RITE OF SPRING MONDAY! (Oh boy…)

The second round of the rock-em-sock-em performance art biennial known as Performa, ended Monday night in a self-immolating “Grand Finale” at the Hudson Theater in Times Square. The festival, which has made us all laugh, cry, pull out our hair, stress out way too much about our fashion sensibility, and run around the city like freshly decapitated chickens (turkeys, if they do the same thing) trying to cram in as much Art World-sanctioned performance as their not-so-easily-navigable website could promote, went out rather self-consciously behind a plush red curtain.

I can’t exactly figure out what kind of the statement Performa is trying to make. RoseLee Goldberg herself came out and acknowledged that this was some kind of Performa On Broadway affair (Yvonne Rainer’s deflated RoS Indexical had premiered at the theater on Sunday and Monday). But why? And to what purpose? It seems to be reinforcing older ideas of the distinction between uptown and downtown, hard lines that have long softened since the 60s, even since 2000. Uptown and downtowncriss -cross all the time now. Classical musicians perform in little bars in Brooklyn. Brooklyn based choreographers are making dance for theJuilliard School. The old guard are now uptown staples (Wegman’s photos for The Met, Mark Morris’s Mozart Dances at Lincoln Center, Twyla Tharp’s innumerable Broadway hits).

So what fuss is the Art World trying to make? It’s not like art galleries aren’tswarming with rich people, who have taken over nearly every piece of property (even some projects) from 125 Street (on either side) to Battery Park. That includes all of downtown (Tribeca, both Villages, Meat Packing, LES, China Town) and the Brooklyn annexes of DUMBO, Williamsburg, Fort Greene, Park Slope. The presence of colonies of galleries in Chelsea have no doubt contributed to the flushing out of that area, including the slow bleed down to Gansevoort Street, where flourished, as recenlty as 2000, the unforgettable gay bar Mother, and the seediest yet most reliable and inexpensive place in NYC to find yourself in a naked orgy of men, Mr. Jay’s Hangout: all gone.[1] Seven years later, the dirty laundry has been washed, cash has won, and it would seem that the underground that the Art World now laments the loss of, has been displacedby the Art World itself, at least in terms of its bent on overinflated values and appealing to the affluent mindset.

You can’t have it both ways, RoseLee.

Still, the performances presented at the “Grande Finale” were pretty good, although predictably hard-edged and/or emo-cheesey in certain places.

Dynasty Handbag, a devilish cross between Amy Sedaris’ “Jerri Blank” from Strangers with Candy and Mo Collins’ “Lorraine” from Mad TV, opened the evening with a hilarious tribute to Performa self-consciousness. Her shtick, which is to perform with a voiceover back-up to allow slapstick-ish bad lip syncing (way before Britney decided to join in) and inner voices that disclose various existential insecurities, worked particularly well when two or three inner monologues competed stream-of-consciously to come up with a drawing that would appeal to the Art World audience. It was hilarious, climaxing, of course, with this idea: “A piece of shit on top of a birthday cake.” Perfect.

Cynthia Hopkins, who had delivered a rather compelling performance back in 2005 at St. Anne’s Warehouse in Accidental Nostalgia, a multi-media performance that included several original country sets with her band, Gloria Deluxe, came out with an acordian and delivered oddly syruppy anti-war songs that neither convinced you the war was bad or that she was good.

Brooklyn based ultra-indie band, Stars Like Flea, played a long, if anarchicly beautiful set. The lead singer can go; he adds little more than self-involved non-performing and solipsistic-auteurism. The rest of the band, a clusterfuck of piano, strings, guitars, harp, drummer, brass–a real orchestra–is virtuosic and creates big textures that usually culminate in aleatoric climaxes on major chords. It’s dada turned emo, not at all bad, if a little aimless.

HK119, the alter-ego of Finnish artist Heidi Kilpelainen, is equal parts Grace Jones and Klaus Nomi. Her metal-edged electro-pop sound is hot, as is her sinuously elastic body that was wrapped tightly in black vinyl from neck to toe. Her equally hot-bodied back up dancers had sharp, dry, geometric choreography, and manipulated simple card board cutouts of circles and triangles into a seemingly endless variety of patterns. But the seemingly endless set drew a few heckles from the audience. “It’s gong time! Bring out the gong!” snapped someone behind me. But she was hot, and it was hot, so, whatever.

Ubiquitous downtown music hero, Nick Hallett, delivered a sober set of three songs from Meredith Monk’s 1972 song cycle, Our Lady of Late. I love avant-classical, because even at its most edgy, it is softer than other forms. Accompanied only by the proto-electronic ocillation of a crystal wine glass, Hallett sang in microtonally plaintive strands, or jabbered out made-up language, or delivered medieval melodies with simplicity and clarity against the circular pitch from the glass.

Imani Uzuri, accompanied by guitarist Marvin Sewell, sang a couple overwrought, hyper emotive songs. Her big alto voice is hot, and she really chews the words, but there was something a little naive about it. I can barely imagine RoseLee chillin’ at home in her living room, curled up on a rainy day with a blanket and a cup of fennel twig tea, really feeling the Uzuri. But who knows.

The whole night ended rather poopishly with a nonsensically forced dance party at the front of the stage. It was eerily reminiscent of the fake riot Yvonne Rainer staged in RoS. This was supposedly a performance by Asia Today. I didn’t get it, nor did I like it. It seemed to lazily punctuate a festival that had, at least in some ways, initiated some interesting debate and caused us all to take a closer look at the relationship between performance and art.

But the biggest problem separating the two worlds is money. There isn’t equal opportunity here. After all the hooplah dies down, the downtown performers will go back to playing gigs for fifty bucks and a drink ticket, while even the most mediocre visual artist can sell a “limited edition print” for several thousands of dollars.

Performa’s moves have made them look a little out of touch: with the sizable group of performance artists who are promoting interdisciplinary collaboration, artistic ingenuity, and economic sustainability; with the fist-to-mouth grit of young, innovative performance artists; and most gravely, with the inverted dynamics of the economic and capital realities of twenty-first century New York City.

I only say this because of the evangelical attitude that has seeped from the cracks of this otherwise awesome event. Let’s hope in two years’ time Performa will feel less like a sermon, and more like a true exploration of contemporary (performance) art.