Marcus Civin: American Rifle
François Ghebaly presents American Rifle, a new, one-hour solo performance by Marcus Civin as a part of Perform! Now!, a festival of performance art in Los Angelesʼs Chinatown.
Civin: “A rifle is a gun; rifle, a noun, but also I am thinking ʻrifleʼ as in: to rifle through, verb, to madly look for something, moving through hoping to seize upon a clue or a point of origin—an origin of violence perhaps. Imagine if this mad searching movement is a pattern, a well-known dance even. Imagine dancing The American Rifle. Instructions for dancing The American Rifle: put your head down, run in place while clutching and releasing your fists and throwing up your arms—alternate arms, then throw up your arms together. Choose a partner and throw your partner against the wall.”
Civin creates prop-based performances, drawings, text works, photographs, and sculptures that explorehuman violence, human resourcefulness, and the persistence of hope in impossible situations. In solo performances that swing between the comedic and the tragic, Civin plays a determined clown who labors with unwieldy, absurd, wobbly props and set pieces. These solo performances layer recorded text and readings over gestures and appropriated actions.
Civinʼs intuitive, research-based practice leads to abstract, poetic performance. Civin collides references to different historical periods and notorious figures. In American Rifle, Civin puts psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in French Revolutionary Jean Paul Maratʼs bathtub, the bathtub/deathbed pictured in the Neoclassical painting, The Death of Marat, by Jacques Louis David. Wilhelm Reich, a student of Sigmund Freudʼs, believed that war was the result of humanityʼs inability to gage, release, and harness sexual energy.
In Marat's tub, spinning, as Reich, Civin fills up the crotch of his clown pants with waxy rocks and with explosives that might have been provided by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, The Underwear Bomber, who, on Christmas Day, 2009, boarded a commercial airliner headed to Detroit and attempted to detonate explosives hidden in his underwear. Reaching for false teeth and hammers, Civin goes to the store, runs, sings Motown while measuring sexual energy and incendiary matter, shakes, lights up, balances, crashes.
Civin received an MFA in Studio Art from University of California, Irvine, and a BA in Theater from Brown University. He developed American Rifle this year, in parts, through writing, drawing, rehearsal, and public performances at Sea and Space, LACE, LAXART, and François Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles, and at The Temporary Space in Houston.
