Too Far In to Be “Out”

Thomas Lavazzi

Department of Humanities/English
Savannah State University
lavazzit@tigerpaw.ssc.peachnet.edu

 

Mark Russell, ed. Out of Character: Rants, Raves, and Monologues from Today’s Top Performance Artists.New York: Bantam, 1997.

 

Out of Character anthologizes the work of thirty-one contemporary performance artists in ten times as many pages, from high poptech artists like Laurie Anderson and big-ticket monologists like Spalding Gray to less well-known ethno rappers like Robbie McCauley and multi-character soloists like Peggy Pettitt. While many of the performance texts are captivating, the collection’s emphasis on the monologue format, its lack of critical apparatus, and the absence of semiotic analysis of the mise en scène of individual performance events produce a limited view of the contemporary Performance Art scene.

 

Each brief chapter opens with a full-page photo of the performance artist, followed by a “biographical questionnaire” of the Playboy’s-Most-Eligible-Bachelors variety (in addition to basic personal information like Name, Stage Name, and Birthplace, the categories include Favorite Performance Experience, Most Terrifying Performance Experience, Hobbies, Reading List, and Favorite Quote). Following the profile is a brief “Artist’s Notes” section, which usually consists of a first-person commentary (ranging in style from the notorious grant-writer’s “artist statement” to casual self-contemplations) or an excerpt from an interview (conducted by someone other than the editor); this section provides helpful grounding for the scripts (often excepts from larger works) that follow.

 

Despite the bubble gum and flip card attitude of the setup, which does not always jibe with the slant of the “Artist’s Notes” (“flippant,” as Russell admits in his “Foreword” (xii), without accounting for how such a textual performance relates to his overall project), many of the performance scripts are insightful, witty, and engaging. Marga Gomez, for example, blends stand-up comedy with childhood recollections and incisive socio-cultural commentary (“When did I go from positive and perky to bitter and pathetic? I’m just like the first lesbians I ever saw. I was ten. I saw them on David Susskind’s Open End…” (165)). Penny Arcade deploys stream-of-consciousness personae to generate edgy satire and confront us with voices from “out/over there” that we would rather not hear (“You wanna help me out? With fifty cents or a buck? I can buy lunch with a buck! Shit. My name is Girl! An’ I am homeless!” (22)). Arcade’s troubling voices speak to Eric Bogosian’s dark humor, which brings us to the verge of a self-annihilating otherness. In addition to excerpts from Bogosian’s confrontational solo and ensemble pieces, the selection here includes “The Poem,” from Advocate. A stirring, eerie, and evocative piece, “The Poem” is performed in a dark room at a desk with a gooseneck lamp illuminating the “Narrator’s” face in a “spooky fashion” (“Come here, my little children. Come here, small tender ones. Into my arms. Into my teeth of streets. Run into the midnight traffic. Fall against the hot drops of water from your mother’s tears. Laughing into my teeth….” (46)). Though Bogosian is known popularly as a stand-up comic, the selections here highlight his evocative, provocative use of mise en scène, running performance along the edge of consciousness.

 

Bogosian is not alone among the artists represented who deploy basic means to create poetic effects. Ishmael Houston-Jones imagines death through the body. In his 1971 piece included here, “Score for Dead,” Jones dances through a litany of prerecorded names of the dead (relatives of friends, celebrities, fictional characters) in a semi-ritualistic event, part homage and part shamanistic transference of the power of death (“When I hear a name that has a particular resonance for me, fall down to the floor in some emblematic way and try to rise again before the next name is called. As the next and the next and then the next names are spoken, repeat the falling… and rising dance… become exhausted with the effort” (195)). Houston-Jones unpacks the mystique of death by embodying–dancing–its relentless rhythm. Houston-Jones is the one of the few artists represented in Out of Character for whom the monologue (in one form or another) is not the primary aesthetic form. At the opposite end of the sensibility spectrum from Houston-Jones is West Coast performance artist Ron Athey, who explores religious fetishism through satirical texts embodied in a tableau-style mise en scène incorporating “medical-based s/m techniques” (34) (he describes Martyrs and Saints, for example, as a “pageant of erotic torture and penance” (34)). While delivering a monologue in 4 Scenes–“a true story from my childhood” (35)–Athey is shackled nude to a column à la St. Sebastian, painfully resplendent with tattoos and kinky body piercings: “From the time I was a baby, my grandma and aunt Vena repeatedly informed me, ‘You’ve been born with the calling on your life’… According to this message from the holiest of holies, I was to sacrifice the playthings of the world in order to fulfill the plans of God” (36).

 

A riveting narrative excerpt from Gray’s Anatomy, by Spalding Gray, is quite at home in the center of the collection–perhaps as its centerpiece. The relatively detailed and informative note preceding the selection emphasizes the importance of personal presence in performance (“being there is everything” (169)), while revealing a theoretically hip Gray (“an inverted Method actor… I use autobiographic emotional memory to play myself rather than some other character” (171)) who nevertheless has a down-to-earth side (“This is how I work. I keep a journal, a Mead wide-ruled composition notebook” (169)). Gray’s performances coalesce around the personal and memory. For Gray the goal of performance is the “presentation of self in a theatrical setting” (171). The excerpt here demonstrates the sheer force such attention can achieve. Though Gray claims that his monologues are initially improvised in front of a live audience from key word outlines, the writing tightens through successive performances to deliver exquisite moments of narrative suspense, as when Gray describes his visit to a Philippine psychic surgeon for an eye operation. On the day of the operation, Gray tries to postpone the dreaded moment by, uncannily enough, telling stories (“But Pini [the surgeon] didn’t want to hear that story. He wanted to operate, and it was time…. I went into the operation chamber… I stripped to my red underwear… the Japanese began to go up to the table. Out come the bloody grapes again!… My time comes, and I jump on… I’m lying there quaking on the table… ‘It’s my eye! Remember, my left eye!… Don’t pull any meatballs out of me!’… his two fingers are erect bloody penises coming at me” (179)). This blend of humor and suspense, with a symbolic tickle (flitting metonymically through the details) is characteristic of a Gray monologue; the excerpt leaves the reader with a piquantly precise taste of Gray’s art.

 

On the whole, Out of Character provides a wide, intriguing sampling of monologists, from the outrageously risky, violently self-present, and brilliantly humorous, to the (self-)celebrative and quietly poetic. But as compelling as such scripts are, without description and analysis of actual performances (other than notes provided by the artists themselves, as above), we have only a sketchy sense of the mise en scènes that are the performances. In his foreword, Russell advises his readers that “to actually understand [the work of the artists represented], closer study of each… is required, starting with viewing them live…” (xii) pointing out later that “numerous elements of these live performances… can only be hinted at on the page” (xiii); but a few such semiotically attuned “hints,” supplied from what must be a rich storehouse of his own observations after a decade and a half as artistic director of P.S. (Public School/Performance Space) 122, could have gone a way toward creating a more complex awareness of the material field of the performances.

 

Nor does the anthology provide evaluative commentary to expand the reader’s understanding of the overall “state” of the art. The entire “critical apparatus” (xi) (other than the artists’ brief self commentaries) is contained in the foreword, in the first page and a half. The remaining six pages primarily narrate the history and social significance of P.S. 122 as a place that allows a “dialogue between a community and its artists” to take shape (i.e., “Public Space”), a place the editor was instrumental in developing: Russell has been artistic director of P.S. 122 since 1983. Certain assumptions, however, about the purpose of Performance Art resound throughout, the bottom line being “to tell one’s story” (vii).

 

The foreword also takes for granted certain conventions of theater that don’t necessarily hold in experimental theatrical situations: for example, that the performance artist is a storyteller performing “in front of” a “listening, watching” audience (vii). Not only does Russell overlook the altered audience/performer relationship in much performance art (consider, for example, Hanon Resnikov’s breaks in loosely scripted Living Theatre pieces to dialogue directly with his audience–Resnikov is not mentioned in the collection), but also lists several features of postmodern performance as influences on “Performance Art” without noting their differences from–and potential disruption of–his own rather constricted mapping of the terrain. He mentions Elizabeth LeCompte’s experimentation with the “nature of personal theater” without commenting on the Wooster Group’s Brechtian bracketing of the “personal” and denaturalizing of the “dramatic” through collage structure; he vaguely notes the influence of “action performances of visual artists” (vii) without explaining what, exactly, these are or how they might support the concept of Performance Art as dramatized/fictionalized autobiography (does he mean “action painting” of the ’50s? but this falls outside the context of his chronology; certainly he can’t mean ’60s and ’70s happenings by Allan Kaprow, Joseph Beuys, Jack Smith, et al., which dialogize the “personal” as a means of vectoring out of the (ego-bound) self). He acknowledges the impact of technology–“consumer electronics,” “fun tools”–while again taming, containing, and subjectivizing their subject-fracturing potential by reducing them to just another means to “tell your story” (vii).

 

This sort of “show-and-tell” attitude toward technology does not gel with the work of one of his own featured artists–and the one who kicks the collection off–Laurie Anderson, who Russell claims “can spin a fabulous yarn” and who “cuts through all the state-of-the-art technology” to sit us on the “front porch, telling stories” (xii). Laurie Anderson is a performer, but she is also an installation artist; her personal presence (sometimes in body and voice, sometimes only in voice) is an important part of her performances, but it is exactly that–a part. It is more accurate to say that Anderson incorporates technology into her performances and installations to dialogize (or cut against) the self, rather than cutting through technology to get to the “personal.” Her performances are at their best when she lets technology play through the self and vice versa (as the “live” synthesizing of her own voice in, for example, Home of the Brave). The “personal,” after all, is not a telos, but merely another rhetorical position, one among the flux–and so what is the self? (Think of the mechanical parrot in a recent Anderson installation at the Guggenheim Downtown, NYC–a computerized voice “speaking” fragments of the installator/orchestrator’s “auto”biography collaged with other textual bits/bites). This is the kind of question that Performance Art à la Anderson raises and that Russell’s version of the scene evades. The foreword stages a similar moment of overreading when Russell highlights Tim Miller’s (a founding member of P.S. 122) autobiographical performances “with props collected on the way to the theatre” (ix) and briefly describes some of the open-ended events that P.S. 122 has hosted, such as “twenty-four-hour marathon performances with bad jokes told on the hour” (x), without considering how such aleatoric events and artificially imposed structures question/put on trial conventional concepts of the “self”/subject and its relation to the “other” (animate or inanimate)/outside.

 

The “Foreword” might have announced its approach to Performance Art a bit more clearly and conscientiously in the larger field of multimedia performance. Like the (formally) monologic gathering of scripts, the foreword’s voice sounds a one-note story about “Performance Art.” Granted anthologies of creative work don’t necessarily have to provide critical apparatus, and all anthologies are selective, but since there are so few gatherings of contemporary performance art, the editor who takes on such a project also takes on a particular responsibility: she or he should be as comprehensive as possible, and at least self-reflexively account for her/his own assumptions about what “Performance Art” is, a kind of editorial reflectiveness that the brief foreword sidesteps. Russell’s disclaimer in the foreword that this is “Not meant to be a comprehensive study” (vii) simply side-steps the issue (“study” is utilized broadly). He goes on to qualify the artists he does include as “some of the most adventurous in the field,” while simultaneously (and arbitrarily) equating “Performance Art” with “solo theatre” (vii).

 

Do we really need 31 examples of the monologue form? And why limit the collection to solo performers, excluding performance art collectives? The combination of disclaimer and promotion of his own aesthetic agenda with the convenient (re)definition of the field through the mask of an unassuming rhetoric (“what might be called…” (vii)) effectively represses the need–if it be allowed that a reader might have one–for a more comprehensive gathering (moreover, Russell universalizes his own assumptions by devaluing the need for any classification whatsoever: “I don’t like any of those titles. I just call it Performance” (vii)).

 

“Might” is a key word. The foreword “might” have benefited from a brief consideration of what Performance Art “might” be, before (instead of) hedging so quickly to a reductive definition. Though the foreword begins with a brief, elliptical chronology of how one strand of Performance Art developed out of gestures toward “personal theater” in the ’70s and ’80s, it does not mention the influence of seminal art movements such Happenings/Assemblage and Fluxus, which would have brought another dimension to the present gathering (and perhaps would have encouraged Russell to reconsider his frame). Considering that many of the readers of the anthology probably will not have this more comprehensive knowledge, Russell could have provided a clear and detailed outline of what’s missing and how it relates to what’s there.

 

And what, for example, is missing? The insularity of the project–most of the performers represented have at one time or another been affiliated with P.S. 122–means that many folks aren’t invited to the party. Notable absences: performance poets such as John Giorno and Armand Schwerner; multimedia artists who feature voice and instrumentation, like Diamanda Galas and Robert Ashley; experimental theater artists like Rachel Rosenthal, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, and Theodora Skipitares who make extensive use of props (and marionettes, in Skipitares’s case); Fluxus-oriented performers like Stewart Sherman, Dick Higgins, Larry Miller, and the Kipper Kid(s); multimedia collectives like the critical art ensemble, V-Girls, Gorilla Girls, and TEZ, who parody academic settings and situations; even including some anti- (or less) dramatically oriented monologists–such as Eileen Myles or “talk poet” David Antin–might have created an insightful (and fruitful) juxtaposition. Some exclusions, of course, such as Karen Finley and Annie Sprinkle, whose shticks have been overplayed/played out, are understandable. In his brief overview of the genre’s development in the beginning of the foreword, Russell does mention Robert Wilson, Trisha Brown, and Meredith Monk (though not Mabou Mines, Yvonne Rainer, or Carolee Schneemann), and groups that work the boundaries between Performance Art and (“just call it” (vii)) Performance, such as Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theatre and the Wooster Group (formerly TPG), but such inclusion is mostly name dropping, as no indication is given of how these works might go beyond the narrow frame he has established.

 

Near its end, the “Foreword” rhetorically restages a cliché of performance theory–that the theater “asks for participation in the illusion” (in this case, of character) (xiii). In Out of Character, Russell’s highly selective (though provocative) collection of performance scripts and the editor’s embedded assumptions about the nature of Performance Art encourage us to participate in a reductive de(il)lusion about a still emerging and not easily defined or semiotically delimited artistic territory. The job of such an anthology should, more productively, be–in the spirit of its subject matter–to open as fully as possible onto the field, to risk losing (one’s)self within it, rather than to seek a comfortable place/space of recognition and subjectivization–however seductive, aesthetically satisfying, and/or intellectually challenging those locales may be.