Listening to the 80’s: Inside/Outside by Linda Montano (review)

Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Doubts... Luigi Ontani,Astronaut. The Kitchen (November). Untel. C Space (November). One of ex-Kitchen curator RoseLee Goldberg's better ideas is the "Imports" series. Many performers outside New York and the U.S. are known only through media, and Goldberg's efforts have made it possible to more accurately gauge some well-publicized but unverified reputations. Two of this fall's "Imports" shows not only gave performers New York exposure, but pointed out the absolutely opposed performance tendencies which now exist in Europe and America. Both Luigi Ontani and Marc Camille Chaimowicz set up a static tableaux as a kind of nonperformed performance. Each event is made up of one slight gesture rather than any large action or series of actions, and each presents Itself as a brief moment (Chaimowicz 's lasts for fifteen minutes and Ontani's for as long as the viewer can stand to lean in from the hallway door to view it, a length which seemed to be about five minute;). Finally, both performances offer a withdrawn presence within a simple but lushly beautiful mlse-ennscene accompanied by soft music. In Astronaut, Ontani stands in the middle of the Kitchen, Its space transformed into outer space by the use of celestial slides from twenty-four projectors and by the recorded music of Verdi, Hadyn, and Puccini. Doubts.... begins as Chaimowicz enters, sits with his back to the audience and swings a pendulum; this activity appears on a video monitor visible to both performer and audience . Then Chalmowicz exits and the monitor shows domestic scenes: ChalmowIcz writes a lqtter, has tea, looks out a window . A slide of double doors is projected against the black wall and Eno's "Discreet Music" and Lou Reed's "Coney Island Baby" provide nouveau muzak. Presumably, something interior and subjective happens for these two performers, but the viewer is left to infer what that might be as nothing is shown except for the works' seductive surfaces. Astronaut and Doubt.... are the performance equivalent of Eno's ambient music, a pleasant aesthetic object to have around whether attended to or not; the pieces go on even if the active mind goes elsewhere. Worth noting is a particularly European erotic style as both performances look sensual but don't arouse. It's also a let-down that so few people bother to check out these events-the total audience for both might have been thirty viewers. ASTRONAUT Another kind of European gesture performance appeared as Untel, a French group which presented a performance with their exhibition at that more modest alternative gallery, C Space. The displayed photographs show a group of men In various street actions which seem grounded in a strategy of sixties counter-culture sociology. For their live act, three men enter the darkened gallery, each man doubling over with laughter to the taperecorded accompaniment of portentously spoken Social Nouns. Each finally falls to the ground, spray-paints a black X on himself, and becomes quiet, then gets up, pastes small stamps on each viewer, and exits. As a performance in a gallery the action was negligible in every way, and it's hard to see how this kind of anemic commentary could stir up some excitement (as the photographs seem to claim) even in a provincial French town. Oh yes, they also beat their heads against the wall. John Howell Linda Montano, Listening to the80's: Inside/ Outside. San Francisco MOMA (January). As a major dictator of dogma and decorum for the past two thousand years, the Catholic Church is a rich storehouse of solemn rite and syncretized paganisms. Many performance artists simply borrowed the trappings or liturgical formulae of the Church; a few have attempted to capture something more of the spirit of Christendom. Linda Montano appears to be one of the latter group. Montano and a group of six performers (George Coates, Steve Collins, Vincent de Luna, John Duykers, William Farley and Pauline Oliveros) lived for twelve hours according to an invented Christian discipline in their performance , Listening to the 80's: Inside/Outside. Listening. . . consisted of four actions: sitting , standing, walking and singing. Each section began with the ringing of a small bell...