What Did I Do to Be So Black and…
(a dream i had/after falling asleep/with the fox news channel on)
“Installation and performance
TEAM: Paul Outlaw (objects, text, video, performance); Curt LeMieux (costume, objects, installation—“So Funny It Hurts”); Joe Seely (installation including pickup truck—“Surface Streets”)
Presented by Brian Getnick (curator) at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) as part of “So Funny It Hurts,” the inaugural performance series and issue of NATIVE STRATEGIES, a journal devoted to performance in Los Angeles
April 2011
Subsequently presented by Highways Performance Space at the Youth Center for Empowerment (West Hollywood) as part of “Highways2WeHo: Surface Streets”
September 2011”
What Did I Do… is a surrealistic meditation on a controversial alternative lifestyle: blacks and gays in the Republican Party. The disparate ingredients of this 30-minute piece combine to create a witch’s brew of cultural artifacts from the past hundred years: big band music, banned cartoons, Gone With the Wind, thug pornography, pop stars, Mandingo, Clarence Thomas & the Clintons, Nina Simone, political blogs, Condoleezza Rice, the original Birth of a Nation and more.
“Outlaw entered the gallery singing, wearing a topless lace wedding dress and a high lace headdress/veil. His skin was whited with chalk or ash. The music, the voice, the entrance and the costume (by Curt Lemieux) were fabulous. His stalk became a dance and then a ballet as he circuited the low stages and the floor. It was as though he was working the interstices between the media projected on the wall, all history and horror – and we in the audience, in our challenged present day. I felt that Outlaw was inviting me into a space between, a space of performance where I might consider things outside my ken.”
- Geoff Tuck, Notes on Looking
