Festival of living art3/24/2023 ![]() ![]() Big Box museum art is included, as you can see from the photo of “Guernica” accompanying this review. In lieu of a catalogue, the program has an almost microscopic list of the 54 (count ‘em!) pictures. ![]() Badly wired musical bombast, as usual for ZJ, is also here - an insistent autotune version of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” plays and replays with interruptions. As we watch the breathless (for the most part) “recreation” of pictures by the talented FOLA ensemble, oblique commentary is provided by Zombie Joe’s musical selections, beginning with Lou Reed’s “Satellite of Love” (with the notable lyric - especially for zombies - “I like to watch things on TV”). The program has no text, or virtually none. Laguna Beach may have dozens of professionals and 500 volunteers to create their tableaux vivant, but Zombie Joe has only eight undead performers, “the unsurpassable FOLA ensemble.” ![]() Pageant of the Masters has a $230 ticket price (cheaper seats will need add-ons for binoculars and seat cushion), whereas you can pan-handle the price of the ticket to FOLA 2017 in an afternoon. Festival of Living Art 2017 - his third iteration of “gallery” tableaux vivant - is a very funny answer to the multi-million-dollar kitsch spectacle in Laguna Beach, Pageant of the Masters this is a sort of dumpster-diving version, a living-graffiti show. Zombie Joe’s pictures can look back at you, too. And as animated pictures, these photos would overlook Genet’s autoerotic “little routines” in his prison cell, a theme he would take up in his only film, Un chant d’amour (1950) with cinematography by Jean Cocteau… From one point of view, these pictures were, after all, “…just the darker side of sets of regulations, just so much graffiti on a prison wall…” (Hebdige, Subculture, 1979) - but from another point of view, they were coded signs of revolt. In The Thief’s Journal ( Journal du voleur, 1949), Jean Genet gives an account of little photos - a hidden criminal portrait gallery - attached with saliva-moistened bits of bread to the backside of a prison regulation card. Zombie Joe is in a silly mood with his new pageant, Festival of Living Art 2017, another set of wordless images separated by blackouts. ![]()
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