What's My Line?

FLUXtask Returns to Kenzo to Make You Act Cuckoo.

by Joel Tannenbaum

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Published: Aug 27, 2008

thefluxspace.org

"Get as many people as you need to lay on the ground and spell your name with their bodies."

"Find a stranger. Tell them a secret — one that is truly personal and/or scandalous."

"Make yourself a mask of someone you don't know here, and wear it as you introduce yourself to them as them, like, 'Hi, I'm you.'"

These were some of the hundreds of assignments given out to the attendees of FluxTask 2007. The event was a strange and wonderful performance collaboration between New York-based artist Oliver Herring, the proprietors of gallery/art complex Flux Space, a bunch of their Kensington neighbors and whoever else happened to show up. More than 250 Task participants spent the evening — in the cavernous main room of the ancient factory that Flux shares with Art Making Machine Studios — pulling pieces of paper from the "task bucket" and acting out the instructions on them, on and around the "stage" — huge sheets of rosin paper on the floor in the center of the room. Magic markers, aluminum foil, cellophane, copious amounts of food, face paint and other random stuff was placed around the room to facilitate the performance.

And Task events are very much performances. The trick is, you're never sure who is performing and who is observing — and, for that matter, what is being observed. "There's no comprehensive experience," says Herring. "You and I can stand next to each other and watch it and your eyes and my eyes will choose to focus on different things and we won't have the same experience."

If there is a cumulative impression to be had of a Task event, it is that of a factory: a factory whose employees are busily, if anarchically, engaged in the manufacture of powerful memories — and of fun. (It certainly helps that Task takes place in an actual factory.)

FluxTask 2007 doubled as the official première of Howard Street (Airborn) and Water Street, two short experimental films directed and produced by Herring and featuring two of FLUX's co-founders, Chris Golas and Joe DiGiuseppe, and kids from the neighborhood swinging from lampposts, climbing walls, splashing around an open fire hydrant and generally creating (harmless) urban mayhem. "Joe and I just acted like fools," says Golas. "We'd come up with a task where we needed someone to help and we'd ask someone in the street." A number of Task attendees were Golas and DiGiuseppe's co-stars, their friends and family members, most of whom live within a few blocks of Flux's North Hope Street address.

FLUXTask 2008 promises to be all that and more. With the help of a grant from the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, FLUX members will spend the weeks prior to the event working with kids from their neighborhood to make short films, walking them from brainstorming to storyboarding to shooting and editing. FLUXTask 2008 will, if all goes according to plan, double as the films' première. Also in the works are a bigger stage, more volunteers and a "carnival" in FLUX's gallery space. Says FLUX co-founder Josh Kerner, "The bar has been raised."

(j_tannenbaum@citypaper.net)

FLUXTask 2008, Sat., Sept. 6, 5-10 p.m., free, FLUX Space, 3000 N. Hope St.

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