Performance

Mike Builds a Shelter is a performance comedy with apocalyptic overtones, a narrative extension of Smith's installation Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter/Snack Bar. In this darkly humorous morality play, Smith contrasts Mike's rural adventures in a pastoral landscape with his home fallout shelter. Throughout, the dual narratives are intercut with episodes of Mike's Show on cable, in which Mike's banal domestic activities are eagerly if passively received by living-room TV viewers.

The third installment in the Action Series. Two characters engage Ann Hamilton's Headlands kitchen-space and create temporal resonances. To survive they must break the fast (a midnight snack) and service the meal.

This title is also available on HalfLifers: The Complete History.

Merce by Merce by Paik is a two-part tribute to choreographer Merce Cunningham and artist Marcel Duchamp. The first section, “Blue Studio: Five Segments,” is an innovative work of video-dance produced by Merce Cunningham and videomaker Charles Atlas. Cunningham choreographed the dance specifically for the two-dimensional video monitor screen. Atlas uses a variety of video imaging effects, including chromakey, to electronically transport Cunningham’s studio performance into a series of outdoor landscapes. The audio track includes the voices of John Cage and Jasper Johns.

“In Martina’s Playhouse everything is up for grabs. The little girl of the title oscillates from narrator to reader to performer and from the role of baby to that of mother. While the roles she adopts may be learned, they are not set, and she moves easily between them. Similarly, in filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh’s playhouse of encounters with friends, objects aren’t merely objects but shift between layers of meaning. Men are conspicuously absent, a ‘lack’ reversing the Lacanian/Freudian constructions of women as Ahwesh plays with other possibilities."

This flashy drama about theater life was made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute and follows the various personalities that make up the show-biz milieu of a fictitious city on a fog bound coast. The fog is thick and so is the plot as it plunges into a series of dramatic interludes which include musical numbers, war scenes, ballets, and erotic shenanigans involving the living and the animated dead.

In 1991 Montano met a Hindu couple at Ananda Ashram, the meditation center she attends in upstate New York. Since then, the three have become friends. Mr. and Mrs. Mehta are Ayruvedic doctors; both physically resemble another Indian couple—saints Sharada and Ramakrishna, who lived in Calcutta in the 1800s—and are both known for their incredible devotion to the mystical life. Montano made this postmodern documentary to honor the Mehtas, to present an idealized model for a spiritual relationship and to hold out the possibility for spiritual ecstasy in everyday life.