Exhibit asks ‘when isn’t it romantic?’
“Songs of the Patriarchy” to ring in San Francisco in 72-hour performance
Pay close attention to the lyrics of familiar pop songs, and the ingrained cultural attitudes toward women become all too clear.
“So many of these songs are actually made to charm and compliment women, but when you hear them all together you realize the structure of society,” said Ragnar Kjartansson, the Icelandic artist acclaimed internationally for his epically repetitive performances that can stretch on for days, weeks, even months.
From Nov. 9 to 11, he is orchestrating the all-female marathon musical performance “Romantic Songs of the Patriarchy,” staged throughout the Women’s Building in the Mission District of San Francisco. “These are good songs written with good intentions, but utterly revealing,” he said, of his lineup that will include Billy Joel’s “She’s Always a Woman,” Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed” and Cat Stevens’ “Wild World.”
This is the inaugural commission of C Project, a foundation created by San Francisco-based collector and philanthropist Carla Emil, to bring performance-based art experiences to unconventional venues around her city free of charge.
“I wanted to do something that captured the city and was about the city,” said Emil, who felt San Francisco lacked the kind of immersive events she saw happening regularly at the Park Avenue Armory in New York and Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London.
While the C Project team did a test run using both male and female singers, “it became absolutely apparent that the songs were much more powerful with the women’s voices within that context,” said Tom Eccles, the project’s curator and executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. In November, the ensemble of about 20 performers will be entirely female, each hypnotically singing one song for hours on end.
“San Francisco needs a shot in the arm,” said Stephen Beal, president of the California College of the Arts, who is not involved with C Project. He thinks the foundation could help address the lack of performance art in the local scene and finds the choice of the all-female cast exciting — particularly given the way that Aretha Franklin’s rendition of Otis Redding’s “Respect,” turned the meaning of that song on its head.
What the C Project team did not anticipate was the explosion of #Metoo shortly after the project was conceived. “We almost pulled away,” said Eccles, questioning whether he and Kjartansson, as men, were the wrong people to do this in the right place at the right time. “It’s an artistic risk for Ragnar. He could have chosen something easy.”
For Kjartansson, the big challenge is to choreograph the progression of songs in such a way that they flow sonically. “You will meet each song individually,” he said, whether the musicians are stationed on the stairs or in a broom closet. But the songs will start to bleed into one another as visitors move throughout the space. A woman singing “You say it best when you say nothing at all,” from a country song by Keith Whitley, could overlap with another intoning, “My bitches love me,” courtesy of Lil Wayne.
“They are all in similar keys and similar arrangements, so they work together,” Kjartansson said.