Non Grata returns to Houston with ideas blazing
The last time Non Grata came to Houston, they set a man on fire on Main Street, just outside of Notsuoh. Instead of calling the police, as you would expect people to do in such a situation, bystanders just started snapping photos.
That happens with performance art.
With Non Grata returning to Notsouh on Wednesday, you have to wonder, what will happen this time?
“We don’t know, it’s not that day yet,” the art collective said via email. “Non Grata is a group, we work spontaneously, we go into a space and work into that time/space container. We do not have planned actions. We are living in the moment. We are generating new ideas in an experimental space, getting close to people, asking uncomfortable questions, from them, from all society.”
Describing exactly what Non Grata is can be a difficult task. In the simplest terms and most convenient definitions, it is a performance art group from Estonia. Founded by Al Paldrok, aka Anonymous Boh, in 1998, it has become an underground legend whose exploits are whispered about in art circles all over the world.
Non Grata’s gatherings/ happenings incorporate bizarre, high-energy activities. It’s common for people to be willingly branded with hot irons. Cars are destroyed. Often, the specific actions that take place dance around the line of legality or stumble all the way over it. Videos of Non Grata are difficult to find, but what you see in them is pure energy being channeled ritualistically through an audience.
“We’re representing a mini-society of the present moment with different symbols and personifications,” Non Grata says in that email. “All these characters: the cheese grater, the holy mother, the punk military warrior, the plastic dolls, the winged man. They are very direct and obvious. People, whatever backgrounds they are, can relate to them in the same way. We are all in a human grinder, just like everyone else. Some people think they can avoid it, but it has sucking power like a vacuum cleaner.”
Non Grata follows political crises in their pursuit of art. The members have assembled at the Standing Rock Reservation for protests there in the Dakotas, and more recently in the ashes of the devastating California wildfires. They’ve just come from the Tijuana area at the U.S.Mexico border, where they’ve spent time observing the ongoing caravan of refugees and migrants.
“Some say it’s wrong that these refugees arrive at the U.S. border, another side says its wrong that they shoot them with tear gas,” Non Grata says. “They’re all bad solutions, but all these people are living in their bubbles. Those in the military, they’re brainwashed like in that Kubrick movie ‘Full Metal Jacket.’ But these people just ended up in these situations, without any real choice.”
We can’t tell you what you’re going to get into if you attend Wednesday’s performance. Again, the group members don’t know what will happen, themselves, though it’s reasonable to suspect something will be set ablaze — whether physically or metaphorically.
“Houston will give us the energy and ideas on how to use and release it along with the audience,” Non Grata says. “Often, we don’t really give them a choice, some people might resist in taking part, but we say, ‘We need you for this … . Will you take part?’ You ask them, and most of the time they do it because they are already there and it’s an unwritten contract that they sign in their minds that anything can happen. And they need to do it to receive this experience. And that’s what it’s all about: generating shifts in people’s minds and bodies, and shifting all our energies toward building something greater then ourselves.”