THREE % THEORY

http://www.robwalker.net/html_docs/three.html







Three Percent Theory
In the summer of 1988, when I was a student in Austin, Texas, I
interviewed a guy named Kal Spelletich for an article I was writing
for the college paper about performance art. The article was
forgettable and sophomoric (after all, I was a sophomore) but some of
the conversations I had while reporting it, particularly my
conversations with Spelletich, stuck with me. He was a grad student
at the time, and a founder of a performance group called Seemen.

Partly for the story, I went to a couple of events at a place called
Austin Media Arts, which was basically a large, windowless room
above a café on Guadalupe. Performance art gets a lot of abuse, and
maybe a lot is deserved, but I saw some cool stuff there. In any case
Spelletich was the person who introduced me to the word
“ephemeral.” And something else: He was from somewhere in Iowa,
and I think I asked something along the lines of, Isn't it a relief to be
somewhere cooler than Iowa, where you can find like-minded
people? “There's always a fringe element,” he said. “You could go to
Waco, Texas, and 3 percent of the people are going to be these
experimental artists.” Obviously that's not true in a literal sense,
but I take 3 percent to mean “a small number” and experimental
artists to mean “interesting and unconventional people” or maybe
“weirdos.” Since that conversation, I've thought of this as the Three
Percent Theory.

Later I moved to Dallas, and then to New York, where I spent most of
the 1990s and where I met E. Seven or eight months ago we moved
to New Orleans. We've met a lot of great people, but I don't have
anything like the “social obligations” I had in New York, and by that
I mean that on Friday afternoon we had no plans for the weekend at
all and I was flipping through the local paper's entertainment
section. There was a listing for “Seemen Interactive Performance . . .
the San Francisco-based project features interactive robots . . . ”

* * *

The Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center is on a street I hadn't
heard of: Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, which turns out to be just
a few blocks off the celebrated St. Charles Avenue, along which New
Orleans' last streetcar line runs, through the fancy Garden District
and Uptown . But a few blocks on the lake side of St. Charles makes a
big difference, and the Zeitgeist turned out to be an outpost in one of
these sections of town that seems to be all abandoned buildings --
beautiful in their way, but apparently on the verge of collapse.
Zeitgeist is a classic Three Percent establishment, a generous space,
built a long time ago for some other, forgotten purpose, with
concrete floors, a lot of local art on the walls, and “Heroin,” by the
Velvet Underground, playing in the background. There was an
incongruous Ryder truck nearby, and it turned out that this
contained the robots.

The newspaper listed the start time as 9:30 but of course it was
about 11:15 when Spelletich began his spiel. He looked almost
exactly as he had 12 years earlier, like a nice, clean Midwesterner
with short hair, a big smile, T-shirt and shorts. He talked quickly
and sort of goofily, like a kid in front of his first audience ever.
Apparently he'd come to New Orleans in connection with a
computer graphics convention, and had managed to hook up with
Zeitgeist and schedule this appearance at the last second. He
mentioned that he had now taken his robots to 40 cities in the
United States and Europe, and always managed to find a space and a
crowd. In Cleveland. In Detroit. Everywhere.

He turned is attention to the first of his contraptions, a skeletal
metal torso in a simple dress, her “legs” ending in a wide, round
base, and with a kind of elaborate nozzle for a head. An audience
member was given the controls to make the “Whirling Dervish” spin
frantically. Spelletich said: “But something's missing, right?” An
adjustment was made, and now the audience member made the
Dervish whirl again, but this time spewing several feet of flame
from the place where her head should be. * * *

Spelletich had a scene in Slacker, in which he wore a TV backpack
that was part of the Seemen repertoire then, and talked about the
disappointment of seeing a real-life stabbing that failed to match the
verisimilitude of the many violent deaths he'd seen on television
and in the movies. Years later, in New York, I somehow heard that
the Seemen name was still around, Spelletich was living in San
Francisco, he'd had some sort of involvement with Survival
Research Laboratories, and was doing work involving pyrotechnic
robots. Apparently these had even appeared at Burning Man, and I
knew that he/they had performed at least once in New York, but for
whatever reason I missed it.

So it was a pleasure to be in that parking lot, with all this metal and
all these butane tanks strewn across the ground, along with a couple
of theatrical “Danger” signs, and a crowd sipping beer and
volunteering. “I have no insurance,” Spelletich announced, with his
big, innocent smile. “No joke.” All the robots involved fire. A woman
who claimed to work at an investment bank strapped on an
elaborate belt that shot fire from the crotch. (“So now you get it,”
Spelletich said to her. “The guy thing.”) Another woman climbed
into a cage and held on as another big sheet of fire swatted against
the bars. The most dazzling, and most popular, attraction involved
standing in the center of a giant cylinder and presumably trying to
remain as still as possible while four bars are set alight and set to
spinning, leaving the volunteer enveloped in fire. The people who
tried that looked a little shaken afterwards.

What's good about all this? Playing with fire, a bit immature, no?
Maybe so. What's good about it to me is that it all seems so
improbable. Fire-belching, homemade robots in some cracked
parking lot — it sounds vaguely illegal. Everything that's good about
it really is ephemeral, from the overall incongruity of the scene to
the vague danger to the feeling of the heat on your face. The
audience can never get big, there's no money it, he'll never be on
Letterman. I guess it's impossible to capture the thing in so many
non-ephemeral words after the moment has passed, and that's the
point. That, and the further confirmation of the Three Percent
Theory.

The last bit of fire drifted into the sky at about midnight. Spelletich
thanked us all for coming. So E and I left for Ernie K-Doe's Mother In
Law Lounge, arriving there just as K-Doe himself was singing his
signature number, and we ran into a couple of our new New Orleans
friends. K-Doe has his three percent, maybe even weirder than
Seemen's. But that's another story.