by Chris Kraus
Richard Schechner is a Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, author of Environmental Theater and several other books on anthropology and theater and editor of The Drama Review. He was once my acting teacher. And at 3 a.m. last Wednesday night it occurred to me that Richard Schechner had ruined my life.
And so I’d write this broadside rant and wheatpaste it all around Richard’s neighborhood and NYU. I’d dedicate it to the artist Hannah Wilke. Because while Hannah’s tremendous will to turn the things that bothered her into subjects for her art seemed so embarrassing in her lifetime, at 3 a.m. it dawned on me that Hannah Wilke is a model for everything I hope to do.
“J’ACCUSE RICHARD SCHECHNER who through sleep deprivation amateur GESTALT THERAPY and SEXUAL MANIPULATION attempted to exert MIND CONTROL over a group of 10 students in Washington, D.C.”
Well, it was a plan. And at that moment I believed in it as strongly as the plan Sylvère and I made one night on 7th Street when I was so depressed and he joined me in my suicide attempt. We each drank some wine and took two percosets and decided to read Chapter 73 of Julio Cortazar’s book Hopscotch out loud into your answerphone. “Yes but who will cure us of the dull fire, the colorless fire that at nightfall runs along the rue de la Huchette…” At the time it seemed so daring, apropos and brilliant but Dick, like most conceptual art, delirium can get so referential—
At Richard Schechner’s Aboriginal Dream Time Workshop in Washington, D.C., he and I were the only people in the group who got up before the crack of noon. We drank coffee, shared the Post and New York Times and talked about politics and world events. Like us, Richard had some kind of politics and in that group I was the only other person interested in the news. I was a Serious Young Woman, hunched and introspective, running to the library to check out books about the Aborigines—too dumb to realize in that situation that the Aborigines were totally beside the point.
Richard seemed to like our morning conversations about Brecht and Althusser and Andre Gorz, but later on he turned the group against me for being too cerebral and acting like a boy. And weren’t all these passionate interests and convictions just evasions of a greater truth, my cunt? I was an innocent, a de-gendered freak, ’cause unlike Liza Martin, who was such a babe she refused to take her platforms off for Kundalini Yoga, I hadn’t learned the trick of throwing sex into the mix.
And so on Perilous Journey Night, I went downtown and took my clothes off in a topless bar. Shake shake shake. That same night Marsha Peabody, an overweight suburban schizophrenic who Richard’d let into the group because schizophrenia, like Aboriginal Dream Time, breaks down the continuum between space and time, decided to go off her medication. Richard spent Perilous Journey Night on the football field behind the changing sheds getting a blowjob from Maria Calloway. Maria wasn’t in our group. She’d come all the way from NYC to study with Richard Schechner but she’d been shunted into Leah’s workshop on Body/Sound because she wasn’t a “good enough” performer. The next day Marsha disappeared and no one asked or heard from her again. Richard encouraged me and Liza Martin to work together in New York. I gave up my cheap apartment and moved into Liza’s Tribeca loft, topless dancing several nights a week to pay her rent. I was investigating the rift between thought and sex or so I thought, letting lawyers smell my pussy while I talked. This went on for several years and Dick, on Wednesday night I woke up realizing you were right. Men still do ruin women’s lives. As I turn 40 can I avenge the ghost of my young self?
To see yourself as who you were ten years ago can be very strange indeed.
On Thursday afternoon I walked over to Film/Video Arts on Broadway to make a copy of the videotape of Readings From The Diaries of Hugo Ball, a performance piece I’d staged in 1983.
Though he’s remembered as the person who “invented” Dada at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire in 1917, Ball’s art activities lasted only about two years. All the other years were fractured, restless. He was a theater student, factory worker, circus attendant, journalist for a leftist weekly and amateur theologian chronicling the “hierarchy of angels” before his death of stomach cancer at age 41. Ball and his companion Emmy Hennings, a cabaret performer, puppet maker, novelist and poet, zigzagged across Switzerland and Germany for 20 years recanting and revising their beliefs. They had no steady source of income. They moved around Europe looking for the perfect low-rent base where they could live cheap and work in peace. They broke with Tristan Tzara because they couldn’t understand his careerism—why spend your life promoting one idea?—and were it not for the publication of Ball’s diaries, Flight Out of Time, all traces of their lives probably would’ve disappeared.
Morphine
What we are waiting for is one last fling
At the dizzy height of each passing day
We dread the sleepless dark and cannot pray.
Sunshine we hate, it doesn’t mean a thing.
We never pay attention to the mail.
The pillow we sometimes favor with a silent
All-knowing smile, between fits of violent
Activity to shake the fever chill.
Let others join the struggle to survive
We rush helplessly forward through this life,
Dead to the world, dreaming on our feet.
The blackness just keeps coming down in sheets.
Emmy Hennings wrote this poem in 1916 and Dick, it was just so thrilling to discover there were people in the past like Ball and Hennings, making art without any validation or career plans when my friends and I were living in the East Village, New York City in 1983.
Reading about them saved my life, and so to stage the diaries I invited the nine most interesting people that I knew to comb through Ball and Henning’s writings for the parts that best described themselves. There were the poets Bruce Andrews, Danny Krakauer, Steve Levine and David Rattray. There were the performers Leonora Champagne and Linda Hartinian, the actress Karen Young, the art critic Gert Schiff and me.
And since three of these nine people are dead now, and since I’d recently read Mick Tausig’s account of Ball in his book The Nervous System (who regrets the historical absence of Dadaist women, but doesn’t look too hard to find them—Dear Dick, Dear Mick, I’m just an amateur but I found three: Emmy Hennings, Hannah Hoch and Sophie Tauber), I wanted to take another look at the play.
As instigator of the piece I played the role of hostess/tour guide, giving my friends a chance to speak and filling in the expository holes. To do this I stole the character of Gabi Teisch, a German high school history teacher created by Alexandra Kluge for her brother’s film The Patriot. Because she is unhappy in the present, Gabi Teisch decides to excavate the whole of German history to find out what went wrong. I was unhappy too. And until we own our history, she thought, I thought, there can be no change.
To get into the role I found a sensible tweed skirt flecked with tiny rhinestones and a long-sleeved lacy blouse: a costume that reminded me of an arcane archetype, the Hippie Intellectual High-school Teacher, of her, of me.
So on Thursday afternoon I stood around the Film/Video Arts dub room watching myself at 28 as Gabi Teisch: a scarecrow with bad hair, bad skin, bad teeth, slouched underneath the weight of all this information, every word an effort but one worth making because there was just so much to say.
To perform yourself inside a role is very strange. The clothes, the words, prod you into nameless areas and then you stretch them out in front of other people, live.
Chris/Gabi was a mess, persona-less, trying to lose herself in talking. Her eyes were open but afraid, locked in neutral, not knowing whether to look in or out. While she was in rehearsal for the play, Chris had started having sadomasochistic sex with the downtown Manhattan luminary Sylvère Lotringer. This happened about twice a week at lunchtime and it was very confusing. Chris would arrive at Sylvère’s Front Street loft after doing errands on Canal Street. She’d be ushered into Sylvère’s bedroom, walls lined with books and African water bags and whips a
nd he’d push her down onto the bed with all her clothes on. He held her, squeezed her tits until she came. He never let her touch him, often he wouldn’t even fuck her and after awhile she stopped wondering who this person even was, revolving on his bed deeper through time tunnels into memories of childhood. Love and fear and glamour. Browsing through his books she realized she was up against some pretty stiff competition, reading some of the inscriptions: “To Sylvère, The Best Fuck In The World (At Least To My Knowledge) Love, Kathy Acker.” Afterwards they’d eat clam soup and talk about the Frankfurt School. Then he showed her to the door…
So what was Chris performing? At that moment she was a picture of the Serious Young Woman thrown off the rails, exposed, alone, androgynous and hovering onstage between the poet-men, presenters of ideas, and actress-women, presenters of themselves. She wasn’t beautiful like the women; unlike the men, she had no authority. Watching Chris/Gabi I hated her and wanted to protect her. Why couldn’t the world I’d moved around in since my teens, the underground, just let this person be?
“You are not beautiful but you are very intelligent,” the Mexican gigolo says to the 38-year-old New York Jewish heroine of the film A Winter Tan. And of course it’s at that moment that you know he’s going to kill her.
All acts of sex were forms of degradation. Some random recollections: East 11th Street, on the bed with Murray Groman: “Swallow this mother ’til you choke.” East 11th Street, in the bed with Gary Becker: “The trouble with you is, you’re such a shallow person.” East 11th Street, up against the wall with Peter Baumann: “The only thing that turns me on about you is pretending you’re a whore.” Second Avenue, the kitchen, Michael Wainwright: “Quite frankly, I deserve a better-looking, better-educated girlfriend.” What do you do with the Serious Young Woman (short hair, flat shoes, body slightly hunched, head drifting back and forth between the books she’s read)? You slap her, fuck her up the ass and treat her like a boy. The Serious Young Woman looked everywhere for sex but when she got it it became an exercise in disintegration. What was the motivation of these men? Was it hatred she evoked? Was it some kind of challenge, trying to make the Serious Young Woman femme?
2. The Birthday Party
Inside out
Boy you turn me
Upside down and
Inside out
—late ’70s disco song
Joseph Kosuth’s 50th birthday party last January was reported the next day on Page 6 of the New York Post. And everything was just as perfect as they said: about 100 guests, a number large enough to fill the room but small enough for each of us to feel among the intimates, the chosen. Joseph and Cornelia and their child had just arrived from Belgium; Marshall Blonsky, one of Joseph’s closest friends and Joseph’s staff had been planning it for weeks.
Sylvère and I drove down from Thurman. I dropped him off outside the loft, parked the car and arrived at Joseph’s door at the same moment as another woman, also entering alone. Each of us gave our names to Joseph’s doorman. Each of us had names that weren’t there. “Check Lotringer,” I said. “Sylvère.” And sure enough, I was Sylvère Lotringer’s “Plus One” and she was someone else’s. Riding up the elevator, checking makeup, collars, hair, she whispered, “The last thing you want to feel before walking into one of these things is that you’re not invited,” and we smiled and wished each other luck and parted at the coat-check. But luck was something that I didn’t feel much need of because I had no expectations: this was Joseph’s party, Joseph’s friends, people, (mostly men, except for female art dealers and us plus-ones) from the early ’80s art world, so I expected to be patronized and ignored.
Drinks were at one end of the loft; dinner at the other. David Byrne was wandering across the room as tall as a Moorish king in a magnificent fur hat. I stood next to Kenneth Broomfield at the bar and said a tentative hello; he hissed and turned away. A tighter grip around the scotch-glass, standing there in my dark-green Japanese wool dress, high heels and makeup… But look! There’s Marshall Blonsky! Marshall greets me at the bar and says that seeing me reminds me of the party we attended some 11 years ago when I was Marshall’s date. And of course he would remember because the party was given by Xavier Fourcade to celebrate the publication of Marshall’s first book, On Signs, at Xavier’s Sutton Place town-house. It was late winter, early spring, Aquarius or Pisces and I remember guests tripping past the caterers and staff to walk around the green expanse of daffodils and bunny lawn that separated us from the river. David Salle was there, Umberto Eco was there, together with a stable-load of Fourcade’s models and a reviewer from the New York Times.
At that time I was living in a tenement on Second Avenue and studying charm as a possible escape. Could I be Marshall Blonsky’s perfect date? I’d given up trying to be as sexual as Liza Martin but I was small-boned, thin, with a New Zealand accent trailing off to something that sounded vaguely mid-Atlantic. Perhaps something could be done with this? By then I’d read enough that no one guessed I’d never been to school. Marshall and I’d been introduced by our mutual friend Louise Bourgeois. I loved her and he was fascinated by her iron will and growing fame. “It is the ability to sublimate that makes an artist,” she told me once. And: “The only hope for you is marrying a critic or an academic. Otherwise you’ll starve.” And in the interest of saving me from poverty, Louise had given me, for this occasion, the perfect dress: a straight wool-boucle pumpkin-colored shift, historically important, the dress she’d worn accompanying Robert Rauschenberg to his first opening on East 10th… Most of Marshall’s friends were men—critics, psychoanalysts, semioticians—and he liked that he could walk me round the room and I’d perform for them, listening, cracking jokes in their own special languages, guiding the conversation back to Marshall’s book. So French New Wave… Being weightless and gamine, spitting prettily at rules and institutions, a talking dog without the dreariness of a position to defend.
Dear Dick, It hurts me that you think I’m “insincere.” Nick Zedd and I were both interviewed once about our films for English television. Everyone in New Zealand who saw the show told me how they liked Nick better ’cause he was more sincere. Nick was just one thing, a straight clear line: Whoregasm, East Village gore ’n porn, and I was several. And-and-and. And isn’t sincerity just the denial of complexity? You as Johnny Cash driving your Thunderbird into the Heart of Light. What put me off experimental film world feminism, besides all it’s boring study groups on Jacques Lacan, was its sincere investigation into the dilemma of the Pretty Girl. As an Ugly Girl it didn’t matter much to me. And didn’t Donna Haraway finally solve this by saying all female lived experience is a bunch of riffs, completely fake, so we should recognize ourselves as Cyborgs? But still the fact remains: You moved out to the desert on your own to clear the junk out of your life. You’re skeptical of irony. You are trying to find some way of living you believe in. I envy this.
Jane Bowles described this problem of sincerity in a letter to her husband Paul, the “better” writer:
August 1947:
Dearest Bupple,
…The more I get into it…the more isolated I feel vis-àvis the writers whom I consider to be of any serious mind …I am enclosing this article entitled New Heroes by Simone de Beauvoir … Read the sides that are marked pages 121 and 123. It is what I have been thinking at the bottom of my mind all this time and God knows it is difficult to write the way I do and yet think their way. This problem you will never have to face because you have always been a truly isolated person so that whatever you write will be good because it will be true which is not so in my case… You immediately receive recognition because what you write is in true relation to yourself which is always recognizable to the world outside… With me who knows? When you are capable only of a serious approach to writing as I am it is almost more than one can bear to be continually doubting one’s sincerity …
Reading Jane Bowle’s letters makes me angrier and sadder than anything to do with you. Because she was just so brilliant an
d she was willing to take a crack at it—telling the truth about her difficult and contradictory life. And because she got it right. Even though, like the artist Hannah Wilke, in her own lifetime she hardly found anybody to agree with her. You’re the Cowboy, I’m the Kike. Steadfast and true, slippery and devious. We aren’t anything but our circumstances. Why is it men become essentialists, especially in middle age?
And at Joseph’s party time stands still and we can do it all again. Marshall walks me over to two men in suits, a Lacanian and a world banker from the UN. We talk about Microsoft and Bill Gates and Timothy Leary’s brunches in LA until a tall and immaculately gorgeous WASP woman joins us and the conversation parts away from jokes about interest rates and transference to make room for Her…
(As I write this I feel very hopeless and afraid.)
Later Marshall made an academic birthday speech for Joseph that he’d been scribbling on all night. And Glenn O’Brien, looking like Steve Allen at the piano, performed a funny scat-singing recitative about Joseph’s legendary womanizing, wealth and art. Everybody clapping, laughing, camp but serious and boozy like in the film The Girl Can’t Help It, men in suits playing TV beatniks but where’s Jayne Mansfield as the fall girl? Then David Byrne and John Cale played piano and guitar and people danced.
Sylvère got drunk and teased Diego, something about politics, and Diego got mad and tossed his drink in Sylvère’s face. And Warren Niesluchowski was there, and John and Anya. Later Marshall marshalled a gang of little men, the banker, the Lacanian and Sylvère, to the cardroom to drink scotch and talk about the Holocaust. The four looked like the famous velvet painting of card-playing dogs.
And it got late and someone turned on some vintage disco, and all the people young enough never to’ve heard these songs the first time round got up and danced. Funky Town, Le Freak, c’est Chic and Upside Down…the songs that played in topless clubs and bars in the late ’70s while these men were getting famous. While me and all my friends, the girls, were paying for our rent and shows and exploring “issues of our sexuality” by shaking to them all night long in topless bars.
