Last Friday, the Museum of Modern Art hosted a celebration of Doug Aitken’s “Sleepwalkers” with performances by Cat Power, Hisham Bharoocha, and Melissa Plaut. Aitken, an L.A. based artist, has graced the walls of MoMA with a vibrant composition of fifteen-minute shorts featuring five graveyard lives of fictional New Yorkers. MoMA’s space handled the party nearly as well, transforming into what felt more like a monolithic discotheque — with Bruce Nauman’s neon light fixtures flashing in the background – than a museum. MoMA has been quietly hosting these events for some time with scant promotion and drawing huge, homogeneous crowds of hipsters.
Melissa Plaut, the cabbie-blogger turned book deal, began the evening with a spoken word performance. Sharing the stage was the rhythmic Hisham Bharoocha and friends on K-N-O-C-K-O-U-T, another Doug Aitken creation. K-N-O-C-K-O-U-T, which could be described as a heftier xylophone, is a sleek table of oak wood supported in a steel frame in the shape of a figure eight. Wooden keys are carved in the oak along the edges and center, creating simple keyboards. Up to five people can stand around it in what becomes a communal drum set (or as Aitken titles it, a sonic table).
As Plaut ended her reading, Bharoocha and company continued to drum. Ryan Donowho – the youngest and prettiest of Aitken’s sleepwalkers – joined the stage with his water drums, seating himself before an array of white plastic buckets. Slowly, against the steady drumming, two figures push their way from the back of the crowd underneath a shaky spotlight. Surfacing to the stage are two Southern bid callers, clad in leather, fringes, boots, and a cowboy hat and as cheerily comfortable as hosts of a television show. Gamely pretending to lead a bidding, they paced across the stage, punctuating the air with their hands and smiling expectantly into the sea of faces. They matched tempo with Donowho, who was head banging, and Bharoocha’s team of drummers, who were beginning to break a sweat. The awesome rhythmic layering concluded in an exhausted finish, and was greeted with large applause.
Off to the side, Cat Power (aka Chan Marshall) could be seen dancing and tapping her feet, smiling underneath her bangs next to Aitken. Known for her shaky performances, she seemed confident but adorably shy, tip-toeing onstage to first hug her friends in the front row before seating herself at the piano. The crowd’s anticipation was jarringly sympathetic, with one audience member screaming, “Shut up you Philistines,” as she began to sing against the chatter in the back. Marshall moved through only a handful of songs without much pause, sticking out her tongue to acknowledge the applause. The glass wall of the MoMA, which looks out to the sculpture garden, shone her reflection against the backdrop of the city and bore a striking resemblance to one of Aitken’s projections.
After bowing her way offstage, Aitken and Marshall were called back for an encore. Happy and silly, the duo passed the microphone back and forth until Marshall began to sing in falsetto opera, twirling to and fro underneath the MoMA’s silent Rodin sculpture. More weirdly fascinated than entertained, the crowd cheered encouragingly for the hipster belle as she finished and handed the microphone back to Aitken. “Thanks for coming,” he shouted, “Open bar!”
