Chapter 3. An Exquisite Corpse, A Car Crash, Joanna Frueh and the Second Performance

 

Chapter 3.

An Exquisite Corpse, A Car Crash, Joanna Frueh and the Second Performance:

I have always been amazed by the sheer, almost-infinite power of the black box—of an empty stage to become the setting for nearly anything that anyone can possibly imagine.  As far back as I can remember I have always loved, needed and sought out the sense of verisimilitude that only exists in a make-believe world created by an artist attempting to fool us into believing.

It is, in fact, quite possible that every performative instinct in me was born on one fateful day when, as children, my brother, sister and I were definitely tricked into believing when we went to a puppet show of Hansel and Gretel in Montclair, California. I remember being fascinated, or more like mesmerized by these floating, life-like creatures and the tiny world they inhabited. I was both frightened and enchanted and at the end of this performance, I was hooked and I never wanted to leave.

​I think something changed for me that day and the line between reality and fantasy was broken down forever more. But that was a lifetime ago and the line between the real, reality and fantasy is very tenuous at that age, anway!

​I was born in Southern California, half-way between Hollywood and Disneyland. My first memory is of the warmth of the California sun on my cheeks and visions of the bright blue sky overhead as the song "A Theme From a Summer Place" played all around me in the background of the car radio. From birth, then, when it came to telling the difference between what was real and what was make-believe--well, I never really stood a chance!

​I came from a family of three siblings and when we were kids, we used be left alone at the Hollywood Wax Museum and auto museum and would spend literally days staring at the Batmobile, Bat-cycle and full-sized wax models of old Hollywood stars and one amazing magic shop. When we got home, we would make Batman and Robin costumes and fight invisible bad guys until sundown--because no one wanted to be the bad guy!

​Disneyland, too, was such a prevalent part of my childhood that I actually recall nightmares of the Haunted Mansion long before I even remember having been to the park! My father used to taunt us by saying, "You're nothing but a nothing, you're nothing but a nothing..." which was a song from some scary Disney cartoon about a mouse who wanted to be a bat. He would also take our stuffed animals and trick us into believing that they were alive--though my brother who was always much smarter than I, was never fooled.

​At the same time, so many of the realities of the world were beginning to dawn on me. When I was a kid, I was always enchanted by the full-page spread in comic books that showed the nuclear family of Sea Monkeys and their underwater castle. One day, we finally, somehow found a crack in my mother's impervious armor and managed to get her to order them for us and we were so excited! So incredibly excited! Before she sent the quarter or whatever amount it was that she taped to a piece of cardboard to mail away, she took a moment to warn us that they didn't look like they did on the tv and the comics, but my parents were always making outrageous claims, so we just ignored her. I wanted to watch these tiny little creatures wearing ties and watching teevee and having little faces and looking just like they did in the advertisements. What we got, of course, was brine shrimp—and we were devastated!  It was the first time that I began to realize that maybe some of the things on this planet were just not as cool as they are portrayed to be. It was a very important and very sobering thing that we all learned that day and it created a tension that never left me.

Flash forward back to UNR, a little later, in performance artist and writer Joanna Frueh’s performance course I saw the same dark space of an emptied classroom become many things; a hospital room, the visceral, liquid spaces inside of a body, a madcap circus tent, a desert oasis—and even, just a generic, minimalist art space.

I remember how amazingly excited I was on the day that I discovered that Dr. Frueh was going to be teaching a studio course on performance art. I just knew that no matter what, I needed to be in that class. I had no idea however, just how much my life would be changed by this class and I also had no idea how much my life would change before the first day of that class would come to pass.

​But in that moment before everything changed, Robert Morrison had brought me my very first Starbuck's ice-cold mocha latte and I was bouncing around like an extremely excited Sea Monkey-boy, spouting out all sorts of ideas, with a mind full of uninhibited possibilities and too much caffeine!

​Only a very few weeks later, however, I would find myself laying out in the warm, morning sun of the Mojave Desert. In the background, my girlfriend was screaming out in pain calling out for her mother, while my sister was keeping local Christian vultures from administering "Last Rites" on us. For my part, I woke up on the scene, spoke incredulously the words, "I'm alive?" Then blacked out again. I remember the dark ring of unconsciousness circling around me and reality closed up, going black once again.

​Of the actual car accident, I would later describe the incident to insurance reporters as feeling "as though we had been sucked through the back window" and as being lifted out of the car and that this was the last thing I remembered. I didn't realize at the time that it was my brother's arm that had serendipitously broken the back window and saved our lives. An event that cost my brother the use of that arm. Which is something I never forgave myself for since I had bribed everyone to come on that trip.

The accident which happened on our way to the "Happiest Place on Earth" also caused the death of a dear friend and marked the end of an age of innocence by reminding all of us that death is very much always around waiting in the wings and that nothing is ever certain. Not love. Not friendship. Not anything. Not even life or Sea Monkeys!

After a month of recuperation and rehabilitation, I was able to return to UNR, just in time for my classes and especially in time for Joanna's performance art course! I was ecstatic. Bruised and with one eye bloodied and walking on crutches, but ecstatic all the same!

​EXQUISITE CORPSE, THE 2ND PERFORMANCE:

Fast forward to the day of my second performance.

​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 on one side and my name, age and vital statistics inscribed on the other.

​Picture it in your head and you know exactly what this looked like.

Lying on a large, white, operating table which for no good reason had been left in one of the drawing classrooms and which I borrowed for the performance, I lay perfectly still. In the background I could hear and was vaguely aware that there was an audience forming in the dark room.

​Around me arose 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. Koeppel, Dr. Koeppel. Paging Dr. Koeppel! Chris Bordeaux 319!" repeated over and over as if on a loop—which of course, it was.

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! That was my second performance and I can still remember every moment of it.

​Looking back at Joanna Frueh's class and especially at Joanna Frueh herself, this amazing and powerful woman and professor at the University of Nevada-Reno has proven to be one of the most important people in my life. She is someone who I hold in the highest esteem and whom I respect in the extreme and who taught me several amazingly important and valuable lessons that I hold dear to this very day.

​Fast-forward a few months.

Dr. Frueh was working on her latest book dealing with women and aging and in association with the work that Dr. Frueh was doing, the amazing and imposing artist Rachel Rosenthal—gave an awesome presentation to a packed audience. Ms. Rosenthal was especially intriguing to me because I was (and am) such a huge fan of Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and Jasper Johns--who she used to hang out with—the only female in a very queer, very masculinist circle!

​Her talk that night was amazing, but it was also frightening as she was absolutely honest about the process of aging, something that almost no one ever is. She spoke of the shifting perception of time as you age, she told stories from her youth in the arts and she spoke about her relationship to many decisions she had made and how, while others always claim that they wouldn't change a thing—that that stance for her was far too simplistic—inauthentic and actually, often dishonest.

​She stood in front of the audience—a true giant of a woman, bald and full of strength and told a crowd of students in their twenties that if they were doing things right their view of the world should change every ten years—that our relationship to the rules, our perception of right and wrong should be in constant change—that when we are faced with the same decisions, we should not be afraid to find new solutions.

​That night, too, she also spoke of life in a way that kind of haunts me to this day. She spoke of history as existing on the threads of a screw—each point moving toward the end—the spirals becoming tighter, shorter and faster, toward the inevitable end—this was her reality--this was her addition to the game of civilization. This is what her years of life on the planet had added to the equation, and that, ultimately, is my point.

​It is a large part of human nature to make sense of things—to take stock of the meaning of existence. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what it means to be an artist, what it means to be a human being. I spend a lot of time attempting to make sense of this world in which we all live. I believe we all seek to make sense of things—in essence, to find our own kind of enlightenment. I believe that it is human nature. I have spent a great deal of time writing about the mechanics of power, the history of knowledge and the structure of intellectual and artistic revolutions and this invests my work. Sometimes...