Performance Review: "Exquisite Language"

Dominic Luxford reviewed our show in the 11/10/2004 issue of Willamette Week. Here it is, along with photographs taken by our own Steve Fritz.

Performance Review: "Exquisite Language"

Artistic boundaries were effectively overrun during last Thursday evening's "Exquisite Corpse" event, part of the monthlong Enteractive Language Festival put on by Portland's 2 Gyrlz Performative Arts. The term "exquisite corpse" refers to a project in which a group of artists collaborate to form a single piece of art—a poem, for instance—knowing only part, if anything of what the other artists are contributing. It's been called an attempt to reveal the "unconscious reality in the personality of the group," and is apt not only as a title for the event that occurred last Thursday, but a metaphor for the entire artistic genre-blurring EL-fest.

The event (performance? party?), which took place at the Heathman Hotel's exquisitely decorated Tea Room, was organized in part to celebrate the work of dozens of artists from around the world, who participated in the creation of exquisite corpse poems. On hand was a motley crew of artists and musicians and around 100 exquisitely dressed attendee-participants (peacock feathers, knee-high leather boots and oversized plastic pearl necklaces amid a small sea of black).

As we downed martinis and created art on magnetic poetry sets (one per table), we witnessed a steady stream of artistic ventures inspired by the concept of an exquisite corpse. Among them were Miss Murgatroid on accordion, Haiku Inferno providing crowd-pleasers such as "Fell in love with a ham sandwich/ Lord didn't say it's wrong!", and Linda Austin dancing with a Medusa head extended from her waist (for hair: phone cords attached to bells and plastic eyeballs). The evening was probably what philistines talk about when they talk about art, but maybe also what New York's art elite talks about. As much as anything else, the art was the event itself. (Dominic Luxford)