upper class dwarf throwing

Via Charlie Whitaker’s twitter feed: the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles recently held a fundraising dinner at which attendees were entertained in the following manner:

So, I spent an hour today at the Abromovic [sic] audition at MOCA. The deal is that the artists/dancers she will hire will spend 3(!) hours under the dining tables of the donor gala with their heads protruding from the tables. They will be sitting on lazy susans under the table and slowly rotating and making eye contact with the donors/diners. Of course we were warned that we will not be able to leave to pee, etc. That the diners may try to feed us, give us drinks, fondle us under the table, etc but will be warned not to. Whatever happens, we are to remain in performance mode and unaffected. What the fuck?!

Says the LA Times:

By the time the guests — a wild mix that included Museum of Contemporary Art trustees Maria Bell and Eli Broad; celebrities Gwen Stefani, Tilda Swinton and Pamela Anderson; and Gov. Jerry Brown and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa — entered the main dinner tent, dozens of performers were in place kneeling on Lazy Susans beneath rectangular dinner tables, heads poking through those holes so that they could turn quietly and make eye contact with the guests. (A few other performers lay on circular tables, nude, breathing life into the skeletons resting on top of them.)

And of course, many of those who took part were proud of the exciting opportunity to become temporary table objects:

"The worst thing that I heard about," said one of the heads, yoga instructor/actress Jesse Aran Holcomb, was someone lining up a little salt near a performer's face "so it looked like he was snorting a line." She found the accusations of exploitation perplexing. "It’s not so bad to sit on the floor -- as a yogi I do that all the time," Holcomb said. "You feel sorry for us because we’re being stared at? But we’re staring at you. Marina gave us all permission to create our own performance space around us — it was a gift."

Well there you go: art appropriate for contemporary power relations.

Comments

[chris y]

The title of the post gets it exactly right.

[Dan Hardie]

Nobody thinks of better titles for blog posts than our host.

[john b]

This is true - and the final line of the post would have been just as good if used instead.

[Dan Hardie]

I disagree. The final line is good, but not as scathing- because not as concise, or as funny- as the title.

[ajay]

ISTR a previous thread where it was suggested that Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull was the emblematic Blair-era work of art. (Not his actual skull. A skull acquired by him.)

I seriously hope that this is not the 2010s equivalent.

[Malcs]

Can't remember if I linked to it at the time, but here is Tom Raworth's response to the Damien Hirst piece:

http://tomraworth.com/notes/?p=581

[Barry Freed]

Ajay, the context was the the Bush years , not Blair, but that's certainly close enough (please pardon my nitpicking, it's a nasty tic).

Then there's the first two paragraphs of this post the second of which contains an image sure to delight as it lingers in the mind so. (and that's where Malcs linked the above).

(BTW, always dig the post titles too)

[ajay]

Thanks for providing the link, Barry.

[CMcM]

The only thing wrong with the headline is the suggestion that dwarf throwing isn't itself a upper class pursuit. Isn't there a certain royal by marriage who got into trouble at a kiwi bar which specialised in just that over the summer?

[ajay]

Peter the Great apparently used to fling dwarfs around the place, though I am unclear whether as part of an organised sport or simply out of high spirits. And you can't get much more upper class than Peter the Great.

[Richard J]

The recent book about Admiral Benbow includes an itemised list of the damages Peter the Great did to the former's house in Deptford. It comes to about £1,300 in 1690 money.

[ajay]

And there was a wheelbarrow race involving John Evelyn, IIRC?

[Igor Belanov]

I thought that everyone at the time was a dwarf compared to Peter the Great?

[belle le triste]

Amazing sentence from CVWedgwood's The Thirty Years War*: "[Oxenstierna] arrived in the capital to find the Queen-mother with her clique of supporters already planning to marry her daughter [ie Queen Christina] to a Danish prince; in the meantime she had taken up her residence in a room of which even the windows were covered in black hangings, and was proposing to to immure Christina here for the whole length of her childhood, with no better amusement than a collection of fools and dwarfs whose elvish gestures aroused nothing but repulsion in the little Queen."

*By no means the only one. Christina of course grew up to be the death of Descartes.

[Dan Hardie]

Has anyone watched the latest 'bold, convention-challenging' etc piece of work by Ricky Gervais, which apparently is dwarf-centric? I have no plans to buy a TV.

[Richard J]

I've not seen it, but people in the know tell me that it is the clinching evidence that David Brent wasn't as much of a step away from Ricky Gervais as he'd like to think.

[ajay]

I thought that everyone at the time was a dwarf compared to Peter the Great?

This is literally true; since the average person in those days would not have been much over five foot tall (see previous thread), Peter the Great at close to seven foot tall would have towered over them in proportionately the same way that I would tower over actual modern-day dwarf Peter Dinklage.

[ajay]

Agree on Gervais. One of the main reasons that I decided to buy a TV was my confidence that it would be able to show me lots of entertaining and instructive programmes that didn't involve Ricky Gervais.

[Martin Wisse]

Everything Gervais did since The Office, especially when teamed with fellow cock Merchant, has been dire and you do wonder how much of the success of that series was down to him in the end. It's all the same formula of him being Brentish and/or humiliating the supposed stars of his shows, like poor old Warwick "Willow" Davis

[JamesP]

I think much of Extras is genius, especially the celebrity cameos. It plays with Gervais' personal assholeness even more than the Office did, though, because the character is much closer to him (is, in fact, essentially a slightly alternative version of himself.) The Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart appearances, in particular, make me laugh whenever I think about them. ("You see, I'm not really a wizard.")

Mind you, the first time I ever saw Gervais was on the 11 O'Clock Show (which was generally awful) and he was so bad that I couldn't decide whether it was some kind of deliberate anti-comedy act.

[ajay]

That show has a lot to answer for. It also launched Sacha Baron Cohen, the man single-handedly responsible for returning British comedy to its roots of mocking poofs, darkies and foreigners. (Their voices are so funny, you see.)

[Alex]

Everything Gervais did since The Office, especially when teamed with fellow cock Merchant, has been dire

It's Moneyball applied to comedy. You need the people who make the other players play better!

Mind you this doesn't work for music. Howard from Take That, Gillian from New Order, Reni from the Stone Roses, and Bez don't == the best Manchester band ever.

[jamie]

What used to do my head in mildly when our kid was younger was to hear his mate Hamza doing his Ali G routine: an Asian kid impersonating a Jewish bloke lampooning other Asian kids pretending to be Black; and doing it in broad Mancunian. I think at that time though there was a feeling about SBC's act that 'hey, people like us are on the telly'

[hellblazer]

Maybe I'm just being incredibly dense, but was Ali G meant specifically to lampoon Asian kids? Certainly the mannerisms reminded me of a whole range of annoying kids I knew at school, of varying ethnicity but unified inanity (in that respect at least).

[Alex]

Well, the core of it was British people embarrassingly pretending to be Snoop Dogg, really. Open source ridicule, if you like.

[Barry Freed]

That's certainly how it read from over here.

[skidmarx]

I think the catchphrase "Is it because I is black?" is fairly race-specific, despite that often being a more catch-all term in the UK than it is in the US.

[hellblazer]

skidmarx: eh? My intended, though possibly misfired, point was about the ethnicity/background of the type of person of whom Ali G was a caricature, and the whole point is that such people were often - usually? - *not* black. Hence the utter absurdity of that line. I don't know, maybe I've been misreading it all this time.

"Where is you now, Sanjit Bhattacharya? I is on the telly!"

[ajay]

Reference the sorts of people that SBC has made his career out of mocking, I note that he has been cast as Freddie Mercury in a forthcoming biopic, a decision which I believe Americans would describe as a "trifecta".

[skidmarx]

@hellblazer - I thought such people were usually white. When I failed to understand what he was up to after a couple of viewings of the 11 O'Clock Show, a friend explained that he was parodying wiggers.

[skidmarx]

I have just seen Reeta Chakrabarti, a BBC journalist with Bengali parents, say of university tuition fees: "Every year there is going to be changes."

[hellblazer]

@skidmarx - ah, understood (and agreed), I misread your earlier comment.

If "us" can be 1st person singular (accusative) then "is" may as well be 3rd person plural, like... (Now trying to imagine a Geordie wigger.)