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excerpt from Andy Ditzler's post to
[email protected] in reply to
eggtooth's inquiry about the show::: "John
Lowther and Allison Rentz shared a bullhorn and certain mock
assumptions about the artist's place in society. Allison entered
from
back and held up the crowd - as in "this is a hold-up, everyone
on the
floor," but you must picture Allison delivering that phrase
without
altering in any way her normal voice. While Allison went around
gathering people's money in a large dirty plastic bag, John
entered from
stage area and aggressively served cake, occasionally saying
"here you
go" and hurling a piece directly to the floor. He himself was
dressed
somewhat like the cake - all in white with a mask and plumage
that
resembled the coconut frosting.
Allison stepped to the stage and announced
that she was now dictator,
and everyone must obey her. "You will all have art once a week."
She
disappeared into the back gallery while John interacted with the
hapless
audience members. Laboriously, she pulled from the back gallery
a large
plastic-sheeted construction, into which she crawled. In this
contraption, she creeped slowly across the floor, writing
letters with a
pen attached to a long stick. John interjected acerbic comments
through
the bullhorn. "The progress of the dictator...is slow." Freed
from the
plastic, Allison started a video projection, with the
intermittent sound
of canned studio laughter. She and John exited the performance
area.
After a few long moments, the audience began joining in the
canned
laughter. Somewhere in here, the piece ended.
A few weeks ago, I showed some Andy Warhol
films at Eyedrum, one of
which was "Space," a sound film featuring a cast who quickly
lose
interest in reading the script and instead begin interacting
with each
other, creating a remarkable compressed atmosphere which is part
party
and part performance, with the line decidedly blurred. The end
of John's
and Allison's performance created the closest thing I've seen to
the
feeling of that film. By the time they returned to the area in
their
normal clothes, the audience was scattered through the room,
Satchel was
still playing his drums, and various audience members would
commandeer
the bullhorn to make comments. It was a strange atmosphere -
post-event
but not fully, since there was still enough going on to warrant
attention, and it seemed that it could have been extended
indefinitely.
It had the feeling of glimpsed possibilities."
Andy Ditzler
www.frequentsmallmeals.com
http://www.myspace.com/andyditzler
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