Keith Hennessy/ Zero Performance: Crotch

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• Keith Hennessy
• Joseph Beuys
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Performance Art

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San Francisco performance artist Keith Hennessy's one-man show explores images and actions of the German artist Joseph Beuys, which leads Hennessy to thoughts about art, art history, art heroes, and to even deeper ruminations on melancholy, chaos, and form. A former member of the improvisational collective Contraband, Hennessy creates edgy work that cuts a swath through dance, circus, performance art, music, text, design, ritual, spectacle, and action. In vintage performance-art rhetoric, he describes his work as "live performance that defies genre and expectation." And who knows what the references to Beuys's unorthodox art presage? During a legendary 1974 performance in New York, Beuys spent three days in a room with a wild coyote after being delivered to a gallery by ambulance on a stretcher. We can only hope that Hennessey's art delivers that kind of bite. (Photo by Yi-Chun Wu)
Thu., Jan. 21, 7:30 p.m.; Jan. 22-23, 8 p.m., 2010