Performance / Media / Art / Culture: Selected Essays 1983–2018

By Jacki Apple

Experience the interdisciplinary performance scene of the 1980s and beyond through the eyes of one of its most compelling witnesses. Jacki Apple’s Performance / Media / Art / Culture traces performance art, multimedia theatre, audio arts and dance in the United States from 1983 to the present. Showcasing 35 years of Apple’s critical essays and reviews, the collection explores the rise and diversification of intermedia performance; how new technologies (or rehashed old technologies) influence American culture and contemporary life; the interdependence of pop and performance culture; and the politics of art and the performance of politics.
 
Apple writes with a journalist’s attention to the immediacy of account and a historian’s attention to structural aesthetic and personal networks, resulting in a volume brimming with big ideas but grounded in concentrated reviews of individual performances. Many of the pieces featured in this collection originally appeared in small press journals and magazines that have now gone out of print. Preserved and republished here for current and future readers, they offer a rich portrait of performance at the end of the millennium.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789380866

Book preview

First published in the UK in 2019 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2019 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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This is a peer-reviewed publication

For Rachel R.

In Memoriam

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD by Marina LaPalma

THE TV GENERATION: MEDIA CULTURE AND PERFORMANCE

Performance in the Eighties: The TV Generation (1984)

Psycho-Opera (1987)

Commentary Intermedia: Performance and Video (1983)

Sex and Technology: The Politics of Intimacy (1990)

The Making of Cambodia: Spalding Gray and The Killing Fields (1985)

Terry Allen’s Radio Cinema (2000/2018)

The Life and Times of Lin Hixson: The LA Years (1991)

SPECTACLE, FILM, COLLABORATION

Time, Space, and Questions of Otherness (1989)

Time Lost/Time Found (2017)

Journeys to Heaven and Hell (2015)

Life, Art, and Death in Multimedia Experimental Theater (2011)

Light Energy, Dark Matter (2009/2015)

Wrestling with an Age That Won’t Give Back (1985)

CROSSING CULTURES: SOUND, SPACE, GESTURE

Radio Art: The Coming Sonic Boom (1990)

The Aural Stage (1991)

Yoshi Oida: Interrogations (1990)

Performance and the Art of Conversation (2015)

Listening to the Universe (1990)

Urban Bush Women (1987)

Tarika Sammy (1993)

Rudy Perez Performance Ensemble: Made In LA (1991)

Lula Washington: LA Contemporary Dance Theater (1989)

Fulfillment in The Empty Room (2012)

Peripheral Visions: Perspectives on Culture, Media, and Performance (2017)

Faustin Linyekula’s Journey from Darkness to Light (2017)

HISTORY RESTAGED

Plato’s Symposium (1986)

Tao, Mao, Now! (1991)

The Sound of History Dreaming the Future (1991)

Dancing on History’s Grave (2014)

Dancing on History’s Grave: Part Two (2014)

Mining the Past to Change the Future (2017)

1969 Speaks For Itself (2018)

Staging Politics: Allegory vs. Satire (2017)

My Lai Revisited: One Man’s Journey (2018)

1984 in 2016: Big Brother is Watching

PROPHESIES PAST TENSE

Voyage to Prague (1991)

Slouching Towards the Next Millennium: Some Meditations on Art and the Twenty-First Century (1989)

The Voices of America 1992 (1992)

Commentary Intermedia: A Bright Tomorrow? (1987/89)

Resurrecting the Disappeared: Recollections on Artists in Absentia (1997)

Commerce on the Edge: The Convergence of Art and Entertainment (1986)

Performance Art is Dead: Long Live Performance Art! (1994)

Notes on Performance and Sex(ism) (2015)

POLITICS OF CULTURE

Commentary Intermedia: Interdisciplinary Performance: Collaboration in the 1980s (1985)

Politics, Performance, and the Los Angeles Festival (1991)

Screamers (1991)

Radiodeath: The Expulsion of Art from the Airwaves (1995)

The Artist as Fundamentalist (1992)

A Question of Civic and Public Responsibility (1994)

Beauty and the (Art) Beast (1993)

CONCERNING NATURE

Calls from the Deep (1990)

Reviving the Horror (1986)

Miwa Matreyek’s Self-Made World (2014)

Laurie Anderson’s Dirtday! (2012)

Cynthia Hopkins: This Clement World (2013)

Meredith Monk: On Behalf of Nature (2013)

Entangled Waters (2018)

AFTERWORD: A Retrospective View

APPENDIX I: Publications

APPENDIX II: Performances

NOTES

BIOGRAPHIES

INDEX

Acknowledgements

From the very beginning of this project I was thinking about who would be the perfect editor to collaborate with. Thus a very special thank you to Intellect editor Jelena Stanovnik for giving me the opportunity to choose that person myself. It was my even greater good fortune that Marina La Palma said Yes! without a moment’s hesitation. I would like to express my deepest gratitude and appreciation to her for her extraordinary knowledge and intellect, her keen insights and historical overview, her passion for the subject matter, her skillful guidance, her generosity, and her wit. The care and thoughtfulness she has given to the process of editing this book has been invaluable. Not only has she been a dedicated collaborator and brilliant editor throughout, but a joy and an inspiration to work with.

I dedicate this book in memoriam to my dear friend Rachel Rosenthal whose life and work and values — her commitment to excellence, and her willingness to take on the truly big issues — have been my inspiration from the very beginning of our friendship when I moved to Los Angeles from New York City in 1981. She was a brilliant artist, writer, performer, and teacher who did not shy away from controversy, and spoke from her heart and mind. She was powerful and she was also funny. She was my soul mother. Her courage, integrity, intelligence, passion, wit, and honesty are all in the image that graces the cover of this book. It speaks for me and for my writing over the four decades represented in this collection. Thank you Rachel for being you, and for being there for me. I miss you every day and honor your memory with gratitude.

Thank you to Linda Burnham for founding High Performance magazine as a forum for performance art and cultural politics and carrying on its editorial mission with courage and integrity. Much appreciation to my editor Steve Durland for providing me with the opportunity to write critical issue-based features, many of which are the heart and soul of this book. Thank you for your maverick spirit and wry sense of humor, for your encouragement and support, for urging me to take on controversial subject matter and write in my own voice, and in so doing making me a stronger writer. I am grateful for my years as a contributing editor/writer (1983–95) and Media Arts Editor (1993–95) and the privilege of having been a part of a groundbreaking publication that facilitated a dynamic discourse for its community of artists and writers.

Much appreciation and many thanks to the late Joan Hugo, the southern California editor for Artweek, and a dear friend. I had barely been in LA for a month when Joan recruited (more like arm-twisted!) me into writing the first of many pieces as a regular contributing writer for her between 1982 and 1990. I am grateful for her persistence and her ongoing support. She was a discerning and knowledgeable critic with an impressive command of language. A master of repartee with a pithy wit and playful sense of humor, she also functioned as the grammar police, keeping us on our toes. I learned how to say a lot in a short space from her. I think she would be proud of this book.

Thank you to Chris Davies, the publisher of Fabrik magazine and website for having given me the uncensored free space to write in my own way about what I want to write about in this past decade. Much appreciation for his support of my column Peripheral Visions: Perspectives on Performance, Media and Culture and providing the online venue, and for granting permission to reprint twenty pieces written between 2011 and 2018.

Thank you to Kelly Hargraves, Marketing & Media Manager for REDCAT, CalArts’ downtown center for contemporary arts for her ongoing support and assistance in providing me with tickets, photos, and sometimes texts from the works I have written about. And likewise to Holly Wallace, former Communications Manager at UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance.

Thank you to Jeff McMahon, Lin Hixson, Jill Kroesen, Anna Homler, Leslie Labowitz, Ping Chong, Xiao Ming Xiao, Bruce Odland, and Sam Auinger for digging back into their old files to find photos and color slides of their early work for the photos in this book. Thank you to Kate Noonan for providing images of Rachel Rosenthal. Thank you to Robin Bisio and Ethan Turpin for the video stills from Entangled Waters.

My deepest appreciation to all the artists, performers, writers, and composers who have envisioned and created these works, as well as all the ones covered in the many articles I have written over four decades that we were unable to include in this book.

Finally many, many thanks to Tim Mitchell, Jelena Stanovnik, and James Campbell at Intellect for supporting this book and bringing it to fruition. Thank you for your guidance, your collaborative spirit and openness to ideas, and your wonderfully good manners that helped make it such a pleasure to work with you. Thank you to everyone at Intellect for their patience and consideration in accommodating my design preferences.

With much appreciation to all my readers over the years, and those yet to come.

—Jacki Apple

Foreword by Marina LaPalma

When Jacki Apple asked me to collaborate with her on this book as her editor, I embraced the opportunity. In the 1980s and 1990s she and I attended many of the same performances and wrote for the same publications: Artweek, High Performance, the Los Angeles Weekly, Arts & Architecture, Images and Issues. Sadly, most of those publications are gone, as are the venues in which so many of those works were performed. The writing, however, endures. As writers, we both love language and have deep concerns over its distortion and degradation. As critics we affirm that criticism needs to be part of the dialogue around art; as artists we care deeply about the conditions in which art may be produced and experienced. As humans who have been privileged but are also awake, we feel that a passion for social justice is inherently linked to concern for the fate of the planet. We also have both worked in radio as a public art medium that has great potential for social transformation. We agree that great art often results from attempts to integrate the natural from which we emerge, the sometimes problematic technological civilization in which we participate, and the spiritual which remains unfinished.

Like all good observation and scholarship, these essays raise many broad questions regarding imitation, reproduction, and interpretation, the role of art and artists in society, and of audiences. They also examine the production and reception of art, and the relationship between art and technology with particular attention to the tensions between the social, concrete, practical and transcendent ideals and concepts in which the works and their creators are grounded. There is also, in this book, real enquiry into questions of beauty and its role in contemporary art, as well as discussions about the creative uses of space, architecture, and cities as sites for sonic arts.

Engaged art criticism is an integral part of a vibrant arts community; art is an arena for dialogue that has profound social functions. The dialogical is as necessary in culture as it is in science, in creative initiatives as much as in good governance. Thus our structure for this book is not chronological. Rather, we have grouped the writing into parts focused on fundamental themes and issues. Several parts lovingly interrogate the specific to uncover larger patterns that we might call historical. History is political because it is the description and explanation of what happened and what it means. In the wake of the collapse of previous boundaries between public and private, cultural space has been transformed. Information and attention have become the new contested resources and the word political has become an accusation of imbalance or one-sidedness, instead of the interactive way in which we organize the social world. The Politics of Culture focuses on both the politics of the art world and the larger culture, and how that affects what is produced.

Noam Chomsky has suggested that every now and then societies erupt in what he has called outbreaks of democracy. Certain artistic movements take political and cultural forms that can be seen as such outbreaks. Performance art emerged in the 1970s in the aftermath of the Civil Rights and American Indian Movements, and anti-war protests that politicized a generation of young people, and gave rise to the Feminist movement. Women asserted the right to have a recognized voice and representation in the public sphere, affirming an equivalence between the personal and the political, as did the Gay Rights movement.

Movements are the antidote to the status quo and thus to stasis. Women in performance art claimed the use of their own bodies to begin cracking open the patriarchal hold on what was valued in the arts. It began to be possible to see work by and about artists who were not of European ethnicity, who were female, gay, or otherwise did not fit into the normative regime. The incredible energy and creativity of that period revealed the yearning for connection that lay just beneath the surface in a civilization of atomized individuals and it generated possibilities of community.

The generation that became active in the 1980s responded in direct and visceral ways to Reagan-era culture, demonstrating the importance of live theater in an age of increasingly mediated experience and affirming the voices of previously excluded cultural and ethnic groups. It was only a beginning, but the arts have, in some senses, come a long way since. Innovators of new theater and performance art replaced acting as someone else with performing as oneself. In the same way that an ordinary bottle-rack placed in a gallery by Marcel Duchamp was thereby sculpture, an adventure to the Arctic, or the serving of a dinner could be performance. Drawing upon various relatively recently established disciplines like sociology and anthropology, art now suggested how any social act may be understood as performative. In time-based arts the relation of performers to audience can produce a visceral and emotional connection. It was a short step to the dissolution of boundaries between artist and spectator, art and life, self and other. The process of making art and the art itself became open to reconsideration. Alas, as we all know, when things are pushed to the wide open position, there will soon be a correction in the direction of slammed shut tight.

Eventually, even when not explicitly suppressed by censorship or direct force, movements die down through entropy or are sucked back into the mainstream by corporate consumer culture that dominates not only the physical sphere but the thought-world in which we operate, communicate, and create. In all the arts, what was uniquely original and disruptive for one generation gets distilled for the marketplace into just another menu option for the next. Beatniks and hippies were absorbed into an array of lifestyle choices available in the mass-consumption sphere. Once-rebellious rock-and-roll, rap and hip-hop are now major industries dealing in stars, brands, and products. Graffiti art became a hot luxury commodity at auction. When everything — our desires, personality, talents, appearance, choices, even our hopes and fears — become commoditized, we yearn for sincerity and authenticity. Essays such as Commerce on the Edge: The Convergence of Art and Entertainment, and Performance Art is Dead: Long Live Performance Art!, prophetically written in 1986 and 1996, take on this phenomenon in American culture.

During the 1980s new terminology arose to talk about multidisciplinary genres that encompassed all forms of time-based works including sound. Performance art was replaced by Performance. The first three parts investigate a range of new technologies, contexts, and intermedia hybrids employed by several decades of artists exploring different terrains, cultural influences, and political positions. Artists seized on existing, as well as the latest technologies. Some videomakers optimistically embraced the possibility of redefining television by proposing radically different narratives. Others interacted with live performance. While radio was recognized as a rich field for artistic intervention and innovation; the broadcast spectrum was also understood as another slice of the commons being overtly grabbed through government licensing, and insidiously swamped by the ideology of the market. Control of the airwaves, explored in The Politics of Culture was understood as part of the struggle for public space during the culture wars of the early 1990s.

In academia one form of displacement was the mapping of one discipline or practice onto another. Reading became the metaphor for any activity of looking at or trying to comprehend human-made objects or systems; a city, a poem, a subway system, a constitution, a national park, a dance, all could be read as texts through a variety of systems. Although today’s widespread and often willful confusion between self-serving fictions and consensual reality is sometimes blamed on postmodernism, it is a very different animal from the creative ambiguities then employed in pursuit of artistic truth. Cognitive challenges for today’s audiences include a mental space saturated with triviality, banality, hedonism, and narcissism. Today the critical question is in cyberspace: who will dominate the limited bandwidth of our minds, who will occupy and own our most precious resource, attention?

The last part in this book, Concerning Nature, deals with works addressing humanity’s role as planetary destroyer, concerned only with short-term gain in terms of endless growth and the almighty Market. There are powerful predecessors such as Rachel Rosenthal (to whom this book is dedicated) whose work is pivotal to the whole enterprise. There continues to be work — by some well-known artists, as well as others — that directly confronts the beauty and horror of the cataclysmic destruction wrought on a global scale by our consumer civilization.

I live in New Mexico, the site of major hunting and trade routes for the native people of Mesoamerica. It was once all indigenous land, then it became El Camino Real, the Spanish crown’s conquest route from Mexico City and later the Santa Fe Trail on the westward trek for European settlers. To me it seems urgent that we cultivate an awareness of the full history of what is beneath our feet. Artists are indispensable to that undertaking. If the political is not personal, it becomes a dirty word indeed.

Performance, Media, Art, Culture: Selected Writings 1983–2018 is not only a catalogue of the fundamental, crucial issues raised by the works and their informed examination and an archive of often ephemeral events and works. Crucially, it is a rich compendium of thirty-six years of responses by a sharp-eyed and eloquent witness to the evolving genius of an age. The word has been piffled down to mean the person who can make your electronic devices work; but in ancient Mediterranean culture, genius — a word related to create, produce, or bring into being — indicated the guiding spirit of a person, family, or place. In modern times, it has been used to indicate the uniqueness of exceptional individuals (Mozart, Picasso, Einstein). But when certain new and powerful ideas and practices emerge — often in more than one place — it is a kind of collective genius of the moment in the sense of that original usage, something inherent and profound. As such, we believe this book will be of substantive use to future scholars, artists, historians, and others interested in cultural developments as the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first.

In this book, I am merely the finger pointing at the moon. The moon is all up in these essays.

THE TV GENERATION:

MEDIA CULTURE AND PERFORMANCE

We are conditioned more by cinema and television than we are by nature…. The cinema isn’t just something inside the environment; the intermedia network of cinema, television, radio, magazines, books and newspapers is our environment, a service environment that carries the messages of the social organism.

Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema 1970

Performance in the Eighties: The TV Generation (1984)

A new generation of performance artists is emerging in the 1980s whose concerns, influences, and expectations, as well as their style and content, are distinctly different from the generation preceding them. Breaking down the barriers between art and life, artist and spectator, the act or process of making art and the art itself is no longer the primary issue. Quite the opposite. There is an ironic twist to the art/life interface that has dominated the avant-garde visual and performance arts for three decades.

Simultaneously, in our media-dominated culture, the boundaries between fact and fiction have rapidly collapsed, often making it difficult to differentiate between the two. In a society consumed by spectacle on a daily basis, so-called real life and the language surrounding it have been theatricalized. The world is a stage. More than a decade ago innovators of new theater and performance art replaced acting as someone else with performing as oneself. Andy Warhol declared that everyone should be a star for fifteen minutes, and in Santa Barbara an American family named Loud allowed a TV crew to move in with them and broadcast their lives. Today a recent TV poll tells us that the American public is bored with Beirut. The world is a television or film soundstage on which daily life is played out and played back. The presentation of image subsumes ideology and identity; performance is paramount. Even our personal emotions are suspect of being merely behaviorally conditioned, media-induced responses. It is indeed possible that if the 1984 season had featured a prime-time weekly series about a man running for President, its star might have had a better chance of beating Ronald Reagan than Walter Mondale does.

In terms of art history, the intellectual position and philosophical ideals of the Modernist avant-garde were rooted in a belief in the future — the notion of progress, and of the artist as revolutionary and/or explorer on the frontiers of the unknown in an ever-expanding universe of unlimited possibilities. Unlike twenty years ago, visions of the future, art or otherwise, are hard to come by these days, and the artist has become more translator than prophet. The stance of postmodern performance artists of the 1980s is characterized by a non-linear synchronic relationship to past, present, and future, the recycling and reinterpretation of already existing information, manipulation rather than invention. Their work is distinguished by their use of conventional television, film, theater, and cabaret formulas and structures, allusionism, and deconstruction. Their sources of reference are popular culture, Hollywood, rock ‘n’ roll and new technologies, rather than conceptual, process, visual or feminist-based works of performance art in the 1970s.

This new generation of artists born between the end of the Korean War and the advent of the Vietnam War are the first children of television. Their experience of the world is significantly different from that of the preceding generations, and it is not surprising that their work reflects a view of the world profoundly influenced by that ubiquitous box. This is the emergence and coming of age of the Diet Pepsi and jeans generation that grew up on game shows, talk shows, soaps, sit-coms, and old movies on the Late Show, Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, and Walter Cronkite, and commercials promising spotless kitchens, perfect teeth, dry armpits, hot fast cars named after animals, sugar-free sex and eternal youth, beauty, romance, prosperity, and stardom. At the same time they are also the first generation to grow up watching daily installments of real wars, assassination, and social protests in living color. At its best their performance work portrays the contradiction and tension between the desire for the world they were promised and the unrelenting anxiety and confusion of the world they are living in.

At the forefront of this emerging group is Los Angeles artist Lin Hixson. Although her training has been primarily in the visual art world — she studied art and dance at the University of Oregon and did graduate work at Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles — Hixson now prefers to call herself a director. From 1979 to 1981 she was a founding member of the now-extinct collaborative performance ensemble Hangers whose eighteen members came from dance, theater and visual arts backgrounds. They produced seven pieces, the final one being Birds on Pedestals with Bomber Ladies (1981)— an hour- long, twenty-scene, multimedia extravaganza about art, politics, and the all-pervasive media, featuring twenty-one performers, with Jane Dibbell as Bernadette Devlin¹. When Hangers disbanded in 1981 Hixson continued to collaborate with Dibbell. Together they expanded and experimented with the collaborative process, and a methodology whose precedents are in the work of Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater and Richard Schechner’s Performance Group in the mid-to-late 1960s, and Elizabeth LeCompte and Spalding Gray’s Wooster Group in the 1970s. In the past year and a half Hixson and Dibbell conceived and developed, produced and directed four interdisciplinary/intermedia, large-scale collaborative group performance works: Sway Back (1982), Rockefeller Center (1982), Sinatra Meets Max (1983), and Flatlands (1983).

Hixson’s strength has been in her innovative staging and often arresting and memorable imagery. There is no one else in LA whose work resembles hers. Hixson’s central concern is with the application of cinematic syntax and montage techniques in all her recent works — photographically composed and framed scenes, cutaways and lap dissolves from scene to scene, and live action played against a film loop background, shifting events from real time to filmic illusory time. Her aim is to create an awareness of the illusory nature of the cinematic experience while simultaneously manipulating emotional response through the use of cinematic allusion in both images and texts.

By deconstructing form and subject matter and re-contextualizing it, she seeks to restore meaning. Conversely by reconstructing and re-enacting the structure and contents of films in a live situation, she believes that the performers become a bridge for the audience between the fact of their own lived reality and the fiction of the reality of the cinema. The audience’s identification and connection with the vulnerability of the performers resituates them within and in relation to that dichotomy. In addition, two of her recent productions — Rockefeller Center and Sinatra Meets Max — took place on location outdoors at night, giving them the look and feel of film sets.

Hixson is an inveterate newspaper clipper, intrigued and concerned by the way the media transforms real events from the trivial to the profound, into disposable fictions. She is interested in the various ways to tell the same story and the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated stories. Her non-linear narratives are without plot development, and her performers play themselves as well as the characters. Hixson’s scripts intercut appropriated texts from newspapers, television, movies, and literature with monologues developed by the performers.

In Sway Back the Film Director played by Jane Dibbell glamorously dressed in a man’s suit and fedora hat, voyeuristically observes the action within the performance. The piece opens with her watching a home movie of the yet-to-appear cast. Her appearances at the culmination of dramatically loaded scenes diffuse these scenes and fictionalize them. They become so many frames from the film. Dibbell’s final monologue is taken from a newspaper interview with film director Bernardo Bertolucci in which he talks about his next film to be based on a real-life story he read in a newspaper.

In Rockefeller Center performed outside at a train station in Claremont, California, a series of overlapping highly choreographed tableaux evoke romantic memories, nostalgic yearnings, and a sense of loss. A man appears with a suitcase. A woman waves to him across a field. They approach each other in slow motion. Our response to this familiar re-enactment takes on a double meaning. We identify with the filmic recollection, not the actual event.

Lin Hixson, Sway Back 1982. Photos: Courtesy of the artist.

Sinatra Meets Max relies heavily on movie allusions and romantic idealization. Various performers recite the opening narration from The Road Warrior in different styles ranging from melodrama to irony. Songs by Sinatra are sung live and on tape. The cast of forty includes a real motorcycle gang, groups of school children, a crowd of people in dark overcoats carrying suitcases and briefcases, a crowd of people carrying ghetto blasters, family tableaux, and a fat man with a dog on a leash, all in a floodlit park-like setting with hills, trees, and paths. The values, style, and aspirations of the Sinatra era collide with those represented by the Road Warrior Max — the silent loner, cult-hero of a post-holocaust future. The 1950s meets the 1980s head-on.

In Flatlands, an American road story about the place we remember that never was and the horizon line we never get to, Molly Cleator appears in a white slip, sensuously brushes back her hair and sighs deeply. She stands on a green lawn behind a white picket fence, an updated vision from Tennessee Williams or William Faulkner, and tells us in a soft southern drawl of her dream to make something of herself, to become a singing airline stewardess and do little testimonial commercials in flight. She recites her accomplishments and virtues and the advice of a TV evangelist preacher who promises prosperity. She is contrasted by a tough-looking teenager in a leather miniskirt standing at the side of a flat anonymous highway (a film projection loop that runs throughout) like a hitchhiker into a Road Warrior future. There are excerpts of text from The Great Gatsby and the flight log of a Florida plane crash, personal anecdotes and one-sentence recitations of unidentified disasters in the news. The power of Hixson’s work is in the way she transforms her appropriated material into metaphors with a larger meaning.

Lin Hixson, Flatlands 1983. Photos: Courtesy of the artist. Montage: Jacki Apple.

Hixson’s work has also provided a context in which other young emerging performers could develop their styles and material. At twenty-five, Molly Cleator is one of the most promising new talents. She first met Hixson as a student at Otis Art Institute, performed in several Hangers pieces, and was memorable in both Sway Back and Flatlands. Encouraged by Hixson and Jane Dibbell, who is a skilled actress, Cleator enrolled in the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute where she studied for a year and a half. Cleator developed her autobiographical monologues as metaphors for larger social issues. Her approach is intimate and vulnerable, and she builds her characterizations to an unexpectedly high-tension pitch. She has a presence and quality most often found in the women in Robert Altman’s films.

Private Molly, Public Molly, created, written, and performed by Molly Cleator and directed by Lin Hixson, premiered at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in October 1983. It is about performing and performance, about name brands, style, charisma, image, packaging, our fantasies of stardom, and our idolization of performers. It is also about desire, the quest for approval, recognition, and love. It portrays our existential ennui and our detachment from real life, the vicarious lives we live through media to fill the terrible void at the center, and the private fears, insecurities, anxieties, and bad dreams that occupy that void. Finally, Private Molly, Public Molly is the product of growing up and living in LA, the dream center of the world with Hollywood at its heart.

Cleator, like Hixson, is fascinated by the power that media has over our sense of identity, movies, and rock ‘n’ roll in particular. Private Molly, Public Molly is built around the tension between the appropriated material and Cleator’s personal confessions. Under Hixson’s skillful direction and staging, Cleator walks a precarious tightrope. We are repeatedly seduced by her, manipulated into identification and complicity, then jolted back into the relationship of audience to performer. Cleator slips in and out of her public and private selves, her daydreams and nightmares, as facilely as she changes her clothes. She puts a pair of high-heeled sandals in a bookshelf and says, "That is Marilyn Monroe," and then, If I stand here I am Marilyn Monroe. She tap-dances to Tom Waits. She lounges in a pale pink swimsuit by a turquoise swimming pool, then tells us how inspired she is by Aretha Franklin who lives in Encino and how what she really wants is to do a concert with her. She plays another song by Tom Waits whose last lines are, I never saw your tears till they rolled down your face, and then tells us that when she closes her eyes she sees a ball of brown lava getting bigger and bigger and rolling towards her. She sits on a hard wooden chair under a painting of an empty road in perspective, wearing a gray coat and clutching a large black purse against her. She stares into space, tensely waiting, as a video tape plays featuring her being interviewed about sexual inhibitions on a real talk-show.

In a low-backed black sheath dress she performs an Aretha Franklin song to a record, using a bare-bulb standing lamp like a microphone. Every so often a telephone rings and a little girl’s voice on the answering machine tells us Molly isn’t home. The differentiation between fantasy and reality collapses in the final scene. In an intimate tone she asks us. You can hear ‘em, can’t you? They’re sitting over there talking about her. She describes the woman adoringly, almost worshipfully, telling us over and over, I remember that I loved her, shifting the emphasis to a different word each time. Only when she refers to the woman walking over to a young man in a snakeskin jacket who plays the guitar, does it become apparent that this narrative is related to an earlier scene in which Cleator in a voice filled with longing, talks to the man, then turns to us and asks if we have any corrections regarding her performance. Switching to the first person Cleator becomes the woman and in a soft southern accent says, I don’t care what you say about me…I am who I am. The scene is from Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending. In the end when she finally answers the ringing telephone, it is Elvis Costello singing to her, I Write the Book.

How many scenes do we each play out in our lives in which we re-enact lines, gestures, and postures from strangely familiar scenarios? Cleator makes us aware of how we mold ourselves to resemble the public personalities whom we admire, the stars and celebrities whose projected images are often as fictional as our own impersonations.

Cleator is a performer and co-writer in Lin Hixson’s latest production Hey John, Did You Take The El Camino Far? No longer working with Jane Dibbell, Hixson has taken conceptual and directorial control, the result being a major step in both the structural and thematic cohesion and clarity of the work. Based on original stories by Hixson, Hey John, Did You Take The El Camino Far? was developed and scripted in collaboration with Cleator and performer and video producer Valerie Faris. Employing production methods closer to the making of a television show or film than anything resembling what we have called Performance Art, Hixson’s team includes musical director-composer Bobbi Permanent, choreographer Peggy Margaret, and video director-producer Jonathan Dayton.