In the current LA Weekly, Sam Bloch offers a “Pacific Standard Time Performance Art Festival Preview,” with a flashback to the 1960s and a flash-forward to the upcoming PST event in Los Angeles on January 22:
“In the early 1960s, L.A. was taking the piss out of action painting, the solitary practice of splattering paint all over a canvas. Behind a beatnik hangout on the Sunset Strip, the glamorous French émigré Niki de Saint Phalle hung bladders of paint and King Kong masks on a wooden canvas and shot it up with pals like John Cage and Jane Fonda. She called these communal paintings tirs — French for ‘gunshot.’ …
“Today staged violence is no cakewalk. For safety reasons, the re-enactment of Saint Phalle’s tirs will be invitation-only, held at an undisclosed outdoor shooting range in the foothills. ‘I’m open to reinterpretation,’ says curator Yael Lipschutz, ‘but to do this with stuntmen or fake guns seems silly.’ (Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tirs: Reloaded, January 22, invitation only.) Read more.