Pianist Brian Parks has been mounting his Performances in Near-Inaccessible Environs, Private and Public Spaces throughout the spring and now into the summer. The 6th in the series took place yesterday in Inman Park in an abandoned and crumbling building that you can only get into by crawling through a hole in a chain link fence.

The space was decadent in that uniquely southern way: languid and beautiful even as it fails both structurally and economically. The graffiti-ridden walls, the peeling plaster ceiling, the accumulations of grit and rubble on the floor--all testaments to loss, decay and broken histories.



Parks played improvised compositions on the virginal (something like a harpsichord) in the middle of the front room. He was accompanied by a percussionist who played subtle, dysfunctional rhythms using the floor, a rusted skillet, and various bowls and bells to augment his 2-piece drum kit. Parks's melodies tended to get caught in 3- and 4-note ruts in the middle of the keyboard, but the restrained, self-effacing music invited us to put the aural experience right alongside the visual, tactile, and kinetic experiences of the space, making no attempt to compete with or cancel out these other experiences. It takes guts to be that respectful.

That's what I liked about Parks's experiment here: that interplay between the performance and the space it occupied. He's not just performing in an incongruous space; the performance itself is creating the space it comes to occupy.



Tyler Green recently cited degeneration as the biggest non-art-world influence on art being made now. But then he goes on to give all the wrong examples: he talks about destruction and disaster, examples of spectacular collapse, none of which is degeneration. Degeneration is gradual. One recognizes it only after it has happened, sometimes decades or centuries after.

Parks's performance is actually a much better example of that zeitgeist. These performances occupy a space, transform it, and then abandon it, leaving the space to revert to what it was before. Unlike with a concert hall which bears the history of all the performances that have occurred within it, this performance will disappear utterly, leaving only the barest trace of its ever having existed; some footprints maybe, the marks of the virginal's legs in the dust on the floor. The refusal to enshrine the performance foregrounds its own fragility, it speaks to the fragility and temporary nature of all experience. Ultimately, all of our performances come and go.

That's the new mythology of our time, isn't it? And that is a kind of degeneration from previous myths of permanence, immovability and the unshakable nature of western cultural superiority.

In that broken space, surrounded by all that beautiful decay, Parks's performance became for me a metaphor for a culture watching its own demise; a metaphor for the declining west having watched its hegemony on expression circle the drain for decades. And we are in Atlanta, so of course here we do it southern style, with facile grace, on the front porch with a Jack Daniels in hand as the sun sets on the American Empire.

This sounds great! Wish I'd been there.

Yeah, it was slyly ambitious. The next one is by some railroad tracks in Smyrna (hometown of Julia Roberts...)