More "After Hours with George Quartz"

The artist sometimes known as George Quartz is a former Good/Bad Art Collective member and CentralTrak resident and shows at Cris Worley Gallery, and he also operates under the personas of La Maladie Tropicale and Jock Ewing.

I find his "After Hours with George Quartz" operation very interesting (previously, briefly blogged here) – he does a live-taped, "talk show"/ performance art -type of work that's like Dick Cavett meets The Twilight Zone. The next one is this Friday.

At the one I saw, the "guests" learned who they were supposed to be at the same moment they were announced to the audience, and none bore any physical resemblance to the celebrity they were to impersonate (e.g., "Joe Namath" was a black female). The "celebrities" were of the 70's-ish vintage emulated by the show.

The ensuing, improvised interviews were sometimes boring, sometimes funny, sometimes weird, usually opening with discussion of the celebrity's career and personal life (about which the guests, mostly young-ish, often knew little or nothing) and culminating with questions such as, "Liz, what is Beauty?", or "George, what is Art?"

Meanwhile, "Quartz" has most of the trappings of a live-taping tv show going on, including a talk show band and a monitor facing the audience that flashes "APPLAUSE" at the appropriate times. And the video actually produced from this performance is beyond-true to 70's or earlier production values (excerpts from the resulting "show" can be viewed on Quartz's vimeo channel).

In short, this is great, wacky parody; but there's a lot more than that going on.

The next Quartz taping/performance will be at the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff, Dallas, at 10PM; more details here (together with links to visuals). Be part of the audience, and you might end up on "tv."