Punk/Performance in the ‘Loin Opening Reception (SF)

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Tenderloin Museum is proud to present Punk/Performance in the Loin, a gallery show & public program series that explores the intersection of punk rock and performance art in the wild and ragged Tenderloin of the 1980s, organized by the late, great video artist Dale Hoyt.

Focused loosely on a triptych of arts spaces that were pillars of the 1980s TL scene–Sound of Music, Club Generic, & the side-by-side Market St. galleries A.R.E. & Jetwave, Inc–Punk/Performance in the Loin features over a dozen long-form video interviews shot by Hoyt that create impressionistic portraits of each venue & its respective community, as well as a collection of posters, photos, and ephemera. Like its subject, Hoyt’s project constellates a frenetic and sometimes cacophonous remembrance of an under documented, fleeting time (and place) in the San Francisco art world, one in which heady conceptual art was sublimated through a visceral and voluminous punk ethos.

As punk rock popped off in San Francisco at legendary venues like the Mabuhay Gardens and On Broadway in North Beach, a edgier second wave of punk emerged in the early 1980s: its nosier, amateur, and most offbeat exponents trickled down the hill and into the crucible of the Tenderloin, where an emergent DIY culture overlapped with the (sur)reality of real life on the hardscrabble streets of the TL. Musicians, art students, runaways, and neighborhood denizens all converged in after hours clubs, ephemeral art galleries, and barely legal venues.

While the neighborhood’s low rent and anything goes atmosphere made it an attractive place for thrill-seeking punks, its dense urban tapestry of grindhouse movie houses, adult bookstores, and other forms of sordid entertainment represented the great American consumer culture gone to seed, targets for reactionary politicking by the likes of Feinstein and Reagan, and anathema to the cultural mainstream. In this way, the Tenderloin was an ideal setting to critique, unravel, and explode societal norms and political ideologies, activities often at the heart of both punk rock and performance art, and Dale Hoyt’s investigation into this milieu reveals how the neighborhood fomented an electrifying mash-up of these two emergent art forms.

The core of Punk/Performance in the Loin is a series of video interviews shot over 2021-2022 at BAVC (Bay Area Video Coalition) and the Tenderloin Museum. In each conversation, you can hear Hoyt asking questions from behind the camera, and the videos are marked by the filmmaker’s ever curious and slightly zany aesthetic. Tragically, Dale Hoyt passed away on April 12, 2022, just three weeks shy of the planned opening of Punk/Performance in the Loin, and this project was the last thing he was working on before he died. The Tenderloin Museum learned from working with Hoyt that he was first and foremost a committed artist whose practice of making was a vital and constant part of his life. He also loved San Francisco deeply. As such, the Tenderloin Museum and a handful of Dale’s friends and collaborators came together to complete his nearly finished Punk/Performance project and mount this show as a celebration of Dale’s life, work, and the city and community that reared him as a person and as an artist.

Join us for an opening reception and informal celebration of Hoyt’s life & work at the Tenderloin Museum on May 5, 2022 from 5:30-7:30pm. Additional public programs include Flipper (ft. Fletcher from The Garden), The Mutants, & Longshoremen at (& co-presented with) the Great American Music Hall on May 26, 2022, part of the Tenderloin Museum’s Sounds of the Tenderloin live music series; along with a screening of experimental and art films from this era co-presented with SF Cinematheque on June 23, 2022.

Many thanks to BAVC & Javan Jiles, Jeanne Hansen, Kareem Kaddah, Brad Yip, Monet Clark, Steve Seid & Jon Shibata of BAMPFA, Steve Polta of SF Cinematheque, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and the many interviewees, listed below:

Interviewees:

Craig Baldwin

Kathy Brew

Connie Champagne

John Coon

Mia d’Bruzzi

Carol Detweiler

Ted Falcone

Judy Gittelsohn

DNA Hoover

Dale Hoyt

Carol Leigh

Domenique Leslie

Michael Peppe

Dave “Dog” Swan

Winston Tong

About the curator:

DALE HOYT has been involved in the making, curating, teaching and criticizing independent media for almost 45 years. He has curated at the Western Front Music Festival, The Kitchen Center in NYC, and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery among other spaces. He has been published in the Syracuse New Times, Send, Video ’80, and Stretcher magazine and has taught at the New School, CCA and the San Francisco Art Institute. His work has been shown internationally since he was 19 and is in the collection of The Long Beach of Contemporary Art, MOMA in NYC and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.