Performance by <— [To The Left]

A woman shrieks with laughter as she looks deeply into the soft sculptures. Her whole body reels when the hot green felt charges her entire being with joy. A few hotel rooms over, a young man’s eyes have welled up as he looks into the violence of the void created by the poet-turned-conceptual-painter. His knees buckle, and now he can barely stand. These moments are not true, but they are also not impossible. Visible human response illustrates the force of art. When there is no emotion, we cannot trace art’s effects and its labor goes unseen. Why isn’t anyone crying at the art fair? functions as a pedagogical framework for surpassing the behavioral standards set by capital-relations as well as a platform for public performance. For one day at ArtPadSF, over 100 high-quality full-impact moments will be staggered throughout the fair. These intense, spontaneous emotional responses to art will be performed by art professionals, students, and lovers who come into contact with art every day, but who have become professionally estranged from a potential full body response to it. These agents of emotion will have been trained by a Method Actor to find an authentic way to locate and perform emotional response to art. The actor/pedagogue will be planted at the pool’s lifeguard post, offering art fair visitors professional instruction about how to emote in the face of art.

Curated by Bean Gilsdorf