OPO (one person's opinion)
David Bernstein and Nicole Demby's performance at Silvershed, very object-centric, consists of two people doing tasks or rituals in what seems like episodes of escalation around vintage-y junky objects. begins with his collaborator Demby putting on a be-bop jazz record on a batty old record player, then laying down and picking up and re-laying a maroon rug, hanging up clothes on a wire hanger, eventually wrapping toilet paper around the performance area, and setting something small on fire and stamping it out. it’s hard to feel there is any raison d’etre to these actions, why this needs to be a performance. are we supposed to psychologize these two actors (i.e. attribute psychological motivations), place this scene in the context of domestic ritual? or is this an Allan Kaprow-like ‘happening’ where the focus is on objects-in-space, not objects-as-props-to carry-out-narrative? the two artists look like mod androgynous Williamsburg-esque inverses of one another. they are doublets, rather than a couple. i think? maybe hard to say. they both have something in their appearance that is similar enough to correlate them to each other (glasses, similar hair, style of dress), but in each one their rendition of that feature is slightly altered so as to distinguish them from being identical twins. the girl is one of those people (i think only in NY) who have an “architecture of hair”. that is to say, her hair is held up in a certain asymmetrical shape that defies gravity and she has that pale sullen otherworldy Blade Runner android-like enigmatic remove to her, like if you ripped off her skin and tried to get to her heart, U might instead find this digitized pre-programmed storehouse of android memories in a gesture of post-humanist melancholic tragedy.
sometimes at What is Metaphor the feedback is the best part of the whole session; sometimes the level of insight of the feedback eclipses the pieces themselves. it’s kind of like “magic.” i don’t know what it is, but it’s just the perfect collection of people who give amazing feedback.
Ari starts by contextualizing the piece in terms of ritual. Ari is always at the top of his game in terms of giving feedback, he feels like a professional “feedback giver.” he’s never dry. for me, the contours of the piece never coagulate enough, or were enunciated enough for me to get to the point of relating it to ritual. then someone says they are reminded of Yoko Ono’s “Cut” piece. don’t know the name of the guy who says this, but i think he works at Silvershed. he says that "Cut" piece shows “the distance people will go, and that the first people (who cut her dress) dis-inhibit the following people.” then he says,"the difference is w/Ono, she has an intentionality, she is trying to push something.” the guy Brian (i think that’s his name?) who always gives fantastic feedback, says “The rules of the performance are converging, maybe they’re ossifying. The gestures are getting larger and larger. Once they get very large, they become childlike. The larger the gestures become, paradoxically they become less interesting. You feel like it was over 5 moves ago. In order to elevate from this move, you are forced to take it to that magnitude.” Brian is brilliant, always says brilliant stuff (and he doesn’t even need an architecture of hair—he is usually dressed rather non-descript, or decidedly non-Williamsburg-esque). the blonde painter from upstate NY brings up something to do with Koan, i guess a Buddhist tradition where you go to a master and ask them something and then they answer and it becomes this alternating exchange—that is what the performance brings to mind. someone references “effigy, voodoo, shared iteration of things that have happened.” is it brian? or that girl with the beaver tail cap? someone mentions “limiting vocabulary, reduce amount of objects and phrase, when someone has reached a fatigue of generating too many iterations of active play.” Bernstein claims that the “intentionality of the piece is born through the act.”
i'm not usually the biggest fan of feedback sessions. sometimes when people give feedback, it can end up being a type of “masturbation.” they are just projecting their own agenda, biases, using the piece to perpetuate their own ideologies; but THIS IS NEVER THE CASE at BHQFU. people are always so astute, their feedback is so specifically tailored towards the piece, it gets into the crevices, the nooks, crannies, of the piece; the feedback pushes the piece farther than the artists even.
funny what the guy said about Ono’s Cut piece, that the “first people dis-inhibit the people who come after.” i always felt like there was this veiled gang rape/angry lynch mob feel to that piece, where the people (men) cutting her dress get more and more aggressive and less inhibited, without even the pretense of being polite about cutting her dress. they are all these blonde J Crew frat boy types doing the cutting, and i don't know if i'm paranoid, but there starts to feel like there is this jeering aspect to them cutting her dress. it's not some elegant genteel art piece--it's pretty CONFRONTATIONAL. it's a paradox, becuz she makes herself powerless in that piece--and yet, that piece is so confrontational. but nobody ever talks about that (in art history), they always treat "Cut" like this brilliant formal excercise in her use of cutting--that that was its main innovation, the fact of "cutting-as-performance." whenever you hear of subsequent performance artists being compared to Ono and that piece, it is always to do with them cutting, not to do with how she used it to incite this ominous group dynamic (with racial and gender overtones), almost masochistically, against herself. so it was refreshing that the Silvershed guy had the moral antennae to discern the "group psychology," and even malicious, aspect to Ono's Cut.
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