Claudia Meza’s Water is intended as an interactive sonic experience. Housed in the White Box Gallery at UO’s Portland campus, Califone tape recorders hang suspended from the ceiling, speaking both individually and collectively. Intuitive gallery behavior suggests not touching, but the tape players are intended to be used. Each contains an “endless” looped tape that can be stopped and started at will by participants. The sound fills the room until it is unclear which element of the composition is contributed by which tape. The experience is immediately visceral; the surround-sound quality of multiple sources envelops the visitor on both an auditory and physical plane. From outside, the occasional Max train adds to the bass vibrations of the collected loops. Each tape offers a specific auditory layer that feels eerie, metallic, ringing. The collective sounds suggest subterranean movement, hinting at the macabre tones of old vinyl sound effects collections. A few players, I’m told on the last day of the exhibition, are broken; rendered mute through use, obscuring part of the once complete score.

Meza created the individual tracks through capturing field recordings of water, editing them digitally, and then outputting them to individual tapes. She collected the Califone players on eBay, one at a time. Many retain inscriptions from their sources, usually middle or high schools, suggesting technology once cutting edge but now nostalgic.

Meza’s work both acknowledges and rejects the loosely-binding theme for End Things, TBA:12’s visual programming. Curator Kristan Kennedy’s concept of how things matter to humans both as objects and as ideas of objects is directly suggested by the fetishized idea of the tape players, meticulously collected and fragile. Meza agrees that “we are constantly collaborating with our materials or objects at hand.” Conversely, she rejects that objects should have such a hold on human  emotions, asking “…isn’t this is what commerce is all about: the fetishization of objects and our interaction with them? We tend to give objects a lot more power than they deserve.”

Inspired by John Cage’s work and coming from a history of unique projects, Meza pursues an eclectic path as a composer, musician, artist, curator, and (duly noted in her artist bio) surfer. As in her work, there is an element of timeless charm and authenticity in her worldview. She doesn’t distinguish between her attraction to Cage’s work and his life as a person; both are equally inspirational. And we are not meant to make distinctions between her work as a popular musician (Explode into Colors, Japanther) and her more abstract New Musics, Mourning Youth, and Sonic City PDX projects.

Kennedy’s visual programming often points towards the personal; how we make meaning for ourselves, how meaning arises, what it means to be human. Meza’s work in various aspects creates a similar authentic resonance; personal experiences are key. Meza refers to Cage’s quote from Kant: “there are two things that don’t have to mean anything [in order to give us deep pleasure]: one is music, the other is laughter.” Water offers a both singular and collective way for participants to make meaning or to simply experience sound as “music”.

Claudia Meza is PICA’s mid-year Resource Room Resident through September 30:
http://www.pica.org/programs/detail.aspx?eventid=884

End Things closes Saturday, September 29:
Washington High School Thu–Fri, 12-6:30pm; Sat 12-4pm
PICA Thu–Fri, 12-6:30pm; Sat 12-4pm

It’s nice when there is a collision between your immediate bibliography and your immediate experience. I saw everything I’ve been reading and more in the actions and reactions of Keith Hennessy and Circo Zero last Thursday night.  And, I saw all the tropes I hate about traditional forms of carnivalesque counterpower and also some troubling and various forms of misogyny on Friday. I saw a piece about the economy that was finally saying something. I saw an attempt at an impossible model, an impossible dance, one about individuals swarming and breaking apart again. I felt myself being confused about the connection between that action and the rhetoric. I saw paintings, live images building and being destroyed. The Raft of the Medusa, human pyramids, romantic structures, bodies bound to fall. I was seduced by the sound of the banjo; I felt like it was a model more than an image or a series of images. I felt like it was an image of what looks like liberation but is distinctly not. I saw a dangerous illusion. I was thankful it existed. Did we see the same show? Yes, I think so, was it…

WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they’re the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune–say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence… An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life–may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE.*

The People’s Mic, like the news, or the Internet, relies upon the subject’s passivity, while at the same time presenting the dangerous illusion of participatory action. It is the loss of unmitigated communication has created pervasive passivity. The reliance upon a distanced intake of information, and the conclusion of respect for the authority of a speaker behind a podium or at the occupied park, hints at the authority of the event…What would be truly inspiring is if the situation was turned completely around: if the crowds refused this ventriloquism in favor of the hundreds of conversations waiting all around them. Imagine the occupation flipped on its axis, its inhabitants acting together based upon true affinity and setting their spectator role alight; the chaotic environment consumed in a cacophony edging toward real experience.**

Today’s social movements have reversed the order, making manifestos and prophets obsolete. Agents of change have already descended into the streets and occupied city squares, not only threatening and toppling rulers but also conjuring visions of a new world. More important, perhaps, the multitudes, through their logics and practices, their slogans and desires, have declared a new set of principles and truths.***

* From “Poetic Terrorism” in Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism by Hakim Bey

** From Lost in a Fog – Lost Children’s School of Cartography

***From Declaration – Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

All photos by Gia Goodrich

Chelfitsch’s Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech is a set of three vignettes that speak to the notion of “work family” with charm, humor and wit. Each part is premised on entirely realistic situations of office politics – Why do the temps have to plan the farewell party? Who keeps turning the air conditioner on high? Why is adorable (if slightly unstable) Erika being let go and what will she do now? – but through repeated speech, stylized gestures and dance moves with props, dramatic lighting, shadows and music, the piece builds suspense, elevates the pettiness and gets the audience to laugh at what they see of their own behavior at work on stage.

According to their website the word chelfitsch was coined by company founder Toshiki Okada and “represents the baby-like disarticulation of the English word ‘selfish’.” Notions of selfishness pervade this year’s festival from Bucky Fuller’s naïve dream that everyone share the world’s resources to Keith Hennessy’s warning on the desperate state of the economy, so it was quite a lovely surprise that Hot Pepper etc. – a piece so literally about work – provided a fresh breath of frivolity for the start of my weekend.

Posted by Laura Becker
Photo by G.K. Wilson

“Why does everyone look so glum?” Someone asked as I exited the building after seeing the first performance of The Love Song of Buckminster Fuller.

“Was it that bad?”

“No, no. It was good. You’ll like it.” I heard myself saying. And, mostly I believed that, but a little while later, I realized the piece had actually made me feel profoundly sad.

Buckminster Fuller with models of the Standard of Living Package and Skybreak Dome

I knew a fair amount about Buckminster Fuller’s story before seeing the film (though it did answer some burning questions I had had regarding bathroom breaks during epic lectures). The performance beautifully illustrated a story I already knew, one we all already know—one about failed utopian visions and hair-brained, lovable inventors. The thing that made me so sad about the piece was that it made clear how fundamental it is that we equate utopian vision with failure, with tyranny and disaster. This is at best a boring equation, at worst it’s the greatest tragedy of our time. I feel like all I do lately is quote the anthropologist and activist David Graeber, but he has the most interesting thing to say about utopianism I have heard in a long time: “There is nothing wrong with a utopia unless you have just one.”

Having to always make a caveat when talking about the work and vision of someone like Buckminster Fuller is too bad. (He made these amazing things! Had these stupendous ideas, but look at that stuff in the context of this other crazy shit he proposed.) Fuller was an average and reasonable person who believed that peace was possible, that, if we just distributed all the resources in the right way, humanity could exist at a higher standard of living (everyone!) by 1985. (“His timing was just a little off.” [mild laughter.] But, doesn’t that off-ness mean he was truly contemporary! This isn’t a mark of insanity or irrational forethought, it’s the mark of genius.)

I think that many aspects of Sam Green & Yo La Tengo’s collaborative rendition of Fuller’s biography were beautifully done (O flying dome as a jellyfish swimming in air!), but I also think it was status quo in the most heart-wrenching way. The attitude felt infused by a kind of loving condescension, as if we were all parents looking back on our son’s early, imaginative exploits. This attitude is a problem, I think, especially when suggesting the application of Fuller’s ideas to the present, or the future. I wished the piece had told me a different story, a more challenging one—one that would help a contemporary audience regard Fuller’s way of thinking in a contemporary way.

I wished that the performance had been a love song for Bucky. If it had been it might’ve sounded a lot more like an apology. It’s not as if I believe that it would be a better world if all his ideas had been put into action and everyone was living in mass-produced Dymaxion houses, driving Dymaxion cars. But, like probably most everyone else in the audience last night, I couldn’t refrain from asking myself ‘what if.’

The real challenge for me, (as a natural cynic) as I left the performance was not in thinking about the budding relevance of Fuller’s design ideas (they’ve been relevant since their introduction and probably before), but in thinking about how his character and vision was and is still incredibly radical. How can we follow his example and develop a new realism, corrupting or at least interrupting the link between realism and western rationality, positivism, and pragmatism. Instead link realism with reasonableness, with an empathetic perception of the world, with imagination. What then would be revealed as the real, obvious issues at stake and what utopias would we then design?

For 10 days each year, there are two Portlands at once, as if in parallel universes, co-existing, crossing over and collaborating for all of us that live, eat, drink, sleep and breathe the festival that we call TBA. Of course the first Portland is the one in which we have to get up in the morning and go to work, fight traffic, bring the kids to school, and go from here to there checking off each item of that day’s to do list. It’s a stable and quite awesome place to have to do all those things, and we who live here know how to make the most of it for the other 355 days of the year, but…

Exhibit B: Portland 2 (see how it glows)

But on that Thursday each September, when the sun goes down and the lights at Washington High School and elsewhere go up, a second city emerges. Sandwich boards serve as entryways and ticket takers are gatekeepers to Portland 2. The shift is almost imperceptible, you may not feel like you’ve traveled anywhere, but at some point it hits you. This year it hit me right in the middle of yesterday’s CONVERSATION – Why Festivals? Curators from the PUSH festival in Vancouver BC, Fusebox Festival in Austin and the Perforacije Festival in Croatia discussed this increasingly popular presenting model. Each of these festivals, like TBA, utilize and showcase their hometowns, not just the various performance venues and the tourist hotspots, but the places in between, the neighborhoods, communities, local haunts, entrepreneurial enterprises and unique experiences of place. This is not simply a bi-product of the festival mode; as explained, it is a primary priority and ongoing necessity for the continued thriving of these events. In order to stay fresh, relevant and authentic festivals must stay rooted in their localities and present a different lens through which to see their home.

TBA has surpassed itself in this local immersion every year since its inception. From re-purposing empty warehouses in the Pearl District, to taking over Pioneer Square, providing a magical red shoe taxi service, incorporating increasingly outdoor and mobile pieces exploring Portland’s civic history, architecture and even impacts of urban development, bridging a path to Portland’s east side with a fiery float, and culminating in the inhabiting of an abandoned neighborhood high school and a collection of the best late night cuisine and spirits from all over the city in one bewitched beer garden on its grounds.

Once you enter the parallel Portland it envelops you for the rest of the festival. You and your new neighbors cross paths over and over; without introductions you discuss pieces like old friends. Your to do list has been replaced by what you come to think of as your little silver bible that is the catalog. You create new paths and see familiar landmarks in new ways.

Perhaps its not a different city at all, maybe its only wearing a costume that shines and shimmers to all its inhabitants. And when all is said and done and the costume is put away, Monday comes again and life in the real Portland returns. And you start the countdown of those 355 days all over again.

Posted by Laura Becker
Photo of Big Art Group by Wayne Bund

1.At the beginning of each performance I look around the room at all of us convened together, ready to pay attention to the coming event. Who are we to whom this show matters enough for us to pause our to-do lists momentarily and sit waiting to give our attention to something beyond our own responsibilities? What else do we have in common other than that we are here together? We will share a visceral experience of witnessing, but we will likely see, hear and remember very different accounts of the same event. Each of us is choosing to give over our bodies so that our lives can be temporally held in time by the structure of the piece instead of just holding our shape together through our own doing. For me being the audience is often a pleasant sense of surrender, even if it is surrender into discomfort.

2.When I look at the other people’s faces in the audience at Miguel Gutierrez’s show, we are all sitting scrunched on the floor of the stage, where he commanded us to settle, our legs and arms wound around us in hopes of not invading each other’s 1/4 inch of personal space while our smells: sweat, breath and the odors from inside of shoes betray our attempts at proprietary. Behind me a face looks back at me full of the uncomfortable sense that he is not the person this piece was made for. Miguel said at the beginning of his performance “you’re all artists here, right?” and as I get my bearings with his piece I realize it is even more specifically for an audience of people who are interested in thinking about what goes into making a work of art in order to teach that to others. I am that person at times in my life and so I feel willing to go along with wherever Miguel takes us, even if my foot is getting numb. Our physical and social discomfort as audience members is harnessed into being a part of the piece: Miguel’s live set design. But for that other guy behind me it all just meant he is stuck being out of place.

3.Sitting in the balcony at the Winningstad during El Rumor Del Incendio I feel the performance is being launched at me, but missing its mark. I think about how difficult it is for me to identify with the political motivations of the woman protagonist or with her various revolutionary comrades. While most of the play is a narration of Mexican historical events in Spanish with subtitles projected onto a screen, they never mention the back story of the political conditions that necessitated these particular people’s radicalization. I have neither the background knowledge of Mexican history or the personal allegiance to armed revolution to respond intuitively with sympathy to the characters. I ask myself why the artists chose to tell the story in this way with so much information and yet without basic context. Who do they envision us to be as their audience? How do they want us to respond to what they are presenting? Do they expect us to be so certainly the cultural left that we naturally side with all socialist activists? (Usually I am a pretty easy sell with idealistic political content.) This piece wasn’t composed for TBA audiences. It was first performed in the artists home country and has been touring Europe, Canada and the US. I wish I could hear the artists wonder amongst themselves how each of these different audiences will experience their work. By the next performance I see from them, Asalto al Agua Transparente, I feel trained into their staccato mode of performing and surrender much more willingly.

Ariana Jacob

Every year I find myself treating the festival as a riddle, looking for the substantive reoccurrences in the performances, exhibitions, and public conversations, hoping I guess to unlock the hidden theme. This year is no different, although I feel as if I don’t have to look as hard. Over the past few days, I have fit in The Quiet Volume, Mo Ritter’s Understanding Witches Now, (part of) The People-Portland, El Rumor del Incendio, Miriam, Lisa Radon’s re-enactment of Alex Cecchetti’s Summer is not the Prize of Winter, and Miguel Guttierez’s Heavens What Have I Done. (All of which I have critiqued, partially re-enacted, and lauded in my kitchen, late at night, for an audience of one or two. It’s really the best place for unfounded claims and making a fool of oneself.)

Throughout the experiences of TBA 2012, I have been involuntarily tying mental threads, binding the overlapping objects and gestures I see. These physical echoes double themselves into recognition through and across performances and performing objects. I have found basins of water, debris, and fragile hands. Coins tossed defiantly from green bags and plastic sacks. (Artists don’t have to make cents!) Blindness, illiteracy, and the inability to speak. Cigarettes being tossed lit or unlit. Rubble and stones and pebbles and pieces of ground, propping things up or being knocked down. Writing on the wall, sitting on the floor. Cats and rabbits and fish.

Mo Ritter’s balanced key, from Understanding Witches Now, ceramic and steel

There is no key in all of these patterns of things. Art isn’t neatly riddlic (which is good because if it was, I would walk away). But for my brain these small concretes are how I anchor and organize the larger abstracts.

Simple-bound Hoko sinker stones

Precarity is everywhere: in the struggles of the creative worker laid bare (and rainbow-clad), in the process of re-telling a story, in balancing a column of objects or a community’s political opinions. All of the work I have seen teeter-totters between easy categorical units. (Someone I talked to, reflecting on the heavy abstraction in End Things, suggested the feeling of being stranded. I think that is one way to look at it.)

We are seeing the shape of things between studio and stage, artist statement and artwork, rehearsal and performance, audience and participant, a thing and its representation. The in-between is a romantic place, a place for reinvigorating a new phenomenology and embrace of reverie. This is where new imaginaries are formed. And that is the charge we have now–to create and learn to recognize new stories, histories, and images as our own. Ones that will support a slowly redemptive future rather than  a seemingly unavoidable apathy and cataclysm.

From Alex Cecchetti’s Summer is Not the Prize of Winter

When I brought my 2 1/2-year-old son Calder to Washington High School this afternoon. We walked amidst Mo Ritter’s sculptures and video screens. He repeated the question: “What is she almost about to do?” These things are just things, but (my interpretation of his inquiry is that) he recognizes that they are somehow more than that.

“We are constantly shifting between moving the object and the object moving us.

–Please don’t touch”

15-20% of the audience walked out of a dance performance I was at recently. We were in a theatre with no back exit and a stage that ran level with the front row – like Imago. Each person that left had to walk past everyone else in the audience and a few feet downstage of the performers.

I gave the show a standing ovation, like in that campy Norman Rockwell painting no one’s ever seen.

I was in an audience with dozens of artists who are deeply invested in performance making and opinionated as all hell, or at least I was in the audience with them for the early parts of the performance.

Afterwards, we fought about the piece as if daily economic calamity, war, global poverty, local poverty or any other number matters ceased to exist. Because fighting about the nature of this one performance was of central importance to us. And the best/only way we know how to contribute to society is wrapped up in these battles over art.

I knew we would argue like this, so I took time to write down all the things I admired about the performance. I anticipated how the haters would hate so as to readily refute their bogus claims. It got heated. It forced us to show what cards we were holding, where our values and allegiances aligned and where they recoiled.

Their critiques revealed that they weren’t seeing what I saw. It offended me that they would see simplicity where I saw intricacy. It was as if they were saying that all __(insert ethnicity)__ people looked alike. And it made me fear for a future blunt of perception.

Whenever I hate a performance, I love to hear others explain what they appreciated about it.

No one worth talking to will begrudge you your values; even though they may test them with flabbergasting insistence.

Whoever Krystal South is, she wrote a thoughtful and smart post far more worth your while than this entitled “Potential Risk of Failure“. Whoever Krystal South is, she seems pretty cool even if the potential risk of failure didn’t feel so palpable to me the majority of TBA:11’s performances.

Part of this boils down to the fact that most performances that are presented in TBA are already dialed in by national and international tours prior to their presentation in Portland. It’s crucial to consider how the human factor differentiates visual and live time-based arts. Imagine crafting a performance for a period of time (several piece at TBA:11 took years to develop) and then premiering the piece, and then performing the piece in a number of cities over the course of a year or longer, and then coming to Portland, Oregon.

How is the premier different from the performance that occurs a year later? How does a performance differ in the second city it tours to compared to the third? Can work fail if it’s already been deemed laudable by other cities’ critics, festivals and audiences?

Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion premiered Radio Show in Pittsburgh in January of 2010 before performing in NYC and making their West Coast premier here in Portland.

Rude Mech‘s The Method Gun also premiered in the first half of 2010 and had been staged in at least six different venues before arriving at Portland’s Imago Theatre.

Rachid Ouramdane‘s World Fair is quite new, having premiered in May and touring France through July. Portland audience’s were the first outside France to see World Fair before it travels to a couple other cities in the USA and Canada and continues to tour Europe.

tEEth premiered Home Made here in Portland last November and received a killer cash prize presenting an excerpt of the work at Seattle’s On The Boards Theatre in January.

zoe | juniper‘s A Crack in Everything is even newer, having been performed only at its premier this past July at Jacob’s Pillow in Massachusetts.

I love that Mike Daisy was able to premier his audacious 24-hour monologue in Portland. I love how Kyle Abraham could hop on the mic after presenting his work-in-progress solo and invite audience feedback. I love that zoe | juniper were able to make their first foray into dance installation because PICA facilitated a residency at Washington High School over the summer leading up to TBA. Zoe said she couldn’t imagine it happening anywhere else.

PICA and Portland (because it always feels like half the town volunteers during the festival) have achieved so much to be proud of, and we all owe them our sincere gratitude for their devotion, but the nights I was in attendance, the main-stage performances didn’t induce anyone to stomp/sneak out mid-show.

Why that is is a question worth considering. I’ll leave that thought open for now and thank you kindly for your consideration. Let’s close with fat copy and paste from Claudia La Rocco’s report on TBA:11 for the New York Times.

Still, Portland’s festival remains an outpost within the largely conservative landscape of performing arts presenters. Often what audiences see on these stages — especially the bigger ones — is more reflective of art from the past, with little attention paid to how artists currently approach and consider their traditions.

 “That’s one of the biggest disappointments I have around the culture we live in, in the States,” said Philip Bither, senior curator for performing arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, one of the few major American institutions to throw its weight behind contemporary, interdisciplinary artistic practice. “That which is, to my mind, the norm of what our culture is producing now, that which is most relevant to our times, is viewed as fringe or oddball or just out of the mainstream. Internationally the keys to the big opera houses and major cultural institutions have been handed over years if not decades ago to contemporary artists. That’s not happened in the States, so it relegates those who are trying to support the work of our times to this odd, hard-to-describe, hard-to-understand, ghettoized thing.”

POTENTIAL

One of my friends  spent hundreds of hours this summer installing the Claire Fontaine piece. Mapping out the United States of America onto the wall and drilling ten thousand tiny holes, then filling them with eco-friendly green-tipped matchsticks. The volunteer labor is a key part of Claire Fontaine’s conceptual gesture, as is the condition that the curator herself light the piece ablaze, something I was anxious to hear about after seeing footage of a burn of another work by Claire Fontaine shown in Europe. In the video footage, the curator repeatedly takes a blowtorch to a different map, and the hiss of flames is joined by the wail of fire alarms as smoke spreads through the exhibition space. The artists which comprise Claire Fontaine (more on that at Claire Fontaine’s site) described the scent of the kunsthalle, and the aftermath image of the burn is seared with a feeling of a man-made natural disaster, controlled destruction within the white cube.

Alas, this series of works has not gone over well in the United States, land of the free (except for some stuff!!!). A version was shown in New York unburned at Reena Spauling’s Fine Art gallery for what I assume are the same reasons it was shown that way here: you gotta get a permit…

Thing is: no one’s gonna give you that permit. Kristan Kennedy, curator of Evidence of Bricks, got the green light from everyone up the ranks except the final hurdle, ye olde fire marshal, “Not Possible At This Time” at the last step. The fire hazard was doused in retardant and remains in the state in which you can view it until October 30th. And it is a beautiful state! The protruding matchsticks create an optical illusion as you move around the room, and I found myself holding my breath as I looked closely, as though a breath could send them like dominoes across the wall.

But I was mad! I wanted to smell the work, I wanted to get the soot of the work in the soles of my shoes, I wanted to see the heat of the work in that classroom. It felt like weeks of anticipation were pent up in the thousands of green dots that wanted to BURN. The potential for so much more was heavy and hard, and I can’t go back to that room.

America! There is a special permit for artworks involving fire here in Portland (thanks, firedancers!) and something tells me that burning a map of the good old USA makes the whole thing hard to swallow for some. The bureaucracy of our great nation of paperwork withholds the completion of the act, all the more reason to burn it! The pent-up potential of the work feels true to the context of Portland, Oregon in the fall of the year 2011.

RISK

So many works within TBA felt like they were about RISK. Not the game, per se, but the idea of danger, a palpable anxiety of a threat to the self. The first definition of RISK, “possibility of loss or injury : PERIL,” sums up some ideas that appear behind a mutitude of works at TBA this year.

Claire Fontaine was risky but obviously restrained. (SEE: POTENTIAL)

Jesse Sugarmann’s video piece Lido (The Pride is Back) is full of risk. In it, the artist elevates three Chrysler mini-vans with 52 air mattresses within a giant interior space. The inflation of the mattresses in tandem creates a whine relative to the distance of the shot, creating a vaccum in the white space, and the vehicles look helpless as they are hoisted up into a slow and steady path with destruction. Their synchronized rise reaches a climax as the mattresses are filled and two risks present themselves; the mattresses on the verge of popping and the vans rolling off in forfeit to the suburban inflatables. When neither happens, the inertia is foiled while the tiny motors kept pumping and straining against the dead weight.

Sugarmann recreated this experience four times during the festival, unfurling mattresses onto the parking lot in the heat and pushing the vans into position. The science behind this is imperfect and self-taught, the risks are many but the artist retained a surreal control over the unweildly materials. John Motley was incredibly astoot in describing Sugarmann as a ‘lion tamer’ during the performance, circling the rising trio of vans in the sunset.

I caught two consecutive performances, and the scene was thick with both excitement and confusion. Art-goers, children, dogs and passers by watched the slow motion wreckage, as the vans slid to balance themselves on their front bumpers, ass-up but somehow balanced. During the second performance, two of the vans lost their balance, losing their perches and a cheer arose in the crowd at the actual action after all of that inflating anticipation.

In another video work, this one by Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor titled Rites of Spring, the camera follows Romanian children as they set fire to piles of poplar fluff that congregate in the Spring. The children run the streets with lighters, the camera follows as the flames exhaust their fuel, over and over again. And surely every Spring those children are warned of the risk of their actions, but the little fires are far too tempting to avoid the danger completely. In the silence of the room I was sure I heard Stravinsky.

There are many health risks involved with bouncy castles, (SEE: OK? A and B, but when the bouncy castle is a larger-than-life supine pink elephant, legs akimbo, into which one enters through the rectum, the risks leave the merely physical and creep into the philosophical and psychological. Citing Oscar Wilde’s decadent reputation, Patrick Rock (of http://www.rocksboxfineart.com/) presented Oscar’s Delerium Tremens as an outdoor jumping establishment to the festival. Opening night, the physical manifestation of a drunken hallucination watched over the throngs as inebriation levels rose to a peak, Oscar popped, victim to a karate chop at the seam. Flaccid on and off for the rest of the festival, the monumental Oscar was a risk of the second definition, “someone or something that creates or suggests a hazard”. The chain link fence caging in soft Oscar really punctuated the gazes of longing from kids who were allowed to look but not touch, nor jump in the inflatable creature. All of the paperwork was in order, but the DT’s had the elephant down. Watching Sugarmann’s mattresses inflate next to the prostrate Oscar broke my heart a little, and I never even had a chance to jump.

FAILURE

Artists and musicians Lucky Dragons, speaking after their PSU MFA Monday Night Lecture a few years ago, summed up their work as “an attempt to fail beautifully,” something which has stuck with me since. Though I missed their performance at The Works as part of the Experimental ½ Hour program (migraine!), I think their goal encapsulates something I love and always hope to see in artwork, which is the letting go of control and the presence of chance. In participatory work or performance, chance runs rampant, and while performative or participatory works probably fail at the same rate as other modes of art making, their failure is public and the artist is often present. Once the work is exposed to the populace, it is out of the artist’s hands, and the potential risk of failure looms. Perhaps this opportunity for failure lets us trust in the fallible object-ness of even the most transient artworks. Hearing a performer fumble over their lines snaps us back to the farce at hand, that distinction between performer and audience scantly separated by a stage, a fence, a string of caution tape or a screen.

This gesture is brave, temporal and feels full of possibility. It is based in time but lives on in the audience and the idea. The bevvy of performances and performative documents that made up this festival have overwhelmed me the past two weeks, and I am filled with a desire to fail, beautifully if possible.

(SEE ALSO: photodocumentation of every day of the festival)

cloudy sunday just before seven is quiet.

epically quietPost-festival depression?
During the festival, I’m consumed and don’t have time to properly be. I sleep too little, drink too much, nub excessive smokes and feel robbed of my direction. My aptitudes swept away by a world running beneath my feet.Sitting in a quiet room with two weeks’ artifacts: newsprints, programs, disorder and a laser machine.I knew this before going in.Bookending a thought Noelle opened with: a festival should leave you broken. That’ll be my way of saying spiritual.The profanity of my habits and routines unbuttons during TBA.

I never know how to get back, but somehow it happens.

Photos from the top:

Gia Goodrich 1,2,6

Wayne Bund 3,4,5,7