Cai Guo Qiang’s Mystery Circle: Explosion Event for MOCA Los Angeles
Chinese Cocktail re-performance, Barnsdall Art Theatre, Los Angeles 1/24/2012.
This past Tuesday at the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre, I had the rare opportunity to attend Chinese Cocktail, a re-performance/concert by Robert Wilhite. It was a special treat, part of Pacific Standard Time’s bonanza performance art festival. Chinese Cocktail had only been performed twice before, both times in 1978.
An absurdist take on music, sculpture, and performance, the arranged set of brightly painted geometric and three-dimensional objects called into question their relationships to each other in space, and our symbolic relationships with them. Add layers of instrumental complexity and you have performance rife with curiosities.
Yes, there was a shiny pink ball with handles that acted as a magnetic theremin type instrument. Yes, there’s a guitar that resembles a giant badminton shuttlecock. Yes, one musician’s sole function is to play his triangular air guitar precisely at the moments it is notated in the score. What’s not to love about a tall bow-shaped guitar painted in Memphis furniture colors? And was that a vacuum cleaner enclosed in an ultramarine box rounding up the rear?
Judy Chicago’s Ice sculpture at Art Los Angeles Contemporary opening night, Barker Hangar, Santa Monica. 1/19/2012
“The Particles (of White Naugahyde) is a previously unproduced three-act play framed as a sit-com in which a family of four auditions for a place in a NASA program that would send them to a planned space colony. The guidelines are that they must live in a security-free community at the edge of the desert with other aspiring applicants for a two-week period. The parameters for admission are not well defined, resulting in anxiety and anti-social behavior among the participants. Directed by Rob Sullivan and William Leavitt.”
I’m excited for this performance on Jan 26, 27th at the Annex of Margo Leavin gallery. I had the opportunity to see another play of his at the MOCA when he had the retrospective last fall. His stage sets are crude but complete. I’m no expert of acting or plays whatsoever, but I thought the actors were restrained a bit. It’s a funny coincidence that this upcoming play is about leaving for a space station when I’ve just been rejected by Virgin Galactic for an internship. I wonder what William would think about the trips? Surely the play will be a little retro, a little futuristic…together creating quite a twilight atmosphere.
Sweeping the tables at the end of Liz Glynn’s All we Need MOCA dinner, 12/1/2011
aber ich glaube dir nicht, Yanyan Huang
