PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Contemporary Fragmentation in ‘P.S. 122 Fields Trips’ at LACE

Most of the five New York-based artists represented in “P.S. 122 Field Trips” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions on Thursday worked awfully hard at undermining their presumed invincibility as Truth Tellers or reliable witnesses. And their pieces either revealed a strong streak of irony about media or benefited from a homemade, show-and-tell simplicity.

Of course, this approach represents a backlash to the grandiose intermedia experiments and rampant didacticism of performance art earlier in the decade. These artists of P.S. 122, an arts center carved out of a former school building in the East Village of New York City, repackage our societal obsessions at human scale and present them to us with a minimum of technological hoopla.

However, their work also questions the artist’s ability to stand outside the glut of experience and information bombarding all of us and make sense of anything except individual patterns of confusion.

On Thursday, whether it was mock-cerebral monologist Mark Anderson obsessively qualifying every observation until it reached dead-end complexity or wild man Danny Mydlack desperately trying to make the events of his middle-class-white-kid-in-the-suburbs upbringing yield a mythic, Springsteen-style anthem, this was (mostly) an evening of insight through comic deflation.

Narrating an imaginary slide-show commemorating embarrassing events in her life, Ann Carlson sweetly parodied both confessional performers and familiar modes of audience participation.

In her short film “Footsie,” Pat Oleszko let her fingers do the walking and emerged with a disarming parable about the unseen dangers lurking under our toes. (Doomed naifs, all of us.)

Even Ishmael Houston-Jones’ supersober dance solos depicted someone conditioned as much by media-processed information as what actually happens to him. (“It was a lot like TV,” he said during the violence and panic evoked in “The Beginning of the End of Everything.”)

Like his colleagues, Houston-Jones questioned whether contemporary life is subject to rational analysis, orderly recall or any plan of action. Just responding personally to world events can be overwhelming (as shown in his familiar movement-litany “Dead, 1981” in which he repeatedly crumpled to the floor in response to an endless obituary list). It is the fragility of that personal response that unified “Field Trips” and made it so unexpectedly endearing.

But it was sometimes much more. When Houston-Jones grabbed his crotch provocatively, defiantly, in the midst of a sequence of slapping his face and pounding the floor in anguish--or, especially when Carlson (in “Sarah”) combined brilliant movement impressions of giant sea mammals with quick gestural sketches of hard-boiled women--the sense of fragmentation at the core of “Field Trips” suddenly became transparent.

Shards of meaning not only linked up in potent new meanings but formed pathways toward unexplored processes of performance metaphor, the Next Phase. Along the way, we sampled the ways in which the artists of P.S. 122 have coped with their disorientation and we gained a new perspective on our own.

Growing up in a house on a hill, Mydlack told us, he quickly learned to “manage on a tilt.” A valuable skill nowadays. Maybe he should give lessons.

“Field Trips” closes tonight.