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"Hello,..."
the foreword to
Attack of the Man-Eating Lotus Blossoms
by Justin Chin
This is twenty-five years from now: I am sitting in the living room with family and friends. A meal is being prepared and brought to the table, there are clusters of conversation, nephews and nieces are scampering around, a television documentary about the 1990s has just ended.
"Uncle Justin," a niece pipes up. "What was it like in the '90s? What did you do in the '90s?"
"Did you do that funny dance with the glowing sticks at the rave?" a nephew asks. Another nephew joins in, "Did you lose billions in the dot com bust?"
By now, everyone is focused on this conversation. Lisa gathers all the young ones and seats them in front of me. She chuckles. "In the last decade of the last century, your uncle was a performance artist."
The kids look blankly at me; two of the older ones look horrified. "Oh yes, remember the time you sang off-key renditions of "MacArthur Park" accompanied by tablas?" my brother says. "Or the time you sat in the storefront window with a hood on taking pictures of passers-by and people who looked in?"
Zack is laughing as he remembers, "The time you explained gay sex using sock puppets, a dropper, and packets of MacDonald's half-and-half." By this time, homosexuality is such the norm that it is passé, we don't have to skirt the topic around little children anymore.
I raise a limp defense. "I was investigating daddy-boy relationships and how the community..."
"Then there was all those scratched slides and tapes of disembodied sound," Richard says. "Didn't one reviewer say it was the bleakest theatrical experience in recent memory?"
"That was about the..." I try to counter, but I am interrupted by my mom.
"And then there was that blood-letting," she says.
"You're being reductive! There was more to it than just that," I protest.
"And you burned all those T-shirts and made someone write his name on your ass," a voice chimes in from somewhere behind.
"Who's that? Who's over there?" I ask, but no one pays any attention to me.
"You tape-recorded me saying I wanted to oof Magnum PI's hairy chest," Lüch accuses. "And you had all those slides of people's poo-holes, it was gross."
"So, Uncle Justin," another niece sweetly asks, "What's the difference between performance art and making a fool of yourself in public?"
"That's an easy one," I tell the little ones as they follow me when I walk over to bookshelf. "See for yourselves..."
From 1992 to the early bits of 2001, I had a concurrent life as a performance artist. I stumbled into performance art quite by accident. I knew what it was and I knew I enjoyed it as a spectator and a consumer, but I never thought I'd would actually do it.
The early '90s was a different time. (Which isn't saying anything at all since every time is a different time.) In the United States, twelve years of a conservative government had taken its toll, a proposal to restrict funds to art that was deemed obscene was in the air, propelled by the rescinding of funds to four artists, the economy was plodding along shakily, and though we did not know it then, because of all the funerals and grief and caring for loved ones, the bell sounding round one of the AIDS epidemic was approaching.
In San Francisco, ACT-UP had imploded and Queer Nation too, as they would all over the country. The words "queer studies" and "post-modern" were bandied about and there was a big interest in critical theory and cultural studies. For the first time in recent memory, a presidential candidate had mentioned the words "gays and lesbians" on the campaign trail and not in a despicable manner.
You can see how, in this climate, solo performance as an art-form, especially within the queer community, made an impact. How using the body, as medium and as content and as form, made such simple and powerful sense. How memory and remembering was a political act.
Circumstances leading to others, I was somehow given the opportunity to put on a show. As a fledging writer at that time, I had for a period of two years decided that I would not turn down any artistic offer--readings, offers to publish, calls for submissions, offers to perform, anything--that was put to me. And I followed through. And yes, there are a few things that I'm glad are long forgotten by now.
I suspected all along that I was a bad actor, and coming to United States, this was proved to me. Not only was I a bad actor, I was a bad ethnic actor, threatening to bring down the race with my ineptness.
I discovered that Performance was not like Acting at all, even though there were some elements of Acting in Performance, and there were threads to the Theatre. Performance was, in a way, un-Acting, and consciously so too. Whereas Acting, when executed in its highest order, tends toward unconsiously un-Acting. The confusions I think I had about performance art came from whether I followed its history from the European '20s, the Dadaist, Futurist and Surrealist schools or from the American '60s, of happenings, actions, environmental and Pop art schools. Added to the confusion was the media representation of the stereotypical performance artist, either wailing like a banshee and throwing food at the audience or being pretentious and meaning-challenged, scoffing at idiots who did not get The Meaning when there was none.
My performance work happily embraced everything it could get its grubby hands on. Often described as interdisciplinary, it was more anti-disciplinary. Though presented in theatre settings and often under the aegis of theatre, it had less to do with the theatre, its history and traditions, and was more aligned to that of conceptual art and performance studies.
My performance aesthetics tended to be lo-fi; this was as much a preference as it was a necessity, working with no budget and being mostly self-funded, as many artists are. I learned how to do things cheaply without sacrificing too much of the look or the function, I learned how to make media, slides, video, sounds with what equipment I had, broken or partly-working as it was, or what I could borrow. My iMac was still years away, and I think of all the possibilities that could have been. I saved money and frequent flyer miles for a travel fund. I worked jobs and worked a schedule that allowed me to do my art. Again, all this is nothing many artist haven't done, are doing right now.
Through it all, I was often prodded to do work that was more commercially viable in its form and content. Not that I was deliberately going against that. I knew what sort of narratives and forms were viable, and that I could do it. But that work just didn't hold all that much interest for me. This was how I thought, what went on in my head, how I wanted to do it, what I could do based on ability, resources, budget. This was how it would be a challenge to me, and how I could have pleasure and enjoyment from doing it.
Some of these performances were successful, some were miseries. I've always felt that I could have staged them better, performed them just a little better.
I am still not a good, or even remotely capable actor; every time I see good theatre, I'm reminded of that. I probably wasn't even a good performer. If anything I trusted that my texts and the overarching ideas of the performance would see me through.
But time passes, and deciding to stay in San Francisco (a decision I made not for love of the city but for other reasons; a decision I do not regret, by the way) made it increasingly difficult to have a life as a performance artist. It was harder to get a run of shows, and I was getting more reluctant to do one-off shows, not to mention the fatigue and exhaustion that puts on a body. After what was to be the last performance, one that was so perfect in my mind, one I truly enjoyed performing, I knew at that moment, sitting on the lanai with my best friends overlooking the Pacific Ocean, that it was the end of that part of my life; and I was happy to end it.
The texts collected here represent the major bulk of the work in my short performance art life.
In compiling and editing them for this book, I set out some guidelines for myself. First, I would not try to rewrite the pieces, even as much as I wanted to. As most writers know, you can keep Leavesing of Grassing until you turn to fungus. What I had in hand were working scripts: they had blank spots for ad-libs and improvisations to factor in certain topical cultural and political references, technical information, notes to myself of things to bear in mind during performance. That text was meant to be spoken, verbalized, acted upon, and so I tried to mediate all that into something that can be read, that works as a reading thing, but also as a text that performs.
Secondly, I wanted to provide some anecdotes about the performance of the work but I did not want to find myself explaining what the work was about. Nothing, and I mean nothing, makes you look so much the plonker as when you do that (except actually plonking, of course).
The first point proved to be more difficult than I could imagine. How you write and think now is different from how you wrote and thought ten years ago. The pricks that you were kicking against have either:
1. gone away,
2. been replaced by their understudies, peers, underlings, disciples, demon-spawn,
3. retired or are no longer pricking
4. become your friend, acquaintance, buddy, or,
5. your shin splints have forced you to stop kicking, or,
6. you've ceded your spot to someone else who is now doing the kicking instead, or
7. you decided to stop kicking and to ask nicely and the pricks were less so, and they listened, and you listened, and a nice chat was had over tea and cakes, and everyone got on and along.
So, I tell the little ones, "There is this book, that will explain everything to you and more." I pluck the book off the shelf. They gather around as I settle into the comfy chair. I turn to the first page. "Okay, are you ready?..."
Email Justin Chin.
Go to the Justin Chin webpage.
Read about the collection Attack of the Man-Eating Lotus Blossoms.
Justin Chin is the author of Attack of the Man-Eating Lotus Blossoms, a collection of performance art texts, documents, and scripts. He is also the author of two collections of poetry, Harmless Medicine and Bite Hard, and two collections of essays, Burden of Ashes and Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes and Pranks. Chin's writings have also been anthologized widely, most notably in The Outlaw Bible Of American Poetry, American Poetry: The Next Generation, and The World In Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave, among others. He lives in San Francisco.
"Hello,...:
© 2005 Justin Chin
The work featured in this journal is under copyright protection
by the individual authors and artists and may not be duplicated
or reprinted without their permission.
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