by Mona Longpre
The weirdest performance I saw recently was done on the sidewalk and parking lot outside SADE gallery during the opening of Adam Charles Levite’s show, “Uncles.” Melina Alhadeff, a Swiss artist out of Geneva, made an unlikely performance into a show that transfixed a parking lot full of gallery attendees.
As I arrived to Levite’s opening, I came upon the lot and saw everyone facing the same direction. I couldn’t tell what they were looking at. Was it something in the sky, police brutality, a person overdosing on the sidewalk? I asked a fellow attendee what everyone was looking at and was told that it was a “famous artist.”
I stood on my tippy toes to see if I could see who it was, and along the sidewalk came a diminutive female with long brown curly hair, sunglasses, dressed in oversized men’s clothing. A lot like a regular gallery goer. This was Melina Alhedeff. Alhedeff made her way through the parking lot, seemingly talking to herself or to the parked cars, it was difficult to tell. At one point Alhadeff, sat down on the sidewalk and removed her shoes and replaced them with roller skates. She again made her way around the small parking lot and simply walked down the sidewalk, before sitting again, removing the roller skates and replacing them with her previous shoes.
And people watched. Absolutely transfixed.
There was no nudity, vomiting, or flame throwers. Only an expectation that whatever pedestrian thing that was done, should be watched intently.
Alhadeff proceeded to ask if anyone wanted a small snack from a bag that she carried—and passed some out. She emptied a glass bowl/vase and filled it with liquid from left over beer bottles walking through the crowd asking if anyone had any additional water to add to the mixture. Everything seemed pretty slow and not very interesting, so I made my way past the crowd and into the gallery to see the show. Fifteen minutes later, as I left the gallery to go back outside, the crowd was still watching her intently.
I was impressed that she was able to hold them rapt just by walking around. Not erratically. Not crazily. Just walking, and muttering a bit, but mostly being, well, quiet.
In an era of Los Angeles performance art, where edgelord clowning has become its own defined niche, it was weird to see something so not that. Was this Swiss clowning? Was this even performance art? Does it matter?
What does matter is that for at least an hour, a crowd of people no less than 50 deep wanted to watch her walk around, talk to herself, and change her shoes? Or if they knew what they were in for would they have walked off?
What does it say about the current state of art and performance art in Los Angeles, if most everyone was willing to watch this, quietly and reverently?
I think it means that they’ve been exposed to a lot, and sometimes the most novel thing is to simply be boring.
Image: Staff