Outside the hut

A pair of artists make some noise

By Jenna Russell

BIRDS OF A FEATHER: Matt Anderson and Pat Corrigan bring art and sound together.

Pat Corrigan is explaining his Abe Lincoln fetish. It’s Friday night, and he’s pacing his basement studio at Local 188, the State Street gallery/restaurant. The ceiling creaks overhead with the movements of the kitchen staff, and music and conversation can be faintly heard, but the cellar is like a prison in an 18th-century French castle. It’s black except for a couple of bare lightbulbs, illuminating rough stone walls that glisten with wetness.

Corrigan and his friend Matt Anderson — ages 31 and 30, they grudgingly admit after asking, quite rightly, why it matters — are the founders of Anti-Friend Hut, an entertainment collaborative they describe, obscurely, as “didactic clong and performace calumny.” (They hate the phrase “performance art.”) The Lincoln obsession fueled a show of theirs called “Toddler Jean Revolt,” in which the part of Lincoln was played by a friend wearing child-size OshKosh blue jeans as a beard. He delivered the “Epantsipation Proclamation” while the two audience members (“Maybe there were four,” Anderson says) threw old clothes at him, and Anderson and Corrigan sprayed liberal amounts of Glade air freshener.

The Lincoln fascination came from Civil War battlefield photographs where the President towers over the soldiers, dressed all in black. “He looks like a freak,” Corrigan says. “To me, he’s like an Anti-Friend Hut guy, wearing costumes, shouting inanities, and everyone’s listening to him.”

Well, sure, if you can imagine Abe Lincoln riding an amplified tricycle, or wearing a cardboard box and tossing hotdogs into the street, as Anti-Friend Hut once did at the now-defunct Pleasant Street Collective gallery. Traffic jammed, hungry dogs descended, and a group of disgusted 8-year-old girls tried to outdo the group by playing their own instruments in a park across the street. “We hated you,” the girls explained later.

Reaction to their antics isn’t always so extreme. At another show, for a group of poets at the Oak Street Theater, Anderson and Corrigan dressed like giant worms in layers of cloudy plastic bubble wrap. They writhed onstage to a roomful of blank looks, then announced they wouldn’t stop until every bubble was popped. They called on the audience to help, but no one came forward. One man sat with his head in his hands for the entire performance. “It was total Yoko Ono,” they said of the episode.

The host of a semimonthly experimental radio show on WMPG (“A Butte for Huso,” 10:30 p.m. every other Monday), Anderson is naturally gregarious, prone to clowning. Corrigan, occasional drummer and guitarist for local bands Peepshow, the Franklin Mint, and Thruthewires is more serious. He grows restless, just talking, and gets up to roam the basement — a mine field of empty beer bottles — rummaging through forgotten piles of paper and props culled from dumpsters.

The first time they collaborated, in 1996, Anderson was releasing a 12-inch LP of experimental soundscapes, and asked Corrigan, an old college friend and roommate, to illustrate the cover. When Anderson saw the results, he called the record label and asked to re-record the entire album.

“The stuff I did first didn’t live up to his illustration,” he recalls. “He hit my ideas better than I did.”

A year later, Anderson moved from Boston to Portland, where Corrigan was, and the pair started staging atonal jam sessions with non-traditional instruments: plastic infant toys from the Salvation Army, an empty yogurt container rigged with a Slinky, shoes equipped with bedspring lifts and Radio Shack microphones.

Sometime later, Corrigan drove a hole through a painting he was making, envisioned a speaker behind it, and asked Anderson to design a sound collage for the piece. When audio met visual, “it was amazing,” Anderson says. “Each held its own, and together they transformed it completely.” The result, a gurgling picture of a ship furnace fed with dead birds, hung in an exhibition at Portland’s old adult theater, now the Skinny.

Subsequent collaborations have included “Bella’s First Tangle,” a twig-based collage (“bungled taxidermy,” they call it) housed in an oddly-shaped coffin. Sound was broadcast from a speaker in the “eye” of the creature. New work by Corrigan and Anderson will be part of a show that opens May 10 at Local 188, where Corrigan is part-owner. Anti-Friend Hut has been an important part of his coming-of-age as a visual artist, he says, liberating him to “put down my illustation hat and paint.”

They may look entirely spontaneous, but Hut productions arise from writing and brainstorming sessions. The members play with language and compose absurdist poetry, inspired by Dada ideas they first admired at Massachusetts College of Art. “After all the writing, we end up with an epiphany, and it all makes sense to us,” Corrigan says. There’s usually a written manifesto handed out to the audience that can help them interpret the chaos “if they try really hard.”

Not that performances are scripted. Much is left to chance, especially in public, where dogs and pissed-off little girls are free to get involved. Costumes are often heavy and awkward, inhibiting movement and vision and contributing to the unpredictable quality.

Each performance is captured on video for later critique. Anderson and Corrigan often judge themselves harshly; at the annual Sacred and Profane festival last year, they used a real bonfire and guillotine to execute dummies representing “past shows we thought sucked.” Two excited strangers tried to throw Anderson in the fire as well, but relented before a genuine crisis developed.

Lately, the pair has explored more complex concepts than in the early days, when “we’d make a bunch of noise and then kill each other.”

“Is it performance, is it noise, is it art? I don’t think in those terms anymore. I’m too busy doing it,” Anderson says. “When people see it, they either accept it and embrace it, or exit quickly.” n

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.