Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Discoteca Flamingstar and Derrida

The past five hours have been quite intense. First, I listened to a talk by two German performance artists who like to call themselves Discoteca Flamingstar. They do very interesting, sexually charged, gender bending, challenging fusions of visual and auditory art. Neither of them really know how to sing or play instruments, yet they often do just that, reinterpretting songs or types of music that have very culutral connotations to express something completely different than you'd expect. For example, the last piece they showed us was a video set to an Arabic translation of a famous World War II era song ("Lili Marlin" I think?). They held a dinner party where the male half of the group was dressed in a wedding dress. In the middle of the dinner party, they got naked and got into bed (a la John Lennon and Yoko Ono). Spliced in between were shots of some dancers doing very mechanical robot-esque (though not parodizing) dance moves.

After that I watched a documentary about Jacques Derrida and Deconstructionism (aptly titled Derrida). I very much liked the style and editorial choices of the documentary. There were a lot of shots of Derrida watching video footage of himself on a TV, or pointing to cameras and commenting on them. The cameras were often themselves captured in the footage. There were lots of interviews, speeches, and readings of Derrida's manuscripts.

Anyway, after those two gems I was all European-ed out and so I came home and made myself a peanut butter sandwich (whether that's because peanut butter and bread are just about the only foodstuffs I have right now, or becauset that's exactly what I wanted or need, I'm not at liberty to say...).

I've been trying to decide whether Discoteca Flamingstar is a Deconstructionist group or not, and I think Derrida's answer might be: everything is a Deconstruction and nothing is a Deconstruction.

So there you go. I hope that's unsatisfying. Or rather, not satisfying.

No comments: