Two articles in the September issue of Artforum feature Triple Canopy contributors, collaborators, and/or agonists. In “The Long Take,” artist Lucy Raven, whose photographic animation China Town is currently being exhibited as part of MoMA P.S.1’s Greater New York 2010, talks with filmmaker Thom Anderson, whose works include Los Angeles Plays Itself and Red Hollywood. The discussion focuses on films that jettison the “stock-in-trade didactics of documentary or metanarrative” in favor of “audiovisual experiences that toy with the forms of time and media themselves”; Raven describes the composition of her visual essay "Daybreak," which appeared in issue 7, as an illustration of this approach.
In “Drama Queen,” David Velasco describes artist Ann Liv Young as “pop avec Sade.” His appreciation includes an account of Sherry tries on Cinderalla, Young's performance at 177 Livingston in June. “Everything about the situation is theater,” he writes. “It is unplanned, but not unanticipated. That it is in any way convincing (as reality, not theater) has to do with the fact that [Triple Canopy deputy editor Sam] Frank has not been scripted but rather has been compelled in the moment (better: inspired) to intervene”—when “Sherry” interrogates a woman in the front row about how she would feel if the audience were to hang someone onstage. “As the evening’s presenter and an ostensible authority figure in the space, Frank rehearses a position overdetermined by prior Sherry performances, and thus the action consummates rather than interrupts the work (or, to be accurate, the former is the consequence of the latter). Frank becomes, in effect, an accomplice to the performance, engaging with the fiction on its own terms. Young plays along, always staying in character (even if it’s a ‘broken’ character).” And so it goes:
SHERRY: This is art. This is performance art, have you ever heard of that?
FRANK: Do you believe in performance art?
SHERRY: Of course I do! Why else would I be doing this? You think that I think that I can make all of these people hang her from a rope?
FRANK: No, I don’t—
SHERRY: That is it! It’s twisted. It’s twisted! ... You guys can all go home. Fuck off. Fuck off. And you can keep your fifteen hundred fucking dollars, you asshole.