Bodies in Space(s): Negotiating Sites/Sights

An evening of performance art at the Madrone Art Bar, curated by Anthony Torres, including works by Bert Bergen, Daniel Blomquist, Terrance Graven, Justin Hoover, Geraldine Lozano, Lauren Marsden, Honey McMoney, Crystal Nelson, Heather Sparks, Kathryn Williamson, and The Muistardeaux Collective.

We were in a bar.  Eric and Tom had bull horns and they were standing in the middle of the crowd, facing one another and talking – not so much to as at or past one another – rambling without interruption about little or nothing. “Bo Diddley, Bo Derek, Bob Guccioni.” Between them, there was a little girl. She had a bullhorn too, and she kept repeating in rhythmic intervals something about, “Spaaaaace!”

The next thing I remember, Crystal, declared that she was an emissary from President Obama. She said that she had come on his behalf to tell us that he knows that people are suffering, that the recession has taken their jobs and their homes and left them destitute. As an expression of his concern, she said that anyone who felt like he or she was suffering could flog her. She sat backwards on a chair and laid a whip on the table beside her. Crystal is black, and the people at the bar were almost all white. I was drinking Southern Comfort; and the whole scenario made me uneasy. Was she ridiculing the claim that people are suffering? Was she suggesting that the President had been reduced to America’s whipping boy? Then people started to flog her, raising the whip and laying into her back with repeated heavy blows, and… she seemed to like it.

All the while, Kathryn kept falling – tumbling off her barstool or slipping on some wet spot on the floor. Was she drunk? Where were her friends? And there was this guy with a two-by-four as wide as the room trying to make his way through the crowd, “excuse me, pardon me.” And this other guy was acting like troll or something, and he seemed to have these two young girls under his spell, and they spat in his mouth and knelt down together and stared up at the ceiling like they were praying to the moon. And Justin was lying on a GURNEY on the floor, while people at the bar covered his body with bandages with Chinese characters on them.   His girlfriend Katie was dressed in hospital scrubs and standing with Xi, who was dressed in a Chinese military uniform; and the two of them seemed to be overseeing whatever it was that was happening to Justin.

And then there was this guy, dressed all in white, with a black eye, and a shaved head like me. Someone told me his name was Sean, and he had this wooden box full of decorated bottles, which contained colorful elixirs, which he would take out of the box and drink. And the elixirs made him twitch – in ecstasy or repulsion, I couldn’t tell which – and they spilled down his body, staining his white clothes. And then somehow I knew that the potions were made from urine that he’d collected from people at the bar. And then he lit something on fire. And Katie and Xi carried Justin on the Gurney out of the bar and onto Divisadero street, where there was some other guy tied to a pole, with a TV under his arm with words on it, blurring into one another, which said something like, “you are here.”