by Anne Gabriel
Every single person on this planet has a limited number of minutes with which to do with as they please outside of regular life/work obligations. Over the weekend, I wasted several of those minutes shaking my head watching terrible performance art. The City of Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs Performing Art Division had its second festival-style weekend of performance art and creative activities, titled EMPOWERMENT, organized to honor women performers. It was during this weekend of activities, actually more specifically the festival’s opening night showcase of eight performance art acts that motivated me to skip the rest of the weekend and prompted me to write this article.
It should come as no surprise that I, along with most people I know, hate most performance art. I hate it in the way that I hate most contemporary literature. Why? Self-indulgence. The same way that a writer writing words and collections of words so that they can deliver to me across several paragraphs and pages an ejaculation of highly descriptive phrases expounding the plethora and multitude of ways and methods that one may write about a single sprouted lonesome sharpened blade of grass gently grown from densely rich and chocolate fertile whetted topsoil accentuated as a verdant stripe amidst a lush meadow pasture of sweetly perfumed and fragrant poppies set against the scorching blazing summer sunshine on the delicately laced edge of a roaring watercourse is terrible—is how I view performance art.
Most performance art feels like having sex with a guy who won’t stop looking at himself in the mirror making you feel like he’s going to ejaculate to his own image rather than anything you may or may not be doing or how great your tits are. Not saying I know this from experience, mind you, Ahem.
I don’t hate ALL performance art. When performance art is good, it’s really good. It’s intoxicating. It swallows you up and you forget to breathe as you’re pulled into the performance along with the person performing it. The only way that happens, is when the performance artist is fully and totally committed. How often does that happen? All the time with really good performance artists and never with really bad ones. The problem is that most of you performance artists are of the bad variety, you just don’t know it.
So here are my pieces of advice for not being terrible and wasting my time:
- Commit. Fully. If you have to ask what this means, you’re not doing it.
- Stop performing for me and at me. It’s annoying. Forget about me and what I might like. You should be so engrossed in what you’re doing that I get pulled into your performance.
- Use your body as a tool not as some kind of temple that should be intently regarded. Its literal only purpose (in regards to performance art) is to let the story and message move through it.
- Interacting with me is fine sometimes, but most of the time it’s cheating to make boring performance art seem more interesting by being interactive in some way.
- I don’t care about you. I care about the story. If you can make me care about that, then I may, maybe just a little, care about you. Remember that.
- Finally. NEVER make me look at you while you are in some form of a static meditational thought process of self regard as you look at a light. I might punch you and/or walk out.
If you decide not to follow my advice, please do let me know in advance by sending a six pack of my favorite beer to my home and I will stay there.
Image: Staff