Terence Koh performs his show at Starr Space to a jaded crowd. — Photos by Mimi Luse

Held at Starr Space as part of his continuing partnership there, Curator Joseph Whitt’s  Halloween event, "Codex Gigas," proved to be an exuberantly depraved show.  A 13th-century book that purportedly houses all of human knowledge, the Codex Gigas was written in a single night by a Bohemian monk who had to call upon Lucifer for help. Thus it is also known as the  "The Devil’s Bible", and accordingly, Whitt’s show was a ritualistic invocation of the dark side, with whatever taboos that remain today brought out one by one in succession. During performances by some of New York’s best-known contemporary artists and bouts of nudity, the rowdy audience was alternatively titillated and bored by both, and couldn’t keep quiet.

	Oh are you naked? Wow. Click to see more.

Accompanied by a recording that shifted between dark electro synth and creepy waltzes, No Bra (Susanne Oberbeck) deadpanned a series of cynical songs with the deepest of apathy.  A song called "Munchausen" was a dialogue between two blase art world types trying to out-do the other in an absurd game of name-dropping and one-upsmanship. Each statement begins with the faux-incredulous "Really?": "Really? I once organized a radical picnic with Kathleen Hannah….Really? I was born with only one leg… Really? I was cremated once."  Performing in nothing but gold hooters shorts and leather over-the-knee stiletto boots, No Bra’s performance was a paradox; alienating her audience with a cold aloofness, while simultaneously displaying extreme vulnerability.  Hardly swaying as she went through the motions of her performance, this was as de-sexed as a topless woman singing to crowd of drunken people could possibly be.

More nudity followed with Belgian performance artists Kendall Geers’ and Ilse Ghekiere’s collaboration. As Ghekiere rolled around on stage, falling in and out of a black bathrobe, Geer manned the sound and projected an abstract video of her taking a bath behind her.  Gutsy as it was, after awhile one could sense the audience growing weary of this humorless semi-erotic performance piece.

Originally performed at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris last week, Terence Koh’s Adansonias was a stark affair, though the distracted audience had trouble granting him the reverence his somber work seemed to demand of them.  While a single industrial-strength bulb hung from the ceiling, the artist, wearing a Mozart wig, a white suit, and encrusted in a thick coat of baby-powder, sat stiffly, playing a sad dirge on a sheet-draped piano.  He then moved to a white chair and began incanting in what sounded like Latin. A ghost, powder shook off of him and curled into the bulb’s glow as he moved. A screen behind him projected simple poetry: "vampire of new york/ master of lonely, king of concerto/ loneliness the lion."

“Codex Gigas” ended with two ill-received film shorts by Harmony Korine. Though they were intended as separate entities, they were made during the filming of his last feature, Trash Humpers, which debuted during this October’s New York Film Festival. Based loosely on a group of older people Korine once saw humping trash cans in an alley outside his house, the noisy audience was shown what seemed like clips from a gerontophilic Waiting For Godot.

The first clip showed a group of elderly pervs gathering in a dingy basement. With time dragging on,  they listen eagerly and fervently hump inanimate objects as two middle-aged men, conjoined at the head with panty-hose, speak in erotic tangents on banal subjects.  Breaking two taboos at once, as is Korine’s wont, the next clip showed a very senior man receiving oral sex from an obese woman. His face an expressionless mask of wrinkles, he gestures encouragingly with a gloved hand, and though all we want is the scene to come to a hasty climax, we are right to fear the scene will never end.

Also performing this Halloween were Amir Mogharabi and Jeffrey Perkins, who staged a hypnotic light show and performance using original slides from the Velvet Undergrounds’ performances, and Disco Mayhem (a.k.a. singer and artist Lizzi Bougatsos and the painter Rita Ackerman) who each dressed as Mu’ammar al-Gadhafi, and read transcriptions from some of the odd tyrant’s rants against the post-colonial abuses of Coca-Cola and Pepsi.