth of a Body can feel so good, it can be the best thing in the world to sense another human, another living being and feel that Warmth. The Body is actually the Thing. Dancing is the Body. Meg is the Wall to lean into, Meg is the Room we are in, Meg is the Door to the UNKNOWN.

Jmy James Kidd is a dance-maker, outfit-maker and space-maker, living and working in Los Angeles, CA.

Meg Foley is an educator, performer, and choreographer. Her work is influenced by her identity as a queer artist and parent and is rooted in a loving tumble with formalism in dance and what constitutes performance. She makes dances, events, and objects that explore the materiality of physical and social identity as choreographic form. Photos by Kevin Monko

[riting]

Ben Levinson on Edgar Arceneaux: UNTIL, UNTIL, UNTIL

In advance of the LAX Festival we asked twelve artists to profile the twelve pieces in the festival. Ben’s piece, UNTIL, UNTIL, UNTIL, opens on October 17th, 2018, at the Bootleg Theater in the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival and runs again on October 19th and 20th.. Details can be found here.

Until, Until, Until… is a sort of trans-dimensional replay of Reagan’s 1981 Inaugural Gala. A non-chronological relapse that collapses the tragedy of an individual (Ben Vereen) into the social trauma of a collective (black Americans past, present, and future), finding their collision in a peak moment of societal descent. Frank Lawson plays Ben Vereen, a performer who met public shame after his tribute to vaudeville performer Bert Williams was cut short by ABC. The edit that the network made omitted the critical second half of Vereen’s performance in which he wiped his face of the blackface makeup that he had donned for his portrayal. This gesture was intended as a critique of the storied violence that blackface represents. Without it, the already precarious use of blackface by Vereen (at a celebration of Reagan nonetheless) had even less to hold it up. In Until, Until, Until… we see Arceneaux’s and Lawson’s Vereen not only prepare for this fateful performance, but relive it through hazy repetitions in a nightmarish recursion.

Arceneaux’s documentation of this 2015 performance begins with a shot of lead-performer Frank Lawson tending the venue’s bar before the piece begins. There’s a casual pan across the mostly white audience. When the play begins we, the audience, are not let in on the nature of our involvement, the character we are playing. Nor do we know who we are watching, even as the premise is clear to us. Lawson/Vereen/Williams (all three folded into one) is rehearsing his choreography. We are eventually addressed and given a clue when his director (Edgar Arceneaux, from the back of the room) suggests he try the verbal introduction so he can get into character and loosen himself up. He does so. A slapstick shrug follows. This shrug is a totem for us to latch onto, a wink, some relief, or at least a sympathetic representation of our own unknowing.

Throughout the performance, timelines elide, characters morph, and epic tensions meet improper resolutions. In a transitional sequence, three presences combine: upon a white canvas: red, blue, and green light producing bright white light as they overlap. According to Arceneaux in an interview with Weston Teruya for Art Practical, these colors represent three distinct traumas attempting resolution but never arriving. The RGB analogy arrives in a previous iteration of Until, Until, Until… in which Arceneaux chose to represent this concept with three busts titled Blue Bert, Green Ben, and Red Ronnie (2017), each faceless but donning the headwear of their respective subject. There’s a certain imbalance to this triad which inevitably crumbles under its own awkward pressure points. Those two whose names are drawn together by alliteration (Blue Bert and Red Ronnie) are drawn together as if cooperative to one another or at least antithetical to Green Ben. Of the busts, Ben and Bert (who are nominally resonant) share a hat style while Ronnie does not. This imbalanced triad exemplifies the way in which Arceneaux’s work disallows conclusion. It opens up more than it gives answer to, particularly effecting when the topic of conversation is as pertinent as his are.

As much as his work is historical and referential, it resonates in its moment. While it was left to Johnny Carson to joke, following the gala, that the Reagan administration was "the first to have a premiere," the theater of presidential politics is at such a high now that the New York Times cheekily joined in last week presenting a three-act script of a typical Trump rally 

Beyond that, Arceneaux is particularly conscious of the space he is working in. In the midst of the show is a potent critique of whiteness in the institutional art world that takes little more than the lifting of a veil and the tilt of a mirror. Guilt is brought from the narrative guilt that a viewer can place upon gala attendees to a tangible discomfort in the room. Just as we saw Reagan’s audience swoon and chuckle behind Vereen, a camera is turned to us so we must see ourselves projected as a backdrop, holding our gaze. Again, Arceneaux will not hand you the answers. He gives us an image, a context, and space, and lets us, the readers, draw from it what we will.

In a way, it is my sense that the trust he bestows us with as viewers is what truly allows his work to resonate.

Back in the world, I had a flight delay. I sent an email to Edgar about changing our call time. It might have been for the best, I was still unpacking for myself the questions his work had already asked. Eventually he didn’t respond to that email, and eventually I did not pry. I found that what he had given me had been enough. What could I seek to clarify if the work had described what it needed to describe in the way it needed to do so? Any question I might have asked would ultimately be its own answer. Arceneaux demonstrated something for me, perhaps unwittingly or perhaps fully aware: that the reading process is much like the writing process, that showing is much like speaking, that the response is never the same.

Ben Levinson is a writer and musician living in LA. He writes album reviews for Tiny Mix Tapes, co-edits Soap Ear (an online journal about experimental music in LA), performs as Cali Bellow, and organizes shows with friends. He tries to keep in touch at [email protected]

Edgar Arceneaux (b. 1972, Los Angeles) is an artist working in the media of drawing, sculpture, and performance, whose works often explore connections between historical events and present-day truths. He played a seminal role in the creation of the Watts House Project, a redevelopment initiative to remodel a series of houses around the Watts Towers, serving as director from 1999 to 2012. 

Photos by Edgar Arceneaux