Five Performances at Once

At Central Square’s Enormous Room on Aug. 14

Performance art fans will have a unique opportunity to overindulge their passions on Aug. 14 at Central Square’s Enormous Room, as Dillon Paul presents “I Can’t Believe I Ate the Whole Thing.”

Paul, a Boston-based performance and media artist, has arranged an evening of five simultaneous presentations occurring at varied sites within and just without the bar/lounge. Included will be live performances by Natalie Loveless, Hiroko Kikuchi, Kristina S. Lenzi and Thomas J. Gustainis, and video by Henry Samelson and John Corso. All the acts will bear a common theme of food ingestion and will be ongoing, between 6-10 p.m.

In Loveless’ piece, “Tomorrow,” she sits at the bar whle turning a music box’s handle, playing Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” speech in an encoded score. It’s an “articulation of ontological tension within a site of consumption and leisure,” she said; with ears blocked and mouth taped shut, she keeps playing the piece, humming and ingesting the entire score. To achieve this effect, Loveless, who has a BA from the University of Surrey/G.S.A., UK and is currently an MFA candidate at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and an MA candidate in Art History at Tufts University, used a basic repetitive numerology scheme to translate the speech into English music notation, and punched the notes into a strip of musical stave-embossed cardstock.

In Kikuchi’s “Why Food?”, she covers windows with thinly sliced raw vegetables. “Kikuchi distills food into an aesthetic and conceptual form,” said Paul, “that calls into question cultural practices relating to food preparation, consumption, and waste.” Kikuchi is currently the Education Coordinator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Lenzi and Gustainis are on the interior and the exterior of the bar for “A Seal and A Monkey Walk Into a Bar,” which is Part One of their series “A Seal and A Monkey.” Dressed as these animals, they are Ace-bandaged to one another and held to their body-less language skills. Lenzi (formerly visiting faculty in Performance Art at Tufts University and currently teaching Visual and Performance Art at The SMARTS Collaborative in Attleboro), and Gustainis (visiting faculty in Photography at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and completing his MFA thesis year at Tufts University), use language and gesture to subvert common preconceptions relating to sanity and madness,” Paul said.

Samelson’s video “Comb”, apparently the reality show of the night, projects images of kitchen activity onto a plate in the front restaurant. “Bringing the otherwise invisible work of the kitchen into the dining area,” said Paul, “the video draws viewers’ attention to the labor behind the product.”

It’s no simple feat. “The looped gesture, implying repetition and monotony in the execution of mundane tasks, coupled with the framing device of the camera, draws attention to the use of aesthetics to conceal means of production.”

The film is a part a video series by Samelson, who will receive an MFA in Painting and New Media from Tufts University and the SMFA in January of 2003, which features kitchens in which he himself has worked.

Corso’s “Sissy Face,” another investigative video, focuses on issues of “gluttony, lust, and Sisyphean disappointment,” according to Paul. “The fruity drink he ingests implicates an insatiable queer desire, one obsessed with consumption, but suspended in deferred pleasure.” Corso holds a BA from Williams College and is currently pursuing an MFA/Masters degree at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

The night’s shows evoke impressions “not only of food and beverage,” said Paul, “but also of language and meaning, the process by which we digest culture. Internal and external realms are explored at the borders of the space and of the body.”

Paul’s own work has been shown locally at the Museum of Fine Arts, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Coolidge Corner Theater, Mobius, and Green Street Studios, as well as in streets, parks and subways, and internationally, at New York’s Context Studios, Providence’s AS220, Hakushu, Japan’s Artcamp, Tokyo, Japan’s Plan B and Kwangju, Korea’s Kwangju Bienalle. She was commissioned in 2001 by the Cambridge Arts Council to create a collaborative installation performance for the Cambridge River Festival.

The Enormous Room, a New York City-style loft-lounge which features a DJ seven nights a week and live Klezmer music on Sundays, is open Mon.-Fri. 5:30-1 a.m., and Sat. and Sun. 7 p.m.-1 a.m. It opened four months ago at 569 Mass. Ave. in Central Square, above the Central Kitchen, next to the Harvest Food Co-op.

For information on this event, please call Dillon Paul at 617.759.4260 or the Central Kitchen at 617-491-5599.