Performance #4 - Honest as Hell: Poltergeist
In
1993, I was asked to be a part of a night of performance, which was, I believe,
made up of a bunch of us that had been in Joanna Frueh’s first seminal
performance art course. At the time I was heavily influenced by the ideas of
ephemeral, experiential art and especially the "Happenings" of Alan
Kaprow, Dick Higgens, George Brecht and The New School, which brought a kind of
individualistic, "Mannerist," almost every day, mundane,
lackadaisical approach to performance art, it's narratives, symbology and anti-aesthetics.
My
third performance returned things to a very simple set-up, took away any real
sense of narrative and should be seen as a kind of sequel to "Exquisite
Corpse." One way of looking at that
performance where I told death-stories was as though I had “passed away” on the
operating table and this could be seen as my/his ghost, haunting us—unable to
stop telling us his stories from beyond the grave, trapped by his need to
perform and explain his ghost identity.
"Poltergeist:
Honest As Hell II" was also meant to be a companion piece to a solo
sculptural exhibition that I had up concurrently in the Font Door Gallery,
which was in the same building as this performance and, which was meant to show
that I saw no difference between my sculptural work and my performance work. In
a similar way, the DUM-DUM Boy was also both a multi-media performance and
installation work--including fabricated steel dunce-caps, steel chairs and
tables in the series. Essentially, in my
work of the time--you were meant to see everything as being connected—with
me/myself being the connective tissue that held it all together. This is an
aspect that once it took hold, has not changed since then—I am the center of
the work. I am the point at which it all
starts out from.
"Poltergeist:
Honest as Hell II" was also the first of my art pieces, aside from a few
drawings and many preliminary sketches, that dealt with the idea and form of
the ghost, especially the “sheet ghost.” Going back to the many ghost stories of
my childhood and adolescence, including "imaginary friends,"
poltergeists in our early teen years and full-blown hauntings as we began to
reach adulthood, ghosts, at this point were one of the few, truly biographical
objects that I allowed myself at the time. Over time, the form, shape and conceptuality
of the ghost and especially the “Sheet ghost” became a major symbol in my work,
in performance, but also especially in my installation work I began to tell
many “ghost stories” and began to love this classic, cliched almost comical
shape. The idea of the “living sheet” as a metaphor for the living dead--it
intrigues me.
The
return of the dead to haunt the living is, in fact, a recurring image in all my
work and the dead always return for a reason. It is not only proper
burial that they seek, but to alert us to the reasons for the fissures from
which they have erupted. These momentary lapses and logical breaks are
examples of narrative parapraxis, or textual slips of the tongue. These
are moments in which the main narrative slips up and attempts to warn us of
some ensuing crisis—though it is not clear whether my performances are the main
narrative from which the ghosts slip or whether they are themselves cracks in
our reality from which an alternative narrative arises. Seen this way the
performances are their own fantasy spaces where anything can happen and these ghosts
appear to be harbingers alerting the audience that they are no longer in
familiar territory but rather it is in these moments that the things that the real
world least wants to admit are spoken clearly.
Sometimes.
The
Ghosts alert us to the threat of a threat--the dissolution of symbolic
order--the threat of what Lacan refers to as "the Real." The
desire to sublimate the existence of the Real is an attempt to look away from
the Real because it is too menacing, too frightening to be seen. According to Slavoj Zizek, the Lacanian Real
is the chaotic, threatening "grey and formless mist, pulsing slowly as if
with inchoate life...the presymbolic substance in its abhorrent
vitality." The vision that our parapraxic glimpses into the
Real show us, is more than merely indeterminate. We are prepared for
that. Because fiction acts as an understatement, a trivialization, a
"mere" mirror of reality, it is here that the Real can be glimpsed
(it can reveal itself without revealing itself). All of the mechanisms
which allow us to repress that which we fear in our lived experience (our
"realities") are relaxed--by the knowledge that we aren't actually
looking at the "real world." And it is the very relaxation of
this kind of vigil that allows the ghosts of the Real to haunt us. If, as
Lacan says, we construct a set of realities to keep us from ever having to face
the Real, and if we tell ourselves that fiction is not "reality,"
then it is here that we should be unsurprised to find the Real most able to
break free of the restraints in which we have sought to contain it—such is the
nature of the stage space and by extension the nature of performance.
Sometimes.
Though,
I still believed in the lofty Duchamp/Cage/Rauschenberg/Johnsian stance of
denying the artist's presence and not allowing identity or personal narrative
to interfere in or decide the course of their own work. This idea/ideal is
something that I continue to go back and forth with, never settling on a single
position of comfort, creating a kind of "Ghost Identity" a kind of
blasted narrative that exists somewhere between storytelling, abstraction
performance and obfuscation. This may be because my sensibilities have always
lain fairly uncomfortably between conceptuality and the identity era of the
nineties and beyond, though the idea that a person like me could ever truly ignore
identity may be a misapprehension and an artifact of a kind of privilege that I
don't actually own.
My
sculptural work of the time began, increasingly, to refer to my own, imperfect
body, introducing full-body casts, clay impressions of my arms, plaster casts
of my hands and plaster representations of my brain connected to steel armature-like
tendrils. Even the action figure
installations that would follow would lead me to far more autobiographical work
in graduate school and I suppose that, if I'm honest with myself—my performance
artwork, sculpture, painting and drawings of the time were all fairly autobiographical,
continue to be and always have been. This only becomes clearer as we get to
UCDavis, graduate school and the creation of Putoh, The Soft Cyborg Dialectic
and the collage recreations of my Teen-age bedroom.
When
I say that I considered Alan Kaprow and the "New School' artists to be
Mannerist in their approach, for the sake of any easy to work with definition
we will consider "Mannerism" to be a period that is a break of sorts
from the traditional styles of a time, a break from the classical, but also a
continuation of it and a growth from it, generating work that tends to be more
stylistic and individual than it is about replicating the accepted rules of
what is considered classic, rote, etc.. It is then, a kind of collecting,
internalizing and understanding of the rules, elements and tropes of a previous
period and taking that knowledge to play with these tropes. In essence, a Mannerist period is one in which
artists take and make the tropes, styles, tricks, aesthetics, philosophies,
limitations etc. and bend them to their will, making them their own.
Essentially, it is play after the rules have been set, internalized and
understood.
I
liked to call this group the "ill-mannered Mannerists"—because their
desire was to remake the rules, remake art in their own image. Back when I was
a child, the first exhibition I ever saw was an installation at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art. It was an exhibition of Mannerism in which all of the
paintings were of women and men with the most translucent white skin and the
longest of all possible long necks. It was a group show, involving several
mannerist artists and included paintings and sculptures of the period. The
artists had reworked anatomy to the point that it no longer had anything to do
with reality—think of Ingres and his reclining nude with the extra bones in her
back and take that many steps further.
When
I first saw these paintings and sculptures, I became frantically worried and
also intrigued and thought that perhaps this meant that there was another race
of creatures on our planet, all of them with ridiculously long necks and
perfect skin. I took these paintings at
face value and I asked my mother if they were, in fact, aliens. She just smiled and said that that was the
style of the time, that the artists painted not what they saw, but instead they
painted what they wanted to see—they were creating worlds as they wanted them
to be. That stayed with me and it was
exactly that which I was attempting in Poltergeist—to create and take control
of my own world. Whether I failed or succeeded, it was an important choice I
was making at the time and it remains with me still.
In
this performance, staged in the same space that Joanna Frueh taught her seminar
courses, dressed in a sheet, with no eyeholes from which to look out of, I
built up and knocked down piles of books, over and over again, recreating the
activities of a "noisy ghost."
There were very few words and almost no narrative to guide an audience. The room, itself was in complete darkness and
audience members had no idea what they would experience. The fact that I was wearing a shroud with no
eyeholes meant that I too could barely see--the same as the audience. The
effect being that this was as much an experience for myself as it was for the
audience.
When
I felt that audience members had been in the space long enough, I began to
shout at them to "Get out!" and threw books out into the theater
angrily, hitting more than a few of the audience members—still, despite this,
most of the audience stayed for the entire performance.
During
the event as I built higher and higher stacks of books—I filled my mind with
all of the times that I had come across ghosts. The Haunted Mansion, of
course! Doctor's office tables always
had a copy of "Gus Was a Friendly Ghost" and Scholastic Books always
pushed the adventures of "Georgie the Ghost." As kids, we would
always pretend that we had imaginary ghost friends, one for each of us, based
on Jane Thayer’s Gus, Robert Bright’s Georgie and Casper the friendly ghost.
Later, as teenagers, we would actually be haunted by poltergeists who broke
downstairs' windows, called out our names and who, once even threw a glasses of
red paint at our parents during an intense argument. Yet, somehow, as I grew
older these memories grew dimmer and dimmer, replaced by uncertainty, disbelief
and this—this performance--the performance of a set of memories, abstracted into
the mundane activity of building up towers of books and knocking them down,
thereby keeping the reality of the past and its ghosts at a safe distance—where
a sheet can become a good stand in—and all ghosts can be friendly for a short
time.
I
read somewhere, or heard it told that all Superhero stories are born of trauma,
from Superman to Batman, from the light to the dark knight—each story begins as
a tragedy. Each is a story of loss and
for a time I asked myself whether all performance arises out of trauma. Is all
story-telling created out of tragedy? The answer, like many came from my
sculpture professor, Robert Morrison—"Don't be so maudlin." he said
"performance, like sculpture, like all communication must be well-rounded
and created under all circumstances and the performance artist must be prepared
to talk about everything, to any and all who will listen. An artist must be an artist for all seasons"
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