A group of women wearing slips and underwear came up on the freight elevator dancing to a raunchy Patti Smith song. The men in tuxedos came down a ladder from the roof. Hixson did a monolog about early teenage sexual experience while blow-drying her hair. The women strung clotheslines across the space and the men hung paper party plates and cups on them while talking about war games. The men put “1950s pastel prom dresses on the women. Hixson and Bonkemeyer jogged in the prom dresses and heels and talked about staying in shape and getting jobs after graduation. The men went into the elevator and the women stood outside with their backs to the men, slowly pulled down their underpants, stepped out of them, and got into the elevator, leaving the panties behind as the elevator descended. This piece contained many of the raw ingredients that eventually came together with power and complexity in Hixson’s recent work with Goat Island, We Got A Date (1989).
Kicked Upstairs, which played to a packed house, toured the local colleges and was adapted to each new space. It was a significant turning point, not only artistically but in terms of Hixson’s role in the community. It marked the initiation of Hixson’s Industrial Street loft as the nexus for independent performance activity in downtown LA. During the fall of 1980, Hangers performed Cowboy. The Cartesian Memorial Orchestra, who later created music scores for a number of Perez’s major company pieces, and Karen Goodman, a member of Perez’s company at the time, and now an established choreographer/solo dancer, presented new works, and two of Molly Cleator’s friends, UCLA students Valerie Faris and Tobi Redlich, did a dance performance called Sleepwalkers. A decade later Redlich opened Caravan, her own Hollywood dance studio, and Faris is half of a film producing/directing team with Jonathan Dayton, known for their innovative rock films. In addition, Hixson took the job of performance coordinator at LACE in October 1980.
At the same time, Rachel Rosenthal turned her west-side studio on Robertson Boulevard, not far from the fast-declining LAICA (Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art), into a performance space called Espace DBD, where she held workshops and weekly performances, many by emerging young artists and former students. Cleator, who was one of Rosenthal’s Otis protégées, introduced Hixson to Linda Albertano and Elisha Shapiro, who were to later participate in Hixson’s post-Hangers collaborative spectacles. From 1977 to 1979 Cleator had resided with Shapiro and Redlich, who was married to him at that time, in the Nihilist Housing cooperative, which produced the Xeroxed proto-punk mail art OK Magazine and held performance events on the roof of the I930s apartment building on Wilshire Boulevard and Beverly Glen. One of the regular performers was a new-wave band called Willys (Charles Duncan, Martin Ingle, Kyle C. Kyle, Steve Hagel) which sometimes featured the six-foot-four-inch singer/poet/performer Linda Albertano, then a UCLA film school graduate. Albertano has since become one of LA’s luminary performance personas, and Shapiro is the notorious conceptualist who has produced such media events and videos as the 1984 Nihilist Olympics and the 1988 Nihilist Party Presidential Campaign.
Cleator, who was still at Otis, asked Hixson and Jane Dibbell, who had joined Rosenthal’s classes, to collaborate with her, Albertano, Redlich, and Shapiro on Rest Area #17, otherwise known as The Pink Piece. A more divergent and eccentric assemblage of sensibilities and personalities is hard to imagine, yet they became primary players in Hixson’s first post-Hangers piece, Sway Back, which was, along with Hey John, Did You Take the El Camino Far, the most fully resolved and conceptually cohesive work of her LA years. Composed of autobiographical monologs, vignettes, and visual tableaux, Rest Area #17 was performed at Hixson’s loft in January 1981. At the same time, Birds on Pedestals with Bomber Ladies was being work-shopped. Although officially presented as a Hangers piece, Birds was as much an outgrowth of the activities in Rosenthal’s class, with Rest Area #17 as the impetus.
Hangers was beginning to splinter as its members’ interests and energies diverged. Hachten was pregnant, and Hixson had expanded her field of activity to encompass other groups, with Dibbell aligning herself with Hixson. When the opportunity presented itself to do a Hangers piece at LACE, Hixson and Dibbell saw it as a chance to do a spectacle-scale piece, and they invited Cleator and the Rosenthal/Otis crowd to collaborate with Hangers. In addition, Dibbell brought in her own contingent from Claremont, a group that included composer Michael Montleone and her teen children Julian and Dominique and their friends, with whom she had been putting on events for some time. The coalescence of such a large and diverse group of young talent and energy resulted in a kind of creative fission that made Birds a groundbreaking performance masterpiece. With a cast of more than twenty and nearly as many scenes, produced without any funding or the guiding hand of any single “auteur,” the hour-long Birds on Pedestals with Bomber Ladies was performed one time only at LACE in May 1981. It can now be cited as an important historical turning point for performance in LA, the performance that triggered the emergence of the TV generation.
This spectacle bore little resemblance to work going on in New York at the same time — neither the techno-pop virtuosity of Laurie Anderson, the hard-edged solos of Eric Bogosian, nor East Village punk rock. Birds was essentially a movement-based piece. Though it owed some debt to the visual theatre of Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Ping Chong, the Wooster Group, and Mabou Mines (which Hixson and some of the others had read about but not actually seen), it was vastly different in its subject matter, tone, and style.
Birds was a truly collaborative work in the way that a TV series is a collaborative enterprise, with Hixson, Dibbell, and Cleator functioning as producers, masterminding the conceptual structure and shaping the individual episodes created by independent teams of artists into a coherent whole. What could have ended up as little more than a variety show was held together not so much by a shared aesthetic, but by a commonality of both cultural experience and the response to it. In many ways Birds was truly a product of an LA sensibility in its methodology, its content, and its look or style. A similar worldview showed up shortly afterwards in the early New York work of the young Tim Miller, who grew up in LA County.
As in all of Hixson’s pieces to follow, Birds traversed the blurred boundaries between public and private realities, between the world on the screen and the world in your living room. War is represented as fashion. Fashion postures as art. Art parodies entertainment. Entertainment sanitizes violence. Politics and entertainment wear the same clothes. Camouflage is chic. Appearances are everything and nothing is what it appears to be. Everyone is a chameleon in media culture. In fact, camouflage itself was the meta-text.
The piece was set in an American landscape of media, art, and entertainment genres which subsume politics. In retrospect, Birds on Pedestals with Bomber Ladies was an eerie forecast of the decade to come — the Reagan era of image, in which an actor President quoted movie fictions instead of history and called terrorists “freedom fighters” — a decade which would culminate in a George Bush/Saddam Hussein image war on videotape, a battle resembling an election-year TV ad campaign. The set itself had the ambiance of a live TV show. Wilson Barrileaux dressed as a motorcycle cop in black leather, boots and helmet, was mistaken by the audience for a hired security guard as he cruised the set. Ron Wood crooned a bad piano-bar/cocktail-lounge medley at an electric keyboard. Barrileaux fractured assumptions based on image when he returned later, first with a feather boa added to the police uniform, and then in drag in a sequined floozy dress and hat singing the 1970s disco song I Love the Night Life by Alicia Bridges.
The piece had a highly designed, glossy stylishness. Costuming was thematic, and props were part of the costume or camouflage. Everyone was either in black, white, red, or green camouflage fatigues or shifty shrubbery, both tropical and suburban. A crowd of women and men in black cocktail dresses and suits postured with champagne glasses. A gun went off. Everyone hit the ground. The entire cast in formal attire fell into military drill formations, panting like new recruits at boot camp. Eight goggled bomber ladies perched on sculpture pedestals spread their arms back like wings (birds or airplanes?). Next they struck classical statue poses,