The Flog

Last thursday, Lightbox was hosting a performance by Thomas Kovachevich that I had the pleasure to see.

“The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute” Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.

As much as Debord’s essay was floating in my mind after I left the gallery, I only found the proper words once home.
Thomas Kovachevich offered a metaphysical and poetical parenthesis in our fast rendered living habits. The performance informally started with who seemed to be the artist child, throwing a ball against the edges of the square metal arena by which we were sited. This unpretentious and strangely absorbing action, created a sort of trance, everyone, cell phones included got absorbed in. The deep metallic and hypnotic rhythm was an invitation to a slower pace realm.
Once the vessel was filled with hot water, Kovachevich delicately lay nylon fibered tissues on its steamy surface and then delicately placed geometrical shapes of paper, triangles, squares and circles, under the colored hues of the radiological light boxes. As the water evaporated, the pieces of paper were starting to evolve in exquisite and informal dances.
Following the astonishment phase, it is as if these geometrical shapes completely ceased to be unanimated and instead, became Kovachevich’s progeny, following their own path through time and space under the beneficial – and perhaps influential – eyes of their almighty progenitor. Although I could agree that “The experience is different for every viewer” and that “each viewer finds it own meaning”, still, I could have drawn similar combination of thoughts which were clearly emerging from the crowd. Each geometrical figure discovered life, than, its sexual potential, than later experienced anger and violence, and finally, death. Even the decease of a triangle and a circle would have had different meanings, while the first one was distinctly suicidal, the other one was violently murdered.
Somehow, I felt that Kovachevich brought us to the Coliseum for an ultimate representation of exposed gladiators. I believe that I enjoyed the massacre and that, like the artist, I had my own “Star”, “a piece of paper (which) gave an outstanding performance that affected me emotionally”. And I felt content to discover that, these “Stars” were treated like heroes and like such, would relish eternity in a peaceful glass-boxed “pedestal” or rather, sarcophagus.