21 march 1996
cliff neighbors

It has been said that "Every Quarter Century a Performance Artist is Born that will Revolutionize the World." But it's unclear: do they mean petty rebellions like a two-year-old refusing to eat corn flakes? Or perhaps those mischeivous junior high school darlings that topple out-houses? A Burger Rat worker who spits on your sandwich in the name of corporate sabotage? Could it be some tired middle class mother-of-four with a riding crop beating the hell out of a life size statue of Madonna made out of green and pink Jell-O? Last week we pondered these possibilities as we stood, skulls agape, while the London-based Kollectiv Mutiny Project (KMP) staged one of their infamous clandestine performances at the Fuck All Gallery in San Francisco on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of that institution's reign as the self-described "premier underground venue for experimental and challenging art" in the Bay Area. The program described the piece, entitled "The Semipermiable Angst of Minus", as a "boundry check on epistomological containment in the Kadarian sense" [refer to Janos Kadar's "The Interrogation of Laszlo Rajk", _Theatricalities_, Vol. IV No. 2, November 1956]. The work was intended to "attack the regrettable audience reaction" at last November's "Cloud of Welcoming Kiss" show at Eigenvector in Los Angeles, where fistfights and small arms skirmishes broke out amid the hail of fish heads. This latter event was disrupted by the eventual arrival of LAPD, called in by panicked KMP art director Elizabeth Shag.

The ensuing evacuation and unfortunate injuries prevented KMP from completing the performance in the manner they had planned, and Ms. Shag later characterised the whole affair as "decontextualized post-partem morpho-phrenesis", complaining that, "it was wretched, really." "Angst of Minus" certainly lived up to KMPs reputation for attempting highly theoretical, yet actually absurd and dangerous actions. A large box was wheeled onto the stage on a hand truck. A young girl entered wearing a white tutu and playing an accordian while dancing in the classical style as three men in coveralls carried on a pile of cinderblocks, bricks and broken chunks of concrete. Various arms and legs were slowly extended from inside the box. Initially they were bare human appendages, and moved like the writhing of snakes. The three men brought out sledgehammers and started smashing the pile of masonry; the pounding was clearly damaging the stage and the stage manager came out to protest. The ballerina danced circles around the stage manager to prevent him from approaching the smashing session. When he tried to shove her out of the way, she swept his feet out from under him with a graceful leg movement and placed her slippered foot on his neck, and the smashing continued and she resumed playing accordian. Animal legs were being pushed out from holes in the large box, appearing to be from various species -- cattle shins, ducks' feet, dog legs, mutton, and so on. They were all quite damaged and bloody so it was hard to tell what was what. The stage manager got out from under the ballerina's foot and started chasing her around the stage. Suddenly several antagonists rushed down the isles from behind the audience throwing fireworks and smoke grenades, and the people inside the box broke open its sides, emerging naked into the chaos and began throwing the animal limbs at the audience. The stage manager and the gallery promoter, also protesting, were swarmed and pushed sprawling off the stage, into the audience which was now fleeing for the exits. Many spectators were soaked with water when the sprinkler system was triggered by all the smoke. The guys with sledge hammers appeared to have smashed through the floorboards of the stage and were in the full throes of demolition. Suddenly the lights went out and the remaining audience escaped onto the street through billowing black smoke.

It's unclear exactly what happened after that but it would appear that KMP turned on a tape loop of maniacal laughing, which we heard out on the street, and then after a couple minutes while I was smoking a cigarette across the street, an explosion rocked the building and blew out the windows with a bright flash followed by more, denser smoke. Fire erupted from the building and it quickly became engulfed. Presumably, the KMP escaped through the rear. By the time SFFD showed up with several fire engines, the whole complex was blazing. A small group of us remained at the scene for a while watching them hose down the block.

I saw a few of the Fuck All people strutting around acting really pissed off. One of the pseudo-anarcho-punk yuppies who had been in the audience started taunting them about what did they expect, and they attacked him and started beating him. Some police officers broke up the mauling and took them all away.

Subsequently the Fuck All Gallery has dissolved, leaving a sorry charred vacuum both at their old site and in the SF underground scene. Kollectiv Mutiny Project is rumoured to be preparing a show in Mexico City.