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.
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.