Long Neck, NY--For a 19-year-old community college student in Long Neck, PerfomanceArtSpace.web was a place to express himself, push the boundaries of art and imagination, and receive (mostly) encouraging feedback. The renovated warehouse, refitted with a makeshift stage and video streaming equipment has become a haven for avant-garde artists throughout Long Island.
His previous efforts, collaborations with better known artists, had been encouraging. Sadly, his final act of performance art-a live online suicide-received mostly critical reviews.
Last Friday, when Bryan Paggerty posted a notice of his upcoming happening and listed the drug cocktail he intended to consume, viewers of the website hardly took notice, and the managers of the space, a loosely-coordinated "Committee for Freedom, Yearning and Expression", didn't want to confine his imagination. Paggerty's performance, titled "Online Suicide", was billed as expressing his "lust for Otherness".
Mr. Paggerty's case is the most recent example of a suicide that played out on the Internet. Live video of the death was shown online to 42 performance art enthusiasts, leading some to cringe while others laughed.
Performance-art suicides rarely come to Long Neck, and what Bryan Paggerty did Friday night left a few of the live onlooker-participants exhilarated, repulsed and confounded. However, most of those who had seen high-quality performance art in NYC considered it a poor quality, unimaginative work.
A frequent attendee of events at the space said, "It's been done before, and better. It's not really art if it isn't new."
A woman who performs under the name "Santee" said that Bryan was struggling to bring something big to the scene, but lacked the creativity to "shock by revealing the inner psyche". "Basically, it was just your straight overdose suicide. Big whup--it's been done."
"Biggles", who coordinates shows in which members of the audience drop water balloons filled with paint onto parked wrecked automobiles to create artworks, said he thought Paggerty's work might be an attempt at a Dadaist concept of Otherness through the "Nothingness" implied in rote "Followership", though he admitted that Paggerty might also just have been unimaginative.
The body will be auctioned off online, in what is considered to be a first of its type sale, and a performance piece of its own, titled "Rotting Corpse for Sale".
Better-rated performances included Marco Luna's "Theseus", in which he pretends to be a Minotaur (with papier-mâché costume) and eats the child-hostages of Athens (actually whale-meat) in a symbolic protest.
In an exploration of culture and ethnicity, performance artist Allison Ward, a Canadian Inuit, offered Eskimo Pies to the audience for $3.75 each while nude. She noted on a placard that two dollars of the price would go to the native Inuit to license the use of the word "Eskimo". Most of the audience complained that the ice cream pies were too expensive and refused them, which symbolized either that modern concepts of intellectual property are an ethnocentric cultural construct, or simply that people in Long Neck are used to buying Eskimo Pies at Food Lion for $1.25 each.
When all of the pies melted, she continued to offer them, but began to chant a poem:
Womb of the planet, frigid…fecund
Melt the life, rape the ice
Buy my goddamn pies!
This brought gasps from the audience and a woman broke into tears and donated 175 dollars and received all of the melted Eskimo pies.
Later, Ward guided people in the crowd to the stage, orchestrated group poses, and stood in the center of the room posing as a militant, and then as a transformed animal warrior, and as a homeless man in a sequined bathing suit.
