PERFORMANCE

By “performance” I mean using my art (either the actual objects or projected images thereof) in a theatrical setting. This has usually taken the form of a satirical “lecture” in which the photographs, paintings and objects are presented as authentic representations from art history, fleshed out with stories about the various artists, collectors and other personages involved. The presentation is most effective when the audience is unaware of the satire, and only becomes so as the presentation evolves from the possible to the preposterous. Needless to say, these presentations are presented in a “dead-pan” manner. It is especially rewarding when some members of the audience never quite do tip to the put-on, no matter how ridiculous the performance gets.

Performance is my most favorite art form. Indeed, any number of objects were made and documented only because they were needed to fill gaps in one story line or another. Additional props has come from found objects and photographs and even “ready-made” slides found in thrift and junk stores, or even having been disposed of. Whole lives, it seems, have been dutifully collected but then left by the curb on trash day.

These are some of my favorite performances:
Frederick Draper Kalley: Prince of the American Renaissance
The Hornbuckle School of Hygiene and the Arts: The Crisis of Aesthetic Focus in 19th Century Rural America
The Venus of Willendorf: Issues of Gender in the Upper Paleolithic
William Tecumseh Sherman: The March to the Sea as Signifier of Leisure in Post-War America.
Coleslaw Baklava: The Ontology of Orthodontics: Junk Food and the Contextualization of Adolescent Yearning in the Era of Middlebrow Mall Taste.
From Dinosaurs to Dinosaurs of the Road: Decadent Fantasies at the End of the Age of the Automobile