Friday, March 25, 2005

Slint @ the Metro

In a kind of dual act of modesty and pretension, Slint performed last night on an often solemn stage with simple lighting explosions. That tone is so good. I got the sense that they were getting a remarkable amount of earnest support by the house and sound people. I knew going in that this tour was a remarkable event but it was still strange to be in a crowd that agreed with me. I cannot remember being in another show where people would shush each other between songs.

I felt a great deal of relief about still living in Chicago when I found out Slint was playing a reunion show at the Metro on my birthday, March 24th. I am pretty much over going to rock shows except for performances by my friends but this was the one show that I always said I would come out of the woods for.

I never saw Slint live. I got turned on to them, a bit after their demise, along with the rest of the Louisville, KY math-rock stuff by this guy Kenny who I went to high school with in the mid-nineties. Kenny always had an impressive aesthetic sense about him for music and color, and most things he turned me on to have had lasting effect on me. Discovering that music like this existed, that there were cliques of people who liked it, and that I wasn’t submersed in that kind of scene was one of the realization moments that I was out of place in central Virginia.

I don’t have the same relationship to any other music as I have to Slint’s small collection of songs. The gem-like quality of the Spiderland album and the band’s short lifespan has created this marvelous aura. The band that did something stunning and then stopped. This band is in control. There really was no possibility of an encore last night. I have always felt they knew they had made one really good thing and it was enough.

Slint has this kind of dual act of modesty and righteousness about them. Their songs are both marvelous and sometimes embarrassingly pretentious (see Don Aman) and the show last night had the same quality. The band was carrying an air of holy resurrection about them and one of the few asides out of the singer/talker was crediting the author of one of their songs and marking him a “genius”. I am sure band has spent the last fourteen year hearing how good they are and how they influences this and that and it seems like they buy it. Unusually, I don’t think it is really a big deal.

The way big words get batted around band is kind of a helpless acknowledgment that Slint did something good. These big words, usually used to flatter and create hype, seem more like a failure for a response in the event of the music. The music is so good it rather eclipses the band. I have less of a relationship through the music to the band than I marvel at the music with the band. I have the same feeling when I hear Roger Federer talk about himself playing tennis.

So, I was happy last night. It was fascinating. It was fascinating to see the small songs from Tweez, which gets maligned because of the rather claustrophobic production on that album, opened up in the live context. Not that there was much improvisation, the songs were presented rather demurely and very close to the records. There were several points of screeching feedback where there was a opportunity to push things and until the last few songs the band constantly begged off those moments, not even pushing it all the way to the reaches of the albums.

While maybe lacking a small effect here and there, the reproduction of their sound was remarkable though. Even places where there where little performance mistakes it seemed like it didn’t really matter, the awkward humanness of these guys is secondary to the magical chiming machine of the song and the bass tone was so good.

Ah Slint.

e

Monday, March 21, 2005

Cupola Bobber’s “Petitmal” & Walkabout Theater’s “Any Illusion: A Perversion of New England in One Act” @ PAC/edge

I experienced a solo-show by Seth Bockley, billed as Walkabout Theater’s “Any Illusion: A Perversion of New England in One Act”, and Cupola Bobber’s “Petitmal” (Stephen Fiehn and Tyler B. Myers) back to back on Saturday and thought it was a sweet double-feature.

Both pieces are created by dudes and they are very dude-ish works. Both present a great deal of text, are concerned with Christian myths and the relationships among people as we as God. Both shows are asking questions of society as well as investigating themselves. Both shows concern themselves with how images are projected and willed to be. They both left me with a sense that these pieces are about many things but mostly about what these particular boys dreamed of becoming in their adolescence.

Not that these works are childish or immature. Seth Bockley presented a thoughtfully acted narrative of characters and physical demonstrations within a tidy mise en scène. And I found the Cupola Bobber to be a very clever pair of artists with an urgency to find a place in cultural history and willingness to put out physical effort for their piece.

Any Illusion: A Perversion of New England in One Act

Seth’s work tracks the rise and fall of an “American Saint”. This character learns to divine using rocks at an early age and eventually becomes a prophet that travels during the course of the play from New England to the west. Set a ways back in America’s past but not presented as biography nor in a simple narrative, Seth morphs from character to character with a great deal of physical and vocal precision and presents splashes of conversations, internal monologue, and public oratory. The set is a wooden table, chair and box in the center of the stage with a half circle of rocks surrounding this set up. The rocks trail from the audience’s left to the rear of the stage wear they scatter. There were also three hanging ropes, two that would dangle a rock over each ear as he sat in the chair center stage and another that hung over the scattered rocks up stage. Either he uses these ropes to swing the rocks by his head at time or he would attach the box to rear rope, squat and set the dangling box swinging in a circle around him.

Many of Seth’s action involve the manipulation to the many small stones he keeps in his pockets. He pulls them out like little magic tricks, puts them away with a small ‘click’, drops them into the box with a ‘clack’ and taps them against the wooded table as he speaks. He uses them like puppets and wills personalities on them.

Seth’s stage to me was filled with natural objects (wood, rocks, rope, cloth) and while of course being sufficiently illustrative of an old-timey setting in created one of the fundamental contrasts with Cupola Bobber’s piece.

Petitmal

I reentered the theater for Cupola Bobber’s piece to now find three large square scrims set up forward on the stage. The show consists of many shadow, video and textual projections on these scrims as well as actions that physically move the center one. This minimalist configuration is emphasized at first with as initial projection of an empty slide projector slide creating an illuminated rectangle on the center scrim. Slowly more visual elements are introduced…a pair of reaching puppet hands with their fingers just not touching ala the Sistine Chapel, and then the full body shadows of two human figure nearly belly to belly (reminding me of the old performance art piece where Marina Abramovic stood belly to belly with her hubby, naked at a door of a museum forcing the visitors squeeze between them to enter), and then a slow repetitive text exchange like…

Left Screen – Hi
Right Screen – Hi
LS – Hi
RS – Hi
LS – Let’s Pretend
RS – OK
LS – Hi
RS – Hi

…and so on. Lights flicker on and off introducing and removing these elements and you can her the movements of the performers behind the screens. The pace is eventually broken with the introduction of twin figures running on treadmills, set apart (one on the right scrim, one on the left) but running towards each other. They have mics and scripts and proceed to read and run and become tired and sweaty. This much describes the piece pretty well for me; it is a frustrated movement towards each other, toward God (or in this case Kevin Bacon, more on that in a minute), and a text presentation that lists the minutia of their thoughts as they ponder the possibility of the revelation of authentic emotion, and such.

Of course it is a big complex piece and goes on…

The piece moves on to bring in several clever images and build at one point to a rather sublime construction where one figure is a tree, a fan is blowing into a mic on the floor and the panels have large S, K, Y projected on them. They perform further feats of endurance by one standing on the other’s back during one long exchange about emotions. And then of course there is the Footloose/Kevin Bacon video and dance sequence at the end.

Contrast and Compare

So back to just the materials…Seth is surrounded by natural objects and simple mechanical devices (pendulums mostly) while Cupola Bobber engages in contemporary plastic media and retro-mechanical devices like treadmills, overhead and slide projectors. Seth’s mechanics are rooted in simple physics where actions pivot around a single source, where Cupola Bobber deals with objects that can be rearranged, drawn from the junk consumer bins cheaply, electrified and are retro-ishly the materials of the indie-band/performance world. Materials of the Modernist vs. the Post-Modernist.

Seth and Cupola Bobber are also working in different orientations and to nice effect. Seth’s historical narrative presented with Modernist theater style techniques of collage, and a Modern’s concept of shifting identity that is ultimately rooted in a single self is a great vehicle for illustrating an individuals journey, the will to create, and the ethical/moral implications of these choices. Seth told me when I asked him why do this piece now that he wants to explore leadership, which is obviously relevant in the context of our current political administration and refreshingly unpolitical in its execution. Cupola Bobber’s dialogue is set in the cultural network of signs and signifiers, yada yada, and is seeped in self-reflective media and historical knowledge. Their angst is the inability to connect via any of the multitude of channels available and there sense of self is barely there except in lists of small private details and idle thoughts. Seth suggests the will to step aside from the network and lead and Cupola Bobber puts their heads down, endures, and hopes for revelation while remixing the world at hand for their amusement.

I have always wondered why a National theater has never sustained itself in the USA. Theater is a great format for exploring ethical and moral issues and concepts of national identity. Economically and politically film and media trumps theater as a contemporary academic discourse on power and as an agent for the exertion of power, but on the level of investigation of humans and their choices, theater, in a traveling format, with a relief from the need to make a buck, it seems could be a useful aspect of a democracy.

I also might comment, getting back to the performances, that in both of works use text elaborately but I ultimately tuned a great deal of it out. In both pieces, the visual, kinesthetic aspects pleased me greatly and the text either was so disorientingly complex or redundantly listed that I found other things to think about. Probably a second look would be worthwhile with either one.

Ultimately these pieces both were very boyish in a physical rambunctiousness sense but also in the yearning they put out. Both seek knowledge, a Christian construction of God, a clearer identity and question the world. Seth plays out the blessed hero, Cupola Bobber wants to be a cool band, make a few sweet records and maybe make someone cry during a guitar solo…pop hero.

Like a boy playing at superheroes this is familiar and rather archetypical it seems but both were mostly satisfying in execution. I hope Seth meets his guru and someone hangs a Cupola Bobber poster on the wall of his or her bedroom.

Addendum…

Cupola Bobber presented their show at last years PAC/Edge and at Links Hall for a time, but this is the first time I have seen "Petitmal". It apparently is more or less the same as previous versions and their infatuation with Kevin Bacon (KB) seems to be sustaining. I think I have heard them talk about KB in the past and they have some kind of fundamental directive in their collaboration that relates to him. While it is somewhat amusing to talk about this KB orientation from a distance, I found the Footloose/KB stuff quickly boring in the show. My shallow dismissal of this kind of orientation is that it feels very 90’s. My more thoughtful take is that this is an attempt by these guys to locate themselves in the center of pop culture as well as art history. This idea being based on the old joke/game about how all movies can be tracked by their degrees of separation to Kevin Bacon…thus placing KB directly in the center of some kind of ironic pop universe and basically a silly stand in for God. It seems by making work in relation to KB that Cupola Bobber seeks to place themselves in the center of the universe with GOD/KB or at least nearby as you can get in this kind of landscape. A kind of shallow pop search for meaning and truth in a shallow pop world that seems even emotionally defensive in its predisposition towards failure.

I had the feeling by the end that even though these guys were working so hard, sweating and bleeding, flickering their historical references at us, and so on, that all this was for nothing because there was some kind of unconscious lack of faith on their part in what they were doing. It is a shadow play. Yes, we are in Plato’s cave but in this case it seems like an excuse for something or a some kind of surrender. I can’t quite put my finger on it but it saddens me, not as social statement our pathetic world but as a sense of meeting someone who has lost their dog. They are putting up lost dog posters but don’t really believe they will ever see their dog again.

Vito Acconci @ AIC

Vito Acconci spoke at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Thick Design series of visiting artist lectures this semester at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The show had a line around the block, which is nice...the museum is actually getting a big enough name to create a buzz. Lot of people got left out in the cold because they scheduled the event in the smaller front auditorium at the museum for some ridiculous reason.

Thick Design seems like a meaningless term for important design or design with depth. Eventually maybe it will be art again…I am being pissy, but it just seems like a reason to publish a paper more than anything else.

Vito was interesting and old and kind of odd. He shared a great deal of work with us going back to his famous following pieces and the masturbation under the floor one and talking his way to the present with a stuttering, kind of creepy voice. He now thinks of himself as a designer/architect and works collaboratively with the designers in his Acconci Studios. He still seems to think like an artist though. Listening to him under that floor with his voice must have been extra creepy creepy.

He presented a great deal of computer-generated ideas for public art/architecture. Lots of them looked rather ugly or dangerous to actually be in but I guess he is now used to presenting to folks who might be funding a project and requiring many concessions, so he is giving himself some wiggle room by proposing the grandest plan possible.

The thing that struck me the most was despite his stated concern for making stuff that people are within and can do many things in his concept of a person is machine-like. People seem to be things there carry out actions (like his performance method was to carry out action) and his architecture gives people room to do those actions. There is a lot of inhumanity in that.

For instance, he proposed a simple living structure for under a highway system but didn't seem to think about (or at leaast made no mention of) how loud it would be under there. He often paired rooms in a way where it seems like sound and actions of your neighbors would be intrusive and annoying.

There was a nice idea of a gallery with walls of little holes so paintings could be easily hung. There was a soft, glowing store made of scrim material that was strange. I like this pretty fish-like bridge thing he actually built (in Europe somewhere I think), and I dug this theater entrance area that created spotlight effects with mirrors and sunlight.

Because of a bomb scare at the museum, there was a late start and loads of tech problems. Vito ended up showing us his documentation from the sound booth. His voice was everywhere but they left the spotlight on the empty podium throughout the presentation. My girlfriend thought he was playing God. I wondered if it was a ploy and if he was going to start whacking off in the booth. Of course the old artists never do anything wacky like that at the Art Institute.

e

Any thoughts on PAC and PAC/edge?

I guess I assume I am speaking into the void when I write this stuff but on the chance someone else has a perspective feel free to comment.

What is PAC/edge?

What should it be?

How would change happen?

e

Sunday, March 20, 2005

What I have realized so far about bloging and writing about PAC/edge shows...

1) That I am sick of the word blog. I am changing the link on my homepage to commentary.
2) Is it a diary? Is it a review? I don't know.
3) I can't keep this up every day.
4) I have a plan.
5) I assume someone is reading these when I write but not when I edit.
6) I have more to say about any particular performance than I think is coherent or that I have time to write.
7) I worry the artists will see what I am writing and think I am an asshole.
8) I actually think they should have followed through with the incest scene in Discarded Landscapes and considered what happens next.
9) I seem to think I know how Pac/edge should run but don't really know what their deal is there.
10) I spend less time assuming the best in people and being optimistic. I blame this on living in Chicago.
11) Bloging can quickly devolve into whining.
12) I like adding pictures drawn on my Palm.
13) That I should try to help folks access the work perhaps.
14) Maybe I am being too nice.
15) My fundamental urge is supportive but kinda pissy.
16) That I equate PAC/edge with the Atheneaum theater which isn't actually true, but none the less how I perceive it. I wonder if that is for the best?
17)...more to come