What role does the performance artist play in challenging the world we live in? Experimental clown artist Alex Tatarsky takes up the question in Sad Boys in Harpy Land, a clownish, devilish, existential act of Lynchian lounge singing and maniacal laughter.
Part of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA)’s Time-Based Art (TBA) Festival, the show was staged at Reed College, Tatarsky’s alma mater. It opened with the artist sporting a long gray beard and vomiting into song. “I poisoned myself on tinned fish / I made myself sick / or maybe the world did,” they crooned, their mouth crammed with macerated fish that sprayed across the stage. The song gave way to cringing, screaming, and frenetic, iced-coffee-fueled panic. It was grotesque and, somehow, deeply relatable.
Perhaps this was because Tatarsky’s penchant for histrionics felt like a form of mourning. “I turn in on myself / but I still want to be seen,” they cried, flitting between spotlight and shadow, alternately demanding recognition and folding inward with shame. Sad Boys in Harpy Land gazes steadily at the performer’s self-consciousness. What does it mean to perform when you are painfully aware of performing? What is the performer’s responsibility in a world that feels, as Tatarsky deems it, like a “hellscape?”
The show’s titular Harpy Land references Dante’s Inferno, which depicts a forest of suicidal souls tormented by harpies, the mythical bird-women who peck at them. Tatarsky rendered the scene with a rubber chicken and a thin branch hidden in a toy box. In their hands, the epic and the ridiculous coexist, neither resolving. Tatarsky’s existential crisis of theater-making unfolded through mash-ups recalling Dynasty Handbag’s intentional grotesquery and Kate Berlant’s glam clownsmanship. Yes, the show is funny, but it’s also unsettling, full of gasping sobs and frightening laughter. “My life is a hellscape,” Tatarsky announced, inhabiting that phrase with their whole body.
Alongside its clownish underpinnings and fish-spewing strengths, Sad Boys is also distinctly literary, invoking Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, and the bildungsroman form as inspirations for a series of ontological vignettes. It’s a lot to wrap one’s head around, which is part of the point. Halfway through the show, Tatarsky paused. “I just wanna check in–is everyone following, like, every single part of this?” they asked.
At times I wondered whether Tatarsky’s hellscape should have been named more explicitly. The word landed with the same blunt, familiar force as phrases like “dumpster fire” or “now more than ever.” Yet the artist’s urgency and destabilization filled in some of those platitudinous gaps. Sad Boys isn’t particularly interested in explaining why everything is terrible. It considers the psychic consequences of living amid the terrible.
Importantly, Sad Boys asks whether art-making is a form of action or avoidance. Tatarsky describes performance art as “one person bang[ing] around for a while in order to make a shape that people might want to think about.” Is this self-loathing? Total inaction? Is refusing to abandon one’s art a radical act, or a way of avoiding larger responsibilities? Tatarsky doesn’t settle the question. They lament and lean in.
At least, that’s how the first half of their performance unfolded. One of Tatarsky’s strongest moves came at the midway point, when they implicated the audience in the creative process. They led us in song, then resituated us around a second, more intimate stage, where warm light and crowd work expanded the show’s intimacy, camaraderie, and freaky freedom. The performance changed shape, and we were inside it.
It didn’t solve the problem. It didn’t negate the hellscape. It didn’t tell us what performance art is supposed to do about any of it.
But it was a weird, welcome start.
Alex Tatarsky will perform Sad Boys in Harpy Land at On the Boards in Seattle Nov 12-16.
