Linda Mary Montano: An Interactive Life and Maybe No Art Experience with Laurie Berg, Kim Brandt, Yanira Castro & Tatyana Tenenbaum

Thursday, February 9th at 8pm ET, ISSUE and The Chocolate Factory Theater are pleased to present legendary performance artist Linda Mary Montano hosting a series of “interactions'' embedded within her new video piece MA AND THE SEVEN CHAKRAS (with video editing/animation by Tobe Carey, sound engineering by Jim Barbaro, and long horn by Brenda Hutchinson). Montano is renowned for videos and endurance-based performances that dissolve the boundaries between art and life. This special evening showcases the artist’s longtime exploration of the intricacies of the seven Chakras, embodying the fundamentally expansive and empathic nature of her practice.

In works like Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984, a collaboration with Tehching Hsieh, Montano spent a year bound to the artist by an eight-foot rope; in 14 Years of Living Art (1984–98), she wore monochromatic clothing, devoted herself to meditative practice, and provided monthly “Art/Life Counseling” at the New Museum in New York (1984–91). Her transformative videos and performances draw upon her biography, from catharsis to the humor of the everyday. Recently, Montano has guided audiences through “interactive healing modalities” that alternate between laughing and crying at SAIC and three minute “Art/Life Counseling via Laughing/Crying sessions” with Printed Matter. This presentation is, in the artist’s words, “SEVEN INTERACTIONS TO BE INTEGRATED INTO MONTANO’S VIDEO WHICH IS A LAMENT AND ALSO HONORING OF MOTHER EARTH/ OUR ANCESTORS/TRANSFORMED BEINGS.”

These “interactions” are performative interventions to be staged through the presentation of her video piece MA AND THE SEVEN CHAKRAS. The interactions will be coordinated alongside ISSUE friends and artists Laurie Berg, Kim Brandt, Yanira Castro & Tatyana Tenenbaum.

This performance is co-presented with The Chocolate Factory Theater, and takes place at their theater in Queens, New York.

The performance will be preceded by a reception for ISSUE Members and invited guests with food and complimentary beer and wine. The reception will be followed by an interactive performance and Q&A moderated by artist, writer, and filmmaker Kathy Brew, with Montano performatively discussing her body of work. 

Notes from Linda Mary Montano:

We are all being inundated with really incredible and strange news on a minute to minute basis. My head feels like a CARTOON HEAD with smoke coming out of my ears, mouth and top of head. BLOWING steam is a response I have felt to the unimaginable terrors of the times!!! As a result my art both addresses the “oye vey” of now but also OFFERS A RELIEF and personal/shared medicine, pill and cure. INTERACTIVE SAFE CONNECTION is one way of addressing my/our challenges? Let’s hope that tonight’s seven doses of CREATIVE INTERACTION AND HONORING OF OUR ANCESTORS, interwoven with my video, will buoy us internally for at least tonight and perchance might ride us into the morning’s sunrise???? The experience tonight is NOT ABOUT ART. It is about INTERACTIVE TRANSFORMATIVE CONNECTING in and with our LIVES!!!

This video (MA AND THE SEVEN CHAKRAS) in collaboration with Tobe Carey, video editing/animations; Jim Barbaro, sound engineering and Brenda Hutchinson, long tube sound has been in process for three years and is the culmination of cosmic Covid grief which ALL of us are experiencing and it also proves true that interactive art softens, heals and provides good medicine for life’s pains, traumas and mysteries! The video and sound are “endurances” which allow the viewer to travel sonically with me up the chakras while viewing a sometimes angel-like Chicken dance. But you are invited to not just view or listen but to INTERACT by moving through the space during the video so you can honor your ancestors? Grieve the pandemic? Experience Art as Life? And guess what? At the end of the one hour video, we will ALL participate in an ecstatic CHICKEN DANCE!!!

Linda Mary Montano is a visionary figure in contemporary feminist performance art and her work since the mid-1960s has been critical in the development of video by, for, and about women. Attempting to dissolve the boundaries between art and life, Montano continues to actively explore her art/life through shared experience, role adoption, and intricate life altering ceremonies, some of which last for seven or more years. Her artwork is starkly autobiographical and often concerned with personal and spiritual transformation. Montano’s influence is wide ranging – she has been featured at museums including The New Museum in New York, MOCA San Francisco and the ICA in London. You can find her free videos on Youtube.