• Dora García
  Fahrenheit 451 (1957), 2002
  Photograph: Fréderic Buisson
  

Just because everything is different it does not mean that anything has changed, 2008

Sydney Opera house, Studio
Performance date: 19 June 2008, 6:30–7:30pm

García uses the exhibition space as a platform to investigate the relationship between the visitor, the artwork and the place. To this end, she often draws on participation and performance. Through minimal changes, the exhibition space is converted into a different experience for each visitor, who leaves it with his or her perceptions altered, or at least with a degree of scepticism and doubt. The stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce, one of the most fascinating and tragic personalities of the revolutionary sixties, visited Sydney on 6 September 1962. He was able to deliver only a onesentence performance: after saluting the public with the words: ‘What a fucking wonderful audience!’ he was promptly arrested on the grounds of obscenity. Richard Neville, a young Australian who would become the guru of London’s counterculture, saw this brief performance and, understanding the importance of Bruce’s position within the generational revolution that was about to start, attempted to organise a new performance at the University of New South Wales. The Australian authorities would not allow Bruce to perform and he was asked to leave the country, never to return. García has imagined the performance that never took place and, for the Biennale of Sydney 2008, ‘lets’ Lenny Bruce finally speak in Sydney.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art:
In the dystopia envisioned by Ray Bradbury’s science fiction story ‘Fahrenheit 451’, books have been burned and their contents remain only in the minds of members of an underground resistance – revolutionaries who learn their contents by heart. Written in the early years of the Cold War, the novel is an indirect critique of what Bradbury saw as an increasingly dysfunctional American society. In Dora García’s work, she has printed the book in reverse, as a mirror image of itself. Her ‘reversed’ books ask us to consider issues of participation, access and readability and reflect on an inverted world where forms of cultural resistance may be truly necessary. What A Fucking Wonderful Audience (2008) is a second project by García at MCA – a series of performances in the form of guided tours of the exhibition.

Online Venue Artist

Dora García
Tunnel People (doragarcia.net/tunnelpeople)

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