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64 Paintings / 64 Plays: Multimedia Mindfrack This Weekend at Bowery

by tomtenney on June 6, 2011

Actually, this time around we’re only doing 35 of the 64 plays, so the whole show clocks in at under an hour. I will be performing live sound on stage while Tim Braun’s insane one-page plays, based on the paintings of Jennilie Brewster, are performed. Some of my sketches for this piece can be heard here. This is experimental performance at its experimentiest. Full details after this gorgeous poster by Ashleigh Nankivell.




Surf Reality Presents
“64 Paintings 64 Plays”
Saturday June 11th, 8 p.m.
Saturday June 18th, 6 p.m.
and Tuesday June 21st, 7 p.m.
@The Bowery Poetry Club

308 Bowery (F train to Second Ave. or 6 Train to Bleecker)
$8

Produced by Rob Prichard
Plays by Timothy Braun
Paintings by Jennilie Brewster
Directed by Faceboy
Soundscapes by Tom Tenney
Video Animation by Ashleigh Nankivell
Featuring performance by;
A Brief View of the Hudson (Ann Enzminger & Nick Nace)
Diane O’Debra
Jeff Grow
Sean T. Hanratty
Milton Katz
Jim Melloan
Stephanie Sabelli

Last summer Brooklyn artist Jennilie Brewster finished a series of 64 16” x 20” paintings called “The Newspaper Series” using photographs from the NY Times as starting points. While at the Djerrasi Resident Artist Program in California Jennilie met Timothy Braun, a former Artist-In-Residence at the HERE Arts Center in Soho. He was inspired to write 64 one page plays. One for each painting.

The paintings are landscapes, still lifes and abstracts. But also mindscapes; they are snapshots of the subconscious. The original NY Times image is in some cases clear and in others transformed, obliterated. Likewise, the connection between the plays and the paintings—and from one play to the next—is non-linear. Characters, images, sounds, themes and ideas shift and reappear as in a dream. The performances too will bend expectation and perception so that some are staged theatrically others as; song, poetry, magic act, video animation, soundscapes and performance art—with the view
toward connecting with the audience and the paintings intuitively.

Surf Reality will be presenting 36 of the plays at the Bowery Poetry Club on June 11th, 18th and 21st. Many of the corresponding paintings will be on view there from June 11th-24th. The full presentation of all 64 plays will premier at the RE/Mixed Media Festival in Brooklyn in the Fall 2011.

Surf Reality was a prominent downtown performance space on Manhattan’s LES from 1993-2003. Founded by Robert Prichard the space was marketed to producers, writers and performing artists as a place to workshop and develope new work.  Today Surf Reality is an independent production company dedicated to the downtown performance vanguard with a long running reoccurring show called “Radical Vaudeville”.

We are pleased and honored that the June performances will also be featured as part of the Underground HOWL! Festival.

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Tagged as: multimedia, NYC, performance

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Storyscape Launch Party Tonight in Brooklyn

by tomtenney on January 28, 2011

Art by Liz Maher



If anyone’s out in the BK this evening and is looking for something that’s cheap, fun, cultural and intellectually rewarding – come see me perform tonight at Storyscape Journal’s Issue #6 Launch Party at the Brooklyn Historical Society.  Well, I guess technically I won’t be “performing,” but rather presenting an audio piece I made last summer entitled “Reunion.”    I’ve been working on a new piece called “Hard Luck,” and I’d hoped to actually perform that one live on stage using my new Ableton software, but alas technical snafus got in the way and so I’m falling back on something older.

There are a ton of other great artists and performers on the bill, including Ken Cormier, The Roulettes, Stephen Massimilla, Amber Boardman, Liz Maher, and Nate Pritts and Jennifer H. Fortin.  Should be fun, hope you can make it!

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Tagged as: Brooklyn, performance

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Final Radio Piece: “Off the Grid”

by tomtenney on July 30, 2010

This is the final piece for my Radio Narratives class, a ten minute audio art/umentary entitled “Off the Grid,”  which profiles (to use the term loosely), three of my favorite art stars: Don Eng, John King, and Walter Gambin.  Special thanks to Reverend Jen for providing some miraculous VO which pulled everything together for me in my hour of need.   As always, I recommend listening with a good set of headphones. Comments and criticism are encouraged.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.


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Tagged as: art stars, performance, radio

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Remix Fest 2010: Bridges built, burned, & lessons learned

by tomtenney on June 7, 2010

Moby - photo by Maurice Narcis

With the RE/Mixed Media Festival a week behind me and the ‘official’ post-mortem with the band a week ahead – I need to start recording the experience. Maybe it’s just snips of memory, conversations, thoughts or feelings that floated through.  A lot ‘happened,’ but this festival was something that came together between the cracks – that became a living being with breath and movement and thought – when we weren’t looking… while we were occupied ‘doing’ everything that needed to be done.  It’s the baby that started growing after a night that started with a feeling – one of love, we hope – who needs your attention every day before it comes into the light, but who you do not ‘know’ until that day it’s born. [continue reading this post...]

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Tagged as: copyright, festival, film, performance, Remix, Video

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The Influence of Art and Performance on the Rise of American Independent Cinema

by tomtenney on May 20, 2010

NOTE:  Written for ‘American Independent Cinema’ class at The New School; May 5, 2010.

The Influence of Art and Performance on the Rise of Independent Cinema

“As in the other arts in America today – painting, poetry, sculpture, theater, where fresh winds have been blowing for the last few years – our rebellion against the old, official, corrupt and pretentious is primarily an ethical one.”

John Cassavetes

Cassavetes

The above statement, taken from the manifesto of the New American Cinema Group (81) written after their first meeting in 1961, is telling.  In the late 50’s and early 60’s, independent and experimental filmmakers, frustrated with the predictable commercial formulae of Hollywood cinema, began aligning themselves and what they were doing with the art and performance world, where they saw exciting changes taking place.   The original intent of this essay was to attempt to answer the question: How does what was happening in independent and experimental film in the late 50’s and 60’s compare to what was happening in art and performance at the same time? What were the common influences and how did they influence each other?   As I dug into the research, it became obvious that trying to create clean lineages and clearly drawn cause-and-effect statements would be impossible.  Attempting to define cultural influences is like trying to bottle smoke – there are simply too many artists and too many elements contributing to the cultural zeitgeist to confidently make such black and white statements.  The alternative seemed to be the much easier task of making broad generalizations like the late 50’s and 60’s were “when the American avant-garde began to define itself, in opposition to European modernism and to post-war American society,” (“Ages” 10) or that the cultural influences had to do with the ascendance of youth culture, largely due to the popularity of rock n’ roll.

Instead of relying on such generalizations, I decided instead to hone my research to focus on three representative independent filmmakers of the time – John Cassavetes, Bruce Conner, and Andy Warhol – and examine how trends in art and performance influenced their works in particular.  In this way we can hope to extrapolate a larger view by looking at a small cross-section consisting of three artists who, while working in very different ways from each other, all contributed to the changes that took place in American Independent Cinema. [continue reading this post...]

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Tagged as: Andy Warhol, Art, Bruce Conner, film, Fluxus, John Cassavetes, performance

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Jarmusch’s Golden Rules v. Grindhouse Manifesto

Post image for Jarmusch’s Golden Rules v. Grindhouse Manifesto

by tomtenney on May 1, 2010

In class Wednesday, David Nugent, my American Independent Cinema professor at The New School, read Jim Jarmusch’s Golden Rules of Filmmaking, published by MovieMaker magazine in 2002.  It was the first time I’d heard them, and was struck by the uncanny similarity to the Grindhouse Manifesto, a creed I wrote in 1997 – published on our website from 1997-2002 – which served as a starting point from which Grindhouse-A-Go-Go!, our midnight show at Surf Reality, was built.  Don’t get me wrong – in no way am I implying that Jarmusch borrowed our ideas, or even read our manifesto, but I think it’s interesting to note how different artists working in roughly the same place at the same time – one very famous, the others solidly ensconced in the performance underground – see the rules guiding the creation of their art in remarkably similar ways. [continue reading this post...]

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Tagged as: film, performance

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2001 Interview with Joey Skaggs

by tomtenney on April 4, 2010

Digging around in my virtual shoeboxes to find material for a paper I’m writing on Culture Jamming, I found this interview I did with media prankster Joey Skaggs in 2001 for a tiny little short-lived zine called VIM, published by the artist Faith Pilger.  Skaggs had just presented PRANKS: THE ART OF JOEY SKAGGS at the UCB Theatre as a part of the 9th Annual Toyota Comedy Festival.  I was interested in talking with him about the relationship of his work to comedy.  Full text is below:

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Joey Skaggs

Joey Skaggs

Joey Skaggs,  is a storyteller, performer and artist who uses mass media as his canvas to reach audiences around the world. He has duped the world’s most respected news outlets with his fictional news stories for over 35 years, and shows no signs of stopping. I spoke with Joey at a cafe downstairs from his Soho apartment, a few days after his performance in the 9th Annual Toyota Comedy Festival.

TT: You began your presentation by saying “I’m not a comedian”, but in a sense, you are. You’re a satirist.

JS: (laughs) Well, but I don’t do ‘stand-up’

TT: Well, sure… but I thought it was an interesting idea to include you in the festival.  It’s like the producers are finally starting to realize that comedy means more than standup.

JS: I thought it was a brave and radical departure…. and I’m glad there was a turnout.  I was really impressed with the range of artists that were there [in the audience] because I think it shows the audience are all kinds of possibilities.  And there were all kinds of possibilities there… that were presented.  It was totally cool.

TT: For people who don’t know your work…what do you do?  How do you sum it up?

JS: It depends on what I think about the person who’s asking me (laughs). What I do is what I’ve always done and that is… I’m an artist, and I felt restricted by the way that the art scene, or the art world, is run, and I didn’t want to be limited to the censoring… and the acceptance, the timing… you know you have a show, or maybe a group show or maybe it’s going to be a theme show where you have to produce a work of art that goes along with that.  It’s all bullshit, so I didn’t want to be limited to that.  And there were so many social issues when I was growing up that I thought were really important and I felt that as a creative person, I could express what I thought about those issues creatively.  I didn’t want to just throw rocks through windows or do destructive things like that, because I didn’t think that was effective.  So, as an artist, I used the media as a medium, and I use deception, a lie, as a means of communicating.  And if you think about what art is… art is a lie.  Art is an illusion, art is a creation that is meant to deceive.
[continue reading this post...]

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Tagged as: Art, interviews, Mass Media, performance, pranks

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