TAWDRY
Joan Dickinson’s “Candid Scenes of Humble People in Relaxed Settings at the Turn of the Century” gave us another look at the world she explored in her recent Link’s Hall presentation, Black Cake: a take on the late-19th-century America of Emily Dickinson and John James Audubon. As a Hawaiian steel guitar played obbligato to a wash of Muzak strings and slide projections of flowery ornamental engravings flashed on the backdrop, Dickinson danced a slow, languid hula, her torso encased in rigid, form-fitting wire mesh. The backdrop changed to a projection of three American Indians in a period engraving, arms out in a posture like Dickinson’s, echoed in turn by her shadow thrown up against the screen. After a fade-out, the lights came back up to the sound of squawking woodland birds. A wooden pole came forth mysteriously from the wings, tipped by a stuffed bird perched on a fat paintbrush. The pole reached all the way to stage left, dropped the brush into a pail of black paint, and to the accompaniment of soft, ethereal music slowly painted a wavy black line across the flat white screen. Suddenly a slide appeared there: two bestubbled, grinning Gemini astronauts photographed shortly after their 1965 splashdown.
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Melcori is evidently still feeling his way into this style; he seemed shaky in his October 9 portrayal of a telephone conversation between two male friends, one of whom is about to leave on a Mexican bus trip, golf club in hand, little guessing that the gods are watching him and arguing among themselves over who will seize control of the wind and influence his game. But on October 16, in the second installment, Melcori made some curious but interesting choices. The protagonist is drinking in the desert at the Mexican border with a cheerful bigamist from Michoacan, and Melcori plays both of them in clownface with his head sticking out through a hole in a white screen, virtually immobile. The oddball visual choice–and Melcori’s emphatic, rapid-fire monotone delivery–left me scratching my head, I’ll admit, but laughing too. One can’t help admiring Melcori’s willingness to throw away caution and delegate decisions to his subconscious.
Owens really went too far, though, when he read aloud a letter he’d found in the grass by the Chicago lakefront, a letter full of paranoid irrationalities, including an “enemies list” using people’s full names. To see such a heartbreaking document put on display without the anonymous author’s knowledge or consent was bad enough, but it might have been tolerable if Owens had explored its aesthetic possibilities or at least shown some interest in the writer’s very evident pain. Instead he simply held the letter up to sniggering public ridicule, degrading not only the author but the audience as well.
