basekamp team > Projects

Hegemonic Bar

project description
press release
instructions
photos from opening
installation views
money
credits

Press release

Hegemonic Bar
members of basekamp & friends
1999, Base Kamp gallery

The Hegemonic Bar is an interactive performance and installation. The opening and performance is from 5 to 10pm, March 12, 1999. The installation will continue to be on view March 13 through 31, by appointment only. Hegemony is generically defined as predominance (the greek hegemon, meaning leader), and is generally used to signify some form of power struggle and hierarchy, between people of one class, gender, orientation, physiognomy, race, nationality etc, and another. The Hegemonic Bar is fragmented into 3 separate rooms, reflecting a generic 3 class system of lower, middle, and upper in order to generally signify class stratification. The rooms themselves increase in elevation as they decrease in scale, each with its appropriate decor, music, drink, and price. As individuals enter the door, they are classed at random, and given a proportionate amount of money to spend at the bar appropriate to their class. The amount of money increases as the number of individuals decreases, proportionately from lower, to middle, to upper. (There will also be non-alcoholic versions of each house drink available, for those who are taking medication, driving, operating heavy machinery, or underage). The installation focuses on class hierarchy as an example of hegemony, through the form of a bar. It self-consciously simplifies the complexities of oppression and hegemony as a whole, for the sake of a participatory and partly parodic performance. The blatant reduction of complete representation, mixed with alcohol functions to avoid pretension and apprehension in conversation, while the stage is set for a potential saternalian role reversal and spontaneous enactments of class mobility. Although the role play can be seen as cathartic, and the suggestion of mobility as idealistic, the framed superstructure of the bar remains firmly intact, and the festival remains contained within the boundaries of the fabricated installation and the paradigms of the participants.