Ever since I first learned of the Happenings of the late 50sand early 60s and the performances in Soho and at Judson Church in the early 70s, I’ve ached to have been able to be there. These moments produced some of my favorite art ever.
Or at least I think so. Having been born in 1970, and having arrived in New York to start my artist life in 1993, I never saw any of it. What I’ve seen, and what I love, is mostly grainy black and white photographs, and some ramblingly long films.
And of course I’ve seen some recreations. Some of these are good — most of the “dancier” ones work pretty well. But most performance art recreations are terribly disappointing. I stand there fidgeting and let down and I wonder if I even like performance at all. Maybe I just like grainy black and white photographs. Maybe I should have become a photographer. Maybe my work is based on a misunderstanding. A fantasy.
But I think the problem is that what makes those happenings and performances of the 50s and 70s so amazing — even in photographs and oral histories — is the particular set of conditions out of which they arose. They were experimental. They came out of small communities of like-minded artists. They were work for which no market yet existed. They were basically groups of artists playing together.
Of course you can’t get that kind of playful experimentalism if you train a bunch of dancers or actors to restage your happening at a museum now that performance is a major commodity. But if you recreate the conditions instead of the performances, I think you can get close.
Of course some things can never go back. I can’t make Soho into a cheap empty wasteland, and I can’t go back to the time before Performa started branding everything that moves. But I can get a small group of like-minded people to experiment and play together. I just did, to make Totally Total Styrene with Michael Mahalchick, Andrew Bucksbarg, Marie Warsh, Max Warsh, and Patricia Milder. And it didn’t disappoint.
