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men of the world performance

men of the world

June 21-23

On the streets of downtown Seattle
Monday, June 21 - Wednesday, June 23

Artist Talk: Thursday, June 24, 7 p.m., CoCA

men of the world is a collaborative performance duo founded in 1991 by Matthew Wilson, an instructor of Performance Art at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Mark Alice Durant, an assistant professor of Art Media Studies at Syracuse University. Combining strategies of sculpture, theater and photography, men of the world attempt to test the boundaries between public and private behavior.

men of the world perform site-specific unannounced public gestures that intervene in the daily routines of social and economic life. They perform almost exclusively during rush hours and in sites of brisk pedestrian activity-governmental plazas, subway stops, parks, public memorials, promenades and great thoroughfares-attempting to gently shift the thought patterns of people who happen upon their performance in the courses of their daily lives. men of the world's "gestures"-pouring 12 glasses of water into each other's mouths, cleaning statues of war heroes with scrub brushes, or laying nine bars of soap and nine clean shirts on the steps of the Supreme Court-often go unnoticed by the preoccupied passerby. But for the watchful, their precise repetition of a singular gesture can elevate the ordinary to the extraordinary. Since Wilson and Durant began their collaborative experiment in 1991, they have produced over two dozen performances in Chicago, San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.

For CoCA's Land/Use/Action events, men of the world will create a specific performance that focuses on the city, its architecture, and its urban growth. In their week-long residency, they plan to both create an original performance for the two of them and to create one large group action. All performances will happen during business hours on the streets of downtown Seattle on Monday, June 21 - Wednesday, June 23.