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Year Meme: 1988
Mar. 27th, 2008 01:37 pmAt the request of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
oakenguy, who said he'd bribe me to hear about my performance art days, I give you 1988. "It was twenty years ago today..."
Like many small, conservative cities, Rochester NY had an underground arts scene that was angst-ridden and confrontational with the outside world. Begun in the 1960s by peace-seeking optimists, by the late 80s the scene was owned and operated by early Gen-Xers with chips on our shoulders and 'zines on the copier at Kinko's. In basements, nightclubs, attics, parking lots and at least one vegetarian restaurant, guerilla art was happening in Rochester. Some of it was performance art.
Performance art. It can be anything you want it to be. And I do mean anything. But it wasn't what I wanted it to be. I was unmoved by the seething sexual victimist diatribes of performance art's leading voices of the time, like Karen Findlay and Lydia Lunch. It never seemed to be about anything other than sexual oppression/exploitation/psychiatric damage, and it never offered resolutions, only in-your-grill rage and dangling naked bits. Sex just wasn't on the roster of topics occupying my ire at the time. I had other dragons to slay, and a steady supply of free alternative performance spaces in which to slay them.
Sorry to probably disappoint, but I never got naked or slapped meat on my head. My performance pieces leaned far to the texty end of the spectrum (as opposed to the visual/movement end). Something like Spaulding Gray, but more bite-y. Once I got a clue, I integrated humor so as to have an audience larger than five people.
My interest began one evening when I went, on acid, to see a performance piece called Egghead On A Stick, based loosely on the theme of the artist fighting with his own intellect. I couldn't have been more blown away by its power. Afterward I stayed up all night scribbling ideas for performance art of my own. It was one of those exceedingly rare occasions when something written on drugs in the middle of the night actually still looks good by the light of day. I had at least ten ideas to run with.
Understand, anything "establishment" was very, very bad with me at the time. Like all of my friends, I survived in Rochester's abysmal job market by patching together two or three crappy part-time McJobs at a time, and being avant garde as an unpaid profession in our off-time. Corporate culture and consumerism were the enemy, and I had a serious case of rage against the machine that drove my creativity. It was a post-punk energy steeped in DIY philosophy, and the mantra of "fuck society" was always a good reason to get up in the morning and do something artistic that was as inaccessible to the mainstream public as possible.
As a Theatre@First member today it pains me to think of this now, but free performance space was always, always available. All you had to do was split the door money with the venue and you were in. I wrote and performed a group piece called The Apocalypse Floorshow in the basement of a Masonic Temple. It was a modular work that took on everything I thought was abhorrent: rampant consumerism, television, yuppies, irresponsible breeding, organized religion. At the struggling Pyramid Arts Center, I wrote and performed one-woman performances pieces called Something To Do Other Than Counting (about a dysfunctional family of women, one of whom was the Messiah but who worked at K-Mart); White Light Special (finding flaw in every Western religion I could think of); and Ugly (vaguely about why you should never listen to your family's advice).
I did shorter pieces in showcases and festivals. I got to be in a larger, revived presentation of the canonical Egghead On A Stick, and the author/artist became my mentor and lover for a while. I was in the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, appeared at WOW Cafe Theatre in NYC, and at small venues all over the Rochester/Buffalo area. Somewhere in a box of my old papers is a poster for a showcase with my name appearing just below a 19-year-old Ani Difranco.
Why didn't I keep up with performance art? Well, after a few years I reached a saturation point where I began feeling like I'd said everything I needed to say. I'd gotten it all out, cathartically if not masterfully. Performance art was losing its draw in Rochester, as well as its pool of artists. As the 90s rolled around, so too sprang up the poetry open mics and slams that earmarked the coming decade and became its people's platform.
And you don't think I wanted to miss out on that scene, do you? ;-)
oakenguy, who said he'd bribe me to hear about my performance art days, I give you 1988. "It was twenty years ago today..."Like many small, conservative cities, Rochester NY had an underground arts scene that was angst-ridden and confrontational with the outside world. Begun in the 1960s by peace-seeking optimists, by the late 80s the scene was owned and operated by early Gen-Xers with chips on our shoulders and 'zines on the copier at Kinko's. In basements, nightclubs, attics, parking lots and at least one vegetarian restaurant, guerilla art was happening in Rochester. Some of it was performance art.
Performance art. It can be anything you want it to be. And I do mean anything. But it wasn't what I wanted it to be. I was unmoved by the seething sexual victimist diatribes of performance art's leading voices of the time, like Karen Findlay and Lydia Lunch. It never seemed to be about anything other than sexual oppression/exploitation/psychiatric damage, and it never offered resolutions, only in-your-grill rage and dangling naked bits. Sex just wasn't on the roster of topics occupying my ire at the time. I had other dragons to slay, and a steady supply of free alternative performance spaces in which to slay them.
Sorry to probably disappoint, but I never got naked or slapped meat on my head. My performance pieces leaned far to the texty end of the spectrum (as opposed to the visual/movement end). Something like Spaulding Gray, but more bite-y. Once I got a clue, I integrated humor so as to have an audience larger than five people.
My interest began one evening when I went, on acid, to see a performance piece called Egghead On A Stick, based loosely on the theme of the artist fighting with his own intellect. I couldn't have been more blown away by its power. Afterward I stayed up all night scribbling ideas for performance art of my own. It was one of those exceedingly rare occasions when something written on drugs in the middle of the night actually still looks good by the light of day. I had at least ten ideas to run with.
Understand, anything "establishment" was very, very bad with me at the time. Like all of my friends, I survived in Rochester's abysmal job market by patching together two or three crappy part-time McJobs at a time, and being avant garde as an unpaid profession in our off-time. Corporate culture and consumerism were the enemy, and I had a serious case of rage against the machine that drove my creativity. It was a post-punk energy steeped in DIY philosophy, and the mantra of "fuck society" was always a good reason to get up in the morning and do something artistic that was as inaccessible to the mainstream public as possible.
As a Theatre@First member today it pains me to think of this now, but free performance space was always, always available. All you had to do was split the door money with the venue and you were in. I wrote and performed a group piece called The Apocalypse Floorshow in the basement of a Masonic Temple. It was a modular work that took on everything I thought was abhorrent: rampant consumerism, television, yuppies, irresponsible breeding, organized religion. At the struggling Pyramid Arts Center, I wrote and performed one-woman performances pieces called Something To Do Other Than Counting (about a dysfunctional family of women, one of whom was the Messiah but who worked at K-Mart); White Light Special (finding flaw in every Western religion I could think of); and Ugly (vaguely about why you should never listen to your family's advice).
I did shorter pieces in showcases and festivals. I got to be in a larger, revived presentation of the canonical Egghead On A Stick, and the author/artist became my mentor and lover for a while. I was in the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, appeared at WOW Cafe Theatre in NYC, and at small venues all over the Rochester/Buffalo area. Somewhere in a box of my old papers is a poster for a showcase with my name appearing just below a 19-year-old Ani Difranco.
Why didn't I keep up with performance art? Well, after a few years I reached a saturation point where I began feeling like I'd said everything I needed to say. I'd gotten it all out, cathartically if not masterfully. Performance art was losing its draw in Rochester, as well as its pool of artists. As the 90s rolled around, so too sprang up the poetry open mics and slams that earmarked the coming decade and became its people's platform.
And you don't think I wanted to miss out on that scene, do you? ;-)