Americans don't deal well with death or for that matter loss. We deal with it expediently or at least hire someone else too. Our cash or the capitalistic incentive that it spawns results in an almost perfect preservation of the dearly departed. However, this is not so that we can revisit or be reunited with the dead, which is the purpose of some cultures' preservation practices, but rather for one last memory of the dead as "not dead" or "undead" or at least "life-like." Scrapbooking. Glamorshots. Americans are all about the constructing of positive memories. We perfected the spin. (Remember Christopher Columbus "discovered" America.) Loss, we discount choosing instead to look for lessons learned or takeaways and minimizing the importance of the loss. By the third telling, we sound as if the loss was just practice, the missing item, counterfeit, or person, not really that close or important, even expendable.
Emily Sloan's performance-participatory art piece, "Funeral Party for the Living," on New Year's Day 2011 at
14 Pews gave a few Houstonians an opportunity to redeux their grief, whatever the cause. This event followed the basic funeral archetype. It consisted of a funeral ceremony followed by a brass band procession to a funeral pyre/internment of sorts. And then food and remembrance. The funeral began with Emily dressed in a black preacher's robe addressing the congregation as to why we were gathered there and what we could avail ourselves of. She then called out names and readers rose to the rostrum.
A few readers read poems. One reader eulogized the death of art.
One addressed his parents, to whom his life choices have rendered him dead, and then symbolically castrated himself by cutting his tie.
Employment was ceremoniously laid to rest. Two women presented the congregation with their melon of misdeeds (a melon on which they documented their sins and other mistakes and then dropped off a balcony at the stroke of midnight on Halloween). They described how they intended to burn the remains of the melon on the funeral pyre as a final purge.
Another woman (a local filmmaker) partook of her last meal complete with musical accompany, smoked a cigarette, and then cut off a lock of her hair.
A eulogist led the congregation in an instructional a capella hymn about what to do with his remains, which involved dismemberment and donations...that is if the recipients weren't too discriminating.
Mean Gene Kelton, the singer of "Texas City Dyke" and "My Baby Don't Wear No Panties," was eulogized by a relative. Two assistant eulogists read obituaries for those who wished to mourn but either couldn't make it or couldn't face the bereaved. Some were satirical. Some were serious. Such is the role of death in the states. In the shadow of death, we don't seem to know whether to celebrate, lament, or self-flagellate. So we do it all, simultaneously.
After the eulogists were done, Emily concluded the funeral and invited the congregation to follow Nick Cooper and some of the members of the
Free Radicals as they led a musical procession to the backyard.
There a small funeral pyre was burning.
Emily and an assistant brought up the rear with the coffin, shaking and shimming as best they could with a sheet metal casket seven feet long. She invited the crowd to play casket-limbo. No one obliged. The band ceased. The burning commenced.
The sinners burned the vestiges of their sin. Several people burned pieces of paper that represented ex-lovers or ex-identities. A woman burned letters from a mentor. A man from Chile cut off his pony/rat tail and burned it. Another man burned a naked picture of an ex-girlfriend, modestly laying it face down. One woman burned her bra, because she hadn't ever and she could. In a poignant presentation, a man burned his addiction. Others quietly and unceremoniously burned pieces of paper and handwritten notes representing their losses. We collectively agreed to burn "war."
The dead buried, Emily invited the congregation back inside to enjoy the potluck which included "Severed Arm" Red Velvet Cake log and "coin" carrots to pay the ferry man.
Everyone was encouraged to continue to eulogize and\or purge by pyre. In the back of the "church", another artist,
Herb Melichar, was collecting people's thoughts on the afterlife and photographing them.
Performance art is all about process, the means more than the end. What made Sloan's performance beautiful was, to paraphrase a sentiment expressed by David Lake, Emily's ability to make high concept art accessible to everyone. She achieved this result by constructing a performance that was more an invitation for audience members to participate and explore a process than a demonstration of how that process should be performed or interpreted. In Sloan's "Funeral", the audience members made it theirs. As Sophie Simons commented, part of the performance's power was that Emily didn't orchestrate or conduct the performance. Instead, she let it happen. She facilitated it in such a way that "Funeral" wasn't the audience experiencing the process vicariously or simply bearing witness or observing how Sloan interpreted the theme. "Funeral" was the collaboration of artist and audience. The artist became facilitator and death coach.
In some ways, Sloan's approach disarms critics of performance art who insist "That's not art! My snotty-nose little brat can do that." At this and other performances such as "Napping Affects Performance (NAP)" and "Wash", she co-opted both the critic and the brat and demonstrated that yes the snotty-nose little brat can do it and it can be art.
