The visually delightful artworks installed in Leonard Greco Jr’s “Fairyland” at MOAH: CEDAR are both the basis and setting for the live performance of Temptations in Fairyland. In conjunction with the exhibition, interdisciplinary performance artist Jason Jenn presents a short theatrical solo piece of expressive movement and spoken word.

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Weighty tableaus and themes are mixed with flamboyant humor in both Greco and Jenn’s work that playfully flirts with camp sensibility. Inspiration is derived from French novelist Gustave Flaubert’s “The Temptation of St. Anthony”, which depicts the desert hermit’s confrontation one evening with a series of lavish and lustful hallucinatory temptations. Our contemporary world contains equally alluring distractions that regularly reach out to us in powerfully appealing ways. Jenn puts the story into context through the realm of performance art’s wild history, its pantheon of unusual characters, and coming to terms with being a performance artist himself.

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What starts out as a kind of lecture/TED Talk about the relationship between Greco's work and the novel, quickly devolves into a madcap performance about the deliriousness of the history of performance art in general. The performance took place in two, fifteen-minute acts having audiences move to both gallery spaces within the museum and featuring a quick, surprising costume change and reveal.  

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“I hadn’t expected such a completely immersive experience – you simply have no choice but to jump onto Jason’s wild speeding train of boundless energy…I giggled between gasping, it was a dizzying, manic performance that delighted me” – review by artist Leonard Greco

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Photos by Orit Harpaz

Body paint by Vojislav Radovanović