Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet

performance and video

The Showroom Gallery + Conway Hall, London; SAT Montreal

6.3.07

Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet was a live performance piece inspired by rumour and myth. In the late 1970s, while still a student, Waw Pierogi, later of an obscure New Jersey minimal synth band xex, composed the interdisciplinary Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet. No documentation of the piece exists, but Pil and Galia Kollectiv have become fascinated by this work, alongside another lost work, Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet. They did not wish to recreate either, but rather they were intrigued by the possibilities of making a new work through the collision of ideas left behind by former art movements and other cultural phenomena. For them unrealised, forgotten and failed revolutions are as much a legacy of modernism as the utopian belief in progress that we have inherited.