10/07/2023
SHOCKLICK MOOSE
*Outdoor Lounge / Performance Installation
Electric Eclectics Festival of Modern Music and Irritainment
Dipped 9v-Batteries (Shocklick Delights)
Funny Farm, Meford, Ontario Canada 2007
Monahan, like all good curators, left the best to the last.... "Barry Schwartz’s electrifying installation was exactly that. Curiosity surrounding Schwartz’s large high-voltage Tesla Coil installation had been building all weekend as the San Francisco performance artist tinkered with his Futurist-like sculpture of coils and wires on the far side of the stage. Indeed, up to the last moment, his attendants were still attending to preparatory details, as the crowd watched a hilarious 1950’s training video on the dangers and hazards of electricity and snacked on “shocklick delights”, small, portable batteries dipped in chocolate. Dressed in a white tuxedo, Schwartz’s bravura entrance was a combination of hip-hop and Broadway showmanship, as he walked through the crowd, scratching and playing his customized steel turntables. Once on stage, he donned large rubber gloves and flippers. Then, in a bizarre fusion of electrician and musician, he began, systematically, checking the flickering and sparking wires and coils, while, simultaneously, caressing them, as if they were parts of a towering instrument, with each test, following the current higher, as he moved up the installation. When Schwartz reached a tiny, smiling, Buddha sculpture at the top, he banged out a nursery rhyme on a toy piano to a round of gleeful applause. It was a fitting, climatic performance that truly lived up to the festival's name."
This review is an excerpt published in Signal to Noise Magazine, Issue 48 (Winter 2008)
Review by Richard Moule
IRRITAINMENT LOUNGE SCHLOCK
