Performance art gets a bad rap–too many naked men smearing meat on their bodies and denouncing the Man, too many cake-spraying women straddling fish. Too often it’s like improv comedy, only not funny–a messy and embarrassing waste of time. But when it’s good, the ridiculous leads to the sublime, transforming a space, generating genuine emotions.
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Laracuente said he selected pieces that had a mystical, ritualistic, magical vibe to them. That and a bit of shock value. What sticks with him from his studies at SAIC is “kind of like extreme,” he says, like Chris Burden shooting himself in the arm, or “70s performance art where people are running around naked pulling scrolls out of their vaginas.”
The last time Laracuente performed was one weekend earlier at Lazerhappy, in a piece called “Death 2006.” He lay on a bed in the middle of the room and fellow student and collaborator Zoe Weisman injected tranquilizers into his hip. Their friend Matt Ginsberg played mandolin until Laracuente conked out. Adrian Tone and Gerard Kilgallon, directors of Lazerhappy, carried the bed to the back of the room and for the two hours he was under, according to Laracuente, people were giving him kisses, telling him stories, stroking his forehead, grabbing his testicles, jumping on top of him, and putting makeup on his face. “It really creeped everyone out,” he says.
I focused on the performances that stretched out over the whole evening, like Evan Scott-Rubin and Lola Rose Thompson’s “I Believe,” where the two women dressed in turbans and flowy white garments gently placed the paraphernalia of new age healing–crystals, gems, stones, pyramids, obelisks, cabochons–on the naked body of a man with a shaved head and comically bushy eyebrows who was lying faceup on a bed on the floor. There was no explaining, no addressing the audience, just a sort of quiet surgery. I got the feeling the point of the exercise was to expose the sadistic and ridiculous sides of healing–eventually they were putting leaves and orange slices on the poor guy.
