Hair apparent

Invented rituals are a way for Geoffrey Hendricks

by KEITH MARCHAND

On a Montana Crow reservation, a young man witnesses natives dancing and playing drums throughout the night. The year is 1963.

1971: a tall, lanky, bearded man who looks like Rasputin on a bad-hair day is shaving his body from the neck down. He is carefully placing the removed hair into labelled containers.

The same man, wearing a sailor suit, is sitting in a rubber dingy filled with water. He has been doing this for 12 hours and in that time, has not acknowledged the presence of the many curious onlookers. He seems to be keeping a journal of the whole situation. Oh yes, one other thing: he is in the lobby of a national museum. The year is 1978.

Again we see the strange man. He has a pitcher of water and a pot to pee in. He is naked, covered with only a sheet, and sits on a mattress. He has been fasting for 48 hours in the centre of an art gallery. Again, he scribbles in his notebook, seemingly oblivious to all else.

People gather round. It is August 1994, in front of the Royal Palace in Oslo, Norway. They watch as the man periodically stands on his head in the murky, predawn light.

Who is this man and what the hell is his problem?

Well, his name is Geoffrey Hendricks and he is the feature of an exhibition titled Rites of Passage, showing now at the Articule gallery. The show presents an overview of his work from 1971 to the 1997, using performance documents, video, text, images and objects made by the artist.

To understand Hendricks's work, one must first look at the work of the Fluxus group--"Flux... forgoes artists' indispensability, exclusiveness, individuality, ambition, forgoes all pretension toward a significance... It is a fusion of Spike Jones, gags, games, vaudeville, Cage and Duchamp." In other words, they wanted to take the pretensions out of an art world that took itself too seriously.

As an artist, Geoffrey Hendricks has elaborated special events in his life as they have unfolded, with particular sensitivity to his identity as a gay man. It is the discovery of a personal archaeology, through both playful and serious examinations of both natural and unnatural phenomena that have motivated his work.

Rites of Passage is showing at Articule (4001 Berri #105, 842-9686) until April 20