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