Eulogy for a Riot

Julian Meyers, the art historian, had a wicked little dialectic going in Riot Show, a discussion he hosted last week at SFMOMA, about his archive of music performances disrupted by rebellious crowds. Myers envenomed the room by juxtaposing archival scenes of audiences rioting against the passivity of a live audience watching scenes of audiences rioting. People could be seen nervously scouting each other, sensing their own submissiveness, as Myers played audio of an attack on John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) during a 1980s performance of Public Image, Ltd.  Myers even toyed with the energy, goading the crowd at times to disrupt him by salting his language with curse words, talking too long and cheerfully withholding the audio and video samples. There were a few half-hearted responses, but it's hard to get an audience to riot today, particularly a highly educated one with class privileges, even when you hold a mirror up to their complaisance.

The total unlikelihood of a riot is in fact what makes a talk like Riot Show at SFMOMA even possible, and what makes Myers' collection something you can call an archive. By the time a thing gets collected it's usually fairly inert, and that's pretty much the only way it's getting into a museum. It's rare that an object in the museum reanimates in some dangerous way, like an egyptian mummy in an old B Movie. The way museums collect contemporary art might tell us more about how toothless the art is and less about how adventuresome is the museum. To fight the mausoleum perception museums are also serving booze and staying open late and hiring people like Myers who do edgy curatorial work. Two floors up from Myers Stephanie Syjuco was invited to create a no-frills, black market pop-up shop as a kind of in-house critique of museum elitism,a and it was packed with manic consumers. The tipsy human decor, however, felt more like some kind of social taxidermy than genuine community energy when compared with the myths of human action surrounding some of the museum's great objects, and it makes one wonder if maybe we just have to give in to the notion that, like old people, we live in a post-action, post-drama era of nostalgia.

This only made Myers' talk more poignant and entertaining and the footage even more fun to watch. In addition to the aforementioned riot, there was audio of a crowd going bonkers after a sax solo from a player in the Duke Ellington Band, and video of 20,000 pissed off fans ripping up a stadium in St. Louis after a petulant Axel Rose fled the stage due to the presence of an unauthorized camera in the audience.

Myers is onto a body of material that not only works as a curatorial framing device for examining the passivity of our post avant garde situation, but links two things that rarely get put together: the high art notion first put forward by Duchamp, that the audience finishes the work, in this case literally; and the political and class frustration that bubble up around music riots. It's going to make either an interesting book or a museum show one day, and I only wonder if Myers will present it as a desk mask for the avant garde, or a romantic reassertion of protest energy, which seems to be slipping away, at least in this country. 

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