So yes, by just declaring it, Monk In Pieces gets to be the Quadrophenia of avant-garde performance artist documentaries, with all the different “tracks” of Monk’s life cumulating in a complete portrait as huge as a star constellation. We are taken back to the dawn of the 70s when starving artists rubbed elbows with street junkies because of the community that formed around the cheap rents. You could grab these huge, cheap lofts and only have to work part-time while devoting yourself to pushing the envelope.
Monk was a spearhead of this and really helped New York establish itself as the performance art citadel of the planet by the twilight of the last century, pioneering places in art without paths that many performers of the future would later inhabit. One of my biggest legal highs at Sarah Lawrence was a workshop that was taught by Meredith Monk, whom I was already hip to from her movie Book Of Days.
“It is achingly brilliant and needs to be stampeded to immediately in the direction of your choice.”
Monk refers to this same workshop a little over an hour in the film as that was where she met her life partner, Mieke van Hoek. It is a very amusing story, and she tells it just like I remember it. It is also very surreal to realize I’ve been appearing in the background of a “how I met my soulmate” story being told for years by Meredith MFing Monk.
It is also the ultimate revenge against all the critics who were wrong that Monk has become a permanent pop culture fixture, as everybody in the world has watched The Big Lebowski and heard her work in the angel scene. Shebar and Roberts spotlight her artistic creations to the extent that their importance resonates enough to be picked up on a Geiger counter. All of the times Monk broke through the barriers of imagination are seen, as well as how those breakthroughs were absorbed from the fringes into the big pop ocean. Monk In Pieces is a showstopper for the woman who stopped all of our preconceptions of what a show could be. It is achingly brilliant and needs to be stampeded to immediately in the direction of your choice.
"…achingly brilliant and needs to be stampeded to immediately..."
