The seventies is an incredibly rich decade for artists working in NYC. I arrived as a painter in 1973 and soon stopped painting. I had done some performative self portraits in photography (circa 1971) which are in the Westfaelischer exhibition. When the curators Nele Kaczmarek and Theresa Roessler took an interest in that work I realized its importance in the lineage of photography of the self. I was a painting student,19-20 years old, when I made that series and I knew nothing of the early artists using their bodies and life as their subject matter. Francesca Woodman and Cindy Sherman were 6 or seven years later. I didn’t think about that until they pointed it out. So I have come to appreciate my naive urges from that time period. The same goes for my early video art. I am a fierce critic of my early video work but was forced to look at it again and do appreciate how it is so different from what preceded it in the art world and the world in general.

Theresa made the final decisions after spending several days in my southern California desert studio. I wanted a survey show which would have included a lot more of my visual art work. Both Nele and Theresa were only interested in time-based work from the seventies. I have come to understand that this period holds a strong research interest for these young curators.  The introduction of portable video equipment allowed artists to make videos without knowing how to use light meters or know film language. The first generation of video art is often restricted by conceptual art and minimalism. As the second generation we wanted poetry, music, and narrative and we naively made our way with all the arrogance of youth. It was a free for all. Music videos were born out of this chaos and within less than ten years was a world wide influence. I fought (friendly fight) with both curators to include the interactive work Miracles in Reverse (2002) and won. I feel it is the culmination of years of work in new media and new narrative. Here is my blurb on Miracles: 

Miracles in Reverse an interactive DVD-ROM. The work is about personal memory… a kind of local internal memory. Miracles is a self portrait, but a self as a process, not a fixed entity, and the interactive user/player becomes part of the process. With rhythmic movements of the mouse, the user can play my ‘life movies’ like a musical instrument. My life story, with a focus on trauma, is seen through the eyes of Jesus, Mom, and an alien. The music was composed by Greg Smith with Michael Kott, Dwight Loop, Don Christensen and myself. 

The name Performance Art was conjured in the late seventies and we practitioners all hated it. The early seventies still echoed the sixties. We were not living off the land like hippies, but we were making our own studio lofts out of abandoned industrial spaces… including bringing water, electricity etc to make our homes and studios. We were pioneers eager for the future. Joan Jonas, Carolee Schneeman and Patti Smith were big influences on me…especially Patti Smith. Poetry also held court in NYC with the Beats still performing and attracting attention which morphed into the Spoken Work movement. One of my biggest moments in the seventies (1976) was being the MC along with Laurie Anderson for the Nova Convention which celebrated  William Burroughs and featured Allen Ginsburg, John Cage, Mercy Cunningham, Anne Waldman, Frank Zappa, and Patti Smith and more. Here is a link to the electronically altered monologue from that night; Keep Moving Buddy is in the top right song cycle collection (scroll down to find it, click HERE). I was also influenced by early 20th century monologist Ruth Draper and the contemporary Lily Tomlin. Both did one woman shows that astounded me. There were a handful of artists using language as the main event during this period. My performance This is my Blue Period begins my serious interest in spoken word. I was attempting to write the way we think using stream of consciousness and sing song couplets. One of my main influences for this period is my father who was a lyrical preacher… a liberal in the deep south. His sermons were ofter in four four rhythms.

My performance Shake Daddy Shake (1976) was the first time I overtly used autobiographical material. It was also the first time that I used an emotionally charged narrative. Women cried when they approached me after the show. That was against the  minimalist rules of the time. I remember an article/manifesto in the Village Voice at the time which laid down the rules for the avant-garde media artist which was repeating the dictate of Vertov’s Man with a Camera manifesto: No main characters, no story, no emotion. My generation intentionally broke those rules, the restraints were deadening from our point of view. We wanted meaning in narratives (not dadaist babble) and music with cultural reference and emotions as opposed to minimalist rules. I think I am still working with this idea of associative thinking in my language work as opposed to the way we write. It has just gotten technically more complex with software enhanced abilities. With Miracles in Reverse the user gets to decide how to navigate the 75 scenes. The user is ‘playing me’ at their own speed and direction… which makes the narrative non-linear and therefore different for everyone. How a story streams out changes the absorption and belief responses of the user. So I think I am working with a more chaotic system than linear narratives and a more natural one. 

The seventies was the decade were I was born again as an artist. I was an abstract painter when I arrived in NYC and an interactive new media artist when I left in 1917. I was influenced by all the converging scenes. Dancers were talking, visual artists and poets were forming bands, modern composers were embracing world music. I was absorbing it all.  I am still swimming in the same pool of these hybrid forms and the technology that these more primitive times encouraged. But I still think my greatest influence was my father. 

I read in the NYTimes today what powerful Performance curators define as Performance Art…But it may be easier to define performance art by what it isn’t. It’s not a concert, or theater or an event. But my performance art is a hybrid of all the above. Curators defining performance art is a fools errand. Each new generation comes up with their own obsessions and interests and often are rejecting what came before. My generation of techno artists was rejected by the generation that followed. They were more interested in food fights and gross outs. When  I started making complex multi-media with wall to wall music, monologues, and projections… it was extremely novel. Now most big rock shows have wall to wall projections… making my pioneer status look retro. Jean Baudrillard was right, everything losing contextual meaning over time.

So having said that, which you didn’t ask about, I am more of a traditional performer. I perform skill sets and ask the audience to watch and listen. I am admiring of improvisational talents that can roll with the punches of audience participation. I also like the hierarchy of the stage for those reasons. I once did a performance in the Albright Knox Museum where I secretly acquired a guard’s uniform and performed a ventriloquist monologue where God spoke through me and I was the dummy which included Mongolian throat singing. The singing involved very high pitched vocalizations. A group of autistic children entered the chamber I was in and clapped their ears and fell to the ground. That was my most dramatic audience response. 

Well, it means the world to me. I am 76 and these shows were my first solo shows in a gallery/museum setting. I also do visual art work that hangs on walls and hope to show that soon. I have staged shows in all kinds of spaces from the Kitchen to Lincoln Center. Lincoln Center was where were had the least support. Everyone there treated us like we should be happy to be performing there. The projectionist took his lunch break during the performance and the image suddenly was totally overexposed. We had to bring everything including chairs and tables for our equipment set-ups. We were also only paid $500.00. They were doing us a favor.

I still have one last ambition in terms of mediated performance and that is for the performer’s body to be IN the image using this new holographic scrim. I have been trying to mix the 3-D (the performers) with the 2 dimensional (the projections) my entire career and now the technology is here to do it with clarity and intensity. I want to re-stage The Gabriel Frequency/29 SpaceTime using the panopticon prison system of a darkened center (darkened center stage) surrounded by lite cells. The piece is about the architecture of fascism… a secret surveillance system working in the dark surrounded by the ‘controlled’ prisoners in the light. I am still interested in internal monologue territory…. hopefully taking the listener along for the ride. But like telling someone your dreams, it is a tricky process often alienating the audience.