I had no idea what to expect from Fin de Siècle by Portland composer Sarah Dougher. The show turned out to be unlike anything else I’ve experienced in all of my five years attending the TBA Festival. Dougher’s performance was described in the TBA booklet as combining Leslie Scalapino’s abstract narrative of war, labor, and class struggle with projections and music. That description was spot-on, but for some reason, I was unable to visualize the resulting manifestation: a pianist, a percussionist, two musicians on horns, two on strings, and a five person chorus. This might have been the first time I’ve heard choir music since high school. As a result, I had more church flashbacks during this show than I did during Andrew Dinwiddie’s reenactment of a Jimmy Swaggart sermon!

Images from the uprising in Cairo were projected over the musicians during the performance. I had a hard time synthesizing these photographs with everything else that was happening in the poetry and the music. The auditory aspect of the work was so peaceful, restrained, and melodious that it served as a dissonant contrast to the dark and sharp nature of Scalapino’s writing.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy the harmonies and poetry of the performance. It was a refreshing change of pace from the rest of TBA, and it rightfully expanded my concept of what the scope of the festival could be. The audience was just as packed for this show as they are for any other TBA event. Everyone seemed enthusiastic about the work, and when the performance ended, there was hearty applause and appreciative energy from all the people around me. Prior to the show, Dougher spoke briefly about some writings related to time-based art. She suggested works that incorporate time make you more present in your being. This sentiment resonated with me throughout the night. Being present seems especially important now because the pace of our lives has changed so dramatically over our lifetime. Some of the technological changes have a way of making us feel disconnected from our existence. I wonder if this might be related to why so many artists are drawn to using new media and incorporating experiences into their work.

As of Day 9 of TBA, I’m tentatively awarding Michael Reinsch’s Gallery Walk “Best in Show.” Reinsch’s performance involves him lumbering about the city in a big white box, embodying the construct of the modern white cube gallery. His monstrance, supported by an elaborate harness system and including pockets for crackers, grapes, cheddar and Perrier, features a series of compact, well-curated shows by emerging artists. As he goes, he recites an approximately 40-minute poem he has composed from artists’ statements that were submitted to him, and some which he found online. This diatribe veers wildly from cliché to cliché, occasionally producing gorgeous turns of phrase and moments of insightful nonsense. His reedy, disconnected tone sounds like the inner monologue of a fatigued and hallucinating museum-goer, or a palavering Jenny Holzer feed with a slight hangover. In his own words, as scribbled down haphazardly in my notebook:

“I’m for an art of the… Oh my god, what just happened?!”

“Let’s chastise the feelers! Let’s clarify the mud.”

“Immoral compass, pointing due south.”

“I’m for an art of the 25 ideas that you don’t do because you’re afraid, and you have a long list of excuses why not.”

“It’s a passive aggressive revolution, where we beat around the bush.”

“Let’s overthrow the government, it’s now technically feasible.”

“I eagerly await my insides being on the outside.”

“You would dissolve optically, making beans on the windshield.”

“Lecherous animalism — it’s nicer.”

Reinsch is accompanied at all times by one of a bevy of hip, stylish and attractive gallery attendants (all, like most gallery attendants, artists in their own right), who offer Perrier and interpretive assistance to passersby: “Photography is allowed, but please, no flash.” The micro-shows chosen were excellent, too. I was sorry to miss Nicole Eriko Amagai-Smith’s gorgeous, strange, kinky drawings, but on the day I was there, Katie Dunbar’s It Is, But It is Not the End, with its inadequate and mysterious electrical apparatuses, echoed the larger work’s exploration of sources of power, and the invisibility of “the way things work.” Her oversized electrical plug emerging from Reinsch’s left side made him look like a gigantically mutated Apple product, transforming the larger work, and the artist’s body, into a source or conduit, a disconnected component of an enormous, enigmatical machine.

Gallery Walk creates a sharp, playful parody of the conventions of artistic culture, while proposing a warped, but uncommonly modest and approachable alternative. It provides a statement that rejoices in, rather than conceals, its own irrelevance, and an opening that doesn’t close. Coming from a week of slogging through galleries and performances, a couple of which were great, I identified strongly with Reinsch’s exhaustion when he said, “I can really feel the weight of a room sometimes, oh! It’s really heavy.” It was a relief to see someone constructing a well-rounded and mature disillusionment, carried off with panache, which also incorporates genuine creativity and love for his subject.

Andrew Dinwiddie has meticulously recreated a live sermon by the evangelist preacher Jimmy Swaggart, recorded in Van Buren, Arkansas, circa 1971. In a remarkably fluent echo of the original (peppered with emphatic interjections, “Huh!”) Dinwiddie inhabits the persona of the Pentecostal firebrand as he spits and fulminates up and down a tented catwalk, his mic cord wrapping itself around and around the tent poles and occasionally pulling him up short, like a leashed pit bull.

It’s an impressive performance of a powerful piece of oratory, and it is hard to decide whether the original sermon or its reincarnation as a performance piece is more compelling. Obviously, Swaggart’s sermon, which rails against “homasexiality,” miniskirts and The Beatles, and draws a causal link between premarital sex and fatal car accidents, is not likely to convert anyone from a TBA crowd — but his rhetoric is informed by some interesting and sympathetic insights into the problems facing the young Boomer Generation, and his quips and arguments follow each other as regularly and unstoppably as the shipping containers on a freight train. The sermon also clearly marks a crossroads in the evolution of American Conservative Evangelical culture; Swaggart recognizes the power and danger in American popular culture (rock n’ roll music and television in particular) to conservative Christian values, and the importance of producing an alternative mass culture that uses some of the same tools for Godly ends. In the years that followed Swaggart, Billy Graham and others established charismatic television ministries helped mobilize and consolidate the Religious Right and brought us, among other delightful things, Ronald Reagan.

Get Mad at Sin! shows us how it was done. The assembled crowd on either side of the catwalk looked more like a Fashion Week audience than any sort of religious assembly (with PICA Executive Director Victoria Frey as Anna Wintour), and chattered gaily as Dinwiddie took the stage. For the first five minutes or so, ironic laughter followed many of the performers’ pronouncements, but after a while, we were mostly laughing with him. The actor’s earnestness was remarkable; he looked right into my eyes as he proclaimed some particularly titillating condemnation of the perilous miniskirt, and I found myself blushing up to my ears and readjusting my dress self-consciously. It wasn’t exactly Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, and I didn’t find myself either shaking and taking my clothes off (which, as Swaggart/Dinwiddie proclaimed with obvious fascination, rock n’ roll makes people do sometimes) or shaking and speaking in tongues (the Pentecostal equivalent), but it was effective as art, in that it was also effective as preaching.

TBA in recent years has featured other recreations of specific performances (notably that guy who did a Beyonce concert verbatim a couple years ago), and I’m going to unscientifically claim that this is a trend in contemporary performance art that’s just popping up all over the place. While (as I mentioned in my review of David Eckard’s ©ardiff), contemporary art audiences really can’t get behind anything that smacks of historical reenactment (too fantastical and theater-geeky), the recreation of historical recordings has become a failsafe way to make an authentic cultural experience in an age when everything is streaming in HD. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could go back in time and experience X or Y momentous cultural event, that history has confirmed was, in fact, momentous — and not just a total waste of time like most of the new performances people make? Why risk being bored and irritated by mediocre new work, when you could check out the original at the library or dial it up on YouTube ahead of time? Not that either Beyonce’s tour video or Swaggart’s sermon were necessarily of great historical importance in and of themselves; the Swaggart record is out of print, and was not among the 489 records by that preacher that are available on eBay as of right now (although someone I talked to at the show recognized the rock n’ roll rant from a sample in a techno song, c. 2000, so perhaps it has had more impact than one would think?). Both, however, are evidence of “rock star” performers at the height of their powers, now available to you in the reinterpreted flesh. Whether it makes you feel sexy, or righteous, or cool, a good act is hard to find, and its power cannot be denied.

tEEth’s Home Made begins with two lovers coddling blissfully beneath a stretched white fabric. Assisted by a flashlight and a hand-held camera, they explore one another by gingerly brushing skin, squeezing folds, and following contours. All signs point to a relationship of pure love and appreciation, with no indicator of roughness save for an occasional bite mark.

When they finally put down the camera and rise, the flashlight is placed so that the shadows of dancers Noel Plemmons and Keely McIntyre fall upon the sheet, which has now been stretched by their bodies to resemble a cavernous hollowed out space. A live soundtrack created by two vocalists and two ambient noise-makers subsides upon occasion, leaving one to hear nothing but the heavy footsteps of the dancers, falling in unison as they lift and drop one another forcefully. When not fused together as one, they repel and attract one another, dancing near then far like cogs on a geared mechanism. Their eventual confused circling pulls in the edges of the sheet, creating a swirled mess with them embracing at the center.

When Plemmons and McIntyre emerge from beneath the fabric, they are fully dressed in custom-tailored outfits that accentuate typical male-female gender roles. In full view of the audience, they undergo a series of complex repetitive sequences which shift upon every iteration, rotating to give showgoers different angles of their maniacal facial expressions and powerful gestures. What had once been a relationship of gentility now exhibits violent qualities as well; the two exchange sensual kisses in symmetrical form just as readily as they scream soundlessly into one another faces. They play with brutality, building off tension that is simultaneously muted and explosive, both humorous and so, so twisted.

Home Made is bold. It flies wildly in the face of viewers without apology. Once Plemmons and McIntyre strip down to nothing and begin to flail their bodies in every direction, one expects them to embody sexuality in its most carnal form. Yet, as they kiss and prod one another while alternating between robotic stiffness and passionate humanism, confusion sets in about whether their characters are dictating their actions or if their actions are being dictated by the nature of their physiologies. Using just their bodies, guttural noises, and mouthings of gibberish, Plemmons and McIntyre explore the balance between love and loathing in human relationships, and just how difficult it is to be a creature both mindful and visceral.

(Editor’s note: Apologies for our initial publishing of the article with incorrect names. The dancers are actually Noel Plemmons and Keely McIntyre.)

Innovation is often born out of constraint. The core of TBA’s popular Ten Tiny Dances is the magic of making a lot from a little. Ten choreographers are invited to develop original performances designed for a humble four-by-four-foot stage. Sunday night marked the twenty-fifth iteration of this Portland tradition since it was founded in 2002.

Unfortunately Ten Tiny Dances had a lot to contend with: a half-hour late start and a densely packed room that was sweltering through one of the hottest nights of the year. Some performers succumbed to the lethargy in the air while others soared above the unfavorable circumstances and put on unforgettable shows.

The most compelling dance was the hauntingly exceptional No Nukes performed by Kemumaki Yoko, who embodied her twitching mechanical persona so completely that at times even her pupils appeared to be distorted. Her movements exploded through her body in a startling fusion of vulnerability and possessive force.

Cyndey Wilkes and Mike Barber were terrific in the mischievously seductive Wicked. Bonus points to Taylor Mac for revealing his genitalia in a quirkily abrupt strip tease. Other notable tactics included incorporating laser lights, flooding the small platform with a swarm of musicians and instruments, and smashing the tiny stage to smithereens with a frenzied axe.

On a broiling afternoon at Washington High School, a crowd of people stood around and watched a very slow, deliberate car accident. Three beige Chrysler minivans, perched on a pile of slowly inflating blue air mattresses, raised their boxy rear-ends to the sun. By the time the chorus of laboring fans had done their work, the vans were resting on their front bumpers, like three rotund synchronized swimmers diving out of a plushy blue fountain. I can’t say that sublimity abounded, but it was present and pervasive, like the smell of the thing at the back of the fridge that you still can’t find even though you’ve thrown away everything.
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I’m going to be a jerk and position this piece as the Oregon response to Cai Guo-Qiang’s 2008 flying exploding car installation, I Want to Believe, in which a series of identical cars were suspended from the roof of a Guggenheim gallery with neon explosions emanating from them as they appeared to flip in stop-motion, as though excerpted from the middle of an action movie. The cars in Lido are non-identical, as are the air mattresses, but the menace of the car as a thing that would just as soon crush you and blow you up as take you to the store for groceries is as undeniable as it is invisible. A car that is not positioned parallel to the ground is an inherently strange object, and while the vans in Lido are not going to snap their incredibly expensive Guggenheim cables and come crashing to the ground, you really hope that they have their parking brakes on, and that Sugarmann won’t bump one of them too hard as he scrambles among the bulging, wobbling mattresses to release the bulky vehicles from their cushiony stress positions.

The Oregon-ness of this piece cannot be attributed to its do-it-yourself cost-effectiveness alone. The creative use of camping gear, which somehow has avoided remark in everything written about the work so far, despite the ubiquitous display of costly outdoor lifestyle paraphernalia as a touchstone of Northwestern identity construction that far outweighs the social (and even monetary) value of many Portlanders’ cars, is also only part of the picture. I am uncompelled by this work as a reference to the hubris of the American auto industry; the “nosedive” metaphor is a bit banal, although things that are supposed to move themselves being laboriously moved by many tiny exterior engines is undeniably pretty funny.

What I really like about this piece, however, is the problem that is proposed, and the resulting solution. How do you half-tip some minivans, and keep them half-tipped? At the performance, the artist remarked on the expense and difficulty of righting a car that has fallen on its top or side, and it became clear that this piece is as much an engineering challenge as anything else; I also had a very interesting conversation with another attendee about artists who have been grievously injured or killed by their projects. Sugarmann is looking forward to the later stages of the performance, when he can stop being careful and really fuck some shit up. This is how we do it here, people, take note.

(Photography by Jamie Marie Waelchli)