Strolling through historic Santa Fe on a mild, late February evening, gallery doors open wide, lights ablaze, inviting passersby to enter and sample savory treats from the city's best restaurants while ogling the artwork-it's the annual ARTfeast Edible Art Tour-what could be better? Well, the tour itself could be better actually, quite a bit better. It's not really fashionable for the media to criticize anything in Santa Fe and less so I'm sure a charitable event that generates many tens of thousands of dollars for children's art education, but fashion is overrated and good deeds are no excuse for not improving on mediocrity.
A very creative and sweet idea for an exciting event, ARTfeast is essentially the goodwill arm of the Santa Fe Gallery Association, working its ass off to prove that the commercial galleries pull their own weight as far as giving back to the community. It's a multi-day celebration featuring lectures, presentations, wine-tasting, etc, but the core of it is the Edible Art Tour. Thirty dollars buys you entrance to all the participating galleries, each hosting a restaurant or catering service that's doling out tasty morsels of nosh. Recent years have seen a welcome expansion of participants in the downtown area in addition to Canyon Road, but also a curious diminishing of certain key galleries and restaurants, no doubt due to the Byzantine politics of local restaurateurs and gallery owners as well as the association itself.
The big problem though, is that the event feels flat. One gets the overwhelming sense that a few people have slaved away for months to get the event to come off smoothly and most of the participants-restaurants and galleries both-rather than seizing the opportunity to enjoy a big party, begrudgingly bear it until the damn thing is over. The food, by and large regardless of restaurant, doesn't exude anything close to a "cooked with love" vibe and, with few exceptions, the galleries appear non-plussed to welcome hordes of people in to dirty the floors and jostle the paintings, which they aren't interested in to begin with, in a mad rush to justify laying down 30 bucks by horking down small, squishy things stuffed with watery corn. Like most big art events in Santa Fe (especially those with a high-priced ticket and a freaking button for proof of admission) the Edible Art Tour is awfully biased to the blue hair crowd. Blah, blah some of my best friends are older folks, honest-that's not the point-the issue, rather, is the conspicuous lack of a younger set-old enough to have $30, but young enough to be, oh, I don't know, the parents of the children the whole event benefits.
But there's no point in beating up a good event; the idea is to encourage the event to be a bigger, better, more inclusive ball for all. Here, there's some hamstringing due to asinine local and state regulations-like no busking (even if a blind eye is turned to the occasional Edible Art mariachi band), no alcoholic beverages without a picnic permit or license and no food preparation over open grills in the streets. The solution, as I see it, is a block party atmosphere, at least on Canyon Road. Stop the traffic, fill the road with food, bonfires and bands, fill the galleries with wines, deserts and art raffles and-most important-invite all the neighbors to participate. Sure it's a gallery association thang, but getting the rest of the community and the galleries to open their doors, rather than shutter and run, will better serve the spirit of the event. This way it'll feel more like a party everyone's invited to and less like a piece of performance art gone wrong.
Right or wrong though, in other news, it's evident more performance art is on the way.
Last week's announcement of the 13 artists participating in the next SITE Santa Fe biennial, which comes knocking this July 9, also included the suggestion that the show will "reaffirm the ephemeral power of performance art."
Wow. Is that a threat or a promise? Performance art is the new painting, i.e., that has-been art form that has returned to prove that it never really died. From last year's many local performance art shows and events to this coming weekend's CCA-engineered performance by William Pope.L (see
) to Rosalee Goldberg's
PERFORMA
performance art biennial inaugurated in New York last year, performance art is trendy once again.
PERFORMA
was most media-visible for Marina Abromovic's Guggenheim project
Seven Easy Pieces
, wherein the artist famous for tearing out her hair while screaming "Art must be beautiful! Artist must be beautiful!" did reinterpretations or, if you like, cover versions, of seven famous and important performance art pieces by various artists. It's kind of like U2 doing "Dancing Barefoot."
Of course performance art always has gotten play in Santa Fe-from the rubber lady to the pomme-de-terrorist-but, though it's certainly a ready art form for confrontation and raising questions, it's also the form that makes the easiest target for Joe Public to fail to take art seriously. Performance artists like Abromovic have repeatedly gone as far as risking their lives to create situations where the deep-seated human anxieties about sex and death and violence boil to the surface, where living or dying depends on audience intervention, and the thanks they get is Daryl Hannah's cheese-ball portrayal of a performance artist in a sub-plot of the goofy Robert Redford vehicle
Legal Eagles
. But, as with installation art, the artists themselves deserve much of the blame. Performance and installation share a tendency to move rapidly from being about the viewer's interaction with the work to being about the artist's concept of the work and their own perception of its place in the history of art and, more specifically, performance art. The end result is that the audience feels isolated and unnecessary. With luck, the performance art at the biennial will be done in the same way as future ARTfeasts-for the sake of its audience rather than itself.
