MY EYES WERE FILLED WITH VOLUNTEARS
“Inside every cardboard box is a toaster waiting to be found,” philosophizes Brendan deVallance in the middle of his new performance piece, My Eyes Were Filled With Voluntears. This curiously engaging untruth, flatly stated and left unexplained amid many similarly curious observations, neatly encapsulates the worldview behind deVallance’s piece. He gives us a way to see the magic lying dormant in the junk that ordinarily weighs down our lives.
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For deVallance to say that inside every cardboard box is a toaster is rather like an art-history professor saying that inside every piece of marble is a beautiful sculpture waiting to emerge. But anyone can see the beauty in marble. It takes an artist of deVallance’s sensitivity to see and appreciate the beauty of cardboard, and to imagine a toaster as a thing of great mystery and power. Because deVallance is so utterly candid and sincere in his performance, that toaster becomes equally magical to the audience. Indeed, deVallance’s cardboard toaster is startlingly beautiful in its clean construction. It has no clutter of dials and buttons, no brand name stenciled across its smooth, unbroken surface. It is simply the Form of toaster.
DeVallance would probably deny that anything profound is happening in his work. In fact, the performer we see is continually humbled by the shortcomings of his own piece. He begins the evening by saying, “Hi. I’m Brendan deVallance. And what I’m about to do doesn’t quite work.” Since he has little money to work with, he tells us, he can never get exactly the equipment that he wants and has to make do with shoddy imitations. For example, instead of having a real dog onstage, he has a videotape of a dog barking. So when he takes the dog for a walk, he attaches a leash to the video monitor (actually just an old television on a skateboard) and rolls the monitor across a tabletop.
