Post-conceptual artist and composer Stephen Prina’s (Art MFA 80) survey A Lick and a Promise debuts on Friday, Sept. 12 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The career-spanning exhibition focuses on Prina’s performance art and music, and includes a revival of 1992’s Beat of the Traps, as well as a rearrangement of a Mozart string quartet scored by Prina in 1976 at the age of 22, and a new composition, according to The New York Times.
Beat of the Traps, which was was co-created with choreographer Anita Pace and the late artist Mike Kelley (Art MFA 78), will be performed on Sept. 18, 20 and 21.
The piece includes monologues—written by Kelley and performed by actor Abbott Alexander—for four classic rock drummers: Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, Keith Moon of The Who, Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Paul Whaley of Blue Cheer.
Pace recalled that the original idea for the work was “to build a drum-dance-music-song-performance that would be kind of an epic theater performance piece.”
Much of A Lick and a Promise are the performances staged in various locations around the museum between Sept. 12 and Dec. 13, but the survey also includes four gallery artworks, including The Top Thirteen Singles from Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles Chart for the Week Ending September 11, 1993 (1993), a wall clock that plays hit songs from that week, such as Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover,” every hour.
Prina will also perform in Beat of the Traps, singing a cover of whatever song happens to be at the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart on the week of the performance.
Drummers and fellow CalArts alums Jonathan “Butch” Norton and M.B. Gordy (Music MFA 80)—who were both part of the original 1992 production—play duets just one beat apart. According to The Times, listening to a rehearsal of their version of Led Zeppelin’s When the Levee Breaks, is “the auditory equivalent of watching a 3-D film without glasses” which is sometimes accessible but often, as Prina phrased it, “like the ceiling is falling in.”
Prina studied at CalArts in the late 1970s with conceptual artists such as John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler and Barbara Kruger. He frequently borrows from other artists and musicians, such as Joni Mitchell and French filmmaker Robert Bresson. “To me, all art is derivative,” Prina told The Times. “Every artwork is an act of cultural appropriation, which is neither positive nor negative, as far as I’m concerned.”
