Gage Boone, performance still from I am Kurious Orange. Photo:© 2009 F.Schnaas.

In a first installment of I Am Kurious Orange--a month-long rehearsal, residency, performance, and exhibition space curated by Anne Colvin--Marc Arthur's performance co-opted the pre-existing social frameworks of public space, assembling ephemeral stages and moving props out of the audience, while weaving them into his semantic fabric of characters and mythical symbolism.

I first experienced Arthur's intermittent segment-acts in late 2007 at the premiere of curator and producer Earl Dax's Tingle Tangle, a burlesque variety at The Bubble Lounge in North Beach, San Francisco, which followed the successful Weimar New York cabaret, part of the Live Art series at SFMOMA. While The Bubble Lounge offered unlikely GPS coordinates for Arthur's conceptually driven work, the rest of the performances at the variety/cabaret gave his act a perfectly contrasting context to unfurl what is now a performance mode all it's own.

Arthur's performance works spread like weeds and crab grass over space and time. At Tingle Tangle, Arthur's act was not 'scheduled' on stage like the rest of the performances, but it unfurled like disparate intermezzos, in spontaneous bursts, spreading amidst the crowd.

Similarly, a few months later in 2008, at another of Anne Colvin's art salon/bar happenings at New Langton Arts, Arthur's participation burst into a sudden start. There, an unannounced lights-out provided an imminent re-contextualization of the performance space, ripping the performers away from their casual mingling with the art crowd. In the next instant, narrative infiltrated amongst the inadvertent spectators. There was neither intent nor space to erect the proverbial barrier between act and audience. Arthur's troupe spontaneously and phenomenologically carved a performing space/stage, defined only by the human wall that conformed along each act, synchronous to the narrative's spontaneous development.

Thanks in part to the gallery setting of I am Kurious Orange's rehearsal/performance of April 30, 2009, a more contained and controlled environment for Arthur's work allowed for 'planted' symbols, adding cohesiveness to the multi-part narrative mode, revealing meaning and intentionality, and yielding more signal and less noise.

Part Satyricon (Fellini), part Prosperous Books (Greenaway), the quasi-epic progression of acts were afforded a more discernible script, a journey laden with object-signs and signifiers that further reveal the Arthur/Boon duo's influences. (Marc Arthur's posse varies in size and characters, but he seems consistent in his collaboration with Gage Boone, a fellow recent graduate from CCA.) They drew mannerisms from the Kuchar Brothers [1]--filmmakers with whom Arthur has recently collaborated-- as they assailed topics including friendship, love, and lust with undertones of reckless abandon. The end results verged on disturbing and often mystifying.

Marc Arthur, performance still from I am Kurious Orange. Photo: ©2009 F. Schnaas.

Props were central, as they channeled the overall conceptual thread of the show, which derives its title from a 1988 collaborative performance between The Michael Clark Dance Company and The Fall[2] at Sadler's Wells in London. Fluorescent orange pigmentation accentuated and codified throughout, in linings of boxes, lighting, costumes, and other objects, all of which acquired and changed meaning as they were deployed from act to act. And in a climatic reference to Yves Klein's cobalt blue body painting series, orange pigment spurted and bubbled out of Arthur's mouth, becoming an ink-ready stamp, contact-transferring facial marks onto a scroll of paper pegged to the wall.

Conceptual underpinnings were conflated in panoply of art references, specifically William Blake's poem "Jerusalem", which was the inspiration for the lyrics to Mark E. Smith's eponymous LP, I Am Kurious Oranj. With its on-and-off switching, Arthur's performance intermittently allowed the structure to titter in spurts and spats amidst the ebb-and-flows of the audience turnover. Like scattered snippets of film that animate and illuminate upon bodily contact, the props remained between segments as the only semantic connector within an otherwise discontinuous narrative. (A similar concept is deployed in two of Anne Colvin's adjacent works in the show.)

At a countdown's screech, the actors fell amidst the crowd, scattered, frozen for a few long but pregnant seconds, in back-bent poses reminiscent of Robert Longo's falling businessmen drawings. This segued into the narrative's improvable social characterizations, a coexistence demarcated by fashion's ambiguous, perpetually mutating, symbolic lexicon. A yuppie banker, a punkish hipster, and a clumsy drag queen--who are the same, familiar, denizens straight out of our contemporary urban landscape--were brought together only through the transmutation of their fluid social identity. It was here where the influences of the likes of the Kuchar brothers and the seminal performance artist, model, and actor Leigh Bowery [3] were discernible.

Next, a latter-day Mary Magdalene demarcated a new segment as she was plucked from the crowd, screeching and weeping. The audience's attention re-gathered, her howling questioned the very purpose of her forced participation in the purportedly selfish, gerrymandered narrative project authored by Mr. Arthur himself, rather than his mythical character. This Fellini-esque maneuver reminded the audience of the blurred line between reality and the diegetic space, and further solidified Arthur's intrusion into, and co-option of, the safe, yet detached perspective of our own subjectivity. We are all in this act together, he was telling us.

As tip of the hat to the Kuchar brothers, the seemingly pedestrian dialogue revealed an improvised script, invoking flower-power cum-soap opera banter, woven into a despotic, imperative dialectic. At times, it revealed the 'process', including such backstage banalities as eating. At other moments, the dialogue sought to expose its crab-grass-like non-linear structure, by negating any teleological expectations we might have had ("This is just a rehearsal", "This is not the end, but the beginning of something beautiful" "faster, louder!, Louder!"

The final segment of the performance revolved around the flight of the two, now transformed, protagonist angels, possibly referenced from an illustrated, vintage copy of a book used as a prop and containing Blake's "Jerusalem". The angels conjured the flight of 'the snake' though a series of symbol-object conflations, and ritualized bonding dances, including Nefertitti as idol-cum-sex toy, and blue keys falling into a book's binding and enshrined in a treasure chest. Orange traffic cones became oracles for dialogs with a volunteering audience. A costume change evoked the skin-shedding snake--newly embodied in Mr. Arthur's slender build--re-inhabiting its shimmery new skin, and soon transformed into a Holy Mary-esque drag icon straight out of a scene from Barbarella.

Evidence of Arthur's roundabout gesamtkunstwerk peppers the unfolding palimpsest pegged to the gallery's wall, with hand-scripted, seemingly platitudinous annotations: "The world you are forced to accept is false", "If nothing is true, then anything is possible", a probable reminder that our inherent objectification by the social contract and our impotent subjective assumptions, conflate as a constant (makeup) mask which morphs, in Leigh Bowery-like fashion, according to the existential state we are in.

Marc Arthur, performance still from I am Kurious Orange. Photo: ©2009 F. Schnaas.

Next May 30th, at the final presentation, we may be delivered back in time to some new and revealing, episodic segments randomly sprouted by the constant tapping roots in Mr. Arthur's mind, unless this was really just a rehearsal and so the future just a re-run of the past.

[1] The Kuchar Brothers' outlandish cinematic experiments with 8mm short films have made them legends of the American avant-garde and the forefathers of what can only be described as the cinema of "bad taste".

[2] The Fall are an English post-punk band, formed in Prestwich, Greater Manchester in 1976. The band has existed in some form ever since, and is essentially built around its founder and only constant member Mark E. Smith.

[3] Leigh Bowery (1961-1994) was a London-based performance artist, club promoter, actor, pop star, model and fashion designer. He was considered one of the more influential figures London and New York art and fashion circles during the 1980's and '90s, influencing a generation of artists and designers.

I Am Kurious Orange , curated by Anne Colvin, runs at David Cunningham Projects through May 30, 2009.

Franz Schnaas is an inter-notional artist, writer, and photographer living in SOMA, SF.