Looking Back on Assembly
By Jesse Cao, Summer 2019 Curatorial intern
“Kitchen Memories” is a new series of first-hand reflections on past programming. Spotlighting a diverse range of perspectives from our community—including those of current and former staff members and artists—these posts reveal the ways that The Kitchen’s events, performances, and exhibitions have informed these individuals’ work and thinking.
OVER THE COURSE OF THREE WEEKENDS IN JUNE 2019, the ASSEMBLY series made a spirited contribution to ongoing discussions both within The Kitchen and in the art world at large about the relationships between space and performance. Organized by Kevin Beasley and The Kitchen’s curatorial team, ASSEMBLY invited sixteen performers to occupy our building’s three floors. In advance of these shows, each floor was emptied in order for Beasley to create video, sound, and lighting systems for the performers to utilize. In short, Beasley and The Kitchen’s team set up a series of blank spatial “canvases,” on and within which artists were invited to explore themes of access, collective thought, and cultural exchange. These performances covered a wide spectrum of genres and styles: some examples were avant-garde jazz piano, operatic performance art involving cling film self-mummification, and a synthesizer-based dance set ready to burst walls at Berghain.
I attended each of these shows as both staff and audience—which is to say I primarily worked at the refreshments table but was able to view the performances once visitors were sufficiently hydrated. Based on my observations and experiences from this vantage point, what follows is a selective portrait of moments from ASSEMBLY that explore two of the series’ themes in particular—how physical space and audience experience reciprocally affect one another and how the codes of art institutions inform how their visitors experience art—in an attempt to understand further the thunderous smorgasbord that briefly took over 512 W. 19th Street.
ON THE THIRD FLOOR
Each day of performances began in our third-floor office space, which was turned into an intimate venue by hollowing out what is normally our administrative hub (opened to the public on this occasion for the first time since the 1990s). The relatively close quarters and unique orientation of the third floor—with a few confusing right-angle turns—meant that performances there became an intriguing laboratory for the relationships between audience, space, and institution.
These became most apparent to me during Logan Takahashi’s experimental modular synth performance on June 30. After I served drinks to the last of the late arrivals and a few parents escorted their children into our adjacent “overflow room” to escape the volume, I entered the performance space and was surprised to find most of the audience sitting on the floor. Even as Takahashi’s tempos and volumes climbed to techno-club-level peaks (booming loudly enough that I could feel the bathroom walls vibrating two floors below, when I went downstairs to set up the first-floor bar), most people remained seated, save for a few courageous dancers and stand-and-swayers.
Those sitting weren’t doing so passively, though. I noticed two modes of seated spectatorship: some people closed their eyes and opted for an introspective, private experience, while others directed their senses toward Takahashi himself, watching closely the craftsman at work. I wondered whether it had been our third-floor setup—one clearly not designed primarily for techno sets—that had primed or subliminally instructed our audience to treat this as something different from a more social dance or music experience.
I also thought about the nature and history of The Kitchen as an institution. As far as art institutions go, this organization does break quite drastically from the mold of traditional museums. However, The Kitchen is of course still bounded, in some way, by its position as an established institution with a nearly fifty-year history. It may be this inescapable identity that has conditioned our audiences to treat techno DJs alongside vanguard performance artists in the manner of sacred subjects that should be viewed with respect and restraint.
ON THE SECOND FLOOR
After the third-floor shows, audiences moved down to our second-floor space, usually used as an exhibition gallery. On this occasion, the expansive space was empty, save for an assembly of scaffolding, speakers, and TVs (creating a stage of sorts) at one end of the room, lending the gallery the feeling of a traditional “concert” setup. If ASSEMBLY as a whole may be viewed as a multi-part investigation into how performer, space, and audience experience interact, I found Angie Pittman’s June 29 solo dance performance to be a trial that yielded incredibly rich results in the second-floor space.
As viewers stood and milled about in the room waiting for the performance to begin, Pittman entered unannounced through the house door, wearing a skirt of metallic red and gold stripes around her neck, fashioned as a cape or robe. She zig-zagged around the space with an innocent gaze, weaving between people at her own pace as if engaged in a theatrical movement exercise. Eventually, she landed in the room’s logical performance spot in front of the “stage.” The audience stood watching as Pittman began dancing. Here, the concept of gaze—about which I’d read Pittman’s thoughts in her interview with The Kitchen—started to stand out to me. In this orientation of relatively traditional spectatorship, the audience was allowed a full, broad gaze at Pittman: no aspect of her movements could be hidden.
After this introduction, though, Pittman migrated to a corner of the room that was behind most of the audience and out of view to others. Pittman settled into a crouch with a handheld microphone and delivered a speech about vampire folklore and Wesley Snipes’s role in Blade (1998). Equal parts spoken-word poetry, sermon, and hyper-naturalistic thinking out loud, this segment proved just as moving and insightful as it was surprising and, at times, funny. Notably, the audience followed Pittman the moment she began her migration and re-configured itself in an ungraceful mass, with heads peeking up through the crowd to catch a glimpse of the crouched Pittman. Even as Pittman attempted to escape the audience’s gaze—perhaps intending for this second portion of the performance to be a purely aural experience, given her use of a handheld microphone—the audience followed.
In that moment, I reflected on whether this was another case of institutional priming. Audiences come to performances held in venues like The Kitchen with a certain expectation: they’ve committed themselves to viewing the show, and they are willing to re-position themselves around performers to guarantee their sight lines, even if those performers intentionally make doing so difficult. After this monologue, Pittman transitioned into the final segment of the performance, dancing to Mahalia Jackson’s “In the Upper Room.” The audience returned to its original position as Pittman invited them once more to take on a clear view.
ON THE FIRST FLOOR
Following the second-floor shows each day, audiences then moved down to our first-floor theater space—an empty black box theater with only an installation by Beasley hanging in its center—for the final set. This unique spatial setup again offered an interesting test case for playing with audiences’ expectations of gaze and spectatorship.
Engaging in this kind of play dynamically and uniquely was a dance piece presented on June 22, choreographed by David Thomson and performed by an ensemble led by Omagbitse Omagbemi. Throughout the piece, Omagbemi crawled, writhed, emoted, and gestured as the rest of the ensemble moved continuously to surround her wherever she traveled and to outline her body with chalk markings on the floor. As they did so, the audience members moved with them—pushed and pulled by the performers’ kinetic energy, but also propelled by a necessity to constantly reinvent their own sight lines. This movement around the theater also created the opportunity for surprising moments of connection. Omagbemi made physical and communicative contact with individual audience members on multiple occasions.
As with Pittman’s performance, we saw in this dance piece one or more performers exploring the boundaries of the audience’s expectations for spectatorial consumption. With Thomson’s choreography, though, the intention was not to avoid the audience’s gaze, but to in fact rely on their likelihood to move along with the performers to amplify the actions of the ensemble. As the audiences continuously wrapped around the scene, they lent a beautiful gravity to the ensemble’s encircling and releasing of Omagbemi. As ASSEMBLY exclusively featured artists of color, I found it especially powerful to see Pittman and Thomson taking the time and space of ASSEMBLY to experiment with what can be described as an “institutional gaze”—a kind of distant, probing, and perhaps cold spectatorship which art institutions carry a reputation for facilitating—to heighten the poignancy of their own work. Especially as the “institutional gaze” historically has been associated with predominantly white artists and audiences, seeing artists of color reclaim space and gaze was a uniquely important result of this sixteen-day laboratory.
LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE
In my experience, beyond being a multi-part series of rousing work, ASSEMBLY served as a meaningful and thought-provoking exploration of many broad themes. Chief among these, I believe, was the investigation of what it means to be an institution and what kinds of expectations and behaviors institutions elicit. Especially as The Kitchen nears its 50th anniversary, it is of great importance that the organization regularly re-evaluates its own institutional identity to further consider issues of accessibility—and ideally it will continue to do so with help from audiences, as ASSEMBLY allowed.
Images: 1) Logan Takahashi in Kevin Beasley, ASSEMBLY, 2019. Performance view, The Kitchen. © Sophia Ragomo. 2) Angie Pittman in Kevin Beasley, ASSEMBLY, 2019. Performance view, The Kitchen. © Paula Court. 3) David Thomson in Kevin Beasley, ASSEMBLY, 2019. Performance view, The Kitchen. © Paula Court.