Rolodex
Lawrence Steger
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Larry (Lawrence) perches on a stool in the spotlight. He pulls a card off of a Rolodex like a petal from a daisy. He reads into a microphone, his affect at once mordant and impish. “Are you there?” He drops it. Cards accumulate on the Club Lower Link’s cabaret stage floor. It’s a turn he repeats in various forms, a recitation forever mutating, although seemingly not randomized. The parade of lines, some quotations, others original (who can tell the difference?) contrast—sad, funny, poetic, obscure—constituting a list of sorts with no story, no development or resolution, only pure exposition: a performance of beginnings.
Lawrence Steger, a Chicago-based performance and multimedia artist, died at the age of 38 in 1999 of AIDS-related illness. Shortly after his death, I inherited his writing files, and in the years since I have delved into them as the basis for several lectures that I have written regarding his work and life. In early 2023, I co-curated, with Lin Hixson and Caroline Picard, an exhibition at UIC’s Gallery 400 titled Reckless Rolodex in response to his work. We derived the title from memories of performances at Club Lower Links on Newport Avenue, in the basement of the original Link’s Hall building: a series Lawrence and Douglas Grew curated and organized in 1990 called Crimes of Reckless Youth, and the solo performance Lawrence presented many times in the early 1990s known as Rolodex.