Last week, I sat for 20 minutes in a near-empty room in the Abrons Art Center. It was a cold, grey day in New York and many in the small audience looked unhappy. At the back of the theatre there was a musician playing the oboe but he couldn’t seem to get a tune going. The event, which seemed to not want to start, was a performance by French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and composer Ari Benjamin Meyers called “K62”, part of Performa 09, New York’s biennial festival of performing arts. I sat there, waiting, thinking that performance art, which had been so sprightly in the 1970s, must be preparing to retire by now. I wished I had brought a book.
Eventually, a woman dressed in black informed us that there had been a mistake – we had been sent to the wrong venue. Our new location, the main theatre in the Abrons Art Center, was fuller but the stage was still near-empty, and even after half an hour things weren’t hotting up. The only real activity in the theatre came from four anxious female organisers speaking loudly into walkie-talkies. They seemed to be trying to locate a portion of the audience who were lost. “Jenny to security,” one of the women said. “Do we have any Ks?” “No sign yet,” a tinny voice replied.
I’m not even sure what to make of the article, really … I mean, I’m thinking that getting put in the wrong location was part of the “performance art.” But what do I know (aside from the fact that I don’t get performance art).
