A Duchampian Romp, Even
Such stalwart passivity in an artist isn’t very dramatic. But writer-performers Greg Allen and John Pierson handily apply the Neo-Futurist aesthetic–“a fusion of sport, poetry, and living newspaper” and “non-illusory, interactive performances”–to their slippery subject in A Duchampian Romp, Even. It’s not the slickest or funniest show to come out of the Neo-Futurarium; Allen’s take on Freud, humor, and Freudian humor–Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, which
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That moment encapsulates one of the show’s central paradoxes, the conflicted relationship between art and emo-tion. It doesn’t take the soul or skills of an artist to feel deeply, even to the point of self-destruction. Nor does being an artist ensure that we’ll have a proper understanding or appreciation of the people closest to us. Pierson revisits this conundrum later. So powerful was Duchamp’s pull on his imagination, he says, that he abruptly walked out on a woman in Chicago who loved him, and spent money he didn’t have, in order to see the artist’s work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. When Pierson recounts the story, both his ardor for Duchamp and his confused, inchoate love for the woman he lost (or threw away) are palpably close to the surface.
