Review: Justo Cisneros’ “Bodybuilder”

In performance art, regardless of the work’s aesthetics and what it’s about, there is a question of philosophy and perspective. Broadly speaking, the artists and the works emerge either from a meta-discourse, commenting on the discomfort and absurdity of performance and observation, or they try to conjure something cinematically alive and incantatory. I prefer the latter, which I think is often more interesting and more difficult to attain. As for the former — we’re kind of immersed in it, our double digital helix of performing and watching winds away the days like a screensaver for one’s life. We mainly find it tedious or lonely now; it turns out there is perhaps a ceiling for how interesting this meta-discourse is, whereas the allure of evocative yet inscrutable art remains eternal. 

Justo Cisneros’ mesmerizing piece Bodybuilder took place at Co-Lab Projects’ founder and director Sean Gaulager’s Ranch Apocalypse compound in South Austin on June 29. It was a sweltering day; earlier I had met some friends at the Lightning Bar in Elgin, a lovingly kitsch evocation of a 70s central Texas dive bar (the neon sign boasts of “color TV”) and watched a sausage eating contest sponsored by the famed Southside Market. The bar played Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” over and over, as the competitors gasped and gobbled. At one point, a hefty contender who had prior to the competition dapped me up in a kind of fat-recognize-fat respect and said: “root for me bro,” bellowed and grasped the shirtsleeve of his pencil-neck neighbor and wiped his greasy mouth. The winner, a stoic man who gave off vaguely Blackwater, tier-one operator vibes, ate sixteen sausages in ten minutes. This was its own performance piece, albeit a fairly obvious one about the intersection of American optimism, hubris, and gluttony. 

Bodybuilder was different — deeper, stranger, hypnotic in its rhythm and sequence of elemental images. The performance was held in a shed on Gaulager’s compound. It was so hot amongst a packed crowd that I had to rely on my upbringing in a meditation movement to center myself and treat the heat as a spiritual sauna. Still, it added to the experience. Texas, with its beauty and bleakness, and its heat, rage, and humor, is as vivid a tapestry as anywhere, and organizing exhibitions outside traditional gallery and museum spaces yields profound returns. It felt like old-time religion, some communal gathering where we sacrificed creature comforts to witness. 

Cisneros and multi-instrumental impresario Shea McGilvray donned sunglasses and glowers for an evil Dale Cooper vibe and played a supple, groovy soundtrack throughout the performance with Cisneros on synthesizers and McGilvray on sax. The vibe was akin to Barry Adamson’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes” during the party scene in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, the famous scene where Robert Blake’s Mystery Man purrs “Call me. Dial your number. Go ahead.” The influence of Lynch loomed large on Bodybuilder, but the work didn’t feel like a derivative pastiche. Rather, it passed through the velvet curtain to a zone of charged dream imagery. 

The setup and “plot” of the performance are fairly simple: a man (Jairus Carr), walks relentlessly on a treadmill wearing only briefs; a woman (Anna Bauer) wears a red jumpsuit with an ominous swirling black star on the back (Cleo Diwati designed the costumes and photographed the performance); there are large ficus plants, a table with wine, and a chair in the center. Throughout the performance, the man and the woman manipulate each other, cut the plants, drink the wine, put on and take off clothes, die, and come back. 

In some ways Bodybuilder is meta, exploring the strange process of building a body, whether that means literally exercising, or the body suit (or suits) we develop and don to exist. But the resonance of the piece is from its atmosphere and inscrutability. The great filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky wrote: “An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite.” Bodybuilder sculpts iconic imagery like a bonsai tree, but wisely refuses explanation. The images contained are deeply symbolic but stretched out as low notes, so they drift untangled from direct meaning. 

The stakes of performance art, like similarly open and vulnerable media — avant-garde music, experimental theater — are high. When they’re bad (which is the majority of the time) you feel foolish, or worse: generally itchy and embarrassed and the performance feels endless, as if you were spending the weekend with a couple you barely knew who were fighting the entire time. When they’re good, you are reminded of the elusive and restorative quality of real art, that which doesn’t make you a better person, but makes you more alive.