Attitude reigns
in performanceart history
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Mondo Artie Episode
#6070
A LIVE Biennial of Performance Art
presentation.
At the Vancouver Art Gallery on
Saturday, October 13
• BY JOHN KEILLOR

Mondo Artie Episode #6070—The
Sleuth Lips Report was a big draw on
Saturday (October 13) at the Vancouver Art Gallery: a surprising feat,
perhaps, for a showcase of performance art about an FBI agent sniffing out American draft-dodgers.
Performance art can be subtle
stuff, so when I arrived at 8 p.m.
sharp in a foyer full of gorgeous people and good wine at $2 a brimming
glass, I suspected the show to be
already in progress. It wasn't. After
half an hour, this comely lot was
ushered into the gallery's rotunda,
from which the audience could see
performers leaning over from the
upper floors. Here the actual performance began. Despite its nominal
theme, it was essentially a history of
Vancouver's performance-art scene
of the 1960s and 1970s. This entailed, among other things, a lot of
name-dropping, food-throwing, a
secret agent, art theory, Hitler, drag
q u e e n s , l e o p a r d - s k i n n e d saxophones, and performance-art gurus
of yesteryear who taped down sections of the audience. This was all
accompanied by coordinated sound
effects and big-screen projections
of Mr. Peanut, a sprinting banana,
someone on-stage somewhere
wrestling a mattress, and a clock
that continually reappeared displaying the actual time, so viewers
always knew the program's sometimes glacial rate of passage.
Some performers were within
arm's reach, and others were high
above, often leaning to present
additional historical tidbits.
Sleuth Lips was the secret agent,
performed by a h a n d s o m e and
professional Archer Pechawis. His
was t h e o n l y regular c h a r a c t e r
amid this disjointed stream-ofconsciousness melee. The audience learned history by following
Lips' progress, and found solace in
t h r o w i n g hot-dog buns—which
had been dropped from the third
floor—at one another. However,
they were n o t invited to throw
eggs at the woman in an alcove
wearing a leopard-print dress. The
sound technician had clearance to
pelt her, and gingerly did so.
Around 15 minutes into the performance, it became entirely about
food, and for the next half-hour
the focus was drag queens making
puns about edibles. On the screen,
the chopping of truffles was examined closely, and hot, meaty meals
were filmed up close at rotating
angles like majestic landscapes.
This wore a lot of viewers out, so
they wandered back into the foyer
for more wine and nibbles. There
was a good spread still waiting.
Meanwhile, those who remained
inside were getting burnt-out on all
the John Waters-like references to
grub. The campy fever of victual
double-entendres eventually broke,
transforming into a defence of performance art in general (these were
Sleuth Lips' findings) and this performance-art piece in particular.
This good-natured tirade included
a journalistic review of the show in
progress, which in part resembled
the notes I took. It also defended
postmodernism, irony, surrealism,
and so on, with cute, academic slogans like Collage or Perish! The
confidence of this troupe in its
endeavour was unshakable.
Nothing has as much attitude
as a performance-art work, and if
attitude has aesthetic merit, this
evening was a sterling success. •

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