Sonic Youth Gossip - Small Steps by Moore & Kesin

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/ar...ries.html?_r=1

La MaMa Galleria
6 East First Street, between the Bowery and Second Avenue,
East Village
Through Dec. 12
Performa 09 left town last weekend after a monthlong run, though traces of it linger. One is the piquant group show “Cold Water” at La MaMa, organized by Hilton Als, critic for The New Yorker, and the protean actor-writer-singer Justin Bond, and devoted to work by artists who are better known as performers.
The pop star Rufus Wainwright, for example, proves himself a better-than-decent painter in an oil-pastel portrait of his partner, Jorn Weisbrodt. The same can be said of the musician Theo Kogan, formerly of the Lunachicks, now with a band of her own, who moonlights as a painter of surly rabbits. I’m not clear on the subject of a picture by the chanteuse Lady Rizo, a k a Amelia Zirin-Brown, but it has an expressionistic flair.
The show’s only professional painter, the estimable Chris Tanner, goes for variety, with three sleek pastels and a large oil-plus-glitter number. But even he wears a performer’s hat: he’s been treading the boards at La MaMa for years.
Naturally enough, theater of one kind or another is an active ingredient of the show. A sculpture by Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson made mostly from colored balloons is a souvenir of a stage piece produced by the performance company they founded, Big Art Group. Leslie Thornton’s video “Peggy and Fred in Hell” feels like a sitcom version of the apocalypse, taped live, 1950s-style. And in a video by Darryl Turner, the singer Rickie Lee Jones transforms lounge-act standards into anguished soliloquies worthy of Racine.
Crossover — the merging or confusing of genres, generations and genders in art and life — is what the show is really about. Kate Bornstein, the author of “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us,” contributes a handful of wicked little ink drawings from the 1970s when, as she says in the catalog, “I was still a boy.” Mr. Bond, who describes himself as a “gender variant queer feminist pagan,” assumes the persona of the transvestite actor Jackie Curtis (1947-85) in a large-format photograph by Mr. Als, but plays himself, and very suavely, in a watercolor self-portrait.
A short 1997 video by the actress Tilda Swinton of two dozing and waking infants (her own) records a fundamental state of transition through loving eyes. And a similar perspective warms “Small Steps,” a fine film by Andrew Kesin and the Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore — it’s the show’s highlight — on the American composer and musician Pauline Oliveros.
During the 1960s, in response to the volatile realities of the time, Ms. Oliveros developed a form of meditational music that mingles ambient sounds from the everyday world with those produced by electronically assisted instruments. (Her own instrument of choice is a customized accordion.) The sonic energy that results, she hopes, will alter the physical and psychic state of performer and listener alike. Now in her 70s, she lives in upstate New York, where she established the Deep Listening Institute nearly 25 years ago. There she continues to do her work, which involves performing but also the opposite: sitting quietly, listening to everything, still as a picture. HOLLAND COTTER