A lady starts off naked except for flesh-colored panties, preggers as an opossum in spring, along her thigh tiny white plastic horses grazing on shimmering fake moss mounted among a forest of model railroad-size trees. The body is a microcosm, you know. She’s wearing antlers on her head. Woman is a beast. She’s a lumbering beast of creation, containing the world inside her and outside her. The ant is a beast with no concept of Earth. The earth is a beast with no concept of the universe. The brain contains the universe. There I was thinking this in spite of myself, sitting at a 50-foot-long polished walnut dining room table. I’m with about a dozen others, and we’re all seated like it’s a proper meal minus the dishes and silverware. Instead we will feast on ART. I just took a weird Brazilian benny and I’m trying to write about this and I’m falling asleep…

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Probably unfortunately for me, I’m naturally somewhat susceptible to performance art. I like not knowing what’s coming next, and I like being “conveyed” to. It’s intimacy without commitment. But this thing, Noémie Lafrance’s “Home: the Body as Place,” was mostly an exercise in self-consciousness for everyone involved.
After a few minutes these stern half-Geisha, half-dominatrix ladies handed some of us magnifying glasses so as to better inspect her thighs, her baby belly with its magic seam, her sundae tits, her follicles, her pores. I could care less about this metaphor. If I want to scrutinize the world I’ll go take an actual trip.
She slithers to the end of the table to a sheepskin throw over a throne-like chair at the head of the table and buttons shirt cuffs onto her wrist. And then she has a staring showdown with each person in the room. With one she is indifferent, another indignant. She is in turns also disgusted, flirty, outraged, pensive, and, overall, self-indulgent.
There’s a sound of dull drone in the room courtesy of some hidden speakers. She has us all play “Mirror,” where we mimic whatever the person sitting across from us is doing. Before we walked into this sacred space we all had create and then put on name tags, which is how I discovered the woman sitting across from me shares a first name with the lady I’m seeing. Next to me is a woman with the same name as my ex. That’s kind of spookily coincidental and deep, right?
It’s pretty clear it’s become a game of Be My Bitch. I am too anti-authority to even follow a recipe in a cookbook, and soon I have almost the entire table following my lead, twirling their hair real or imagined. It’s kind of scary how easy it is to get people to submit…no, actually, it’s disgusting. I am thinking this when the lights go out, it’s pitch black, and the lulling tone turns into a soundtrack that sounds like a grandfather clock trying to go up the down escalator. The Geishas (who I think are naked) walk around with giant mirrors that occasionally catch and reflect light from sources unknown.

Lights go back on. Noémie pours some kind of elaborate tea service. We all get a small porcelain ramekin full of this liquid. I toast but don’t drink the Kool-Aid.

After this, another woman comes out nearly naked with chocolate sauce stigmata dripping from her feet and onto her red pumps. She’s wiggling around, wobbling the chandeliers as she “teases” us with a feather duster. She quickly runs the gamut of “woman”: sexpot, Virgin Mary, feral Neanderthal run by her brain stem, battered maid wife, needy vulnerable lady, and finally, bitch honcho glass-ceiling shatterer. Where’s the version of woman who just minds her own business?
Throughout, some old guy at the end of the table is groaning or making wowza ga-ga noises. I realized he’s the guy who didn’t shut the curtain over the door all the way when he peed in the not very private bathroom, so we all caught a glimpse of his dick. He’s the type of guy who goes to performance art just to see the naked chicks.

Soon we’re writing words, any words, just words, on pieces of paper that’re being circulated in front of us. Next this second lady is lying naked in front of us and we’re all writing words on her in black crayon dipped in water. Some other stuff happens. And then the Geishas come back with strips of cotton gauze and tureens of white gravy paste. Somehow we know we’re all supposed to pitch in and turn her into a piñata like what that crazy sculptor did to Griffin Dunne in After Hours.

I forgot the Golden Rule of performance art: Don’t wear anything you actually care about. I was the only one who’d papier-mache her boobs because that meant I got to touch them, which involved leaning over her. And fuck, I ruined a Martin Margiela sweater. This would’ve been a really bad time if I wasn’t at least a little reverent. But it would’ve been even worse if I entirely bought into it.