Screening Room: ‘Performance on Film’ Series

‘PERFORMANCE ON FILM’ SERIES

Thursday 11 July 
7.30 pm 

‘DAY IS DONE’
by Mike Kelley
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York and the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Los Angeles
2 hr 46 min

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Friday 12 July
7.30 pm

AMOC
in response to ‘DEMENTED WORDS Jenny Holzer’
25 min

‘IT COULD’VE BEEN ME…IT COULD BE ME’
David Adrian Freeland Jr. in response to Amy Sherald
15 min

‘BOWLS BALLS SOULS HOLES’
Mika Rottenberg
27 min

WORLD PREMIERE: ‘TRUE LOVE WILL FIND YOU IN THE END’
by EICHTERLING (Julia Eichten & Bret Easterling)
25 min

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Tuesday 16 July
3 pm, 7.30 pm

OKWUI OKPOKWASILI
for The Performance Project at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles 
5 min 

WORLD PREMIERE: ‘FARMHOUSE/WHOREHOUSE AN ARTIST LECTURE BY SUZANNE BOCANEGRA STARRING LILI TAYLOR’
by Suzanne Bocanegra
starring Lili Taylor
1 hr 30 min

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Wednesday 17 July
7.30 pm

PREMIERE
‘A&E: Adolf & Eva / Adam & Eve, The Counter 2, 28:32'
by Paul McCarthy, with Lilith Stangenberg
28 min 32 Sec

Please note this film is intended for audiences 18 years and over and includes graphic sexual content and extreme violence. Viewer discretion is advised.  

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About ‘A&E: Adolf & Eva / Adam & Eve, The Counter 2, 28:32'
As part of the continued evolution of Paul McCarthy’s ongoing A&E project, begun in 2019, ‘A&E: Adolf & Eva / Adam & Eve, The Counter 2, 28:32' takes his satirically uncompromising body of work to yet another level with the integration of AI augmentation. 

Seen in this screening for the first time ever, the 28-minute-long film, a reconfiguration of a 28-minute scene from the over 3-hour ‘A&E, Soup, Cooking Show’ 2022 performance, confronts the complex mechanisms of power, politics, desire and history through the artist’s and his collaborator Lilith Stangenberg’s garbled, gratuitous and garrulous renderings of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun/Marilyn Monroe. Transmogrifying one of the most viscerally taboo figures of the modern era via performative buffoonery and the relentless costume of AI hallucinations, McCarthy has created a mesmerizing and terrifying work. ‘A&E: Adolf & Eva / Adam & Eve, The Counter 2, 28:32' continues McCarthy’s experimentations with visual technology, and explorations of the origins of fascism, Hollywood, violence, the contemporary art world and the current political climate. 

About Suzanne Bocanegra’s ‘Farmhouse/Whorehouse an Artist Lecture’ 
Part artist lecture, part memoir, part cultural essay, ‘Farmhouse Whorehouse’, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra Starring Lili Taylor considers the lives of Bocanegra's  grandparents on their small farm in La Grange, Texas, which was located across the road from the Chicken Ranch, better known as ‘The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.’ Using text, song, film and projections, Bocanegra and actress Lili Taylor tell a rambling story that examines the idyllic place the rural world occupies in our urban imagination, with occasional detours to explore the pastoral in art, homesteading, French painting in the 19th century, Star Trek, and various utopian communities throughout history. Filmed at the Guggenheim Museum in 2021.

About EICHTERLING's ‘True Love Will Find You In The End’
Made by EICHTERLING, a creative partnership born out of the more than a decade long friendship and collaboration between dancers Julia Eichten and Bret Easterling, TRUE LOVE WILL FIND YOU IN THE END is a poetic experiment about fate and inevitability that references an array of dance practices and choreographic legacies. A collection of vignettes, the film follows two beings in states of ongoing, radical transformation who sift through recognizable languages of dance and movement, tracing the sometimes forgotten or lost histories of dance. Shot in locations across Los Angeles including a farmhouse in Malibu, an industrial warehouse in the Arts District, and a laundromat in Westlake, the film explores the continuity of reciprocity and affection even as the boundaries between human and animal, real and virtual, and fact and fiction dissolve. Produced by BEMOVING and RYBG.  

About David Adrian Freeland Jr.’s ‘It Could’ve Been Me…It Could Be Me’
Created during the uprisings of 2020 against police brutality and the killings of unarmed Black Americans, this timely and resonant performance is set to Joel Thompson’s ‘Seven Last Words of the Unarmed’ recorded in 2016 by University of Michigan Men's Glee Club. ‘In the spring and summer of 2020, we continued to see the lives of Black people ended at the hands of police and a racist system. As I read the articles and saw the videos, I grew angry and tired. I was scrolling through social media one day and I happened upon a video of a choir singing Joel Thompson’s ‘Seven Last Words of the Unarmed.’ I was immediately moved to tears but even more inspired to dance. When I shared this work on social media, it was a much-needed release for me. I was angry, hurt, tired and uninspired to do anything artistic, so setting up my camera and letting the music move me helped me share those feelings. This work is not about me. But it could’ve been me… it could still be me at any moment. And that’s the hardest truth of it all.’
—David Adrian Freeland Jr.

About AMOC’s response to ‘DEMENTED WORDS Jenny Holzer’ 
Spanning the entire first floor of the gallery’s 22nd Street location, AMOC presented a powerhouse lineup of performers in response to Jenny Holzer’s 2022 exhibition ‘DEMENTED WORDS’. The company created an immersive concert experience around the works, engaging with the artist's unique ability to harness the power of words.

The performance includes traditional spirituals and rearranged early Baroque compositions, featuring interpolated text from Jenny Holzer, conceived by Zack Winokur and company: Anthony Roth Costanzo, Countertenor; Keir GoGwilt, Violin; Coleman Itzkoff, Cello; Davóne Tines, Bass-baritone; Sae Hashimoto, Percussion. And featuring ‘Nobody Knows’ Traditional, arranged by Davóne Tines. ‘Ah Belinda’ Henry Purcell, arranged by Celeste Oram and company. Text from ‘Truisms’ by Jenny Holzer, ‘Flow My Tears’ John Dowland, arranged by Celeste Oram and company. Text by Dowland and QAnon.

About Mike Kelley’s ‘Day Is Done’
Over the course of his four-decade career, Mike Kelley (1954 – 2012) produced a provocative and rich oeuvre that conflates the highest and lowest forms of popular culture in a relentless critical examination of social relations, cultural identity and systems of belief. Through an extensive variety of media, including drawing, painting and sculpture, video and photography, performance, music and a formidable body of critical writing, Kelley sought to reveal the unexpected connections and contradictions of the American vernacular.

In ‘Day is Done,’ dancing Goths, singing vampires, hick story-tellers, malevolent barbers and the Virgin Mary populate Kelley’s conceptual musical. This hilarious and disturbing video, written and directed by Mike Kelley, with original music by Kelley and Scott Benzel and choreography by Kate Foley, explores American popular rituals and entertainments by weaving together 31 scenes based on high school yearbook photographs of extracurricular activities. As early as 2009, Kelley began to conflate his two major ongoing projects: The Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series—originally conceived as a 365-tape opus, one tape for each day of the year, 31 iterations of which constitute ‘Day is Done’—and the Kandors series.

About Okwui Okpokwasili for The Performance Project 
Okwui Okpokwasili, renowned American multidisciplinary artist, writer, choreographer and MacArthur Fellow, debuted an immersive piece, in collaboration with director Peter Born, encompassing dance, vocals and dynamic visuals in November as part of The Performance Project, a showcase for the performing arts at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles established in Fall 2022.

About Mika Rottenberg's 'Bowls Balls Souls Holes'
‘This piece spins around relationships between the physical and metaphysical. Rooms become characters, the bingo balls become electrons bouncing, the clothespin guy is the conductor, the sleeping moon lady is a vessel and the announcer is the gatekeeper. They all affect temperature and move architecture. Internal psychological space extends beyond the body’s border, shaping the exterior by using parapsychology.

Cause and effect, as a basic mode of progression, has been a main interest for me from a psychological, sculptural and social perspective. In this piece, I address this idea less in a physical direction and more in an abstract direction, extending it to the metaphysical and to processes that are not necessarily visible, like the production of luck or the loaded phenomenon of global warming. You can’t really see how these things work—both are cause and effect relationships that are abstract. Weirdly, I find that it’s easier to believe in your ability to influence luck than to see how you play your part in climate change. I use cinema as a tool to make viewers believe in an immaterial chain of cause and effect. Cinema allows that type of deception, so the production of luck becomes real and glaciers melting into a bingo hall become real.

I also use cinematic structures to manipulate space from a sculptural perspective. When making ‘Bowls Balls Souls Holes,’ I was drawn to a bingo hall in Harlem that seems to me like it is its own little universe. You hardly notice the sign when you walk on 125th Street, but once you enter you discover all these people playing for hours. They seem to function in a different time and according to the rhythm of the random numbers being called: I-20, O-72, B-12, etc. What if these numbers are some kind of code and the people are not playing bingo? What if the numbers actually write a sequence that opens a wormhole into another dimension, where cause and effect rely on laws different from the laws of physics?’
— Mika Rottenberg, in conversation with Christopher Bedford for the Rose Art Museum exhibition catalogue 'Mika Rottenberg: The Production of Luck' (2014)