ABSTRACT
The last pre-pandemic staging of The Tenders took place at the Art Institute of Chicago on 14 February 2020. A mixed-reality performance, The Tenders, juxtaposes the figure of the rhinestone cowboy with immersive military and domestic environments haunted by the legacies of American settler colonialism. In response to the onset of COVID-19, The Tenders was resituated as a live virtual event staged across three quarantined domestic spaces. Pushing against the limits of video conferencing technologies allowed for a layering and conflating of augmented, virtual, pre-recorded, and live materials into a new form of mesmerizing complexity embodying the dual architectures of fort and home in a time of isolation, precarity, and social upheaval. Responding to the transformation of self-taught American artist, Loy Bowlin, whose ‘original rhinestone cowboy’ persona and meticulously bedazzled ‘beautiful holy jewel home’ were inspired by a 1975 song adapted and made famous by Glen Campbell, The Tenders engages with the cover song as a means of exploring the ways in which personal and political histories are written, re-written, and written over. For Performance in a Pandemic, we composed experimental liner notes for the performance reimagined as an album.
