About a month ago, I found myself caught up in a strange scene. Surrounded by reams of cardboard and packing tape, I spent an hour and a half constructing a train from cardboard while cacophony evolved around me. My friend Andrew and someone I had never met were dueling in knight and dragon outfits in the hall; others were dancing on the table, leading the packed room in renditions of camping songs and Soulja Boy and giving each other paper mustaches and unibrows.
Was it spontaneous madness? An ARTT100 class gone terribly wrong (or, more accurately, right, for once)? Nope- just the warmup to next week's art event, TASK.
"In the case of ‘TASK,’ I write a bunch of simple tasks in order to get the performance going. Each one goes in an envelope and is put in a task pool, and the performance starts with each participant taking an envelope, opening it, and trying to fulfill that task. Once they’re done, they each write a new task, put it back in the task pool, grab a new task, and go on with business. After the first five or ten minutes, the performance is entirely self-perpetuating.
"I set up basic rules, such as ‘don’t leave the parameters of the stage’…You don’t know what’s going to happen. The rules that I start with are not binding. Anybody could just walk out, or break the rules. But that never really happens. I’m always surprised that there’s no real anarchy—only staged anarchy.”
As creator Oliver Herring has described, Task is truly "awesome chaos," an "art rave without the drugs and alcohol." (I know, some of you groan at the last part.) It's happening Wednesday of next week, April 2 at Ritchie Coliseum; if you go, you won't regret it. It's kind of like a community poem, except in real life instead of words: ridiculous, impossible to predict and often hilarious.
Not that'd predict anything else from the mind of someone like Oliver; after all, this prominent contemporary artist (google him, he's kind of a big deal) and all around cool cat spent ten years knitting sculptures out of mylar. Imagine being a Bedouin in the Israeli desert, minding your own business, and suddenly coming across some random german guy knitting at the bottom of a ten-foot hole. Yeah, he's like that.
So if you're in the mood for fun and surreality, mark your calendars. Even if you're not, we have 2000 free bagels. And you know you like bagels.
In the meantime, have some video:
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