Joseph Keckler and Max Steele
I totally loved this queeralicious HOT! Festival show, presented by Dixon Place offsite at The New Museum for Contemporary Art, regrettably for one night only. Both of these monologuists take audiences to dark, Scorpionic places, although Max Steele's sweet, ditzy, CyberGeneration persona subtly tricks you into thinking that, at worst, you've stumbled into typically dicey fairy tale territory when, in reality, you're in way deeper than that. You have never had a relationship from hell like the one that Steele had with the likes of one "Scott Panther," who sounds like his surname is more than just a little descriptive. Here's a charming Interview magazine video clip of Steele.
Joseph Keckler--a charismatic, astonishingly gifted performer all around--masters a wealth of faces, voices and sounds as he unspools strange/wacky stories or sings his songs, catching you up in silky, sticky webs of wonder and emotion. He commands a versatile vocal range, at times reminding me of Freddie Mercury, or Rufus Wainright, or Antony. As a storyteller, he's an action painter of fallen rainbows and dog-chewed Crayolas. How dangerous a spider is this Keckler? Ask the fan who found an out-of-control wireless mic inadvertently lobbed in her direction. "That's what qualifies this as peformance art," said momentarily unnerved Keckler. "The element of danger!"
Indeed. Oh, brave queer world!
3 comments:
Max Steele- I'm not sure 'charming' is the word I'd put on the interview. In my opinion, prentention kills the soul of art, and nothing screams pretention like writing a 'zine' that 'I left at random places.' There is no indication otherwise that he takes himself, not his art, too seriously. But welcome to the CyberGeneration.
I don't know that taking one's self or one's own artistic expressions is something that you have to the cognizance to blow your whistle at. How is a lack of artistic integrity eveident in any situation, outside of high schoolers missing "play practice"?
Max has also said that the 'zine was birthed out of a feeling of being left out of NYC's performance art/queer in-group. He felt isolation and loneliness on some level, and therefore expressed himself in a cheap rag about sex. Do you somehow have the right to condemn him for expressing himself or the way he does it? If that's your business, then you have thousands of years worth of work to criticize and invalidate. Have fun with all that.
No, you're right. But let me explain myself, I should not have jumped to conclusions. The interview had a lot of red flags for me. The mirror glasses, which reminded me of the hipster aesthetic, as well as the way he explained himself. There seems to be a trend, in all art forms, music, photography, film etc. where artists are creating seemingly authentic expressions, for example the zine, which are really just dramatic ways to make an image for oneself, and pretentiousness is a part of that. And everyone is just a made up image and interacting with each other as these images. Much like one makes an image for oneself on the internet, hence, cyber generation. The realness, honesty and artistic integrity, in that situation, in my opinion, is lost. But if Max is really a modest young man just trying to express himself, as honestly as possible, than I've been proven wrong.
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