ARTS

Two plays, art exhibit tap into our reality-obsessed culture

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Monday, July 14, 2008

Call it our society's obsession with celebrity and the drive to get some for oneself. Then consider the Internet arena of blogs, chat forums, community Web sites and user-generated content that allows us to reveal ourselves to more people with less effort — and yet with more distance — than any prior communication system in history.

Andy Warhol was right: Everybody can be famous for 15 minutes. Or at least you can be a YouTube star, which these days is celebrity.

Not surprisingly, today's younger artists are just as tapped into and fascinated by media influence as Warhol was. And two plays currently on Austin stages along with an exhibit at Women and Their Work bring that point home.

Using actual postings from the Austin pages of the Web site, 'Kidnapped by Craigslist' plays at the Blue Theater through July 26. Beginning on Thursday, New York playwright Jason Schafer's 'I Google Myself' gets a re-staging at Hyde Park Theatre after its popular run earlier this year. And in 'Reality Show' at Women and Their Work, artist Jill Pangallo presents her work as well as that of four of her colleagues who share an obsession with reality television.

For two years Pangallo, along with Anna Krachey, Cecelia Phillips, Laura Turner and Jamie Wentz, gathered every Wednesday to watch reality television. "We shared a guilty pleasure," says Pangallo, who teaches video art at the University of Texas where she just completed a master's of fine arts degree. "Like any other addiction, somehow I felt less guilty about it and the escapism it brings when I was sharing it with others." And somehow — Pangallo says it's probably her driven nature — she felt even less remorseful about the hours watching shows such as "So You Think You

Can Dance" and "The Bachelor" if she gave herself, and her cohorts, the task of creating artwork from the experience.

For her part, Pangallo created "Group Crit: The Pilot" a 30-minute video parody of unscripted reality series that captures exhibit artists involved in a group discussion about one another's work — not too unlike what happens in art school.

"It's exactly what it is, as real as it gets," Pangallo says. "Boring, in other words."

Or is that boringness perhaps the real reality, she asks.

At the exhibit opening, Pangallo created a video confession booth and invited the public to pop in and tell the camera whatever they wanted. The results were surprising — from mundane reactions to very stylized preenings. Or maybe that artificial behavior isn't so surprising given our culture's widespread media savvy.

We get just fragments of people's lives, self-selected bits of their personalities, Pangallo says. "People are self-consciously trying to project hyper-real images of themselves. And that's all messy and overwhelming. I think everyone today is in the middle of a mass identity crisis."

Identity and its surrounding crises pop up in digital collages by Anna Krachey. She took as her subject Brad Womack, the Austinite who starred on "The Bachelor" and made reality television history when he rejected both finalists. Using headshots of the contestants who vied for Womack's proposal, a headshot of Womack and a generic baby picture, Krachey digitally created a series of baby portraits of the imagined progeny.

The resulting composite baby pictures are unmistakably creepy — and they say volumes about the confluence of media and social mores that's reduced the selection of one's lifemate to a televised contest.

Pangallo. who was awarded Best Artist this year by the Austin Critics' Table, nevertheless cautions about taking the issues brought up in the exhibit too seriously.

"We have fun on our 'Ladies Nights,'" she says, likening the television viewing gatherings to a 21st-century quilting bee. "There's community, discussion, laughter. We're not being all critical."

Likewise, the creators of "Kidnapped by Craigslist" say the hour-long play is not a judgment on the online community and its participants. Katie Goan, a Houston native and graduate of St. Edward's University who is now based in New York, said that she and her artistic collaborator, Nitra Gutiérrez, also a St. Edward's grad, first started culling postings from Craigslist a few years ago when both were looking for material for open mike comedy nights.

"Some of the postings were just so absurd," Goan says. "They were naturally occurring comedy."

It also seemed like a naturally occurring carnival with all manner of things being hawked and pushed in a loose raucous way. Goan and Gutiérrez combined the carnival motif with actual Craigslist postings and scripted material for their first iteration of the play in New York in 2007, which garnered good reviews and lots of audience interest.

The playwrights have changed it up for the version they're presenting at the Blue Theater, pluming the Austin Craigslist for humorous oddities specific to the city.

"Different cities use Craigslist for different things," Goan says. "In New York, it's all about finding an apartment. In Austin, it's definitely one big crazy marketplace of people selling and buying just about anything. And it's also about political discussions."

The "rants and raves" section of Austin's Craigslist provided terrific creative fodder, Goan says. "People can hide behind the anonymity of the Internet and feel like they can say anything," she says. "At the same time they're being much more personal and direct."

Goan and Gutiérrez are working on versions of "Kidnapped by Craigslist" to play in Phoenix, Los Angeles and Denver.

That brave new psychological territory of being simultaneously very public and very anonymous forms the basic underpinnings of "I Google Myself." New York-based playwright Schafer, a staff writer of the former Showtime series "Queer as Folk," found fascination with the narcissistic impulse that drives people to search obsessively for themselves on the Internet but then hide behind the anonymity offered in the online world.

"Google" follows three very different men — one a lonely stalker, one a mechanic and one a gay porn star — who nevertheless share the same name and find one another through the Internet search engine. Their online collision is at first odd. Then it turns destructive.

The play premiered in New York last year. In February, Austin's Capital T Theatre Company presented the show as part of the FronteraFest Fringe Festival, and it quickly became an audience and critical hit. Capital T is re-staging "I Google Myself."

"Everybody's googled themselves," Pangallo says. "We're all participating in this culture. And none of us can be that critical or condescending about it."