Sue Tompkins at The Modern Institute

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The painting's ineptness could almost be salved with reminders of Tompkin's enjoyably askew performances, the hollow echoes of paintings like. Today everyone verbs the noun. "Performs Painting" "Investigates Painting." And Painting saved by performance has become a trope. At least these have Polaroids as appendages to make them kind of do a jig.


See too:  Sue Tompkins at Lisa Cooley

Sue Tompkins at Lisa Cooley

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When the then burgeoning band dissolved it left Tompkins vocal tracks unaccompanied, but Tompkins was still the hypnotically consumate performer, and to perform words you said them. And so the bouncy atempo monologues without the band to shape it made for a plinko coin prosody, floating words’ disjointed and inharmonic edges to hang about meaningfully awkward.  And how did you perform painting? By putting the stuff on the canvas.