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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 22.1 (2000) 91-94



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Italicized Monsters and Beached Whales

Michael Rush

Figures

Art and Performance Notes

1839, written, designed, and directed by Michael Counts. Presented by GAle GAtes et al., Brooklyn, New York, November 11-December 18, 1999.

Laurie Anderson, Songs & Stories from Moby Dick, Next Wave Festival 1999, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York.

IMAGE LINK= IMAGE LINK= In the lobby gallery of GAle GAtes et al.'s enviably huge space in Brooklyn's DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) neighborhood, four hundred artists exhibit small canvases in an exhibition entitled "Size Matters." The same appellation may be affixed to Michael Counts's imagination and ambition, but in his case think BIG. In a few short years he and a sophisticated team of collaborators have created twelve theatrical event/installations inspired by sources as encompassing as Joseph Cornell, Robert Wilson, Edouard Manet, and Sophocles, to name but a very few.

Experiencing a Counts theatre piece is akin to diving into a hypertext on the internet, but he's doing all the clicking and controlling. It's also like cruising through a fun house at the carnival, but the creatures popping out of the darkness aren't just screaming, they're reciting oblique texts from classical literature, art criticism, Fellini movies, and Dada playlets. Counts certainly knows how to navigate an encyclopedic array of material and twist it into his own fantasies. Given the deteriorating state of late twentieth-century performance art (identity monologues, new vaudeville comedy routines), aficionados of the form may well find solace that someone as energetic as Counts still feels strong affinity for the artful abstractions with which theatre artists like Liz LeCompte, Robert Wilson, George Coates, Richard Foreman, and John Jesurun nourished us. This is not to suggest that Counts is an 80s clone: he isn't. He's more a clever student (he graduated from Skidmore in 1993) who's been paying really close attention and now knows how to carve out his own turf. Like several visual artists of the moment (video/film appropriationist Douglas Gordon, Duchamp progeny Mike Bidlo, and Cindy Sherman come to mind) Counts has learned how to mine art-historical sources, combine them with postmodern literary and theatrical techniques, and emerge with his [End Page 91] [Begin Page 93] own brand of an exquisitely executed theatre of images. Having paid homage to Tacitus, Matisse, and Hopper (in Field of Mars, 1997-98), and Cornell, Wyeth, and Casablanca (in Tilly Losch, 1998-99), Counts turns to Sophocles, Manet, and photographer/inventor Daguerre in 1839, named for the year of the camera's birth.

Likely conceived as Counts's entry into the millennial sweepstakes (where the 1890s have emerged as prime material for writers and filmmakers), 1839, according to press information, imagines Daguerre having a dream in which a child, in the guise of Oedipus, wanders through a landscape peopled by narcissists in love with their own photographed images. In reality (in this case, an oxymoron), 1839 is Counts's dream in which an Oedipal conflict in Revolutionary-era America leads to a pregnant mother's death by arrows to the abdomen as participants in a life drawing class and over-sized escapees from a bestiary do a dans macabre in the falling House of Atreus. Clear? Not to worry. With Counts's work the play is not the thing; the visual/verbal/aural environment is. In 1839, walls disappear, floors slide, actors dive into a void, and mammoth armadillos roam the earth. Extraordinarily precise lighting and gesture cues isolate moments of genuine beauty. The crowning moment in this visual feast is when Oedipus's/Henry's/Whoever's mother (expertly acted throughout by DD Dorvilleir), in her naked re-enactment of Manet's Olympia (and of Carolee Schneemann's similar pose in Robert Morris's Site), lies on her illuminated bed and drifts away on it, deep into the vast upstage playing area. Notice also the Dutch still life that appears complete with ripened fruit and slaughtered game.

Adding greatly to the visual environment (and...

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