Media

Artist Turns Beck’s Palin Interview Into Awkard First Date and Calls It Performance Art — Really

Liz Magic Laser Glenn Beck Sarah Palin Performance Art I Feel Your Pain

Performance art is often in the eye of the beholder. That’s certainly true for the work of one New York City-based artist, whose recent piece pairs dialogue from Glenn Beck’s 2010 Sarah Palin interview with the awkwardness of a couple on their first date.

“I Feel Your Pain,” by Liz Magic Laser (her real name), is a wild, 80-minute 2011 performance that features not only the words of Beck and Palin but also Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Boehner and Anthony Weiner.

LA Weekly has this description of the piece, which debuted this weekend in Los Angeles:

The first scene zeroes in on a boy and a girl who are apparently on their first date. Their hands touch as they reach for the popcorn at the same instant, and they shyly kiss. The audience around them laughs with curiosity. They begin talking, and as the titles have indicated, their dialogue is largely drawn from Glenn Beck’s 2010 interview with Sarah Palin. The boy teasingly asks the girl if she’d like to hear an excerpt from his journal entry of the night before. “It’s about you,” he says.

The rest of their date unfolds in a flurry of excitement as the two of them discover many points of philosophical agreement. The shifting of context from supposedly unscripted talk show to professionally acted play serves to highlight just how ridiculous the words spoken are, and how they draw on the emotional pulls of fiction to elicit certain audience responses. In scene after scene, this idea is explored from different angles. Two couples get into heated fights, using lines from an Anthony Weiner press conference in the middle of his recent scandal. A pair of male friends talk about the assassination of Osama bin Laden as though going over the details of a sexual conquest.

Liz Magic Laser Glenn Beck Sarah Palin Performance Art I Feel Your Pain

Image source: Liz Magic Laser

Writing about her inspiration for the piece Laser called Beck and Palin’s sit-down a “peculiar interview.”

“Beck began by telling Palin, ‘I want to read you what I wrote about you in my journal last night.’ It sounded so contrived, like an adolescent come-on. There was a strange contradiction between its private premise of intimate dialogue and the very public conditions of its reception,” Laser wrote in a column for Art in America in March.

“I wanted to restage this extreme contradiction of Beck reading from his journal, this manipulative disclosure of personal feelings, in a context that is anything but intimate,” she wrote. “I decided a movie theater was the appropriate setting because of its paradoxically collective dimension: it’s a public space in which audience members gather to have individual experiences of the private dramas unfolding on-screen.”

Laser’s website noted “I Feel Your Pain” received some support from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other donors.

Watch a five-minute excerpt of the incredibly odd show below:

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