Critical Correspondence

Performa 09: Symphony n.1 at PS 122

by Karinne Keithley

Symphony n. 1, created by the Italian collective Alterazioni Video and Icelander Ragnar Kjartansson, approached performance on its most ephemeral terms: an experience without residue. Attendance here was something like dining out. Structured as a kind of domesticated piece of noise art, five men in concert attire perform four formally demarcated symphonic movements (time-kept by an occasionally masochistic cohort (Kjartansson) on video), the piece made sound of out un-instruments—notably a laundry drying rack and a large bartender’s setup taped to a ladder. Meanwhile on video (and I mean vhs, this shit is old school) Kjartansson moves through task analogs to allegro, adagio, andante, etc., first shaking pasties on his heavily amplified nipples, then slamming his head and chest with a keyboard and a vhs tape, then eating a burrito (ah, the adagio), and finally strumming guitar and humming a cowboyish loop. Sonically we proceed from relatively grating found noise toward relative sonority (the sound of the bowed laundry rack is kind of whale-like in its beauty). The real project in this project was promised as “joy, infinite profound joy.” Joy, or maybe its cousin giddy happiness, definitely arrived in the fourth-movement turning-loose of the piece onto the audience, as inflatable soccer balls were kicked at us, and we hurled them back. (Only one person seemed to be pissed at getting nailed; she left early, in protest or protection.)

I thought a lot about behavior—the taming of futurism, the boyish charm of ball-chucking, our collective happiness at getting to play too, and the odd, rogue photographers wandering (unsanctioned as far as I could guess) around the stage to get their close-ups, as if it really was some kind of archaic thinking that the performance took precedence over its documentation.

This project was a performance without remainder: the preparation for and undergoing of group experience, unironically, undisturbingly gleeful(if not perhaps joyful). And I really did like watching the flickering explosion of a light bulb (used for its light function in the third movement and then microwaved in the fourth), like a model H-bomb that never dreamed of melting anyone’s skin, safely sacrificing itself to our pleasure behind the rectangular window.