Salon.com > performance art

I was a political astroturfer

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 10:00:00 +0000

“There’s a movement building, and it’s spreading like wildfire,” announced Rafe Lieber of Citizens for Access to the Arts at a rally on the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall early in January. With politicians, celebrities, a brass band and a screaming crowd, any passerby would conclude that some popular uprising was in the works.

Speaker after speaker, including City Council members and even Brooklyn-native actress Rosie Perez, gave impassioned speeches about the importance of providing access to art to young people, leading the crowds in chants of, “We’re not gonna stop!” “Fuel our dreams!” "We're coming for you!" and, most frequently, “Save Ovation!”

The participants were decrying the decision of Time Warner Cable to deny the arts network Ovation TV to poor and minority viewers. Cheering along with them, I suddenly heard a cell phone ring. The woman behind me, a fellow protester, answered, saying, “Can you call me back? I’m at work.”

While I had considered the rally more of a quick buck than work, her statement wasn’t technically wrong. Like me, many of the rally’s participants had arrived via the same November Craigslist ad for “TV Press Rally Extras.” A week before the rally, we received an email from Warren Cohn, an employee of the power lawyers David Schwartz and Bradley Gerstman’s lobbying firm Gotham Government Relations. In part, it read:

Naked if I want to: Lena Dunham’s body politic

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 20:00:00 +0000

In Hollywood, it seems you're only allowed to be naked if you're Megan Fox. If you're not, you had better be apologetic about it, like Melissa McCarthy in "Mike & Molly." But God forbid you're a woman with an unconventionally beautiful body and you're okay with it. That's when people like Howard Stern start to get hysterical: Lena Dunham, whom the radio host described as a "little fat girl who kind of looks like Jonah Hill” and likened her taking off her clothes to rape, has become a feminist heroine largely due to the fact that she unapologetically parades her naked body across the TV screen. Dunham has been both derided and deified for baring her unconventionally beautiful figure throughout both seasons of her HBO series. (And don't expect her to stop anytime soon, she told Entertainment Weekly in a February cover story: "My point with getting naked is never proven.") And through her performance, she has established a new body ideal. Carolee Schneemann, the feminist artist who originated nude performance art in the ’60s and was dubbed “body beautiful” for her stunning figure, believes Dunham does more than add a dose of reality to the “deformations” – “the swollen puffed up lips, the emaciated shapes, the huge inflated boobs” – that populate Tinseltown. “There’s nothing deformed about Dunham,” she said. “She’s the ideal of normal.”

When two guys married a tree

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 12:45:00 +0000

In June 2009, Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing, known as the conceptual art duo the Art Guys, put on tuxes and walked down the aisle together at a marriage ceremony in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. It was nearly a year to the day after California’s Proposition 8, which sought to outlaw gay marriage, made it onto that state’s ballot, and gay marriage was, of course, still illegal in Texas. Not that it mattered. The two men getting “married” that morning were both heterosexual – in fact, they were both already married to women. As they approached the minister in front of gathered family, friends and local art lovers, the duo dragged behind them a wagon with a live oak sapling planted in a pot. Readings were recited, vows were spoken, and the guys slipped a brass shower curtain ring onto one of the naked branches of the little oak. The Art Guys proclaimed it all “art.” The piece was called "The Art Guys Marry a Plant."