RADAR

Heidi Rider performing at Radar.

At 300 N Casino Center Blvd, Las Vegas, February 6th, 2020

by D.K. Sole

Radar again! Good! For how long have these performance nights been popping up? Over a year. Brent Holmes is in front of us in a muted electric blue jacket. Monera Mason is always here to contradict him. Yasmina Chavez has a brown thing like a small feather duster sticking out of her clothes. (Chekhov’s gun, she uses it later.) They climb over a counter in the old downtown bus terminal to address us from the inside. Come in, come in, they say, but we do not come in. We are sitting on chairs. This is the introduction; the performances will start soon. Short performances, a whole evening of them. Who’s ready?

What can you say about the performances? Everyone is invited to get up and try something, although we have to admit we see the same faces often. They are all welcome – you hope someone unfamiliar will appear too. It is not a negative thing to have the people you know perform, and if you think there should be a change then why don’t you stand up and do it? Always this tension. Go on! I reflect on all of this as I am sitting there like a potato sack. Heidi Rider’s costume is amazing: she is riding a ridiculous broomstick horse with a sort of American Colonial jacket and wig (is that stuffing?). This horse, which is tied to her crotch with a loop of flaggy material, swings thrustingly when she stops. Something so ambiguous and unwholesome must be critical. She shouts phrases – the exact point of the critique is not named; it falls everywhere in a cloud of clown-disgust. “Love it or leave it,” she sneers colonially, swinging her horsey.

Ali Fathollahi has a flag too. Dressed in a wetsuit and yellow flippers he wears the Iranian flag like a shawl, pulls it off, rinses the colour away in a tub of water (after kicking an inflatable globe), and paints the white surface with red American stripes and blue shapes that are not quite stars. That was more complicated than most of his Radar performances last year, which involved something straightforward and dangerous. He would light a cigarette in his mouth and stretch one surgical mask after another across his face until the cigarette stopped burning through the layers, for example. There was that time he immobilised himself and hauled his body off the stage with plungers. He makes himself clumsy. This is an intrinsic part of his act. He makes himself this way – he is not made by others. He is the creative force behind his condition. What is that condition? Weakness, clumsiness, inability to move, perseverance. A purpose is executed faithfully, diligently: the outcome is ludicrous. Well.

By now, thinking back on Rider and Fathollahi, you have a suspicion that everything to do with flags and countries can’t be said clearly. It has to be gibbered or gestured at. Maybe the outrage (in the case of Rider) is too large. You’re so outraged you can’t invent a complete new sentence. Your character (you perceive them from a distance and inside) is too complacent. Or maybe they are like Marina Tsvetaeva’s lyrical poets who have to grow into their vocabularies. “From helplessness they often begin with others’ words – not their own but universal ones” (tr. Angela Livingstone). In Rider’s second performance she plays both the president and Rush Limbaugh, gawping and gurning as she reads the Presidential Medal of Freedom speech. “I want a catharsis! You want a catharsis!” she shouts at the end. “There is no fucking catharsis!” Alec Jones-Trujillo hisses out a monologue that seemed to be about the United States as well, in some way, or maybe only because it had the same flavour of outrage.

“A fat dog that takes its own walk with an app! We want to taste our meals in other people’s mouths!”

(He was in John Gilkey’s Wet the Hippo improv in L.A., said the person next to me, and I remembered a small front room, a narrow staircase, and a curtained-off back space with chairs. As I write his words down now I notice, too, that Jones-Trujillo pays attention to rhythmic consonants – the first sentence is all short, aggressive “t” and “k” and “pp” and the second smooths the sounds out with an insinuating grossness: “mmm” “thh” “ss.”)

There were other unstated things. Clarice Tara Cuda climbed a ladder, read handfuls of letters from her shirt, threw them on the floor, and then sang murmuringly while shaving her head. Text, what did written text mean here; it was being tossed away while its aftermath reverberated into her hair and removed it. Karla Lagunas went about with a rectangular mechanical light, trying to persuade people to articulate their honesty. The light was Diogenes but the desire for articulation wasn’t. “I am looking for an honest man,” she told the artist Aaron Sheppard, singling him out in the crowd. “Oh shit,” he said, from the top of his tallness. Also she ate a cabbage. “I feel so intimidated by you back there eating cabbage,” said Holmes, who went on to ask his own questions of people and then feed them spoonfuls of apple, pistachio, vinegar, and cantaloupe from his new position in the bus terminal’s kitchen.

Radar isn’t always in a bus terminal. Holmes mentioned last February’s Cold Radar – an evening in an unheated warehouse with a concrete floor around a time when snow had been falling, or promising to fall, on the Strip. On that night Nanda Sharifpour rolled herself up in a blanket and said she would not move. Today she moves around easily, taking pictures of Fathollahi. So it is not a truly Cold Radar: we may never have one again. What flavour of Radar is it? No one gives it a name but the flags stay with me, and that notion of outrage going beyond coherent expression, outrage that left you in no doubt something terrible and offensive had been detected, but what -- it asked you to ask. What? It was everywhere.

Check Radar’s Facebook page or Instagram for the dates and times of future events.

Australian artist D.K. Sole lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and works at the UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art where she is in charge of Research and Educational Engagement. She has exhibited in Las Vegas and Denver, Colorado.

Posted by Wendy Kveck on March 18, 2020.