SEPT 11 — At a gig recently, I met Friendly Girl who was selling CDs. A round of conversation later, I went to check out her wares. A particular DVD/CD combo piqued my interest because it had an onion wearing a pair of headphones on the cover, and she convinced me to buy it.
I’m not an artist, but I take an interest in artistic ideas. Like a lot of other people, I like quirky things. For me to take an interest in something, it should be weird, funny, and respectful of my time schedule. This is the same criteria I apply to the men I date.
So when Friendly Girl asked me if I enjoy inspirational performance art, I find myself nodding like a toy puppy on the dashboard of a taxi. She then seduced me further by describing the DVD using phrases like “experimental music of the future,” “cutting edge arts movement,” and “avant garde without the mustard.”
A few minutes later I was blown away by this artsy mumbo jumbo and convinced that this bunch of artists I had never heard of were really worth the money. They are the future, and I will be inspired by them to create stuff of my own that will benefit my people and my country’s economy. Plus, it came with a free CD. What a bargain!
The show begins in a room where a sheet of plastic dotted with onion skin is suspended across the ceiling. An old woman walks out and starts playing a musical instrument to the “music” on the sheet. She is joined by her buddies (Old White Guy, and Japanese Guy). Old White Guy has got a big bag of sand and he is shaking it at different speed, Japanese Guy has a small covered tray of sand/beans and does the same; they’re all making a lot of noise. The expression on their faces is as if the world has come to an end, and they are doing one last performance before they get picked up by aliens to go to a new planet.
Next, two little girls are playing with music boxes and seem really excited. They make a lot of cooing baby noises which is unnatural because they appear to be past the cooing age. Their moms look excited too. They just can’t get enough of it, and continue cooing over their music boxes for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, Japanese Guy is moving as if he’s at the Ministry of Sound, except the “music” he is playing sounds like what you might hear at a monastery. The Monastery of Sound, as it were.
The next clip has everybody on stage cracking their knuckles, snapping their fingers, scratching their faces, and tapping at the microphones. Old White Guy sticks his fingers down his throat and makes noises like he is going to vomit and Old Woman starts gnawing on something.
After that, Old Woman gets on stage on her own and rips some fabric apart. Then another guy comes in, wraps her in paper, sticks tape over her eyes and mouth, and gives her a haircut while wearing a ghostbuster outfit. This was the only clip I enjoyed because his scissors were hooked up to some sound transmorgrapher which amplified each snip, thin, and shave. When he turned his razor on it, it sounded like the guys who come and fog your neighbourhood to prevent dengue fever.
And just when I think it’s starting to get better, Old Woman is back on stage faffing about with hand cream. She has a bunch of friends with her, she controls the hand cream supply, and they line up to receive their cream from her. When everybody is creamed up, they rub their hands in front of the microphones as if their lives depended on it. After 10 minutes, one of the girls stops them, they all look surprised, and take a bow.
You know what, I think I’ve made it sound a lot better than it actually is.
Call me a philistine if you want, but it was a huge waste of time. If art is supposed to provoke a reaction, then all this DVD provoked was an urge to stuff Old Woman, Old White Guy, and Japanese Guy into a big barrel and chuck a mixture of onions and hand cream at them while playing a recording of all the noises they made throughout the DVD (which won’t be hard to find because, guess what, it’s all on the free CD that came with the package).
June hunted Friendly Girl down on Facebook, told her the DVD did not deliver on the awesomeness she had been promised, and demanded an exchange. However, in the time it took for Friendly Girl to reply, she watched it again, grew fond of how awful it was and decided to hang on to it after all.
* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.
