Edgar Arceneaux: Until, Until, Until…

Performa15, Performance Art, Production

Edgar Arceneaux’s first live performance investigates the infamous 1980’s televised performance of Broadway legend Ben Vereen, which came to define him personally and publicly. Televised nationally as part of Ronald Reagan’s inaugural celebration, a cable company omitted the final five minutes of the performance, causing its satirical critique to be lost on viewers at home. Until, Until, Until… is based on the five minutes of footage that never aired that night. Arceneaux’s commission, a mise-en-scène of the 1981 inaugural party, will be orchestrated around a central elevated platform and encircled with round banquet tables covered in red cloths. Simultaneously a live film set, the performance foregrounds the past, illumines the presence of its ghosts in the present moment, and opens the possibility to reconsider our collective understanding of its events. Central to Arceneaux’s work is the intersections of the past and the present, of history and memory. He frequently manipulates existing or new systems, methods of cataloging, and visualizations of the passage of time. For Until, Until, Until… Arceneaux occupies the slippage between the live and the televised to investigate our relationship to time.

Edgar Arceneaux (b.1972 Los Angeles, lives and works in Los Angeles) makes drawings, installations, and films as complex arrangements of association that examine relationships between disparate histories. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Kitchen, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland. His work was recently included in Marking Time at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia; Mutatis, Mutandis, at the Vienna Secession, Vienna, Austria; the 2008 Whitney Biennial, New York; La Biennale de Montreal 2014; and the 2015 Shanghai Biennale.