Purge II: Brian Lobel

Lobel’s work is introspective, but not self indulgent. In this piece he looks at the nature of friendship in an age where social media makes friendship an easy, and it would seem meaningless, option. Starting some time back by asking an anonymous audience online to judge whether his Facebook friends should be kept or deleted, he also asked those same friends to tell him why they should be kept. Some chose not to be kept, some begged to stay. In parallel, Lobel describes the beginning and ending of his relationship with a partner, Grant, a relationship that started online and ended there too.

We the audience were asked to join in, to add a friend or delete one, to vote for who should stay or be deleted. And for a Facebook user this all made very interesting food for thought, but what for those who are not? Probing the basis of why we choose people to befriend and why they want to be our friends is fascinating, and Lobel poses this idea with so much charm that you might feel that you want him to be your friend. Or do you? After all, for all that charm, this is fascinatingly manipulative stuff that left me wanting more – much more than was allowed in what was a very fast moving hour of art performance.

Dome Studio, 18 May 2014

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