Alex Da Corte: Chicken

On March 5, 2020, a crowd gathered for a disorienting spectacle, featuring the sale of the moon amidst confetti explosions, at Gershman Hall at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Fifty-eight years earlier, the performance pioneer Allan Kaprow had staged Chicken in the same space. One of Kaprow’s Happenings, this was an uproarious, sometimes cruel production, with the titular animal hawked by performers in the roles of pitchmen who also burned a nine-foot effigy, with eggs and feathers raining down at various points. Alex Da Corte’s “reinvention” of Chicken substituted Kaprow’s live and dead chickens with yellow orbs and a primary-color palette, maintaining the carnivalesque tone of the original while shifting its focus to the more ethereal subject of the moon. The publication Alex Da Corte: Chicken is positioned as a “living document of a moment in time,” chronicling the purposely disorderly performance through reflections, historical essays, documents, and photographic collages.

The 2020 Happening took place at a jittery moment that many of the contributors recall with a mix of wistfulness and doom. The book opens with one message sent to Da Corte by a collaborator on the project, the artist and writer Rosalyn Drexler, on March 4: “What a time (!) to invite a crowd (Into the possibility of mayhem and mistaken nostalgia.)” In their reflection, the curators Erica F. Battle and Amanda Sroka note that the impossibility of accessing the past—through a restaged performance or the act of recollection itself—became particularly obvious during the height of the pandemic, when it was “harder than ever to cherry-pick fact from fiction or to locate precision in the fog of time and the unreliability of memory.”

The publication’s structure reflects this fogginess, beginning with a section that provides glimpses of the performance’s origin and impact while leaving its composition mysterious. Curator Kim Nguyen’s essay relays her interpretation of Chicken through a fiery and poetic lens, emphasizing its anti-capitalist themes. Sid Sachs, director of exhibitions at University of the Arts (who commissioned the new piece), thoroughly unpacks its 1962 iteration, tying Kaprow’s use of poultry to Jewish atonement rituals, the rise of mechanized agriculture, and US trade policies of the 1960s. The score for Chicken, altered and annotated by Da Corte, shows how the 2020 version of the piece differed from the original, with the chickens replaced by yellow orbs, confetti taking the place of feathers, and gender-neutral roles for the more contemporary performers. The score’s cross-outs and overlapping instructions make it hard to imagine the specifics of what Kaprow or Da Corte envisioned, though this confusion is of a piece with Chicken’s chaotic sensibility.

The center section of the book contains photographs of the performance, bathed in yellow, blue, or red light. Rather than feigning towards “objective” documentation, these images are integrated into collages with lines, grids, and confetti-like circles that echo the graphic elements of the piece’s props, sets, and costumes. Interspersed throughout are pitches recited by the performers cast in the roles of salespeople, promising “unending joy, a happier pet, a better car, a better life” with the purchase of the moon. The arrangements of images and text impart the feeling of frenzied, concurrent action described by the contributors, as well as the last-hurrah nature of the packed indoor gathering.

In the final part of the publication, the mechanics of the performance come into greater focus, especially for readers familiar with Da Corte’s previous work. In their essays, writer William Pym and curator David Breslin provide more straightforward recollections of the 2020 Chicken, including the appearance of Da Corte, in heavy makeup, in the guise of Kaprow. In his vividly-colored installations and video works, Da Corte has inhabited the roles of Mr. Rogers, Eminem, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Frankenstein—familiar figures thrust onto flattened backdrops, in situations often involving the queasy proliferation of consumer goods. Da Corte’s uncanny habitation of the Kaprow persona underscores the 2020 piece’s status as an alteration, rather than a recreation, of the original work. As Battle and Sroka write in their two-part remembrance of the performance, “While [Da Corte’s reinvention of Kaprow’s score] could be seen as a response to the impossible task of re-creation, it also aligns with Da Corte’s practice, in which the echo, the doppelgänger, and the artifact are filtered through his unique twenty-first-century aesthetic.”

Through its many perspectives, the book conveys how Da Corte’s performance addressed consumerism, objectification, and frantic cycles of labor, jettisoning the animal cruelty of the 1962 version through a poetic, oddball alteration. “[In the reinvented performance,] there’s still this idea of dealing with something that’s commodifiable, something that has a life cycle. But now, fifty-something years later, we’re at a different place. What we’re trying to commodify has become a war of grasping for the space beyond what we can touch or pull apart or eat,” Da Corte explained in Interview. Through its playful, fragmented format, Alex Da Corte: Chicken reflects the artist’s larger practice and the ungraspable nature of performance itself.