The Digital Face (2012)
By Liz Magic Laser
The New York-based artist Liz Magic Laser (b. 1981) brought her political performance, The Digital Face, to the McKittrick Hotel on May 5, 2012, as part of “Oh, you mean cellophane and all that crap,” a 12-hour-long fete put on by the Calder Foundation. For a meticulously rehearsed ten minutes, Laser had two professional dancers, Cori Kresge and Alan Good, replicate the gestures from two State of the Union addresses -- President Barack Obama’s 2012 speech and President George H. W. Bush’s 1990 oration (which, by the way, Laser says was the first televised address to employ strategic oratorical gesture). Dressed in shape-revealing gray spandex body suits, the performers enacted their silent, robotic movements to the amplified sound of a camera shutter snapping one frame a second. Generic yet somehow specific, they channeled the concentrated intensity of factory workers on the production line, operating as if programmed for maximum efficiency. The effect was at turns firm and relaxed, aggressive and defensive. Harmonious and jarring at once, their lithe bodies consigned to the awkward machinations of political rhetoric, their dance was hypnotic -- propaganda without a message. Aft…
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