Invoking the Spirit of Laughter

On Monday night, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Bing Auditorium, Russian emigre artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid stood beneath large images depicting Van Gogh’s 1889 self-portrait projected onto various areas of the human body. Part of a performance titled “The Healing Power of Art,” the images supposedly showed patients being cured of everything from insomnia to depression.

Later, brandishing a framed reproduction of the Van Gogh painting, Melamid “healed” members of the audience with the conviction of a Pentecostal preacher. And these were only a few of the highlights in an evening that began with Melamid proclaiming “I am a genius” to applause and laughter in the sold-out auditorium.

The appearance, which also featured writers David Eggers and Ian Frazier, opened the fall season of LACMA’s lecture series, which usually presents serious conversations with writers like Susan Sontag. Monday’s performance was hardly business as usual.

“Bringing unpredictable and stimulating speakers is an important part of what we do,” says Paul Holdengraber, the institute’s director. “With Komar and Melamid, we knew that this would not be a problem.”

Provoking strong reactions is nothing new for the artists, who have been working together for the past 35 years. As political dissidents in the pre-thaw Soviet Union, they used irony, one of the few strategies available to them, to critique the country’s repressive regime. Their satirical renditions of Socialist Realist propaganda were known as Sots art, a reference to American Pop art, and in 1974 an outdoor exhibition of their work was demolished by a KGB bulldozer.

Making Light of the New Priests

Since immigrating to the U.S. four years later, they have continued to puncture the pretensions of politics, science and especially art. For a project called “People’s Choice,” for instance, they conducted polls around the world to determine what people liked and disliked about art, and then executed paintings based on the findings. In one work, “America’s Most Wanted,” Komar and Melamid determined that they should put George Washington with strolling tourists, a blue lake, two deer and a hippopotamus.

In “The Healing Power of Art,” Komar and Melamid have set their sights on the elevated status of art and artists. Art has replaced religion, they theorized, and artists have become the new priests.

“That’s why we wear black,” Melamid told the audience Monday night, showing a slide of a group photo of UCLA studio art faculty members, who looked as if they were dressed for a chic funeral.

A new religion builds its ranks through miracles, and there were plenty to go around on Monday. At one point, Komar and Melamid screened an infomercial for their “light and shadow” therapy. The video showed the artists, attired in white lab coats, projecting masterpieces of Western art onto a dour young woman allegedly suffering from an unspecified malady. In the final frame, she waves happily as she leaves the Light and Shadow Institute.

The evening’s most vaudevillian moment arrived when David Eggers, author of the autobiographical “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” shared a dramatic testimonial about how art had transformed his life. He invited “unbelievers” to test the power of art for themselves, and several members of the audience obliged, coming onstage with the aid of crutches and wearing dark glasses. Melamid, one hand on a Van Gogh reproduction and one on their foreheads, proceeded to “cast out” their afflictions, bringing each of them to their knees.

Finally, Frazier, a journalist who has also been described as a “very serious humorist,” read “Laws Concerning Food and Drink; Household Principles; Lamentations of the Father,” his meditation on parenthood written in the admonitory language of the Old Testament’s Book of Leviticus.

Los Angeles arts administrator Aandrea Stang thought the performance was “a witty . . . commentary on the state of the museum and the museum-going public.” UCLA graduate student Leilani Reihle wanted a more serious discussion of the issues. Talent agent Vaughn Hart said, “I still don’t understand what it was about, but it was sure funny.”

Phyllis Ehrenberg, a teacher, expected the evening to be an actual demonstration of art therapy but said that she wasn’t disappointed. “The laughter was therapeutic for all of us.”

* Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, along with David Eggers and Ian Frazier, will discuss “The Healing Power of Art,” 7:30 p.m., today, LACMA West Penthouse, Wilshire at Fairfax. All seats have been reserved but some standby seats will be available.