The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, the farmhouse next door, and unexpected connections in between
Charles McNulty calls Suzanne Bocanegra a path-breaking, uncategorizeable artist
Presented by the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA in the Threatre at Ace Hotel, Farmhouse Whorehouse, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra Starring Lili Taylor is the third in a series of performances by visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra. Bocanegra's performance is part artist lecture, part memoir, and part cultural essay. Charles McNulty reviews the performance for the Los Angeles Times.
"Path-breaking artists help us to see the world afresh by challenging our habitual patterns of perception. They shock us into new awareness by joining the disparate and sundering the similar. Reality is distanced so that we may become reacquainted with it.
Suzanne Bocanegra, an adventurous visual artist who has been branching out into other disciplines, has been working in recent years on a series of artist lectures that are uncategorizable performance pieces. Memoir mixes with cultural history as a slideshow incorporates Bocanegra's arresting visual sensibility in a theatrical exhibition that doesn't so much set out to simulate her character as to tap into the wavelength of her febrile mind.
In "Farmhouse/Whorehouse," presented by UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance at the Theatre at Ace Hotel on Saturday, Bocanegra, sitting inconspicuously at a desk in dim light, feeds lines directly into an earpiece worn by actor Lili Taylor, who delivers a tantalizingly digressive talk. The retrospective address, vibrating with eccentric observations and quiet humor, centers on the memory of Bocanegra's grandparents' farm in La Grange, Texas.
This small, hardscrabble rustic oasis from Bocanegra's childhood stood opposite the happily notorious Chicken Ranch brothel, better known as the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. The odd juxtaposition of these seemingly opposite worlds leads to a frolicsome deconstruction of cultural binaries, which is a fancy way of saying that our minds are pried open to unexpected associations."— Charles McNulty, Apr. 16, 2018
This post is an excerpt, read the full article on the Los Angeles Times website.
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