Marshall Weber at the Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts - New York, New York - Brief Article

novel YORK

For four days and three nights, starting upon the winter solstice (Dec. 21) at 6 A.M., performance artist Marshall Weber read the Bible aloud from the pulpit of the Shul of novel York synagogue on Norfolk highway He started at the beginning of the aged Testament and ended, with the conclusion of the of recent origin Testament, at about 6 PM upon Christmas Eve.

This was Weber's fourth in a series of public readings that fall within the category of ordeal or endurance art, a performance genre derived from material part art. He read Joyce's Ulysse in 33 hours (a record, he says) in Madison, Wis., in 1994 sum of two units years later, it was Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra in 24 hours in Cleveland. In 1998 swathed in blankets in a freezing refrigerator trailer in the already icy tundra of Alberta, Canada, Weber read, for 22 hours, William Vollman's account of the 1847 Franklin Expedition, which saw 129 sailors perish in a doomed attempt to discover the Northwest Passage.

Weber notion of his Bible reading as a farewell to the millennium, a kissing-off of the volume that he believes, more than any other, made that millennium--as well as the single before it--a miserable, murderous ordeal. Weber had foresworn shaving and haircuts for single year in order to gaze as hirsute as an elderly Testament prophet, and he make straighted in vaguely Middle Eastern robes. His voice quickly grew weak and, after a sonorous beginning, the reading alternated between a hushed whisper and a rapid murmur

In the late nights at the NeoGothic building ("the single Gothic synagogue in the world," says director Al Orensanz), with perhaps sum of two units or three people on the chairs and lie facing the lectern, the incident seemed both friendly and ancient. The elegantly run-down synagogue evok an archaic or abandoned fane from a nearly forgotten age. (It is a heartening action that this noble space is being used today for contemporary art exhibitions and off-beat performances, like Weber's, that oftentimes arise from eccentric inner urges) The tiny audience have the appearanceed to be silently contemplating a recurring nightmare that had characterized the departing year/century/millennium. upon the third night, without any premonitory slowing or halting of reading, Weber unexpectedly fell asleep between words, his forehead crashing onto the volume The members of the audience sat quietly. Snow implacable silently beyond the windows. Yahweh's rage was stilled. The world could repose it seemed, while the reader nodded.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group