Woodstock on the Brda - art camp - Construction in Process VII—"This Earth Is a Flower"

Art in America, March, 2001 by Richard Vine

Performances

June 18-July 2

Each night brings a dilemma: take the early bus back to camp (and opening hour at the Bar at the End of the World), or stay in Bydgoszcz for the late performances in the tent on Mill Island or at the loungelike Club Mozg (Brain Club) downtown. Some of the acts are musical: young Polish musicians from the conservatory playing Cage pieces and other experimental works with astounding precision, England's Fred Frith doing everything conceivable to an electric guitar except playing it straight. (A total of about 20 musicians take part in Construction in Process, though they do not reside at Roma.) Other offerings, some in the afternoon, are in the standard art-performance mode. Joan Jonas (USA) scrapes stones, dances with an umbrella, dons masks, sings, hoists enormously long wooden staves in the air and generally carries on in an incomprehensible though mildly entertaining fashion. Emmett Williams (USA), the ex-Fluxus eminence grise (and president) of the Construction in Process organization, offers two shows. The first is an abortive voice-and-synthesizer collaboration with Florian Mutschler (France) that quickly deteriorates into bickering. The second, a reprise of his "classic" Out of Africa, looks vaguely racist as Williams attempts to get an inflatable gorilla to eat a banana; it is redeemed at the end only by his German-British wife Ann Noel's pantomime rendition of "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina."

Young Poles provide both the nadir and the summit of Construction in Process performance. A Gdansk group called CUKT, using a combination of video projection and live raplike harangue, presents a virtual political candidate named Victoria Cukt, a supposedly sexy female media construct, capable (in the creators' minds) of simultaneously reflecting and manipulating voter response. Probably intended as an Orwellian satire, the piece (whose message is that "politicians are useless" in the age of direct Internet polling) ends up suffering from the very sin--blatant electronic "mind control"--that it seeks to expose.

At the other esthetic and technological extreme is the performance of Jaroslaw Misiewicz, a self-taught classical pianist who has come to Construction in Process as a volunteer. At Lubostron Palace, in the chatty aftermath of a recital in which Robert C. Morgan (USA) played stormily arranged, strongly chorded versions of tunes like "Oh Susannah," followed by a reading of his own poetry, Misiewicz wanders over unannounced to the grand piano and begins to run though his own Chopinesque compositions. Within minutes, we all sit stunned in the domed and mirrored salon, hanging on each chromatic shift and arpeggio that pours from the scruffy upstart's now elegant fingers.

It is, for this observer, a crystallizing moment. From the project's very inception, the question that has pervaded Construction in Process is whether such a '60s-style, noncommercial, deliberately peripheral experiment can compete with (or stand as a meaningful alternative to) the irony, theoretical timeliness, and marketing savvy of recent "festival" art and its promoters' frank media prowess. Yet here is a third way--one that leaves 100 bedraggled bohemians from around the globe enraptured by an unapologetic display of old-fashioned high-cultural "elitism"--literally cheering for aristocratic taste, innate talent, lyric beauty, discipline and true esthetic complexity.