David Neumann at The Kitchen/ The Brooklyn Rail

Watching Big Eater is an immersive experience, although sometimes spoofs on an academic panel discussion emphasize the gulf between audience and performer. David Neumann doesn’t engage in creative seating arrangements like the ones Meg Stuart used in her take on the panel, last fall’s Auf den Tisch! (At the table!) at Baryshnikov Arts Center (the audience sat around an oversized conference table among the performers, with the table as the stage). Still, in Big Eater Neumann achieves a similar atmospheric quality. Portions of the show transition seamlessly from dreamy abstraction to direct confrontation to slapstick and parody, creating an encounter that is more performance installation than dance show.

Andrew Dinwidde in Big Eater. Photo by Paula Court.

A tall tower of metal folding chairs seems to grow organically out of the floor in the far left corner; the charming, bearded Andrew Dinwiddie picks a few out of the pile and dances gracefully while holding them. They are unfolded and clanging about. In sparkly leggings and a faux fur vest, Neal Medlyn leaps onto the stage like a gazelle, although I doubt even a gazelle in the wild could burst with as much presence. He puts his hand down his tight, glittery pants and stares at the audience. Video of Neumann’s father eating and speaking in the forest plays on a small retro television set, set to the right. “This forest is obscene,” he says. The look of the old TV contrasts with wall size video projections that play periodically behind the performers.

Eventually Weena Pauly—playing the moderator in this conference, which is ostensibly about the ways in which the world might end—takes the mic; others talk over her. Someone asks, “Who wants to get things moving?” They dance for a while with or without props, with or without talking. The movement can be funny. It can be emotionally resonant. It can sometimes reference pop culture, and other times the ballet Giselle. Will Rawls and Kennis Hawkins speak less than the others, but they dance with more urgency for communication in their bodies, perhaps because of this. When Rawls takes the mic and gives a short, autobiographical-style monologue about a shy kid who felt at home on the stage, I imagine that it’s not fiction. But then again, nothing personal in this piece is without wider social implications. I want Rawls to keep speaking but he trails off, turning the mic stand upside down and slowly spinning the pole as he slips into the darkness on the side of the stage.

Andrew Dinwidde and Neal Medlyn in Big Eater. Photo by Paula Court.

Eventually the subject matter becomes more clearly focused, honing in on a widely circulated Youtube video clip of David Hasselhoff. In it, he’s drunk, lying on the floor, making a mess of his hamburger and getting scolded by his frustrated teenage daughter. Neumann explores the outward language of Hasselhoff’s unfortunate, inebriated movement and the metaphoric value of his alcoholism as it relates to the rest of us, which might just mean America as a whole. When Medlyn and Dinwiddie first re-enact Hasselhoff’s part in the video, I’m reminded of Brody Condon’s dance re-creations of Youtube clips of college kids on psychedelic drugs. But Condon, although he is clearly interested in the effect drugs have on society, goes about the physical interpretation of intoxication by way of abstraction. Neumann approaches the recreation of Hasselhoff’s humiliating moment on the floor “eating a Wendy’s” in many different ways. He replays the scene so many times that the abstraction actually fades, the humor melts off the movement, and the words of this aging actor and his teenage daughter can sufficiently break your heart.

In one rendition of the Hasselhoff and daughter drama, Natalie Agee and Kennis Hawkins speak and dance the role of the teenage daughter at her wit’s end. We hear the crescendo in her voice as she tries desperately to convince her father not to drink. To embody this voice, each of them picks up a metal folding chair and winds up as if they’ve lost control and they’re going to swing the makeshift weapon right into their father’s head. It’s an expression that contains all the rage of youth and shows desperation to get through to someone who won’t respond to reason. Of course, the swing never happens; the chairs are artfully contained and the rage swallowed and transmuted into a less explicit but lovely sequence of glides and turns.

The piece ends with a seated, interview-style, face-to-face conversation between Medlyn (Hasselhoff) and Pauly (daughter). This time, Medlyn clearly articulates Hasselhoff’s slurred answers to his daughter’s questions: “because I’m lonely, I have a lot of trouble in my life” and, “bullshit, fuck you, I don’t have you in my life.” It’s a sobering note to end on; by isolating the man’s words away from Internet video titles like “Hasselhoff drunk off his ass! Very funny video!” we can finally hear him express the emptiness that fuels his alcoholism. In the mean spirited comments on Youtube, people drunk on celebrity gossip make judgments in order to create distance for themselves. As a counterpoint to this norm, Neumann deconstructs Hasselhoff and in the process, shows us our collective insides. America’s guts, it turns out, aren’t all that pretty.

Link to article in the Brooklyn Rail HERE

Whitney Biennial 2010/ The Brooklyn Rail

In the viewing room where Rashaad Newsome’s video plays, a couple of women in their seventies sat and discussed which of his vogue dancer’s poses were similar to the positions they took in their yoga class. I found their enthusiasm for both voguing, a dance form evolved in gay ballrooms and clubs, and yoga incredibly endearing. More to the point, their presence marks one crucial difference between watching these videos at the crowded Whitney Biennial and watching them anywhere else: the conversation — between older women trying to put an underrepresented dance form into a context they understand, but also between the curator, critics, and whomever else has something to say and a platform from which to say it. At the level of intention, the Biennial is about conversation between particular works sharing space at the Whitney. If this is so, then it’s fair to say that the video works as a whole, no matter how understated they may be individually, present a dominating voice in the matter. It is, after all, 2010, and they speak in a technological language we understand. So then why doesn’t this dominating voice convince?

Jesse Aron Green, still from "Arztliche Zimmergymnastik" (2008). Hi-Definition video projection, color, sound; 80 min. loop. Collection of the artist

Perhaps because, given that it’s difficult to concentrate on a painting when it’s hung next to a flat screen TV, most of the video in the show is ghettoized on the third floor and shown individually in a maze of black box mini-theatres, hidden away so that the work can’t bounce off disparate ideas and mediums. Most of the video pocketed off in these little rooms can be categorized as performance, and its creators as performance artists in one way or another. Rashaad Newsome, Sharon Hayes, and Kelly Nipper are all known for their live works; Kate Gilmore isn’t, but her videos were included in the 100 Years [of Performance Art] show at P.S. 1 and historicized as such. Jesse Aaron Greene and Alex Hubbard show performance-based video that can also fit into the category. The overall conversation among these artists is about the body’s focus, its absence, its independent actions, its representations and its ability to speak and be heard with or without verbal languages. There is clearly a moment in history being captured by the inclusion of so many artists who use such similar formal strategies.

At least two of these artists present video works here that are examples of the most culturally relevant performance of 2010. Newsome’s vogue dancers take gendered movement as far out of context as possible, making the gestures themselves the stuff of abstraction. His references to a queer subculture are casual, not forced; he avoids didactic political statements and focuses instead on the intricacies of physical form. Sharon Hayes uses a comparable approach in her video installation Parole (2010). Documentary footage of her confrontational street performances play; she and others repeatedly read the contents of a politically charged love letter out loud. Alongside multiple views of the reading, we see at-home footage of the often visible but never speaking soundperson in the performance documents. The silence of this androgynous figure—whose presence is ostensibly about the role of the media in the dissemination of public speech—compounds the viewer’s inability to assign a conventional gender definition. Like Newsome, Hayes builds her piece out of component parts that are themselves highly charged representations. Ambiguous gender (Butch lesbian? Trans man?) is used here as raw material, providing an example of the kinds of nuance that the sound bite and other media filters destroy.

These deserving artists, however, are ill-served by the very show that sets out to celebrate them. Their works are less visible and meaningful here in this muddle of similarly constructed formats than they would have been if experienced live or even—surprisingly—streaming online. The Internet might even be considered an alternative art space, closer to the lofts where video and performance artists like Joan Jonas showed their work in the late 60s and 70s. Jonas herself, back in those days, rejected gallery and museum showings of her performance-based videos since she claimed that the old spaces were unsuitable for the transgressive new form. 2010 is as much about institutions bumbling through attempts to contain performance in museums as it is about the politics of speech and the languages of body-based abstraction that the artists themselves are concerned with.

Since these performances on video are, for the most part, non-narrative and oftentimes repetitive and durational, an important part of viewing them is actually watching the whole thing (imagine looking at just one corner of a painting, and judging it based on that). Next to no one actually does this; it guarantees fatigue. Critics, who must, might even label excellent works as “unendurable” or “tedious” when what they’re really responding to is an overwhelming amount of non-negotiable, repetitive, time-based viewing. (I’m thinking of the Boston Globe critic’s flat-out, generalized dismissal of these works.) Museums are institutions that were built to show paintings and sculpture. They were meant to freeze time. Is it any wonder time-based art suffers inside them?

Link to article in the Brooklyn Rail HERE