PPL, You’re a Big Boy Now OR Rauschenberg ist Tödlich, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Panoply Performance Laboratory.
PPL’s Edible Art
By Esther Neff
The Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL) will serve a menu of edible and inedible items as they are ordered up by the public. This “diner” and “opera” is open from 1pm to 1am on Monday, December 10, 2012.
You’re a Big Boy Now OR Rauschenberg ist Tödlich involves frameworks for music, text, actions, images, and interactive sequences. These evolved from improvisational and object-based performances done collaboratively by cellist and performance artist Valerie Kuehne; composer and performance artist Brian McCorkle; and writer and performance artist Esther Neff. Through a haze of grease and cigarette smoke, these three artists deliver over-the-counter plates of performance and ask if you need anything else, sweetheart.
PPL, You’re a Big Boy Now OR Rauschenberg ist Tödlich, 2012. Courtesy of the Panoply Performance Laboratory.
Material for the diner/opera was developed through meals and conversations in diners and over 8 days of performances in a bowling alley, public library, gallery, bar, art fair, private home, and elsewhere across the Midwestern USA. Concerning itself with the mimetic structures of diner meals, the similarities and differences between menus, the standard array of ways to cook eggs, performances occurring between diners and servers, and the poetry of short-order call-and-response, You’re a Big Boy Now OR Rauschenberg ist Tödlich refuses to unify form and content, drawing instead on constructive and conflictual relationships between “art” and “life.” The project borrows Rauschenberg’s intention to construct the “nonmeaningful” by combining disparate visual elements, yet further deal with the cooking and consumption of meaning by emphasizing the problematics of attempts to “disorder” perceived distinctions between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. Over the course of the day, combines and confusions are performed as readily as digestion in the new storefront gallery, Fitness Center for Arts and Tactics, in Bushwick, Brooklyn. This performance is a
part of Fitness’ marathon series, which curates artists working in live mediums to make durational public pieces.
Brian McCorkle is the co-director of PPL and a member of the composer-performer ensemble Varispeed. He has performed as part of PERFORMA ’11 in NYC and MPA-B ’12 in Berlin, DE and all over the world.
Valerie Kuehne is a resident artist of PPL and has performed all over the world solo and in collaboration with other artists and musicians. She has released several albums and EPs. She is also the curator of The Super Coda and an organizer of performance tours.
Esther Neff is the founder and co-director of the Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL), which is a collective, a project space, a curatorial platform, and the title of collaborations between her and Brian McCorkle.
