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International Performance Art Series
Performance
This performance draws upon elements of popular culture and street culture,
both politicized and not politically invested. It plays graffiti and street
writing against mass-culture images of power and wealth. It plays activism
and insurgency against mass-media accounts of global social and military
policy. It uses the images and sounds of street demonstrations (as well
as some attempts at their repression by the state), speeches, and marches
as well as sounds of popular musical forms. It also uses images of the
popular portable cassette players and radios, which ironically serve to
dissipate and fragment the regional and street cultures — if any
still exist — of those who use them.
The musical genre it plays off of is rap song, a form used mostly by black
singers in the United States, a rapid disco monologue that is often a
complaint about some common problem of daily life. The performer, who
carries a giant parody of the street tape recorder, suggests several different
types of street figure, from street kid to Latin American guerrilla to
disco dancer. The work is meant to suggest that there is a choice of responses
to the direction of society by the State. It is also intended as an expression
of solidarity with Latin America, a current focus of repressive military
activity. The final song is an improvised chant in a form known as repentista
— a rough equivalent of a rap song, but couched positively rather
than negatively by a famous Cuban singer in his seventies who affirms
his people's will to continue in the face of the threat of renewed U.S.
militarism. His spunk presents a fine model for a renewed spirit of activism.
Statement
Watchwords of the Eighties
This is a work of the present: about the Right's taking power in the United
States, marking a change in the world order having enormous though varying
effects on people's lives virtually everywhere. The weight of shored-up
privilege of an ever-smaller U.S. elite will fall most heavily on the
"Third World" and on the poorest at home — but we all will feel it.
It seems particularly important now for a critical art to take shape,
now that irrationalism is being deployed to regain control over national
life and class divisions are being accentuated. New regimes promise to
make everything right by sweeping away what came before, and the Rightist
regime that swept in on a minority of possible votes is attempting to
sweep away the social gains of the sixties, fought for and won inch by
inch:
- of blacks, Hispanics, Asians, native Americans and other national
minorities
- of women of gays and lesbians
- of working people
- of students and young people
- of the poor, the elderly, the socially and physically handicapped,
including veterans
- of left intellectuals and professionals
- of community activists of antiwar, antimilitarist, and anti nuclear
activists
- of artists and others doing cultural work
- for citizenship rights and personal rights, for self-control and
privacy
- for reasonable pay, job security, and occupational health and safety
- for corporate accountability and the valuing of people over profits
- for good and secure housing and enough food to eat for freedom of
expression and
- for good and humane education for ecologically sound and humanly
safe practices
- for buyers' protections
- for a movement away from war and away from support for repressive
governments
In the mid-70's Cold War academician Samual P. Huntington announced that
the United States was suffering from TOO MUCH DEMOCRACY. On the cusp of
the 80's people are giving up their democratic rights under pressure of
economic warfare. You white collar, professional, and business people
constituting most of our audience, reconsider your allegiances! Are you
satisfied to accept the new watchwords
QUALITY (= elite, expensive, conservative cultural products) and
ELEGANCE (= unblushing ostentation for the limousine class)
over your own more humane values, such as tolerance and compassion,
or a just and dignified life? On the cusp of the 80's, the Cold War
dark ages will not be reimposed without enormous cost.
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