David Kodeski’s True Life Tales: Another Lousy Day
It’s all in the name of superrealism, the wish to make the invisible visible, mark the unmarked, and force audiences out of complacency. Performance art broadcasts its creator’s compulsions. Yet ironically these compulsions often get in the way of the story itself, shadowing the invisible with the artist’s obsession with showmanship. It’s difficult to balance a sense of ethical obligation with blatant self-dramatization, and the results are sometimes entertaining and stimulating but not always as powerful as the Christian right would have us believe.
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In fact, such performance art can be pretty tiresome. Certainly there’s a lot to rage about, and howling is sometimes exactly the right thing to do. But shock value loses its currency. If there’s no affection behind the artist’s disaffection, we drift away. With Another Lousy Day, however, David Kodeski calls us back to the alchemical basics of performance: personal involvement, straightforward storytelling, and a grudging respect for unanswerable questions.
We follow him along his path of discovery, learning as he learned. First the journals give us hints into Dolores’s daily life: what she wore, why her work or friends were (usually) lousy, how she fought with her sister Rose and her father, how she cleaned her bedroom and tidied her drawers with meticulous regularity. Later we see Dolores through her scrapbooks: her trips to Hawaii and Las Vegas documented in souvenir sugar packets, postcards, receipts, and menus stapled and pasted into cheap, crumbling volumes. Despite Kodeski’s flat book-report style, we get sucked in. Like him, we want to know more. Every scrap of information seems a significant clue.
