Politics of Desire

at. March 12: Our fave East Bay art-provocateur Natalia Mount, the brave and brilliant curator expanding the re-booted Pro Arts Gallery into a Performing (and Publishing) Commons,
re-invigorates the covid-neutered with a heath dose of orgone energy! Here's the festive launch of her break-out brainstorm/confession/love-letter, The Commons: of Friends & Lovers, written as an experimental dialog with Marc Herbst, the legendary editor of Journal of Aesthetics and Protest.
In a wild and wide-ranging textual exchange, these two sex-positive protagonists excavate their roiling libidos in an enlightened effort to connect them to the macro-politics of community activism. Not only taking the “personal essay” to the next level of interpersonal correspondence, in fact Ms. Mount tops even that in tonight's performative and A/V-enhanced reading. Body-doubling for Herbst in the enacted dialectic is the much-missed Praba Pilar, a reknown UCD performance artist in her own right. Their live-action back-and forth of the book's raddest pages proposes new libidinal economies that fuse Eros and Polis.

The supporting hour is a veritable hothouse (bath-house?) of orgiastic shorts, featuring the transgressive work of infamous Aktionists Kurt Kren, Otto Muehl, and Hermann Nitsch! PLUS sizzlers from Erotic Psyche, Julia Ostertag, maybe Genesis P-orridge. $9