A Harshly Negative Review of OLS

Katy Siegel’s Friday morning session “An Age of Extremes” ended with a performance by Our Literal Speed, a twosome intent on using the format of the oratory paper as a dismantling of the academic conference. The stylish duo doesn’t call their work performance but rather claims that they create “media pop operas” or “pedagogical concept albums” (I know, you can roll your eyes, it’s totally okay). From what I gathered from their convoluted discussion on contemporary criticism, the duo thinks that studio art practice and art history are one and the same (yes, I’m pretty sure Benjamin Buchloh explained this in 1990 in his famous essay on Conceptual art and even before that, this notion was enacted in the 1970s by Marcel Broodthaers). The essential problem of Our Literal Speed’s polemic is that, in fact, not all art history is mired in institutions. Since the dawn of the sixties and the alternative exhibition space, art historians have been free to be cultural critics, sociologist, psychologists, and yes, even artists. Performing a tired trope about the administration of art that is dressed up in hipster glasses and long legs is not the least bit provocative. The talk was phony, misinformed, and said truly nothing about the state of our “dull culture.”

After that panel I was more then ready to seek out some books on performance art, works that I felt might assuage the true infuriation I felt (and I am aware that such a reaction might, in fact, point to a successful provocation by the group, but I also kind of doubt it). Thus! I was more then pleased to find at the book fair a recent text on performance by the artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena. His work and, surely his writing in Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Criticism, and Pedagogy, I reasoned, could redeem these awful feelings.