Marshall Weber at the Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts - New York, New York - Brief Article

Art in America, June, 2000 by Thomas McEvilley

NEW YORK

For four days and three nights, starting on the winter solstice (Dec. 21) at 6 A.M., performance artist Marshall Weber read the Bible aloud from the pulpit of the Shul of New York synagogue on Norfolk Street. He started at the beginning of the Old Testament and ended, with the conclusion of the New Testament, at about 6 P.M. on Christmas Eve.

This was Weber's fourth in a series of public readings that fall within the category of ordeal or endurance art, a performance genre derived from body art. He read Joyce's Ulysses in 33 hours (a record, he says) in Madison, Wis., in 1994. Two years later, it was Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra in 24 hours in Cleveland. In 1998, swathed in blankets in a freezing refrigerator trailer in the already icy tundra of Alberta, Canada, Weber read, for 22 hours, William Vollman's account of the 1847 Franklin Expedition, which saw 129 sailors perish in a doomed attempt to discover the Northwest Passage.

Weber thought of his Bible reading as a farewell to the millennium, a kissing-off of the book that he believes, more than any other, made that millennium--as well as the one before it--a miserable, murderous ordeal. Weber had foresworn shaving and haircuts for one year in order to look as hirsute as an Old Testament prophet, and he dressed in vaguely Middle Eastern robes. His voice quickly grew weak and, after a sonorous beginning, the reading alternated between a hushed whisper and a rapid murmur.

In the late nights at the NeoGothic building ("the only Gothic synagogue in the world," says director Al Orensanz), with perhaps two or three people on the chairs and couch facing the lectern, the event seemed both friendly and ancient. The elegantly run-down synagogue evoked an archaic or abandoned temple from a nearly forgotten age. (It is a heartening gesture that this noble space is being used today for contemporary art exhibitions and off-beat performances, like Weber's, that often arise from eccentric inner urges.) The tiny audience seemed to be silently contemplating a recurring nightmare that had characterized the departing year/century/millennium. On the third night, without any premonitory slowing or halting of reading, Weber suddenly fell asleep between words, his forehead crashing onto the book. The members of the audience sat quietly. Snow fell silently beyond the windows. Yahweh's rage was stilled. The world could rest, it seemed, while the reader nodded.