Chapter 9: Return to America. The imperfect body and the difference between performance art and ballet. From Blood Telling to the Diabetic Luchador. Your Blood will betray you. Tales of the Soft Cyborg: The Spaniard.

 

Chapter 9: Return to America. The imperfect body and the difference between performance art and ballet. From Blood Telling to the Diabetic Luchador. Your Blood will betray you.  Tales of the Soft Cyborg: The Spaniard.

Flash forward to 2004, I had just moved to Seattle after living in Europe and teaching English at the University of Johannes Gutenberg—I had recently been separated from my ex-wife and I was looking for work at local art galleries, consistently being told that either I was perfect, but that there were no positions available or that I was over-qualified—one person from a local museum even told me that if they hired me I’d me trying to get their job. I laughed but it was probably true.

​After several years, after having lived in Europe, after having been married and gone to graduate school, I was single again and ready to return to doing performance art, this time in Seattle, WA. After a devastating divorce that had left me demolished, I took a year off from everything and had just begun showing work again, especially sculpture and painting. I had recently moved into public housing at the Olive Tower on Boren and discovered the Faire Gallery Cafe, where I was to spend long hours talking about everything with Elisheba Johnson the owner, who became a dear friend and who gave me my first solo shows in Seattle.

​At this time, as well, I began to write for the local online newspaper, the Post Intelligencer and became fast friends with local artist Ryan "Henry" Ward and a particular band of Street Artists, known as the Predators of the Wild—a name chosen by Ward, himself.  The "Soft Cyborg" had moved into the world of sculpture, adding ghost sculptures and moving, flexible, latex sculptures to its expanding oeuvre.

 

Soft Cyborg: Ghost Story: A mixed media audio/visual sculpture included the video "Soft Cyborg: Brothers," which was played below a sheet ghost forcing the viewer to look under the skirted folds of the ghost's sheet. While latex covered Holiday toys became actual soft robots that moved at the push of a button. During my time at the University of California, Davis, I had been working with latex and plaster making large sculptures, so it was a logical next step for latex to find its way into my performance as well.

​"Soft Cyborg: The Tale of the Spaniard" took place at the Anne Bonney, an antique shop that was next door to the Faire Gallery Cafe.

​The Spaniard, the creature/protagonist/antagonist in this performance was very loosely based on the infamous shaving scene from the Melville tale, "Benito Cereno." More for the feeling than in any concrete way, but also especially for the way that the Melville story depicts the consummate definition of an unreliable narrator. This performance, too, is about narrative storytelling and how it cannot be taken at face value and is always based on point of view and self-protection.

​In this performance, I started by sitting on a chair, stage right that was situated on the second floor of the antique shop. Dressed in black wearing a mask that I had made by pouring latex over a mannequin head, which had the effect of looking like creamy fluid, as if my skin itself was melting away or perhaps like the face of a burn victim. The outfit was made complete by the inclusion of an antique sailor's cap that I found in the shop and a stuffed monkey that I also found there and should have purchased, but I was too poor at the time. As I sat there I began to motion to the monkey and like my father with our stuffed animals or the puppets that mesmerized me as a child, the stuffed creature came to life and the Spaniard, like a modern-day "Commander McBragg." started to recount his silent and dubious war stories.

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In fact, this entire performance was about telling stories, whether real or imagined, truth or lies. The performance began with the Spaniard either speaking through or speaking to the stuffed monkey and ended with the Spaniard wearing a sailor's cap playing records, telling war stories and painting chocolate pictures—harkening back to Sugar Bear in the Salon performances. Telling my stories and his own—this was a collage of many of my earlier performances.