Photo of Mikey Parlane's Long Live The Knife If you're not an SAIC Performance student, you probably don't know about the annual New Blood festival that happens each year which I've helped on individual performances for about 3 out of 5. For New Blood V or The Art School's Crusade: A Confidential-Crunk with Death (that forced conjoined reference was only sad-funny to myself), I decided to take pictures this year as a non-laboring tourist of the event.
Normally I'm ambivalent about the work each year, not unlike the BFA show, students can become complacent assuming that not having the financial means for the exact set up they want or think it's just practice and that the viewer will focus on the content.
It of course involves relational application situations and there are mitigating circumstances for some things which I accept and often contend with especially with time based work, but it's frustrating to see someone who intends a extravagant vibe and then all I can see are crappy sheets and an exposed platform. Personally, that offends me as a viewer and a maker of performance work, I don't want to see any hint of your dorm room, the plastic chairs that come with the classroom, it creates an interruption where there shouldn't be one. Even if you're not "acting", the proposed aesthetic still needs to be considered.
Also sometimes I just think the overall idea is lazy or uninspired. That happens in every art locale and is more on my own crabby, strong-willed opinions. That's not to say I apologize for that either, SAIC also has an epidemic of students and teachers who want to be liked and thus don't make constructive criticism; they just find compliments wherever they can. But I'm getting on a rant I probably shouldn't publish on the internet when I'm graduating soon looking for jobs.
Back to the point, this year I saw examples of work that gave me a twinge of pride either conceptually or aesthetically which was Hallmark heart warming to know that someone just gives a shit about their work, the audience and the venue.
Here were the ones that caught my eye and just needed to be photographed a few weekends ago. (Yeah I still didn't carry my SLR but it was night at the time and rainy. I would throw myself in front of my camera as a human shield if needed). :
Kitty Huffman's The Innermost Room I actually missed this on the first day, I went with my friend Stephanie and we didn't realize there was a whole second floor of work. Coming upon this in the auditorium was aesthetic arrest. I mean it would've been amazing if she had real melting candles on every chair, but fire codes and safety dictate that electric candles are totally okay and work within this stipulation.
She created a complete environment, it had an almost Shirin Neshat vibe with the textile prints but in an art history sort of way (or from what I gleaned from the artist statement) she wanted a Ryan Trecartin vibe of reading culture and nostalgia of a non-existent environment. That part I can't verify or discredit but wasn't anything I picked up on.
Huang Li Hui's Asian Babe I had a debate with Slater about this who I thought would love this piece and he thought I would hate this piece, oh how the tables were turned. Like Asian comedians telling jokes about abacuses, I'm normally sensitive to (hate) this repetitive genre of race art that rarely pans out, especially with Asian Americans for some reason.
The artist situated herself in various neighborhoods (the west loop, Belmont, etc.) in tacky stereotypical Asian clothing, although stereotypically relevant if it were 1957 and tape on her eyes with a sign asking about what the onlooker's idea of an "Asian Babe" is. She served tea and had a lottery box for the interviewee offering backrubs, French kissing and origami.
Slater hated it because it was so simplistic and broke down, which I do agree is a huge issue with the piece and lagged in its obvious didactic intention, but the wonky quality of it worked for me in a sense. If you're going to do bad, you commit to it; plus it functioning as a mobile street piece works with the street style. Also he felt black men who were interviewed were made to look stupid but that part I think is bullshit, if anything they were pretty competent. The camera paydirt was this old white guy who obviously was digging himself into deeper and deeper holes and just kept making his statements more odd and amusing.
I think if she focused less on erotic exoticizing and more at trying to dig without motive in people's back history for their prejudices, it would've been much more interesting and fresh of a perspective on a relatively dry topic.
Daviel Shy's Five Modes: A conflation of athletics, spectacle, Judaism,masochism, musicals and kink
I saw this girl in one of Mark Jeffrey's Goat Island-offspring classes during the summer and I thought her group did the best job of being cohesive and exuding a natural energy. People pick up performance art so easily at SAIC that they assume that anyone can just do it, but they forget you have to make someone care about you and be overall present in the work.This 45 minute piece was more in the vein of "installation performance" where I don't think one would necessarily want, or should, sit there the whole time to view it. It was more about enacting slices of memories like a live slideshow, it entertains at moments and trails off at moments. And I think that's okay for this type of work, on the other side of the coin you don't need to always be "on" all the time and entertaining the audience, it's not a sitcom.
I think she best curated this room that every corner was satisfying and her performers did this weird giggling intermittently that had an awkwardness to it that worked as opposed to some Children-of-the-Corn fear tactic. I didn't once have to think "oh there's a terrible chair from one of the Sculpture rooms" or some terrible interruption of the fantasy with obviously employed SAIC school supplies.
All in all the best New Blood showcase I've seen so far, which is promising because I've been on guard about the department treading water.
And introducing my bud Stephanie that accompanied me as my date, who I actually met in my first intro to performance class about 3-4 years ago.
You work that 1964 yearbook, girl.
