Dennis Cooper, Duets With The Statue Of Liberty, New York Native, January 13, 1985

Art isn’t supposed to be numbing, right?  Lets face it, that’s the effect of most performances, music, books and paintings these days.  Not that this necessarily is the artists’ fault.  Why blame people who see the strip mining of slight variations on played-out aesthetic ideas as the appropriate response to a scarier and scarier world?  There will always be more artists interested in handling refined material than ones who dirty their hands on the raw stuff of life.

But it is annoying to find superlatives like “genius” continually tagged on each promising upstart who heads East (Village, that is) in search of fame, etc.  Such indiscriminate praise not only for stunts these artists’ growth; it leaves a critic like me struggling to convince this jaded world about a truly extraordinary artist like John Kelly.

Go West Junger Mann is Kelly’s first full-length performance piece.  His earlier works have been sketch-length and wedged onto the Pyramid Club’s tiny stage, known only to cognoscenti who plan their evenings around what they read in the East Village Eye.  I’ve been sold on his work since The Dagmar Onassis Story, his exquisitely garish tale of a cocaine-addicted opera diva’s last hours on earth, in which Kelly compressed an epic’s worth of ideas and energy into twenty minutes.

Go West Junger Mann found Kelly just as effective at three times the length.  The piece concerns a young East German graffiti artist named Waldemar Dix, played by Kelly.  Oppressed and depressed by restrictive conditions in his country (suggested by Huck Snyder’s monumental Berlin Wall set), Waldemar dreams of, then executes a defection to the West.  He winds up a hip denizen of New York’s Lower east Side, smoking cigarettes with a gentle, victorious smirk, the suggestion being, I think, freedom tempered slightly by the dictates of fashion.

Kelly is a skilled, intuitive actor.  The dramatics he employs to create Waldemar seem drawn from silent film, opera and ballet, mediums in which exaggerated physical gestures and implosive facial expressions do the work of dialogue.  Theoretically, the result would be camp (this did seem to be Kelly’s partial intent), but he performs with such conviction that the effect is two-fold, as if one could be spooked, say, by the monster mask a child were wearing simply because one could see in his eyes how deeply he wanted to be that beast.

Kelly’s performance is structured episodically and incorporates short films by Entnee Chase, an eclectic score by Guy Story, as well as sections that display Kelly’s numerous talents.  For instance, Kelly has a singing voice capable of lovely operatic turns; a section of film in which he portrays Waldemar’s mother signing him to sleep is among the piece’s most affecting moments.  A hilarious duet with the Statue of Liberty (played by Marleen Menard) is another.  But there literally isn’t an uninspired move in the entire performance.

Part of what makes Kelly’s work so original is its inherent necessity.  The best art has always been, in the words of one of Kelly’s fellow performers, “work that exists because it has to.”  The level of commitment in Go West Junger Mann, not to mention the piece’s many surface and internal pleasures, is what ultimately convinced me I was seeing something important.