Spontaneous Mural #1

Early one Saturday evening in March of 1999, artists Neil Johnston and Jon Reischl set up their installation/performance art piece in the balcony of First Avenue, the popular Minneapolis music club. To the wall, they mounted 8 x 12 feet of primed masonite opposite a makeshift table filled with bottles of acrylic paint, wide-bristle brushes, and various creative implements. Below them, on the mainstage, a potpourri of performance art activities took place, somehow combining the eclecticism of the Gong Show, the casualness of Austin City Limits and the integrity of London's Royal Opera House.

The event was an installment in a series called Ricochet Kitchen, a sort of caberet-style artistic carnival organized by Vox Medusa Productions. Ricochet Kitchen has long been associated with dance, music, spoken word and other stage-oriented arts. Visual arts have always seemed secondary (and somewhat out of place) there, though most Ricochet Kitchen events have included exhibited artwork in some fashion. Johnston and Reischl sought to move the art of painting off the back-burner in the Ricochet Kitchen, by adding performance to the recipe.

"We are visual stenographers," say Reischl of the experiment. "We are basically painting the show." Reischl and Johnston both don elaborately simple outfits, reminicent of Devo suits, decorated with duct tape and adorned with peculiarly functional gadgetry.

"We wanted to play up the performance aspect of the painting. Rather than just two guys painting, we've become these characters that justify their warranted attention." It's true, the outfits add an air of intrigue to the operation and create something of a theatrical barrier between the audience and the performers, even as the painters take breaks to wander through the crowd and freshen their beverages.

For the spectators, something magical is happening, indeed. It's not everyday you get to see the creative process in action. The two painters have no preconception of what they will paint. All they have is an intention, nee oath, to work off of the atmosphere of the rest of the Ricochet Kitchen.

By the end of the evening, the three sheets of white masonite have transformed into an barrage of color and form, equal parts abstraction and representation. The audience, having seen the piece develop while experiencing in tandem the events that inspired it, have an intimate connection to the painting, the painters, and the show itself.