Feel-good performance art: There’s no such thing

Until recently, a copy of a New Yorker cartoon hung over my desk: A man and a woman… Until recently, a copy of a New Yorker cartoon hung over my desk: A man and a woman pause as they enter a building and the man asks his date, “Why isn’t there any such thing as feel-good performance art?”

Last weekend, though, through a slightly uncomfortable experience in a museum, I learned that sometimes the stuff that doesn’t feel so good is just what we need.

Miranda July visited the Andy Warhol Museum Saturday, and because she’s practically a household name when it comes to performance artists, I decided to see her show, “How I Learned to Draw.”

My friend Tom and I entered the theater at nearly the last minute, and we struggled to find seats in the soldout crowd. We contemplated sitting in the front of the room, but we ended up sitting farther back, forcing a few people to move around so they had to sit next to two people they didn’t know – us.

When the show started, July immediately forced the audience to interact with each other under the guise of being parents of children new to a school: Everyone had to shake hands with the person on either side of them, introduce themselves and then tell the person the name of their child. While I – and I’m sure other people in the audience, too – looked a bit dumbfounded, July stared at us and waved us on. We dutifully smiled and shook hands and exchanged the names of our “children.”

Later in the performance, July seamlessly incorporated other members of the audience, all impromptu. She concluded her performance by making everyone in the room hold hands in the dark for at least 15 minutes while she prattled on about her family, showing videos and explaining another project she was working on. At the end, everyone was allowed to leave only after they found the proper moment when everyone in the room would simultaneously rise.

Earlier in the show, when she started pulling people up from the audience, my friend had whispered to me, “Aren’t you glad we didn’t sit up front?” It didn’t matter, though: July’s performance, “How I Learned to Draw,” forced the audience to escape their traditional posts as passive observers and interact, whether or not they wanted to.

I thought about an interaction I had had a few days prior to seeing July. Until January, I worked at a pharmacy in Shadyside that had regular clients. One little old man came in every day and bought the same items: a candy bar, a bottle of apple juice and a fifty-cent lottery ticket. I eventually began seeing this man in my neighborhood, and I began saying hello to him. I stopped working at the pharmacy in January, and began working at a place on Mount Washington, for which I took a circuitous bus route. I occasionally saw this man on the same bus, but because we were outside of our normal environment I never said anything to him.

A day before July’s performance, though, I ran into this man while taking a different way to work. To avoid saying hello, I tried to slip unnoticed past this man as I walked by him on the street. But instead he said “hello,” and I ended up talking to him for about 15 minutes. In that time, I learned that he was born on Mount Washington, that he prefers living in Shadyside, and that his name is Kenneth.

I’m not someone who isolates herself from others by avoiding interaction with them, but sometimes I find myself shrinking from people I tell myself I don’t want to talk with, remaining self-absorbed with my own circle of problems and situations. July’s performance helped me see that maybe other people occasionally feel this way, too.

If others feel this way, then perhaps it’s an epidemic. Last summer, my friend Ko rode his bike the same way to school every day, and he made a point of saying “hello” to every single person he saw. He said some people just smiled back with a “hello” of their own, but that for the most part, people looked at him shocked that someone they didn’t know was greeting them. What kind of a neighborhood do we live in when people feel strange saying “hello” to one another?

As per my New Yorker cartoon, there may be little “feel-good” performance art out there: To be honest, July’s work, friendly though it was, made me feel a little displaced. And, I have to admit, there were moments when I felt a little bored. Still, for the past week, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the performance as well as my curious interaction with the candy bar and juice man from the pharmacy: Sometimes you just need to say hello.