GRADUALLY

A Performance by Butch Merigoni
New Orleans, March 8, 2007

A New York artist, originally from New Orleans, Butch Merigoni returned to New Orleans with a relatively rare visual arts performance. Not that art performance has disappeared, but unlike the seeming heyday for this medium in New Orleans when I arrived in the late 1970s and 1980s, it seems too long absent. Many of us remember the CAC and even the New Orleans Museum presenting performances.

Butch’s intent was that this piece serve as a combination of his reaction to the post-Katrina world of New Orleans and an empathetic response to the artists and others still living with that rather surreal reality. One knows that, in fact, the artist’s ability to focus significant light on, or aid in overcoming the insanity of, such a social, economic and political collapse is likely to be minor. However, each of us speaks with the power of the media we are competent in. It seems as well, that an art performance may be pretty much as successful as all the documentaries, political visits, and editorializing that has already taken place. In any event, Butch appeared to realize that, as artist do, he was speaking to the audience in attendance and expressing his need to comment. That is sufficient.

In short, Merigoni, dressed in a rather insubstantial white pair of pants and t-shirt, without shoes, stood in the empty streets of Gentilly at night and pelted himself with 144 (twelve dozen, a gross) raw eggs. After this painfully extended process, he removed his soiled cloths and poured water over himself to cleanse his body, dressed and left. The whole process took approximately 30 minutes.

Two of the essential decisions made in such art acts became the key to the success of this piece – pace and place. A three dozen egg performance was not an option. As with all of us who have endured the barrage of small and large blows for over 18 months by institutions, contractors, and thoughtless talking heads, too much seems never enough. For thirty minutes the central sound in that once bustling Gentilly neighborhood was that of eggs breaking over and over and over on the artists body. The tension built as the blows continued and the performer, shaking in the cold night air, persisted well past our grasping of what he “meant” to say. His slow, deliberate and trance-like countenance was mesmerizing and not a little painful to us all.

Place counted on two other levels. This near empty and almost silent part of New Orleans was a companion performer, but so was the fact that Merigoni stood on a sewer cover where the detritus of the eggs mounted under his bare feet. The performance was lit by twelve participants each holding a flashlight. Each had some power to control what was focused on. It was not incidental that such temporary lighting was for so long part of our mode of survival. (I won’t try to impose my interpretation of the possible rationale for persistence of the number 12 in the piece, but it clearly has symbolic power)

As I mentioned afterwards to the artist, the phrase “You have to break some eggs to make an omelet” kept coming to mind. However, as did he, we all seem to just wash off the muck, start the next day, and have long given up the idea that an omelet will ever be forthcoming.

Gerald L. Cannon

Video: Patricia Sills