Art Lies, Volume 23, Summer 1999 Page: 58
60 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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The Art Guys
UTSA UNIVERSITY CENTER
SAN ANTONIO
by Hills SnyderLove Is The Drug
"FE-FE-FI-FI-FO-FO-FUM, I smell smoke in
the au-di-tor-i-um....."
Yes, and Charlie Brown is the clown, as the
song goes on to say, but the Art Guys are the
drug. They are at the University of Texas, San
Antonio, in the University Center auditorium
doing the Macarena to music provided by a
wind up monkey. It is a hilarious moment, but
as sometimes happens when art is blessed with
magic, it will be upstaged by it's own prop.
This occurs because the monkey music keeps
going off unbidden throughout the entire three
hours of the Art Guys show.
135 minutes in, their heads taped together,
the stupefaction is deep. You look up, planes
flying over head, but through the window of
video. You're frozen in a James Seward Johnson
pose, eternally late for some skyscraper courtyard
rendezvous, bronze as a baby shoe. The airplane
drone is hypnotic and peripheral, like the sound
that emanates from beneath and behind the
surface of reality when you're tripping. The
planes slide across the twin video screens occa-
sionally while the rest of the time the monitors
show blue sky with the occasional drifting cloud,
or maybe your imagination provides these
details. It's all very pleasant. Might as well be
laying on your back on a cool, even lawn.
Nothing prickles and the temperature is perfect.
Sky is blue, clouds are drifting, planes are
humming or maybe it's the sound of the azure
dome itself and everything under it. Then
suddenly you find yourself doing one of those
Austin Powers double takes. You kind of shake
your head and snap back to the messy stage.
The Art Guys have been busy, but they're
only half way through. You could've slipped
out to your root canal appointment and come
back all nitroused and ready for the finale and
nobody would've been the wiser. They call this
work Daisies, Pansies, Daffodils and Other Sweet
Smelling Things Like Flowers In The Springtime
After A Light Misting Rain At Dusk or 101 of the
World' Greatest Events All In Row Tonight Right
Before Your Very Eyes And We're Not Kidding
And This Time We Really Mean It.
The performance is structured around the
following format: artist approaches podium
and reads off the title of the particular piece
58 ARTLIES SUMMER 1999from a numbered list and then steps back to
center stage to perform that particular
sequence. The items on the list of "the World's
Greatest Events" range from the trivial, such as
Rock-N-Roll In The 80s, to the truly great, for
instance Rock-N-Roll In The 70's. Some of the
other items on the list: Neckties, High Five,
Math Question, Do Like The London Bridge,
Cheerios, Moment of Loudness, Tape Heads
Together, Jack Barely Taps Mike Very Softly,
Bucket Feet, Politics, Consider The Consequences,
Think About What We Are Doing For A Minute.
They are at the podium now, turning the
page, returning to center stage, accomplishing
the task of retaking center stage, taking a
breath, beginning the sideways shuffle back to
the podium. Let's see, Number 86, 7rust Us. It's
late in the show, volunteers are called for,
blindfolded, forgotten. At least half an hour
passes while a grueling, slowly dawning, abject
misery and its philosophical antipode forms in
the minds of the volunteers as they realize
they've been duped. One, a little older and
wiser than the rest, a reader of fairytales, gets
out of the situation gracefully by being among
the first to oblige when The Guys arrive at
Number 95, Would Anyone Like To Place
Something Else In Our Pants? The ex-volunteer
saunters over, blindfold now in hand, stuffs it
down Michael's pants which are already
bulging with cheerios, stuffed animals, beer
cans and bearcat stew for all I know. A bit later,
an audience member seizes the moment and
adds the Macarena monkey to Jack's jam
packed pantaloons. Can you guess what
happens next? It brings down the house.
There's the trailing drone of a jet again.
The artist, formerly the object of your atten-
tion, sometimes flattens out and becomes
uninteresting. Foregrounded, the performer is
mentally laid on its' side until all things are
equal. That's when you hear the drone, moving
from the marginal to the peripheral, a subtle
gradation, but whether it is an actualization,
simulation, representation, whatever, it doesn't
matter. You just know you are privy to the
peace that realizes the center is big enough to
contain all of it. In these moments a sweetness
in the Art Guys work surfaces, like in a perfor-
mance at the San Antonio Museum of Art twoyears prior when they patiently went through
the audience of a hundred or more and gave
each of us a kiss. It wasn't a conceptual piece.
The resistant among those witnessing
these miniature spectacles might say that this
sweetness is a kind of charm that is deployed
to deflate skepticism. These people already
left. They were having a bad trip. Others
might say it's a clever disguise to conceal the
fact that the performers are getting away with
murder. I reject this notion as well. They just
work too hard for this to be plausible. For
example, within the duration of this perfor-
mance, they've each chugged at least five
Budweisers. You think that's easy? Well,
maybe you don't realize they did it without
corporate sponsorship.
I submit that the Art Guys were sent
here to make us have a psychedelic experi-
ence and go to school at the same time. The
moments of light which appear in the alter-
nately dull and funny clutter of their
ongoing project are some sort of shamanistic
indwelling which smiles at you with your
own wisdom after wearing down your resis-
tance with the mundane humor of an atten-
tion seeking child.
Some, of course, will remain skeptical
even as they prefer the more obviously
likable material, like the time (also from the
SAMA performance) when Jack performed
Born In The USA with a Walkman and a
broom. Headphoned, he could hear Bruce
wailing away in that used-to-wear-a-leather-
jacket way, but all we could hear was his
voice singing the lyrics and his fingers riffing
on the broom which obscured the air guitar
we were all straining to see. It took courage
for him to do this and he was smart enough
to realize that for it to work he'd have to do
the entire song.
Number 101 on the list is Thanks To
Each And Every One Of You. They do and
they also thank a number of others, including
"the guy who designed this auditorium." But
they're not perfect. They forgot to thank the
monkey. O
The Art Guys
Daisies, Pansies, Daffodils and Other Sweet Smelling
Things Like Flowers In The Springtime After A Light
Misting Rain At Dusk or 101 of the World's Greatest
Events All In Row Tonight Right Before Your Very
Eyes And We're Not Kidding And This Time We Really
Mean It, 1999
Photos: Chris BirchIE W S
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Lightman, Victoria H. Art Lies, Volume 23, Summer 1999, periodical, 1999; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228053/m1/60/?q=%22Bryant%2C+John%22: accessed June 5, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .