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The Artists Aren’t Here – The Absurdist Performance Art of Shlomi Greenspan & Sarah Beck
by Paul Rocca
Andy Kaufman would respond to hecklers by reading The Great Gastby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. As audience members became frustrated and started to leave, Kaufman would ask “How about I play a record instead?” The audience, desperate, say YES. Kaufman then plays a record… of himself reading from The Great Gatsby.
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The clichéd brick wall backdrop of a stand-up comedy club. An empty stage. A microphone caught within the confines of a single spotlight. The garish blaze of a neon sign. A row of cocktail tables. Sitting atop one table there is a “RESERVED” sign foretelling the appearance of important company.
In lieu of a comic’s performance, an antiquated answering machine system sits on a wooden stool. Within moments, the device comes to life and plays its recording on a loop. It airs a series of phone messages left by Roger, a platitudinous voice obsessively insisting that Jerry leave a table open for the talent agent Paul Bernstein. You know, the Bernstein.
Roger never receives an answer. Instead, his voice provides a narrative to an otherwise empty space. And, as each message increases in its situational absurdity, Roger maintains the same comic urgency. Bernstein! Bernstein! Table for Bernstein!
In a way, Untitled (It’s almost a one-liner) is an archaeological excavation. Unearthed is a forgotten stage littered with artifacts that hint at a story, but no living soul is there to tell it. The answering machine is the closest there is to a human presence, but its narrative through Roger only makes the scene more of a spectacle—one with clear parallels to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
[Distillate © HA&L + Paul Rocca | Sarah Beck | Shlomi Greenspan {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]
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