Yesterday marked the beginning of the 2008 Transmodern Festival in Baltimore, Md. The festival, which will continue until Sunday, is arguably the country’s most egregiously radical display of avant-garde performance, sound, film and installation art. Like a drunken cousin at your brother’s wedding, the festival’s wares seem to be a mix of hilarity, complete lack of taste, and occasional shining genius.
On the poppier side of the program are bands like the venerable Straight Punch to the Crotch, a five-piece from Charlottesville, Va. The band members have clever and memorable monikers: Baby Crotch, Bella Crotch, Circe Straight, Husky Crotch and Iron Crotch. While the band remains unsigned, there’s something oddly arresting about their hackneyed pop choruses, especially on a track called “Robot Baby” that would fit nicely in an X-rated “Flight Of The Conchords” episode. Another piece, “Sushi Conquistador,” aims to describe the ineffable culture shock a Latin American must feel in Japan.
On top of the band circuit, there are performers like Randy Russell. Russell, believe it or not, is credited with inventing the Semioabstractique Collage technique. Dina Kelberman, a filmmaker and founding member of the Wham City collective, is also showing her work (I bet you were wondering how long it would take for a Whammer to get in on a Baltimore show). The Festival also hosts food venders with ingredients only made from foraged goods, Christian-rock fashion experts, slasher-opera writers and armies of queer-power DJs.
But, if the previews are any indication, the depth of the festival lies in the massive installations, sound and otherwise. The website of installationist Ingrid Burrington, a Californian still in art school, contains her apparent mantra:
We are inching towards legitimacy! We are desperately and embarrassingly authentic!We compulsively write lists!We are very, very hungry!
Her project is titled “Memorial For Everything That’s Ever Happened Ever,” and promises to be “a public gathering to recall the vastness of history and the loss of our sense of it.”
The only other available piece of information is that in her life “she has made terrible mistakes.”
Snacks, a.k.a. Dan Breen and Tom Boram, are two sound designers who incessantly cite Poodle Cakes and Layered Dips as their only inspirations. It’s almost impossible to tell what they’ll be doing at the festival (I don’t even think they know), but they do engage in a type of sonic poetry hardly worth prefacing:
…diarrhea spray of the rhythm rat in outside temperature its melt electric circuit farts and fnnrts with practical funky Schlagzeugerscharfsinn and unite belly laughter be could interference for loading skillfully compensatorily, natural lunches is grooviest native recording of the yearly, how had to the place of assembly David of a Tudor installation on the last minute to be shifted.
Anyway, Kelley Bell, an animator and designer from Baltimore plans to install her “Hydra,” which will drill visitors with re-imagined audio. The Hydra looks to be a massive system of microphones under the guise of gauze and lipstick, which repeats whatever one says back. Bell tells us, however, that “each of the Hyrda’s nine heads regurgitates speech in a different distorted way. The Hydra says a lot of things all at once; each one of its heads has its own nuances, its own way of speaking, in an effort to please everyone. A hydra does not lie, but the truth that emerges from the Hydra’s lips is a definite departure from the original.”
Even if you question a hydra’s veracity, there’s no way you can question the humanitarian motives of troupes like The Theft and Rescue Society. Stuffed animal bunnies used to smuggle contraband into the U.S. are almost always abandoned once the contraband is removed, and the Society aims to relocate these bunnies to new homes. Using their website as a base of operations, the Society will be keeping tabs on where these lost bunnies were last sighted. An adoption gallery tells the success stories, and continues to strongly encourage festival goers to seek out and find these homeless animals.
Sarcasm and eye rolling aside, the bigger picture of a festival like this is pretty mind blowing. Already in its fifth year, the festival cuts right to the chase and lets just about any type of bizarre production do its thing. The festival is being held at four different locations around the Load of Fun Galerie & Performance Space in Baltimore. At only $25 for four days, the Festival is so crazy that it doesn’t even piss me off.
People can disparage the whole premise (and believe me, they have). The bottom line, though, is that the Transmodern Festival is so sincere in its absurdity that anyone who disparages it inevitably comes off judgmental and generally super lame.
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