Melissa Longenecker at Sala Diaz - San Antonio - exhibit combines the genres of performance, video and installation

Melissa Longenecker's The Great Wide Fluorescence (2002) brilliantly combines the genres of performance, video and installation, transcending the bland video-documentary format of '70s performance artists while retaining their aura of transgression. During the course of a year, this former San Antonio artist periodically vandalized a Los Angeles-area Kmart, knocking row upon row of seductively packaged commodities from the shelves, hurling them to the floor and littering the aisles with food, dry goods and personal-care and grooming products. Sauntering through the store, she ran her hands, caressingly at first, across endless displays of stuff, before aggressively ratcheting up her contact with the neatly stocked shelves or jumping into a bin full of pillows. Her antics--never to our knowledge interfered with by store employees--were videotaped by a camera hidden in a shopping cart or, at times, by an assistant. The footage was edited into a jumpy 5-minute video, which served as the foundation of Longenecker's installation at Sala Diaz.

Capturing the pervasive, artificial light of the discount store, The Great Wide Fluorescence occupied both rooms of the darkened gallery space. In the first room two video projectors were aimed at opposite walls. On one, the tape of Longenecker's performance was projected, followed by progressively degraded copies. Each was dubbed from the previous one while it was being projected by hired assistants who served as manic video jockeys for the duration of this performance/installation. As the picture degraded, the ambient sounds recorded in the store intensified: rumbling, crashing and the echo of loudspeakers filled the space of the gallery. On the opposite wall was a video projection of dozens of spinning Kmart shelves stacked with packaged products. As if marching or dancing, the boxes and bottles were brought to life by a process of stop-action animation that involved moving each of them by hand and videotaping their changed positions with a hidden camera.

The second room at Sala Diaz was crowded with floor-to-ceiling utilitarian steel shelving. Stacks of videocassettes on the shelves kept additional veejays busy popping tapes into and out of VCRs. On small TVs placed here and there were seen the most-dubbed copies of Longenecker's perfoRmance tape, which at last showing exceeded 70 generations. Barely legible, the tapes primarily consist of black-and-white static, mimicking the artist's degradation of Kmart's spectacular order. A finishing touch on the installation's theme of reprise was provided by importing the trash, including Coke cans, chip bags, a cooler and wads of paper that remained after the first incarnation of The Great Wide Fluorescence in Longenecker's master's thesis show at UCLA.

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