the Man in a Box, by Randy Gledhill:
There is a big white box. Inside is a man. An elegant man. I know this because his tuxedo clad arm and leg extend outside the box through the wall. The hand is manicured, the leg draped in a crisply pressed trouser and ending in a foot clad in a perfect patent leather shoe. Randomly placed through the walls of the box are optical devices, like the type employed as doorway peepholes. The audience takes turns having a peek inside. Through the lens I see a man dressed as for a formal affair, sitting before a music stand holding a text, his arm and leg, of course, extended outside. Time passes. The audience engages. People touch him. Someone offers the exposed hand a massage.
The man begins to read aloud. We listen intently.
you can’t see all of me through the holes, but I am going to read for you
he begins to recite lists of everyday life and concerns.
walking across the road, by the bar, near the window, and then walking around the pavement to the bus sign, next to the park…
describing people
moustache, eye glasses, gray hair, blond hair, black hair…
some clothing
suit, shoes, raincoat …
food
bread, bananas, potatoes, carrots, raspberries, onions…
sport
American football, tennis, swimming, horse race, jockey, golf…
family
sister, brother, father, mother, grandmother, cousin, son, daughter…
Finale
Well I think that is about it. I want very much to get out of this box. I want to thank the nice person who gave me a hand massage. It was very nice. Thank you very much.
“One of the highlights of the festival proved to be the work of Magnús Logi Kristinsson, whose performances are all about endurance.
Of the two I was in town to catch (there where another three), one saw Kristinsson stuck in a box; the artist’s suited-and-booted leg stuck out from one appropriately sized hole in the front of his white-painted wooden container, an arm from the other.
For the other performance, the artist caked his arm in white paint and rested it on a pedestal in a gallery of the Einar Jónsson Museum. The work had the tragicomic quality of clowning, objectifying the artist’s body and drawing attention to its physical limits. Encapsulating Andrésson’s largely successful curatorial meditation on the prologue to what Erasmus termed the “terminus that yields to no one”, Kristinsson’s work reminds us of the body’s role as arbiter of our time spent living”
