Like parents prepping for Christmas morning, insiders exchanged knowing looks at the Dallas Contemporary patron party on Saturday, January 17, for Loris Gréaud‘s exhibit, “The Unplayed Notes Museum.”
For DC supporters like Nancy Rogers, Laree Hulshoff and Ben Fischer, Tammy Cotton Hartnett, Muffin Lemak, John Clutts, Dr. Sami Arslanlar and Kenny Goss, this was up there with the Olympics and Super Bowl rolled into one.
Loris had taken over the entire 26,000-square-foot space. While guests enjoyed their adult beverages outside at high tops warmed by patio heaters, others wandered through the various rooms. In one darkened room ringed by a tube of light were rows of sculpted fists on poles atop rectangular blocks facing a wall with artwork. A voice could be heard reading William Burroughs. In the room adjoining the fist room was an open space with gargantuan black shiny deformed sculptures from Versailles with black paintings on the wall.
A little further was a two-fold presentation.In the back for the gallery were towering, grinning angels arranged like Stonehenge standing guard around thousands of dead butterflies. On the wall at the front of the room was a thermal video. At first glance it looked like dough being massaged. Close but no cigar. It was two porn actors having sex. A person remarked how the thermal shows body parts heating up.
In the largest gallery space was an upside-down tree on a stage surrounded by silver light bulbs. This sight appeared to be attracting a herd of black mutant quadrupeds. On the far wall was a showing of an underwater explosion that appeared to be more of a Rorschach test. On the adjoining walls were dozens of black relief paintings.
Media types like Holly Haber suggested that friends stay at least until 8:30. Why? Was Loris going to address the crowd? The answer: “You’ll just have to see.” Some like Jeff Byron and Kevin Hurst couldn’t stick around and headed out the door.
At 8 p.m. someone muttered that one of the now-routine earthquakes had just hit. Was that the surprise? Nope.
As guests continued to wander the rooms, it became apparent that most had abided by the suggestion to wear black or white. John Reoch was so typical of John Reoch in white jacket and shirt topped with a white top hat and sunglasses. DC Senior Curator Justine Ludwig just couldn’t resist being different and wore a raspberry cocktail dress. Nancy Rogers was in a nifty black evening gown with a delicious slit showing her left leg. But leave it to Lady Rogers to be a tad bit different. It wasn’t just the diamonds on her earrings and around her neck and bracelet. It was the fur jacket of rainbow colors. But she had an excuse. It was chilly outside and she had to be at the Ritz for a deb party and then to The Joule for the after-exhibition dinner.
Loris himself was hardly noticeable as he blended in with the guests. But he was in some sense making a farewell tour of his installation. What was to come would take his handiwork out of his hands.
At 8:30 the lights went out. Emergency lights started flashing. Calls to evacuate the building were shouted by staffers. The sound of plaster sculptures and framed artwork hitting the concrete floor could be heard. It was Dead White Zombies trashing pieces of the art in each room.
The carefully installed exhibition was now being permanently changed and it was out of his control. An angel was face down on the hard floor. The mutant creatures had been ravaged. The hands were in bits and pieces. The framed artwork was bent and torn. For more than two minutes, the local “zombies” had their way with the artwork that had taken months from around the world to prepare and install.
Instead of being scared at the drop-everything-and-head-for-the-door development, guests raised cellphones to tape the happening. But once outside, guests like Wendy and Jeremy Strick, Capera Ryan and Ekaterina Kouznetsova discovered they would not be allowed to return. Alas, patron Laree was not on the scene. She was holed up in Museum Tower fighting the flu. A rumor flowed around that she just couldn’t stand seeing the art decimated. Due to the chicken soup flowing into Museum Tower, she evidently was under the weather. In fact, poor Loris was starting to feel under the weather in the days to come.
But before he succumbed to the seasonal ills and departed for his next ports o’call, the 35-year-old avant garde artist said, “Everything went above my expectation. Everything has been so great.”
However, the crowds were much bigger than Loris had expected. He thought perhaps a hundred would witness the trashing. Instead it was more than 300. Seeing the first falling angel, he thought to himself, “This was not a good idea. It was super crowded. Maybe this is going to be a major failure. Then I started running in all the spaces and I see some pieces collapsing. It was like, ‘This was not how it was supposed to be…to be smash and crash.’ This was where I lose the control which was part of the event for me to become part of the viewers.”
He had mixed feelings. “Real excited; real happy; very sad; like a shock at the same time. The worst for me was the sound and not visually what was happening. But hearing the works cracking and collapsing. This was actually violent.”
When asked if the terror and damage that had recently taken place in Paris just days before had made him have second thoughts about such an unstaging, he said, “Actually, no. Because the way we rehearsed and talked about the work with the actors, we talked about the precise way of doing it… I wanted the event to be conceptual for everybody to project what they want to project on it. If it has to be the recent event in Paris, of course. But 9-11, some riot that turned bad or even some peoples’ desire and frustration as well. I think anybody at some point would like to destroy, to smash something because of the situation like people are starving. Sometimes you want to crash something… When I saw the event in Paris, I was shocked and sad, a terrible nightmare but it reinforced the idea of doing it in Dallas.
“I’m afraid people will crystallize on the event itself at the opening. I’m still shocked at what I have done. With time people will have more critical distance and enjoy this idea of resolution inside the display of the show.”
He also emphasized that the event was to show that art is not sacred. “I see people who take parts of the animal that was broken and go with it. I think, ‘That’s okay.’
“Imagine if they start assembling them (the destroyed pieces) and start selling them on Ebay.”
Laree says
I absolutely LOVE your writing!
John says
Fantastic article Jeanne! You really captured the evening, the people, the work… and the spectacle. It was a delight having Loris in residence to install the show for a month prior to opening. This was the culmination of his 5 year project created for dallas contemporary in his first ever US show!