On 11 June, Karriere was visited by The Palm d’Or Social Club presenting its American’s Cabaret – a string of performances by international artists brought together to form a cabaret.
With Karriere transformed into a burlesque nightclub, complete with velvet-clad walls and muted lighting, the performances were presented in a continuous sequence – and delivered with an intensity that completely won over the place.
The Karriere neon signion the street was temporarily taken over by the Americans from The Palm d’Or Social Club, who provided their take on the whole deal about ”art and social life” that Karriere prides itself on.
The starting point was a number of works collected especially for the visit at Karriere, supplemented by works by the participating artists, who on this particular night were Lucas Ajemian, Julien Bismuth, Henrik Capetillo, and Jean-Pascal Flavien. They were joined by the American’s Cabaret House Band, which is made up of Giancarlo Vulcano (guitar), Jason Ajemian (bass), and Noritaka Tanaka (drums). Special guest stars were the extravagant Kate and Nana Francesca.
The host of the evening was the artist Lucas Ajemian. Opening with the restless, up-tempo rock’n’roll number Rapid Boy, he got things off to a strong start and took the audience through a breathtaking two-hour show.
One of the common features of the works presented was their use of existing pieces at Karriere; they were incorporated into the cabaret as scenery and props. For example, Franz Ackermann’s mural formed the backdrop for a number of short commercial breaks created by the Brooklyn-based Lifetime Friendship Society. A kind of meta-commercial from the creators of the graphics seen on the music channels VH1 and MTV.
Music and songs played a pivotal part this night, which saw Julien Bismuth reading aloud from the collection of texts entitled Monologue for Minerals accompanied by compositions by Giancarlo Vulcano (whose day job is currently scoring the US sitcom 30 Rock and who has been involved in making the music for the Lord of the Rings films). The texts were similar to crime novels in style, featuring crystallised plots and narrative styles.
In The Woman You Want to Be, five men dressed in women’s clothes delivered a scathing text written by silent-movie
star Margery Wilson (1896 – 1986), a text which addresses the challenges and paradoxes of a woman’s life. The piece is delivered to the tones of a merengue written by Brooklyn-based musician Greg Stare.
One work was a work in progress throughout the night: US artist Richard Jackson provided instructions on how to stick together small stacks of trashy literature by means of brilliantly coloured paint. The piece was entitled Untitled, and at the end of the evening it consisted of a row of small towers.
In Hamburger Haiku by Henrik Capetillo, Lucas Ajemian ate a burger using knife and fork, gradually peeling back layer after layer of this all-American as he devoured it. The entire séance was recorded on film and shown as a live-feed projection on the wall, a reference to Jørgen Leth’s recording of Andy Warhol eating a burger (from 66 scener fra Amerika, 1981).
In Hunt for Next Friday by Mike Bouchet, the house band offered up a mixture of the theme from The Hunt for Red October (a blockbuster film from 1990 starring Sean Connery) all mashed up with lyrics and music from the film Friday (1995) by Ice Cube.
In a rather different vein, the track Structural Sound by LayAllOverIt – a band consisting of two of the members of the house band – was a right riot of genre-defying ecstatic music for contrabass and drum. The ecstatic mood got another notch up as the longest-lasting performance of the evening, Erotic Oeuvre Song, reached its culmination.
Lucas Ajemian had staged Olafur Eliasson’s National Career Lamp in Karriere’s wardrobe to great effect; the stunning pink light transformed the space into a red light district display window, complete with two sexy, flirting, scantily dressed women.
Throughout the evening, they approached and flirted with guests and each other, using a selection of titles of Eliasson’s works as their only verbal utterings, supplemented by the universal sensuality of body language to underline and emphasise their messages: Eye See You, 2006; Your Negotiable Panorama, 2006; Your Activity Horizon, 2004; Double Sunset, 1999; Your Black Horizon, 2006; The Body as Brain, 2005, etc.
Their two hours of recitals took the form as whispering and murmuring while the other performances were taking place, but they ended in an explosion of ecstatic gospel, soul, and erotic dancing which took the entire assembly to great, great heights. The evening was brought to a close by Mopping by Barbara Smith, a piece executed with floor mops in four different colours quite literally washing the dance floor clean of guests, sending them onwards into the night.
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