"Exquisite Corpse." Performance Art. Originally performed in Joanna Freuh's Performance Art Course. This reconstruction documents my second performance. 1992. Images and photography by Krista Lee Wolfe. Music by Haunted Me -- Pleasure.
Beads of sweat were pouring down my forehead onto my ears and down the sides of my face. With my eyes wide open, I could only see the white of the sheet-become-shroud that was covering me from head to ankles—leaving my toes exposed.
On my big toe hung a tag with a big X and on the opposite side, my name, age and vital statistics. Picture it in your head and you know exactly what this looked like. Lying on a large, white, operating table, I was perfectly still. In the background I could hear and was vaguely aware that there was an audience forming in the dark room.
Around me rose the scent of Lysol, bleach and rubbing alcohol—definitely a heady mix, which in conjunction with my current situation was filling me with nerves and making me kind of dizzy at the same time. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest shaking the void of the space that held me trapped in its wombic, membranous cavern. Ambient noises started to creep in, “Dr. Koeple, Dr. Koeple, Paging Dr. Koeple! Chris Bordeaux 319!” repeated over and over as if on a loop--which of course, it was. As I lay there, I remembered the first time that I ever did a performance art piece. Not performance, like singing or dancing, but performance art, like Chris Burden, Joseph Beuys, and Paul McCarthy.
I was dressed in a clown mask, black shorts and Minnie Mouse ears. I could barely see anything. In the background a loop tape played the “Bag of Laughs” from the death of the Joker in the first Batman movie. I was propped up against a wall, as Robert Morrison’s sculpture class walked in, all of them watching me as I stood there, loop after loop playing endlessly, until my shaking legs gave way and I dropped from sheer exhaustion. As I stood there, I remembered the inspiration for this piece. I was walking through Toys R Us in Reno one day, when I passed a wall of laughing bags and, just as I did so, Reno had its largest earthquake up to that date.
Bag after bag began to laugh, loudly, maniacally--the moment was terrifying--it sliced deep into the heart of me. It meant so much, it meant so many things all at once--eviscerating the seriousness of life and opening death up to the ironic, sarcastic meaninglessness that only a mechanical, mindless wall full of novelty gags could begin to approach. A memory within a memory. A dream within a dream. I snapped back into reality. That’s when the lights went up and the performance began. As I began to speak, telling stories and recounting all the times that death had crossed my path, trying to make sense of each and every one of these abstracted moments, I felt as though the sheet over my head was bobbing back and forth frantically.
I was certain that the effect was being ruined, that I was moving and rattling beneath the sheet and that what should have been a very serious piece about life and death was turning, instead, into a comical scene, ruined by my inability to lie perfectly still. However, immediately afterward, when the class met to discuss the performance--the other students in Joanna Frueh’s Performance Art Class, raved and celebrated the performance, telling me that it didn’t look like the sheet was moving at all and some even wondered if my voice had been piped in, which it had not.
A perfect effect. A perfect performance.
A perfect moment.
Everyone was fooled.
I was beaming with pride!
The Subaltern Has Teeth! A meditation on art, oppression, life, and post-modern modernity Enzyme Magazine. 2016.
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