On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century

Revisions of Excess

• • • Revisions of Excess S ometimes I love reading about "the loss of the Real" and other greatest hits of postmodern thought. But we're talking High Concept with most of this stuff, and the texts get ever more pre-, post-, and para-. Academic cultural critics have always invented their own little worlds and turgid new languages. But dip into some of this poststructuralist za-za, and you have to wonder if the alphabet itself isn't in deep trouble. A performance group called the V-Girls recently launched a parody from within at CUNY Graduate Center with "The Question of Manet's Olympia: Posed and Skirted." This faux-panel discussion by five female faux-academics deconstructed Manet's painting in penetrating Octoberese . That is, the discourse re-deconstructed what is already toodeconstructed . Seated at a long table (perhaps a telling reference to the Wooster Group?), the panelists (Martha Baer, Jessica Chalmers, Erin Cramer, Andrea Fraser, Marianne Weems) had a prim, suited, freshfrom -the-Sorbonne look. Haughty and deadpan, they delivered brief and ridiculous papers-"The Female Nude: The Beginning of the End of a Good Idea," "Semiotic Problems in Seeing and Spelling," "Olympia as Phallus: An Interrogation of the Horizontal." Etcetera. I particularly enjoyed "Manet's Best Friend" (illustrated with a slide of an imploring spaniel), which dissected "the gaze o( the dog" in the usual opaque isms and wasms. The V-Girls' last performance was a fake Lacanian analysis of Heidi. To find any of this funny, audience members probably had to know the basic po-mo buzzwords or buzzphrases-like "the gaze." Still, the panels are an anti-elitist project-they're about "foregrounding the privilege." (Or is that "privileging the foreground"?) When one pan- 178 REGENERATE ART elist asked, rhetorically, "Should ideas be applied to art?" the audience applauded. I'd like to send Lacan to see the Blue Man Group. In this show, the bodies kept oozing, and the byproducts became art. With their blue bald heads, blue hands, identical clothing, and total silence, the group's members (Matt Goldman, Philip Stanton, Chris Wink) looked humanoid and anonymous. And the program at their recent Performing Garage show never called them Blue Men, but Blue Man-as if each were one piece of a single body. This was a parasitic body. They sat down at a formal dining table and ate claylike pablum from their plates; more pablum immediately squeezed out of holes in their shirts and back onto their plates. They ate that. They were eating themselves. Their actions were comic, even gimmicky at times, but The Blue Man show had a subtext of profound alienation-discomfort with the self and with artmaking as a sign of individuality. They are, in fact, generic performance artists, evoking images of Oskar Schlemmer, Yves Klein, and the Kipper Kids. They began the show by removing what appeared to be toothpaste caps protruding from their lab coats and, immediately, thick blue paint began to drip onto small canvases attached chest high. When all the gloop was gone, they hung their new abstract expressions from clamps. And as half the world once said of Jackson Pollock: "A monkey could have done it." They made more trick art. Seated behind tubs of orange, pink, and chartreuse paint, the three splattered the liquid with plastic ladles, faster and faster, splashing it onto the audience. The front rows cowered , and for a moment, the air was a pixillated multicolor cloud. They then displayed the large sheet they'd been sitting on, which had become something of a Barnett Newman in pink and orange. Later, one performer threw ping-pong-sized balls into the mouths of the other two, who then broke the balls open in their mouths and spewed the contents-orange, blue, and purple paint-onto a canvas. The game was for each "artist" to catch the paint seal-style, no hands. The result was a bad Frankenthaler. They also presented what they called a Poster Moment to illustrate how little a single human can do. Each held a stack of posterboards. Every board had a different message. Words flashed by so quickly that Revisions of Excess 179 there was time to read perhaps half of one board and nothing from the others. And most of the messages were comments on the choice the reader had just made. For example: "This one isn't as deep as the other two." Between...