Continuing on with my surveillance of performances at Encuentro, here in Santiago, today I kept an eye on Helene Voster’s Unbecoming Nationalisms: A Queer Labor of Unproduction; Alexander del Re’s Dissidents; Anadel Lynton’s On the Edge; and Tatiana Maria Damasceno’s Faith in the Body.   And as you can imagine, it was a good thing I did.  Fellow believers in peace through order (hopefully leading towards a galactic empire), let me tell you what I saw.

I think it’s pretty clear what the problem is with Unbecoming Nationalisms.  In this performance, Voster and a gang of henchmen (and henchwomen, and occasionally henchchildren) took apart an American flag, thread by thread.  Now don’t think my problem is because the flag is American–I’m from space, I don’t care about that. No, the problem is that she (and her henchfolk) took apart any flag at all!  Destroying the symbol of one nation is the same as wanting to actually destroy all nations.  This is all just about wanting to smash the state, and if I haven’t made myself clear yet, DON’T SMASH THE STATE, PEOPLE!  Corporal Outis commands you!  No state smashing!

As this crime against authority went on, I couldn’t help but consider that there were innocent passersby walking along just a couple hundred feet away (as seen below), with no idea of what horrors were happening nearby.  In this case, they are probably better off not knowing, for the sake of their own sanity and moral welfare.

That said, the flag does look pretty cool when pulled apart into all those individual threads.  Tell you what–if you re-sew it back into a flag, all is forgiven, and I won’t pass your name on to the proper authorities.

I couldn’t see a lot of del Re’s performance, Dissidents, through the doorway.  But from what I saw, there were multiple choreographed actors moving around the stage, in costumes more deranged than a desert planet’s cantina, with projections on the screen.  At one point, the projection was a bunch of cryptic words–a code to other subversives, perhaps!?!  Or maybe subliminal messaging? (Subliminal messages are fine, of course, if they’re in favor of the State, but I am suspicious that that is not the case here.) And of course there’s the title, which says it all.  I would be much more in favor of something called, say, Subservience or Conformity–that’s a quick tip out there to any of you looking for a good performance title. All in all, while I didn’t get to see much, what I did see exemplified my idea that artists are insurrectionists and agents of chaos.  We must impose order upon their works before it is too late!

I was also unable to see very much of the other two pieces.  Lynton recruited a number of people to dance around in concentric circles.  Now I know what you’re thinking–I’m going to complain about henchfolks again, right?  No, actually in this case I think it was a good thing.  She got lots of people to dance around in an orderly structure, bowing their will to hers, a perfect portrait of subservience within the world of art.  This is exactly what we need more of, so I tip my helmet to her!  The only problem here is that they were dancing around flowers laid out on the ground, and as established in the last post, nature is really never a good thing.  It’s often the biggest roadblock in the way to creating a real top-of-the-line civilization.

Unfortunately the sun was giving me a lot of glare through the window at that time of day–but they never said the life of a spy was going to be easy, right?

Faith in the Body shared the same fault with On the Edge of including some nature.  The artist danced around within a rectangle delimited by various plants, and some bowls, around the perimeter. She did wear all white, and I am already on record of approving of any all-white performance uniforms. I’d like to show you more pictures of this piece, but at this point, The Man stopped me from taking photos of the performances. I know what you’re thinking: “Corporal Outis, aren’t YOU The Man?  Aren’t YOU the one who is always saying that authority is good, and we should always do what the authorities tell us to do?”  Well, yes.  BUT!  Some The Mans are better at being The Man than other The Mans.  In my case, I am very good at being The Man, and you can trust my judgement to be completely perfect in all things.  However, the world itself is not perfect, and so I am not the only authority in it, which means that I don’t have too many photos of the performance, and Damasceno is probably getting off easy–who knows what unspeakably nefarious actions happened in this piece, without proper documentation!

But, now let’s look on the bright side–here is today’s gallery of people who signaled their endorsement of my goal of peace through order (optimally the kind of order that is backed up by a planet-destroying space station).  First, two people who directly signaled their love for my kind of state-enforced peace, via a peace sign.  Yes, brothers, peace at all costs (particularly the costs of innumerable dead enemy armies)!

And here are some (but not all) of people who showed their allegiance to all the things I stand for by taking a picture of me (in which case I usually also took one of them), or by some other signal.

You might think to yourself–“Corporal Outis, you’re supposed to be taking pictures of the artists.  Why are you taking so many pictures of the audience?” Well, Favored Reader, remember that I was told yesterday that many of the people in the audience are in fact artists as well!

We are building an army of like-minded fans of Empire and its Agents of Authority!  My heart is warm.  More surveillance tomorrow!