The Push Pops are a radical, transnational queer feminist art collective. Geared toward engendering ‘Embodied Feminism,’ Go! Push Pops employs the female body – that which is bound to a cross-cultural language of desire, signification and power – in tactical, ideological strategy. Go! Push Pops utilize gesture, exclamation and popular idiom to embody a new age discursive physicality interfacing with the ancient archetypal realm. Neo-Dada, Fluxist and Feminist, their performance work posits the body as a danger to the operation of reason and patriarchal economy of lack. A wild leap, an elusive slogan, a paroxysm of the flesh – The Push Pops reinscribe the body through participatory ritual, spontaneous performance and interactive multi-media installation.
Trapped behind tacky animal print bed sheets in a symbolic pen visible only through small ripped holes, The Pops play dress up with female/animal archetypes: A drunken fox-hipster-sorority girl-artist lost in perpetual Spring Break. A Feminist warlord shooting vitriol through the tip of a mop. A Unicorn phone sex operator singing with a banana shoved down her throat. An angry bunny eating an entire cake as she reads angrily from ‘He’s Just Not that Into You.’ Vengeance, anger, distress and anxiety surged amidst broken domestic items, overturned living room furniture, decadent food, seasonal foliage and loads of animal kitsch. In the center, a glowing television loops a collage of imagery including clips from ‘Girls Gone Wild,’ animal sex, professional hair removal, amateur strippers, relaxation tapes and sissy nobby. Meanwhile on the other side of the curtain, master of the tidy kitchen and the smug voice of patriarchy: a handsome gentleman wielding a riding crop and a gaudy animal fur cap hurls his sexist jargon into the mix. Part ‘Theater of Cruelty’ part Brechtian ‘Learning Play,’ Push Pops Gone Wild is a platform for empathic learning. Throughout the 7-hour performance The Push Pops reach various points of internal combustion - erupting into catfights, crying, singing, chirping, growling, screeching. Possibilities of contact always in flux, mobile, electric, pluralities of identity emerge and destruct. Occasionally The Pops enter less abrasive territory – loudly plotting the feminist apocalypse in 2012 runs into merrily singing a few rounds of ‘In the Jungle.’ Each new vignette abruptly ruptured by the delirious, rising jouissance of the next improvisational incarnation.Occasionally, The Pops ear ringing antics push spectators into activity – throwing glitter, confetti and toy ponies through the looking hole, some even yelling back. Push Pops Gone Wild explores ‘play’ as a stimulator of the deterritorialization of bodies and representational codes.
Push Pops Gone Wild was held at 88 Starr St. in Bushwick, Brooklyn on November 14, 2010 as part of the Arts in Bushwick Beta Spaces Festival.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
The Push Pops have gone wild!
Come see the world premier of video footage of GONE WILD, the Pops latest performance - this weekend only.
