That '70s Show

Stage two in the roll out of the Marina Abramovic Institute, which materialized out of nowhere at 575 Sutter Street last month, took place last weekend with the opening show Degeneration/Regeneration curated by Cameron Jackson.

Stage one was a low-key shout out to potential donors last month in which Abramovic gave a talk about performance art and showed video of herself and others but gave few details about the program. The institute is here, in part thanks to San Francisco gallerist Stephen Tourell, who sits on the board of Abramovic’s Institute in Hudson, New York, and helped snag the Sutter Street commercial space.

        This account of the debut show deals only with Friday night. There were events on Saturday and Sunday as well. As you would imagine, the work presented was body-centric, with live performances by local artists Jennifer Locke, Igor Josifev and Michael Ryan Noble, and videos by Kadet Kuhne, Wojtek Doroszuk and Terence Koh. Guests were corralled in the basement where Locke, dressed in a latex gimp suit and hood, was busy painting a glassed-in-room completely black. Abramovic then glamoured the crowd of between 100-150 people into a slow-motion climb of the stairs to her mellifluous drone of the phrase “lifting, stretching, touching, moving.” The insta-ballet of forced-marched art people took me back to the ‘70s and those charismatic practioners in the art of self-awareness, like Werner Ehrhard and EST, whose cult-like trainings verged on messianic mind control. It was a ballsy attempt to upend a jaded crew from texting their way through another speed date with art and into a more meditative space. With just a touch of her Jedi magic, Abramovic had them in the palm of her hand. Unfortunately, she quickly released them into a show that had all the morbid charm of an episode from Tales of the Crypt. Aside from Locke’s S&M take on Ad Reinhardt and Kasimir Malevich, and to a lesser extent Igor Josifev’s performance of a Duane Hanson corpse, the work seemed jejune and a little dated. Unmarked videos played like trailers from Hollywood horror films. Each alone might have been more interesting. As an ensemble they canceled each other.

I found video intriguing, although I'm not sure who made it. Cleverly placed by the ladies room, where a line was assumed to form, it showed in black and white an androgynous male, his face covered by a wig, his penis hidden between his legs, dancing to a silent tune, with skulls in each hand. But since I’m a man I couldn’t linger too long without holding up the line.