PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Woodall’s ‘Gim Crack’ at Temporary Contemporary

A gimcrack is a showy object of little use or value. “Gim Crack,” a 50-minute work created by San Francisco performance artist John Woodall and performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary on Thursday night, is no showier than it need be. But its value depends on patiently assembling the shards of meaning or resonant imagery that penetrate its rather smugly opaque veneer.

The piece involves three men--Tom Ford wearing a sturdy woodsman’s get-up, the others (Woodall and Tron Bykle) in baggy outfits reminiscent of hospital patients’ attire--in a series of blackout scenes.

Ford’s character amuses himself by making cat’s cradles and revolving slowly in a chair. He perks up to squabble with Woodall in a knockabout way that involves disappearances into trap doors and flying clouds of dust. Woodall is more of a cipher, most vivid when he tells long-winded stories in good ol’ boy accents to an unseen listener, accompanied by croaking frogs. Bykle often seems to have passed out or died.

But Woodall and Bykle cooperate to build a memorable image: a giant cat’s cradle laced on an agglomeration of odd props they’ve toted onstage. The two characters twang the strings of their handiwork with increasing vigor until the entire object vibrates.

The other major image in the piece is of revolving bodies--at one point, two of the men simultaneously revolve on stools on the two levels of the set--that may represent the essentially solipsistic nature of humankind. At the beginning of the piece, taped voices of an urbane-sounding man and woman talk obscurely about someone they call the Blindsman, who finally appears as a dummy in sunglasses reading a book. That absurdist touch remains an enigma.

In a crisply professional production, Tom Dannenberg’s score provides a percussive pulse. Woodall devised the ingenious set; other key contributions are by noted costume designer Sandra Woodall and Scott Goodman, who created the allusive slide projections. Performances continue today and Sunday.