Guerilla installation and performance

Late one night at the San Francisco Art Institute, Dartaigne's sister Dolly (Tiare Ferrari) talked the night security guard into letting her and her brother into the locked Diego Rivera Gallery. They were dressed formally in their most elegant evening wear and carried art materials, sticks and a pro cassette recorder. The cavernous gallery was hosting a sculpture show: 8 or 10 heavy, human-scale constructions made mostly of half-inch or thicker cast iron stock welded into different crude shapes and thoroughly rusted. Several of them were on iron wheels but were very reluctant to move. For hours Dolly and Daryl pushed the sculptures and beat on them with sticks and made drawings on the empty walls. They recorded the eerie, primitive, industrial sounds of the sculptures. At the end, all were all returned to their original positions and the gallery was locked up for the night.

The Didactyl Brothers were an art team composed of Dartaigne (Max) and Daryl (Mark Norris, MFA CalArts). They made impromptu installations and music recordings over more than a fifteen year period, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the Mojave Desert. Their work was rapidly executed but often monumental in scale.