"Clang! Clang! Clang! went the... groinal attachment?"

November 5, 2012 9:16 AM

Art can sometimes be weird. This is one of those times. [slyt] [nsfw? maybe? I have no idea.]
posted by quin (25 comments total)

Absolutely NSFW, I'd say, unless you work in a fetish-wear shop.
posted by drlith at 9:19 AM on November 5, 2012

Figured Lady Gaga would be over by this point.
posted by mrgrimm at 9:22 AM on November 5, 2012

I liked it. I'd like to see more. It's a nice counterpoint to the Oscar-bait tone of The Sessions.
posted by infinitewindow at 9:22 AM on November 5, 2012 [2 favorites]

Also, this seems clearly like some sort of interpretative dance. What's the point other than to point and laugh? I didn't think it was that good.
posted by mrgrimm at 9:24 AM on November 5, 2012

This is from bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS, and There is more where that came from.
posted by JHarris at 9:24 AM on November 5, 2012 [5 favorites]

(And even more than that, if you search YouTube for it.)
posted by JHarris at 9:25 AM on November 5, 2012

I think you should at least present the entire piece before judging it.
posted by R. Mutt at 9:28 AM on November 5, 2012

You people have clearly never seen any community theater at the Silent Hill Auditorium.
posted by cortex at 9:33 AM on November 5, 2012 [2 favorites]

Previously
posted by cazoo at 9:35 AM on November 5, 2012 [2 favorites]

But seriously, why? Why did Marie Chouinard make things like this?

May I suggest that the fact that you find these things very weird is its own reason? That, by showing things you find incredibly odd, they are pointing something out about your own preconceptions? Why does this kind of thing creep you out? What is it in your mind that is affected by this? Maybe some of the strangeness you percieve is in you.

But anyway, a search for the original video clip suggests it's been shown on Tosh.0, where memes go to die.
posted by JHarris at 9:37 AM on November 5, 2012 [5 favorites]

As hard as I try, I rarely understand performance art or dance.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:38 AM on November 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

I think you should at least present the entire piece before judging it.

Epony...ironic?
posted by the painkiller at 9:43 AM on November 5, 2012

Yeah, this is part of the performance removed from context for the lulz. The actual piece is really fucking cool.
posted by cmoj at 9:56 AM on November 5, 2012 [4 favorites]

Every time I go to Youtube, I have that video stuck up in the top left corner - the largest rectangle - and it's the dude with the four foot long metal penis pole banger, fixin' to do his thang.

How do I get that to go away? I've seen it like three times now, and the last two times - today included - were by accident. Not that I dislike performance art, but really, come on now. I got it the first time. Really.

Like Chrome, and now Firefox - you go see one WTF page, one time, and now it's plastered on your new tab. At least I do know how to get those to go away though.

OH SHIT STAIRCASE WIT I HATE YOU. I could have gone as metal penis pole banging guy for Halloween this year.
posted by Xoebe at 9:57 AM on November 5, 2012

Very similar to Butoh, which is itself sort of preoccupied with non-human shapes.
posted by Ad hominem at 10:04 AM on November 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

Also this pokes at our stigmas / fears about disability and medical care, and the dehumanization of people who are visibly disabled.
posted by idiopath at 10:13 AM on November 5, 2012 [3 favorites]

Well if you take anything out of context it is equally bizarre. Those guys throwing that ball around a green field with bulging crotches and ass-tight short pants? WTF?!?! Amiright?
posted by JJ86 at 10:16 AM on November 5, 2012

Oh dear. I don't find this even a little strange. Obviously I've seen too much dance since that fateful day when I met a dancer in Riverside Park and finished the day at a show on Broom Street, in 1975.
posted by Goofyy at 10:17 AM on November 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

I miss the early days of Channel 4.... the'd have that sort of stuff on all the time.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:21 AM on November 5, 2012

PBS used to show experimental short films late at night that had plenty of stuff like this. One thing I will always remember was not dance, but video of a guy running around with scissors with a narrator reading medical observations of accidental lobotomies. PBS is fucking awesome. No wonder people want to get rid of it.
posted by Ad hominem at 10:27 AM on November 5, 2012 [3 favorites]

I can no longer find copies of Coup de Boule or Demontage IX on the interwebs.
posted by infinitewindow at 10:31 AM on November 5, 2012

I'm pretty much a philistine, particularly when it comes to dance, but this sort of art doesn't move me much further than bemusement - like most modern/post-modern performance art that I encounter it comes off to me as self-parody ("Now is ze time on Sprockets vhen ve dance mit crutches!") and the whole shock/weird/strange/epater la bourgeoisie thing is, to me, an incredibly bourgeois sentiment, giving only the appearance of transgression. The crutch thing is somewhat interesting, though; I'd be curious to hear what people who need crutches, etc., think of them being used as props by an "aesthete beyond norms" and "her ideas on the way the indefinableness of the Other and the flagrancy of Beauty." Seems kinda yucky in a co-opting way, but maybe I'm just too sensitive about that sort of stuff.

I'm still agog over the trailer to Wim Wenders' Pina I saw this morning, though.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:37 AM on November 5, 2012

This is an excerpt of something I posted in its entirety previously.
posted by Blasdelb at 10:53 AM on November 5, 2012 [2 favorites]

The lulz version of this has been around for a while with the caption, "Oh children, its DINNER TIME!"
posted by charred husk at 10:56 AM on November 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

Blasdelb:
"This is an excerpt of something I posted in its entirety previously."

That should probably make this a needless lulz double, then.
posted by charred husk at 10:59 AM on November 5, 2012