Walking Alone: Short Stories by Bentley Little

Author:Bentley Little [Little, Bentley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cemetery Dance Publications
Published: 2018-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

MONA RETROSPECTIVE,

LOS ANGELES

(2016)

The stereotype is that California is a vast cultural wasteland, the tired Woody Allen canard adopted by pseudointellectuals everywhere after they saw Annie Hall. But it’s not true, it never has been true, and this weekend’s program at the Museum of Nu Art proves it. For MoNA is offering a retrospective of some of the best installations and performance art pieces of the ’80s and ’90s, including several of those famously defunded by the NEA.

DAY 1

It’s odd to realize that what was once new and cutting edge is now old and safe, with formerly “dangerous” artists now comfortably middle-aged and taking the work from their glory days on a greatest hits tour to contemporary audiences in direct violation of the philosophies they once espoused. Several of the artists, however, will be premiering new pieces, including Mark Lunch, the artist I’m most looking forward to seeing.

I initially discovered Lunch’s work in college. Gay, black and proud, Lunch created pieces that were often violent and sexually explicit. This did not sit well with the university’s donors during the Reagan era, and his sole local exhibit was actually not on campus but in a rented space nearby. I had never seen any of Lunch’s work at that point, had in fact never heard of him, but an article in the university newspaper detailing how his installations had been banned by the administration was enough to get my First Amendment dander up, and I accompanied a group of like-minded friends to the empty warehouse where his show was being presented.

I was blown away.

The most impressive piece consisted of playground equipment constructed from the bones of Ku Klux Klansmen that had been dug up by African American children under Lunch’s supervision. The ropes on the swing set were made from nooses that had lynched black men in the 1960s.

The most outrageous piece, innocently titled “Reversal,” involved a jar of white men’s toes that Lunch had amputated and pickled. As patrons strolled in and out of a small room, he sat on a black toilet and, one by one, ate the toes. “Reversal” ended eight hours later when the toes had been digested and defecated.

Controversy had followed Lunch throughout that period, and he had thrived on it, creating one groundbreaking installation after another between 1985 and 1995. Reportedly suffering a nervous breakdown after the disastrous reception of a piece that consisted of a séance conducted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1997, Lunch had lain low in the intervening years, and rumors swirled about his whereabouts. Occasional accounts surfaced that had him studying with Sufi mystics, moving to Haiti, or living with a Native American shaman, but it was never clear whether those stories were true, false or fell somewhere in between.

This MoNA retrospective is supposed to be his re-entry into the North American art world, and for it he has prepared a new work. I am beyond excited, and I actually arrive an hour early, taking a chair near the front of

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