OUTSKIRTS

Series of performances where something grand was imposed upon something pathetic. The Empire State Building was projected on the side of an abandoned strip mall and Mt. Everest was projected on a large pile of snow in a vacant parking lot.

Guerilla performances late at night or early morning in remote locations using the car headlights and piles of trash and dirt as a backdrop. These performances recontextualize the musician and his service as well as challenge the performer to respond to desperate conditions.

EXCERPT OF A REVIEW BY MATTHEW GAVIN WALSH:

Beverly positioned himself behind a building in the middle of the night, stopped his car & got out to drop off a message in a very private setting. If that isn’t the stuff of ritual, I don’t know what is.

He greets us in a shaky manner, repeating variations of the words “how” “is” & “it” for multiple, generative meanings. “Breathe, innards, breathe,” He demands of himself because he is a “breaker with broken wrists.” He can take this, he’s tough—an exhalation of frost tinged CO2. He’s aware
of his power.

One thought came to me looking at this video, is that the scene & aggressiveness of the character made me think of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man. “I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct & sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?” A stirrer up, social critic & cynic, the Underground Man lives behind the scope of a “normal society” & provides the chorus of The masses. B.F. is not only the standard definition of a persona—which would be the first gloss in an artistic milieu—he exists as a pure metaphor, more like a Grecian mask. Beverly Fre$h, in his backlot “dining on pigs feet, laughing at the horse’s mind,” approaches something biblical. --

- Matthew Gavin Walsh, 2008 “Notes from the Loading Dock”

+ VIDEO BY JOHN IKERA & BEVERLY FRE&H

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