Artist, writer, curator, and musician Lexie Mountain is planning to break the Guinness World Record for the longest game of “telephone”, the childhood pastime wherein participants whisper a phrase from one end of a line to another. Along the way, the message might be misheard, mutate, and end up with a totally different meaning. It’s a fitting endeavor for Lexie Mountain, who has a prolific oeuvre of examining and manipulating meaning in a variety of media—from performances live-remixing audience-recorded tapes to dissecting the tropes and idiosyncrasies of art history.
This Sunday, (hopefully) more than 1,330 people will snake throughout the galleries of the Walter’s Art Museum in Baltimore, following a line of red tape, to pass along a phrase Lexie will whisper in one participant’s ear. We sat down to discuss the project, Egyptian gods, and documentation just across the park from the museum.
