The Life and Times of Keith Haring, An Iconic Artist

-The Arts Fuse

This biography of Keith Haring is a compendium of vivid, first-person narratives that provide an engaging insider’s perspective on the artist’s life.

Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring by Brad Gooch. HarperCollins, 512 pages, $42.

Brad Gooch is an esteemed memoirist, novelist, and biographer of such literary figures as Rumi, Flannery O’Connor, and Frank O’Hara. His latest book is a compelling analysis of the remarkable legacy of visual artist Keith Haring.

Gooch was a contemporary of Haring — they inhabited the same queer mise-en-scène in 1980’s New York. He draws on this on-the-spot knowledge to good effect. Much has been written about Haring from an art history perspective, but Gooch adds immeasurably to the literature with this sensitive and engaging contextualized portrait that examines the life and times of the iconic artist.

The biographer was given full access to Haring’s archives and interviewed more than 200 people. The result is a compendium of vivid, first-person narratives that provide an engaging insider’s perspective on the artist’s life. Because he focuses on friends and colleagues, Gooch delivers less academic artspeak about the work and more backstories about his inspirations and frustrations.

Growing up in Kutztown, PA with working class parents and three sisters, Haring described himself as being a “little nerd.”Even as a young child he often doodled abstract cartoons with his engineer dad. In middle school, Haring had a paper route and was briefly a Jesus-freak. He became a bit of a hippie in high school and began experimenting with drugs.

After graduating, Haring briefly went to Pittsburgh to study art, but landed in New York in 1978. Gallery assistant, busboy, and club doorman were some of his early jobs as he attended School of the Visual Arts for two semesters.

At that time, the bankrupt city was under siege: its many problems included high crime and unemployment, burned-out blocks, power outages, and crumbling infrastructure. Stuck in the accumulating detritus, artists in all disciplines took the opportunity to create in polyglot, do-it-yourself ways. Haring eagerly jumped into the churn.

Attracted to the emerging graffiti scene, Haring began drawing images of crawling children and barking dogs on outdoor walls and in public spaces. He also posted Xeroxed agitprop broadsheets — a strategy inspired by William Burroughs’ cut-up methods.

Haring found a kindred tribe in the burgeoning club scene in the East Village. Gooch details the gonzo performances, installations, and experimental videos he participated in with friends — the then unknown Kenny Scharf, Madonna, Ann Magnuson, and Jean-Michel Basquiat — at such venues as Club 57 and the Mudd Club.

Haring’s public profile increased enormously after he began drawing with white chalk on the blank advertising panels on subway station walls. He’d jump off a train and sketch in full public view, all the while furtively avoiding arrest. Under these sped-up circumstances, his pictographic imagery of zapping spaceships, pulsing TV’s, barking dogs, crawling babies, leaping porpoises, and smiling faces matured.

Over the next five years, it is estimated he drew over 5,000 chalk drawings (all unsigned) throughout New York City’s boroughs. Photographer Tseng Kwong Chi documented many of his underground performative actions. Eventually, some of these drawings were digitized for a Time Square electronic billboard show.

Despite the growing attention, an early review of Haring’s work in Artforum (1981) was somewhat dismissive: “The Radiant Child on the button is Haring’s Tag. It is a slick Madison Avenue colophon. It looks as if it’s always been there. The greatest thing is to come up with something so good it seems as if it’s always been there, like a proverb.” In contrast, artist Roy Lichtenstein was more affirming: “There just isn’t a false move. It’s all so beautifully devised.”

Galleries, collectors, and museums began to take note of Haring’s growing notoriety. His first one-person gallery show took place in 1982. A year later, the artist was featured in the Whitney Museum biennial. Invitations soon followed from institutions in Europe, Australia, and Japan.

In 1983, Andy Warhol befriended him. Haring began to emulate the artist. They spoke on the phone regularly, often partied together at night, collaborated, and traded artworks. When Warhol died, Haring stated, “Whatever I’ve done would not be possible without Andy.”

As demand for Haring’s work increased, he robustly expanded his output to ink drawings, woodcut prints, paintings on tarpaulins and wood, aluminum sculptures, theatrical sets, and costumes as well as large-scale outdoor sculptures for playgrounds and murals for inner city walls, clubs, and children’s hospitals across the world. Haring was dedicated to making his art accessible to a wide audience, outside of the elitist, insular domain of curators, galleries, and museums.

Whatever the medium or scale, Haring maintained the ethos of his early subway drawings: no preparation, no preliminary sketches, just sure-handed strokes in his inimitable style. Interviews with gallerists tell a repeated tale: Haring would sequester himself in the exhibition space days before an opening, creating the entire show en masse. Often, the paint was still drying as the public was entering.

Throughout his life, Haring surrounded himself with kids. Young graffiti artists partied with him in his homes and studios. He collaborated with teenager tagger, LA II (Angel Ortiz), embellishing ready-made statues with hieroglyphic images and worked with 1,000 students in an enormous mural celebrating the Statue of Liberty (1986). In Gooch’s biography, we also learn more about the private side of Haring’s loving relationship with multiple godchildren around the world.

Sex, love, and drugs were also a huge factor in Haring’s life (deliciously detailed in Gooch’s reporting). He met his first significant lover, Juan Dubose, at the St. Mark’s Baths. Every weekend the pair went to The Paradise Garage — a club primarily for Black and Latino gay men. No alcohol was served, though many of the partygoers used hallucinogenic enhancements as they danced through the night. Madonna previewed two unreleased songs at the artist’s 26th birthday party (1984) at the venue — only to be upstaged by Diana Ross serenading Haring with “Happy Birthday.”

Trying to maintain accessibility to his work as prices for his art soared, Haring opened his Pop Shop (1986) in Manhattan, where he sold pins, T-shirts, calendars, watches, magnets, and prints. Critics trashed him for this, calling him “a disco-decorator.” While it was never a money-maker, the Pop Shop remained open until 2005 — and it maintains an online presence today. A Pop Shop in Tokyo was less successful; it closed after a year.

Even as his fame grew, Haring remained dedicated to grass-roots activism: designing posters for anti-nuke rallies, anti-apartheid protests, safe sex promotions, and events for a myriad of LGBTQ causes. During 1985’s Live Aidbenefit for famine relief in Ethiopia Haring painted on stage as Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, and Mick Jagger sang.

While working in Tokyo in 1988, Haring noticed purple lesions on his leg; his HIV status was confirmed upon returning home. Using his celebrity as a bully pulpit, he publicly announced that he was living with AIDS in Rolling Stone a year later: “In a way it’s really liberating… Part of the reason that I’m not having trouble facing the reality of death is that it’s not a limitation… Everything I’m doing right now is exactly what I want to do.”

Rather than slowing down after his diagnosis, Haring ramped up his artmaking and political activity. In his journals at the time he described his life as “working obsessively and constantly every day… the only time I am happy is when I am working.”

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Stonewall Riots in an 1989 exhibition at New York’s Lesbian and Gay Community Center, Haring painted the men’s bathroom on the second floor with his “Once Upon A Time” mural, which celebrates the pre-AIDS world of unbridled gay male sexuality.

Haring died in 1990 at the age of 31. His memorial service at St. John the Divine Cathedral in Manhattan was attended by “more than a thousand invited guests.” Soprano Jessye Norman sang, choreographer Molissa Fenley danced, and actor Dennis Hopper eulogized. Kenny Scharf and Ann Magnuson were among the less reverent at the ceremony, joking that “Keith would be really bored right now,” as they recreated some “shtick and act” from Haring’s Club 57 days.

Ann Temkin, the curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, testifies to the ever-growing interest in Haring’s work after his death: “It’s a sort of truism that more radical work needs about thirty years for everyone to catch up and for the work to look as if it’s contemporary at that moment… His work can seem timeless now.”

In his endnote, Gooch’s succinctly articulates the transcendent power of Haring’s example and work: “In our own era of engagement by so many artists with any available surface; with personal icons and licensing; with activism, collaboration, communication; and with the fostering of community, Keith seems more than ever one of us.”

Mall Meditations

-VTDigger

Wintry months have me meandering indoors at the University Mall in South Burlington.  Morning crew starts at 8:30 am when only the IHop restaurant is open. We are quiet and determined with our walkers, canes, and shuffling gaits. Regulars acknowledge each other. We are on task in our forward momentum.

After a lap or two, some sit and join their coffee klatch. Others soldier on. Even with my Ferrari stickers, me and my walker are about the slowest; I am passed again and again as I do three rounds. A few determined shop owners get their steps in before start of business.

Professional service folks exercising with nonverbal clients join the fray, as do some fashionistas rolling in their wheelchairs who settle in the food court. People who seem to be unhoused wash up and use the facilities, and then linger on benches to stay warm.

As we continue to circle, administrators do daily walk throughs and security benignly strolls. Retailers raise grates and open doors while taking out garbage and restocking. Special events teams set up tables and prepare temporary displays all before the public arrives.

Late afternoons are quite different. Unsteady walkers dodge teenagers paying attention to themselves and their phones. Girls with their off-shoulder sweaters and impossibly tiny shopping bags have so much more game than unfocused boy packs. A few couples tentatively hold hands.

One man carries a teddy bear on his walks between stopping at both coffee shops at opposite ends. He never initiates contact, but warmly smiles when greeted. I marvel at trans individuals growing more assuredly into being in this public space - flowing granny dresses for the young and miniskirts for bewigged boomers.

Weekends, during business hours, are family fests. Moms set the itineraries, with dads and kids in tow. Grandparents put little ones on the mini carousels, swings, and train. Birthdays are celebrated. Gamers line up for competition. Even miniature golf is played. It can be a bit of bumper cars for me. 

Holiday pop-up shops are gone, but free tax helpers have taken their place. They too will season out soon. Amidst all the economic churn, it is reassuring how many stores survive. I wave to a few Kiosk operators and worry when they close even for a short vacation.

Friends sometimes accompany me. I find sauntering allows for freer conversations, although I prefer walking alone. My snail pace is constant, there is no second gear. To keep it fresh, I change directions, layer in shortcuts, even add store extensions into the routine. Occasionally I count steps in one of my three loops to gauge consistency.

Mostly, I feel invisible in my circumambulations - no one pays attention to an old man using a walker. No bully pulpit here. I am caught up short at how difficult it is for me to observe without judgement. I so often want to give unsolicited advice. A little mouth yoga (smiling) and breathing quiets my all too busy mind.  

Warmer temperatures will soon invite me to stroll outdoors to experience spring and listen to the birds. Here I encounter joggers, dogs, parents pushing strollers, and walking neighbors. I look forward to greeting them - we made it through the winter!

Of course, I will still have rain dates with my mall family.

About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, And New Queer Art

-The Arts Fuse

Jonathan D. Katz is a pioneering historian working in queer and gender studies. In 2019, he curated About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, And New Queer Art for Chicago’s Wrightwood 659 Gallery’s commemoration of the 50thanniversary of Stonewall. About Face featured over 350 artworks by 38 LGBTQ+ international artists.

Focusing on underrecognized interracial and multi-gendered artists across generations, Katz assortment challenged the prevailing prejudices of homonormativity, which overlooks BIPOC and trans folks in favor of assimilated white and cisgendered people. The show was a self-conscious provocation, an attempt to revise the LGBTQ+ canon.

The recently published catalogue for About Face (Monacelli Press, 272 pages, $65) includes elucidating essays and texts by Julian Carter, Anthony Cianciolo, Amelia Jones, Ava L. J. Kim, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Christopher Reed, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Dagmawi Woubshet. This lushly designed book — there’s 300 illustrations — offers proof of concept for Katz’s curatorial vision of the ever-evolving hybrid intersectionality of queer aesthetics.

Such well known American artists as Nick Cave, Keith Haring, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Peter Hujar are included. More significant, given Katz’s revisionist approach, are the appearances of installation artist Tianzhuo Chen, Leonard Suryajaya’s color-saturated photographs, Bhupen Khakhar’s figurative paintings, and the performative tableaus of Keioui Keijaun Thomas and Del Lagrace Volcano.

Other highlights in the volume confront the art world’s systemic racism; these include Jacolby Satterwhite’s immersive 3D animated media creations inspired by gaming, as well as South African photographer Zanele Muholi, and Canadian Cree interdisciplinary performance artist Kent Monkman.

The primary focus of About Face is on the new, but the work of deceased artists add welcome depth to the tapestry. The Bay Area is represented by Harvey Milk’s early photographs from the ‘50s and Jerome Caja’s irony-infused paintings, created with day-glow colors as he was dying from AIDS in the ‘90s. Greer Lankton’s tawdry sculptural dolls is a vision of East Village New York during the ’80s.

Necessary Action

A print of mine, Necessary Action, created from a word cloud of voice-overs from three of my disability-related videos is included in The S.P.A.C.E. Gallery’s “All that Feels” exhibition, February 2-24.

NECESSARY ACTION (2000)

Seizures at bedtime. MRIs locate a tumor inside the spinal cord. A hospital gurney takes me into overhead white light. I wake up screaming, covered in blood and iodine, paralyzed from the neck down. Body and mind are ripped apart. I cannot stop the jerking of my limbs, unclench my hand, or move my toes. There is no location on my left side and no sensation on my right.

All I have is Larry. His eyes say  “Don’t Die.” Dawn is the worst -- with him asleep and the medical shifts changing, I stare back at the world, whimper, and cry. What’s the movie today? I fantasize getting to the window, breaking the glass, slitting my throat.

Two boys down the hall -- motorcycle crashes screwed cages into their skulls. No one’s told them they’ll never leave. The elegant woman across the way -- flawless on top, but her legs are dead. Another surgery gone wrong. My roommate lost toes to diabetes and had another stroke. His wife screams on the phone to come home.

People worse off make me feel less sorry for myself, until someone more mobile shows up. I’d rather be alone glaring at my swollen and skewed left side that is flaccid, sagging and lifeless. My movie in this room has the helmet kids not shrieking, the young men walking upright, the old ones not drooling, and me tapping my fingers.

Six weeks in the hospital and two months in a wheelchair at home, then I navigate life on the outside. Alarmed expressions, sympathetic smiles, and open-mouthed pity: the more generous people are to me, the more I resent them. Few really care to know, most want only to be reassured. Each encounter makes me smaller.

Meeting other crips, I never ask my real questions. I’m frightened when Jack regresses, Stephanie gets depressed, Judy breaks her hand, or Mark dies. The movie here? Stephanie’s legs untangle, Jack walks unassisted, Mark gets published, and Judy rides her horse with me running free. I still dream fully able, they all do too.

Life at home revolves around getting to work and fitting in rehab with Larry as my soccer mom. Cooking and cleaning, the dog and me; I’m a burden to him. While my relation to living remains elusive, I don’t know how to ask his forgiveness to go first. As we drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, I imagine us as Thelma and Louise, blissfully accelerating into oblivion.

With no sensation, sex is purely visual. Reciprocating with my enfeebled fingers and locked-in neck is short lived. Often, I disassociate to retrieve stored memories of thrusting, receiving, grasping, hardness, wetness, stickiness, and release. It’s not enough. The movie should have us rolling around wrestling and jousting, fucking and sucking with gleeful abandon.

I’m despondent whenever my body fails and it always fails me. Sadness and anger, frustration and tears are constant -- but private. As the neuropathy increases in my legs, I obsess on long-term survivors whose over compensating bent frames refuse to give in. My debilitation fuels self-loathing. I embarrass myself with fear and shame.

What I wanted to be temporary is permanent. There are no happy endings for the movie today: no transformations, no miracles to celebrate, and no heroic deeds. There’s just Larry and me, holding on to one another, slowly making our way in the world, careening side by side.

DREAMING AWAKE (2003)

I dissociate from the burning in my legs,

silently crying between sleep and the morning.

Hopes and dreams keep me safe through the night.

After surgery, I died then,

but you refused and brought me back.

Seven years and counting, of tilting toward the ground.

I am afraid if I sit down, I will never get up again.

The dancer in me learned to stand visually,

the marathoner took the second step.

Rehab gave me strength and range of motion.

But with each new modality, 

I interrupt expectations:

improvements are not cures.

If I sit down, I will never get up again.

Still imagining a body I cannot have,

I startle myself, glimpsing fatigue in passing windows.

My bifurcated body torques with every stride,

neuropathy and weariness debilitates.

Therapists caution about wear and tear,

while friends cheer, “You’re getting better!”

If I sit down, I will never get up again.

Navigating deadened limbs and twisted trunk,

pain remains constant, dulling our life together.

After a day’s activities, I have no comfort left to give you.

Living through chemistry, libido is gone.

Holding and touching you,

I long for remembered sensations.

I’m afraid if I sit down, I’ll never get up again.

If I sit down, I’ll never get up again.

*  *  *

In this metaphorical body,

I try to intercept suffering,

abide in discomfort,

forgive the trauma. 

Bearing witness,

I sit with loss,

move toward unobstructed feeling,

and bring you along into my dreaming awake.

NIGHT SWIMMING (2004)

By day, I am an arts warrior, public servant, heroic crip. Open, responsive, cocksure, ambitious – I seize the public gaze as a bully pulpit. Offstage finds me enslaved by quivering muscles contorting my stride.

After surgery, my swollen spine shut down. Gurus and saints abounded, but no roses from above. Paralyzed weeks turned into months – a flicker, a twitch, a wave; sitting to standing, six steps to go home, with wheelchair, ankle brace, and cane.

Gestures repeat to imprint; but gravity intervenes. Syncopated embellishments focus spatial awareness, though alignment remains akimbo. With little sensation, each footstep is defiant. Only in the pool can I run with the ponies again.

Eight years now – I still fixate on atrophy, ignoring progress. Balancing rehab and recovery, clinging to a reconnecting, physical therapy and pharmaceuticals combat lost kinesis, encouraging hope.

Night murmurs locate points of pleasure: behind the left knee, above the nipple. I crawl inside the softness, relishing the incandescent kundalini rush absent pain. Legs lie quiet, the burning subsides. Stillness embraces me.

In the extra room (that we do not have), I plié and pirouette with dramatic abandon, leaving behind my imploded, twisted carcass. The tumor does not return. My pelvis aligns. Depression dissipates. Then I awake.

Violent spasms hurl me out of body. Heart and breath stop. I stare down at my contorted gaping hole of a mouth and rehearse death, porous and seductive. Floating in this space between, I no longer fear dying, only waiting.

Stolen shadows hover. It seems easy (one breath away), but is so hard to surrender into the void, although I am well practiced, writing libretti for lost lives in vigils through the night and surviving my own demise, time and again.

Larry carries me back once more through his weight, touch, and voice. Unfettered love makes the journey familiar and secure. No past, no future, just present. Grasping for now, I pray for clear seeing, acceptance without judgment.

Morning comes. I amble toward the light.

A barn visit becomes a wintry tango between horse and human

-The Other Paper

Late one night, I drove out to the barn in Williston to exercise my Shetland pony. The weather was freezing cold. Lights were off and the barn doors were closed, as the horses had settled in for the night.

Turning on a few lights, I took my pony into the indoor arena and let her loose, to run free. What fun we had, me with my walking cane and the lunging whip, and her bucking with legs akimbo, darting and swerving around me in ever changing circles, trotting with gleeful abandon.

When I ambled around the perimeter, she followed just out of reach. I had brought along treats for encouragement. She inched up to me, stretching out her neck and lips to grab an apple biscuit, and then darted away. We eyed each other at opposite ends of the arena. Cuing off each other’s shoulders, we followed the other’s lead in an exquisite dance.

When I sat down to rest, she meandered toward me and gingerly reached for another treat. Then encouraging me with a nudge, she zipped out of arm’s reach to begin the game again.

There were only the two of us, but it wasn’t silent in the quiet arena: her hooves flying over the uneven dirt and her steamy breath filled the space. Sounds also rushed in from outside, horses stirring in their stalls and an occasional passing car provided accompaniment to our wintry tango.

Eventually, she let me know she was done frolicking. Nuzzling my shoulder, she put her head through the halter, and I led her back to her stall. Once I gave her some fresh hay, she was done with me, so I put on her blanket and turned out the lights.

It is such a profound gift to be in relationship with this animal, as it requires me to be fully present: no past, no future, just now. What happened that evening had no agency the next morning; each day we begin afresh. When she greets me with a whiney, I interpret it as, “What do you have for me today?”

With every visit, I need to show up fully. If I try to rush through grooming and cleaning hooves, or lose focus in a training session, it guarantees frustration for both pony and me. And I must always change the routines, as bored equines test their owners.

Not all our interactions are hands on. Some visits include quiet time sitting by her stall. Not so much dancing here – but more like a blissful co-existence for which I am deeply grateful.

Rudolf Nureyev

Rudolf Nureyev passed on this day, January 6, 1993, at the age of 55. Here is something I wrote in Artpaper, February 1993 that is also included in my book: because art, commentary critique, & conversation.

January 11, 1993, Sovetskaya Hotel, St. Petersburg Russia. There were memorial services throughout Russia today; your funeral took place this morning in Paris, but no mention of AIDS. Earlier tonight I attended the Kirov Ballet’s performance of Le Corsaire. You performed its pas de deux when you defected to the West some 30 years ago in 1961. I was only a child then, but you captured my heart with your audacious living and art.

During the first intermission at the Maryinski tonight, I met an elderly man selling early photographs of Kirov’s stars – Makarova, Baryshnikov, you – out of a torn plastic bag. For only a dollar apiece, I acquired a small piece of your history as a young Russian superstar. Seeing your face in the photograph made me remember myself as a younger man and my responses to you - one of my first gay heroes and artworld role models. When I returned for the ballet’s second act, I could think only of how exuberantly you must have danced on the Kirov’s stage.

As I sit in my hotel room (dawn approaching, images of you wash over me), I remember your Romeo to Merle Park’s Juliette in the Royal Ballet’s London production. You seemed as innocent as a 16-year-old, yet possessed a demonic sexual presence that exhilarated me. As I watched you perform over the next 20 years, you became even more omnivorous, powerful, virile. Whether on stage or in occasional sightings in lobbies and restaurants, your bounded into every space flamboyantly, outrageously, defiantly – you gave me courage.

I loved you Rudolf, and want to thank you. I’ll miss you as you join 90 of my other angels who have gone before me with AIDS.

Keith Haring

-Outer Appearances from the Annals of the Gay & Lesbian Review

In 1980, graffiti-inspired chalk drawings proliferated throughout New York’s subway system. Keith Haring’s whimsical, cartoonish iconography was everywhere. Zapping spaceships, pulsing TVs, barking dogs, crawling babies, flying angels, leaping porpoises, and smiling faces abounded.

Haring’s “tagging” was soon legitimized by the art world; his first gallery show was in 1982. One year later, he was featured in biennial shows at the Whitney Museum and at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavillion in São Paulo. Before long, he was collaborating with Andy Warhol, Madonna, Grace Jones, Jenny Holzer, and Bill T. Jones in galleries, museums, theaters, outdoor spaces, and dance clubs. Next, his artistic œuvre expanded to include ink drawings, woodcut prints, paintings on tarpaulins and wood, aluminum sculptures, sets and costumes, and large-scale outdoor murals in New York, Tokyo, San Francisco, Paris, and Melbourne, and on the Berlin Wall. By 1986, his very own Pop Shop in SoHo sold branded merchandise, including pins, T-shirts, calendars, watches, magnets, and prints.

In 1988, Haring was diagnosed with HIV, which only seemed to escalate his artistic output. He was ubiquitous, even designing a label for Absolut Vodka and a carousel for an amusement park in Hamburg. Two years later, at the age of 31, he would be dead of AIDS. What he achieved in just ten years of public art-making is astounding.

Even before his furtive subway chalk drawings, Haring was posting absurdist agitprop collages, guerilla-style, on walls and lampposts, composed of headlines from The New York Post to create messages like “Reagan’s Death Cops Hunt Pope.” His 1985 painting Untitled (Self-Portrait), in which his own face is covered with red spots, was grimly prophetic. A raw sexual energy permeates his later works, as depictions of disease and death come to dominate. In many of these drawings, amorphous, multi-limbed, grotesque monsters are being penetrated through various orifices in a frenzied kinetic energy. This work hints at new directions for the artist that were never fully realized due to his premature death.

Haring was always out as a gay man and donated numerous designs for LGBT causes, notably ACT UP, National Coming Out Day, and Day Without Art (World AIDS Day). Most iconic, perhaps, was his 1989 Silence = Death acrylic on canvas showing a pink triangle filled with his schematically outlined figures covering their eyes, ears, and mouths. Notebooks of the numerous drawings of penises that he did in front of Tiffany’s and the Museum of Modern Art are always fun to see as well.

 (Originally from the March-April 2015 edition of The Gay & Lesbian Review)

Return to Milledgeville

(originally published in The Journal, 2011)

My father sold cattle at the Chicago stockyards. On weekends, I often tagged along with him on country trips to meet with farmers. One rainy day in 1962 in Milledgeville, IL, a Shetland pony gave birth to a beautiful roan filly. I had never seen anything so miraculous. I was smitten. Her name was Raindrop.

For years afterward, I ran with her in the fields, groomed her in the barn, and rooted for her at county fairs. She was the best friend I ever had. Although, once I got to high school, life was gradually filled with other activities.

Fast forward to seven years ago, at the age of 53, I reconnected with my childhood passion and learned how to hitch up a pony and drive her with me seated in a cart. What a fun mid-life crisis this has been! My pony’s name? Raindrop.

When work brought me to Chicago a while back, I asked my two brothers if they would join me on a day-trip to look for that long-ago pony barn in Milledgeville. They were skeptical. I hadn’t been back there in almost 50 years and didn’t have the address, but they signed on for the adventure.

Our first stop was the Village Hall where a friendly clerk called the library and learned that the title of the farm had been transferred in 1985 to a family she knew. Directions were easy. Ten minutes later, there it was.

No one was home, so my brothers and I explored a little. The shady groves of trees and fields where I ran with the ponies were as I remembered. However, the cattle pens were overgrown, the corncrib burnt down, and the pony barn quite derelict – now a completely ramshackle structure.

My brothers saw abandoned detritus, I saw majesty. Here I was, next to the very stalls where I spent hours being with my beloved playmate. We laughed at our divergent perspectives.

On the drive back to Chicago, I felt such gratitude for the opportunity to retrace my childhood Shetland dreams. It’s quite healing to come full circle at mid-life; and even more delightful to do so with family.

About Ed by Robert Glück

-The Arts Fuse

Robert Glück’s latest novel, About Ed, is a virtuosic amalgam of discursive ruminations — part AIDS memorial, part meditation. At the center of the work, the author recounts his relationship with the visual artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai. They were lovers in the ’70s and remained close friends until his death from AIDS in 1994.

Shifting perspectives and time frames interrupt the narrative throughout, a hodgepodge that includes Glück’s reminisces of the dead lover, childhood memories, portraits of elderly neighbors, dreamscapes, and travelogues. At first, this fragmented structure is confusing, but stick with it — About Ed delivers an immersive, emotionally rich experience.

The writer unabashedly celebrates sex, lots of sex. He also blurs various fictions and truths into a moving nonfiction/literary pastiche, incorporating into his melliferous prose text taken from taped recordings of his late friend as he slid into dementia and from the artist’s dream journals. Philosophical asides by the author abound, as well as his confessions of petty, unforgiven slights.

One chapter ingeniously details their ways of grappling with HIV status, a strategy inspired by the dead artist’s notes. Glück calls this book both “a novel and my version of an AIDS memoir.” As with other ‘new narrative’ queer writers, such as Dale Peck, Kevin Killian, Brad Gooch, and Kathy Acker, the storytelling approach is non-linear, intentionally self-conscious, and profoundly personal.

Two chapters, under the heading “Notes for a Novel,” provide a meta-view of the two decades of struggle it took for Glück to decide on the book’s final form. Elegiac and introspective, the completed manuscript turned out to be less about portraying the deceased than fending off intimations of mortality: “Do I write to remain in contact? — when I’m finished will he be truly buried?” The answer to those questions is that creating About Ed “turned into a ritual to prepare for death, and an obsession to put between death and myself.”

World AIDS Day

In the 1990’s, as losses continued to mount in the AIDS pandemic, I began creating elegiac films to mourn, rage, celebrate, and feel less helpless. Here are three works from that period.

UNFORGIVEN FIRE (1993)

Late night phone calls still frighten me. Years ago, my neighbor, Charlie, would call in the middle of the night, screaming through his dementia for help—begging us to get him out of the hospital, away from his real and imagined demons. I wouldn’t answer the phone; I could only listen to his voice coming through the answering machine. Silent and paralyzed with fear, I thought there was nothing I could do. I never did visit him in that hospital. I was too ashamed, and he never came home again.

I remember holding Peter, trying to warm his shivering body—hoping that somehow I could heal him, even for a short while so that he would sleep. Both of us were drenched in his night sweats. He kept apologizing as he cried. I wept, too, but my tears were filled with rage. Earlier that day, we had spent hours waiting in lines, filling out forms that enabled him to get medications. He had no health insurance, and each stop demanded that he be present to sign the proper forms. So he sat exhausted and consumed by his fevers while I held his place in line. Months later, I dreamt of him and called, only to speak to his daddy. Peter had died that morning in Michael’s arms, as his mama urged him to go on.

I called my friend, Lee, at home to see how he was feeling. I had just returned from an extended business trip and wanted to reestablish contact. His sister answered the phone, thanked me for calling, and asked if I wanted to share something with those gathered in the apartment for his memorial service. Selfishly, I felt cheated that I wouldn’t have any private closure with him. Weeks afterward, I called his disconnected number, hoping we could talk one last time. Months later, I called his phone number again, explaining to the newly connected household how special my friend Lee had been.

When the call came ending Kevin’s deathwatch, I was relieved. Three weeks prior, the doctors had stopped his feeding, upped the morphine, and said he would go in 48 hours. But they didn’t know the Kevin I did. We were lovers a decade ago: We trained together, made love together, and dreamt our dreams together. Upon hearing the news, I thought at least I wouldn’t have to call the hospital anymore. In his last month, with the morphine obliterating all feeling, I would call and be continually told his condition was “satisfactory, SATISFACTORY, (satisfactory), satisfactory.”

Most recently, I cried with my friend, Margie, over the death of her brother, Christopher. Margie told me of crawling into Christopher’s deathbed to hold him. As his spirit began to leave, instead of releasing, his body contracted (as only a dancer could) and tightly embraced her. She held on, knowing that he was going, leaving her with the unfinished legacies of all those prematurely lost. He had chosen to die peacefully with great clarity, letting Margie know that his work was now done, but hers and ours only begun.

They’re all gone now—96 of my angels. For all too many of them, I didn’t get to say goodbye. I wanted to. I still need to somehow resolve the forlorn reality of their death. The impact of the grief and the mourning of each new loss remains as intense as the first. Oftentimes, late at night, it is hard for me to breathe, as I cry for all the devastation among us. Heroes, all of them, so needlessly lost. I am truly blessed to have been touched by them all—to have been loved by angels.

For all of us that have gone before and for those that remain,

may there be passionate, unforgiven fire.

STOLEN SHADOWS (1995)

Years ago, outside of Odessa, Texas, I came upon a desolate graveyard with no entry gate, no large tombstones, not even any shrubbery—only small marble plaques implanted in closely cropped grass.

I began to wander among the rows of graves and discovered Baby Jessica next to Baby Jonathan, who was alongside of Baby Thomas. I wondered why they had been buried together in the barren outskirts of town, instead of in their family plots next to the church on Main Street.

I was reminded of those babies recently when I was in New York and went to a movie. Afterwards, I walked from the theater on the Upper East Side to Greenwich Village, where I was staying. It was a Sunday morning and the streets were empty.

I passed 62nd and 2nd, where I used to live with Bill. Not too long ago I had been listening to his concerns about his plummeting T-cell counts.

Further down on Lexington Avenue, I passed the apartment where Gary and his lover had lived. Gary left that apartment and moved to Florida after his partner died.

Just across the street was Christopher’s apartment, where Stephanie was now staying. I can still recall reminiscing with her, listening to how much she missed him.

Crossing over to the West Side, I ambled into Chelsea. About a mile north was Manhattan Plaza. Kevin moved there after Don died. I wonder who lives there now, now that Kevin is gone.

On 24th and 9th I passed Vito’s apartment, where I often stopped on my way home for the latest gossip from the Hollywood closet. How angry he’d be, if he were still alive, about how little has changed.

A few blocks further downtown and I was in the Village. Here, on every block, I looked up and saw shadows of those taken from me far too soon. Images of my lost ones surrounded me. Overwhelmed, stunned, and numb with grief, I tried hard to hold on to some of my stolen shadows.

* * *

I remember waiting, waiting with Henry through the night. Some months before, Henry had asked me if I could love him unconditionally. I said I would be there for him, to do whatever he wanted. Henry asked me to assist him in his suicide.

We began to research and developed a plan. Not long afterward, Henry was ready, so I came over and we prepared the concoction. Once mixed, Henry began to eat the substance that he so desperately hoped would bring him to a somber, peaceful end.

Within moments, Henry fell into a light sleep as I waited beside him. All of the research had told us that the process might linger on for hours. I was prepared to wait, wait for Henry to let go.

Hours later Henry’s breathing had not slowed or deepened beyond the belabored rasping with which I had become so familiar. I began to worry about what to do next if Henry’s body was not going to

let go. The Hemlock Society suggested keeping a plastic bag nearby, but I was not willing to consider this option.

Henry roused momentarily with a start. “It’s not working. Please, please help me.” In his stupor, he reached over, took off his ring, and passed it along to me as he slipped back into an unconscious state. I gently force fed more of the prepared mixture and continued to wait.

Eventually, Henry’s breathing became less labored and evolved into a slower, more irregular rhythm. Around 1 a.m., Henry died as he wished—wrapped in a deep sleep.

* * *

In your ashen face, I see the faces of all those gone before. As your shallow breathing slows and your eyes begin to glaze over, I climb into bed and wait with you. I try to keep you warm, to no effect. I

lie on top of you, trying to give you my breath and my heat. Your muscles give up control and fluids pass. I wash your body with warm water. I don’t want you to get cold. I comb your hair, change the sheets, arrange your arms in repose, tuck in the covers, and wait.

I sit across the room and wonder who you are now. Where have you gone? Will you miss me? Already I’m missing you desperately. In the end, there was nothing to say. You couldn’t talk anymore, but your gaze held firm. In our last hours, all I had left were your eyes and now they’re clouded over.

Your mama and daddy told me they were glad we had each other. But I don’t have you anymore, and as I sit here, I don’t want to call them with the news. Then you’ll be theirs—their son, their family, with their grief, and I’ll just be your “special” friend who’s left behind. Relatives will gather to commemorate and mourn, sharing stories of a somebody I never knew. My tales will be listened to and our life together will evaporate.

So I sit here and wait, not wanting to let go of you. I want my grief to be ours alone. I’ll pick up the phone and call. “It’s time now,” I’ll say, “We need to say good-bye.” When I’m asked how you died, I’ll answer, “He just isn’t here anymore…he’s gone on into the shadows.”

WALKING WITH THE DEAD (1996)

In 1979, friends began to get sick with lingering flus, night sweats, and ongoing fatigue. We all thought another shot of penicillin would take care of it. Now, years later, morning coffee has me scanning the obituaries, locating my lost ones, remembering all those I’ve outlived, needing to tell their stories.

I felt prepared for some deaths as a result of grappling with failing health over the course of the illness. Others took me by surprise, as time and geography made communication infrequent. Still others I discovered in passing conversation with friends who assumed I had already known. Their grieving resolved, mine now only begun.

Whenever the seasons change, the carnage seems to escalate. This past winter seemed quiet until I read three obituaries on the same day, adding them to my list of 119 and counting.

* * *

I hold on to my dead. They have become the elements in my reality. I hear Celie’s fluid-filled lungs gurgling as her family healed itself, gathered around her wasted transgendered body. Her quick, shallow breaths are wind in my universe.

Peter’s night sweats become water. Entwined in fevers, chills, sweat, piss, shit, tears, cum, and spit; I kissed his cracked lips and held him forever that night.

My fire resides in Bill’s fever-ridden body on the ice mattress. It was too early on to name the disease, so he wasted away, an anomaly for the medical students to ponder. I’d nap with him on the frozen bed: “No, I’m not cold, I’m with my friend.”

David’s ashes are my earth. Defiled at death, his family cremated him before an autopsy could reveal how his lesion-filled organs could have functioned for so long. I smear his ashes, warrior-like on my body, as I rage into the night.

I hold on to all of them. My dead: they are my mandala. Telling their unfinished stories affirms my own life. I walk among them and live.

Notes on Fluxus

This fall I spoke about Fluxus with Sean Clute at The Current, Brownell Library, Champlain College, and EEE VT. Here are some of my notes and links from our conversations.

I have long been enamored with the radical Fluxus art movement of the 1960’s. This group of artists, inspired by Dada, Marcel Duchamp, and John Cage, created playful intermedia performative events pushing against prevailing norms in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, architecture, film, and theater — blurring distinctions between art and life by celebrating common daily activities.

Their focus was on the process of creation itself, rather than the production of objects; the idea was as important as the artwork. Fluxus was an intentional praxis of intention. Their radical aesthetic notions influenced subsequent conceptual art as well as postmodern performance, media, and visual art.                                                      

In 1958 Cage gave a series of lectures “Composition as Process” at New York’s New School for Social Research. Informed by his admiration of Marcel Duchamp, study of the I Ching and Zen Buddhism, he aspired to have “all distinctions between art and life removed” as he embraced randomness, chance operations, and early adoption of technology in his artistic practice. This proved very potent for attendees that included George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, Jackson MacLow, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and others.

One of the class attendees, Allan Kaprow introduced 18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place on six days, 4–10 October 1959 at the Reuben Gallery, New York.  Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms, Al Hansen, George Segal, and others followed suit with maximalist immersive environments. 

At the same time, Yoko Ono and LaMonte Young were presenting conceptual musical, theater, and film concerts in Ono’s Chamber Street loft in 1960-61. George Maciunas also started presenting what he called Neo-Dada events in music, theater, poetry, and art in a short-lived AG Gallery in 1960. Many of the participants had taken Cage’s New School classes.

Maciunas was an interesting character: a graphic designer as well as an artist, he was an early proponent of artist live/work spaces in Soho and organized 15 co-ops between 1966 and 1975. However, he was terrible with money and most of his initiatives were short-lived, often fleeing from creditors.

One thing he wanted to do was create a magazine entitled FLUXUS, to capture the zeitgeist of this time. He was living in Germany in 1962 and organized a series of concerts as fundraisers for the new magazine. 

·      Fluxus Festival l (Wiesbaden 1962)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YibFHWZ66GQ

Well after a few festivals in European lectures and concerts halls, suddenly there seemed to be a Fluxus art movement with George Maciunas, its self-appointed impresario.

Some of its distinguishing features:

• Performance scores, propositions, and provocations of everyday actions

• Non ego approach to artmaking, collaborative authorship, anyone could realize

• Task oriented, improvisatory performance

• Ephemeral, fluid, chance

• Challenges what is considered art and its value

• Hybrid (Inter)media

• Playful

• International – Korea, Japan, Denmark, France, West Germany, U.S.

Event Scores represent an idea or thought experiment and were used as working sheets for Fluxconcerts.

• George Brecht

Drip Music (Drip Event)

For a single or multiple performance

A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel. (59) (evolved into dripping music into French Horn and Tuba)

• LaMonte Young: Draw a Straight Line and Follow It (59) - Nam June Paik

• Yoko Ono: Light a match and watch till it goes out (64)

• Alison Knowles: Identical lunch, Nivea Cream, Make a Salad (62) Disney Hall (2019) “A tuna fish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo…”

From the beginning Fluxus was very porous:

·      György Ligeti - Poème Symphonique 100 metronomes (WP/ Holland 1963)

·      Joseph Beuys sat at a desk and wound up musical toy (63), 9 hours wrapped in felt dead hares (64)

·      Yoko Ono, London and Carnegie Hall concerts – cut piece (64), Grapefruit (64) A book of instructions and drawings

·      Nam June Paik, pours water over head, lifts violin and smashes it, TV Cello (71)

·      Ben Vautier certificates authenticates mundane objects as art, living in a gallery storefront window for one week (62)

·      Shigeko Kubota Vagina Painting (65)

Dick Higgins one of original members from Cage’s class and Germany concerts says:

·      Fluxus in not a moment in history of an art movement.

·      Fluxus is a way of doing things, a tradition, and a way of life and death.

·      It mattered little which of us had done which piece, the spirit was: you’ve seen it, now – well it’s yours.

Mieko Shiomi describes Fluxus as a “pragmatic consciousness” that makes us “see things differently in everyday life after performing or seeing Fluxus works.”

George Maciunas with his graphic design skills tried to brand Fluxus with:

·      iconographic logos,

·      unnumbered, unlimited editions

·      game-like kits, chess sets

·      box sets of various performance scores for other artists,

·      occasional magazines, newspapers, pamphlets

·      stamp dispensers, table clothes, clothing, aprons

·      even tried opening a Fluxus store (64)

40+ Fluxus Films challenged the standard practice and appropriate content for cinema:

·      Yoko Ono’s slow-motion frames of mundane action – blink, match & #4

·      Dick Higgins Invocation - chewing

·      Nam June Paik’s Zen for film – roll of clear leader, silent 8 minutes

https://ubu.com/film/fluxfilm.html

 The aesthetics of Fluxus encouraged others:

·      Mail art – Ray Johnson

·      Small presses – Dick Higgins and Bici Hendricks

·      Watched the sky and imagined peace – Yoko Ono & John Lennon

·      FluxDivorce  - Geoff and Bici Hendricks

·      FluxWedding – Billie and George Maciunas

·      Fluxmeals - Collaborative color-coded dinners

·      Cellist Charlotte Moorman’s Avant Garde Festivals

Vermont has a long history with Fluxus artists:

·      Geoff and Jon Hendricks grew up in Putney (Their father founded Marlboro College)

·      Dick Higgins had a studio in West Glover

·      Alison Knowles went to Middlebury College

·      Nye Ffarrabas lives in Brattleboro

Fluxus had an enormous influence:

• Warhol’s early films were derivative of Fluxus films, particularly Ono’s

• Fluxus Shop in 64 was a precursor to Keith Haring’s Pop Shop in 1986

• Marina Abramovic reminiscent of Ben Vautier

• Japan Society: Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus (Oct 13)

Queer Networks: Ray Johnson’s Correspondence Art by Miriam Kienle

-The Arts Fuse

Ray Johnson was an enigmatic and reclusive artist who emerged as part of the Fluxus New York scene in the early 1960s. The movement’s ethos was to use everyday materials to challenge what is considered art. His work encompassed collage, mail art, performance, photography, repurposed found objects, and artist books.

Johnson is best known for his foundational role in instigating the mail art movement. He meticulously (and obsessively) collaged together newspaper clippings and photos from gay physique magazines along with pictures of dead celebrities, advertisements, and personal letters to create what he called ‘moticos.’ He mailed them to friends, art world colleagues, and sometimes strangers. He encouraged ‘on-sending” by asking recipients to “please send to…” or “please add to and send to…”

Miriam Kienle’s Queer Networks: Ray Johnson’s Correspondence Art analyzes this body of work through an academic lens. She argues that the artist’s mail art used camp and homoerotic imagery, as well as insertions of innuendo, to create coded queer assemblages — radical statements that were distributed through the postal service during pre-Stonewall days. In addition, his list of addressees, which including prominent LGBTQ contemporaries, can be seen as a precursor to algorithmic networks of the 21st century.

While Kienie’s thesis is astute, she focuses on only one component of this artist’s oeuvre. Johnson’s collages are extraordinary, but his performative acts, which the artist called ‘nothings,’ were just as radical. There are those who believe that his 1995 death by suicide should be considered as his final performance. Johnson told a friend a few days prior “he was working on the biggest work he’s ever done in his life.”

Posthumously, Johnson left behind a vast archive. Over three thousand photographs found in this cache were shown in the 2022 Morgan Library & Museum exhibition Please Send to Real Life: Ray Johnson Photographs.

Kienle’s perceptive centering of queerness in Johnson’s artmaking would illuminate this work as well.

Distance Is Malleable: A Conversation on Duet Projects

-motor dance journal

John Killacky: I’ve known your work for forty-two years as an audience member, presenter, commissioner, collaborator, and friend. With your husband, Koma, you created a movement and performing style that was sculptural, primal, and existential. In 2014, you began performing A Body in Places, a series of site-specific solo projects. Three years later, you started The Duet Project – often working with artists of different disciplines, ages, races, and cultures – forging new aesthetic ground resulting in interdisciplinary projects. These works are imbued with ferocious kineticism, simultaneously audacious, feral, and fragile.

Eiko Otake: You are one of my Duet Project partners and I have long admired the media works you’ve created. In July 2018 at Jacob’s Pillow, we were sitting near ‘Sam’s tree’; there was a planting ceremony a day before to honour Sam Miller, our mutual friend, who had helped me conceive The Duet Project. It occurred to me then to invite you into the project. As with my other collaborators, I had no idea what we might do, but you said ‘YES!’ We ended up sharing our eulogies, in which we spoke to our mothers. We recorded and edited them together at Vermont PBS studio with Brian Stevenson as another collaborator.

Was our talking to camera a dance? Was my talking after you a duet? YES, in ways that extend what people might think of a dance or a duet. Our work was a layered duet; not only between us, but each of us with our dead mothers and with Brian, the cameraman. Speaking in English in my artwork was new to me at the time. I could not have done that without your encouragement.

with Koma Otake

JK: You continually amaze me as you immerse yourself in myriad collaborations that are quite different from the body of work you and Koma made for decades.

EO: I worked with Koma from 1972 to 2014 and I feel proud of the work we created together. Eiko & Koma collaborated with others, mainly music artists, but we worked within defined roles. When our Retrospective Project (2009–2012) ended, I was sixty years old. At that age, ten- and twelve-year Chinese/Japanese cycles both align for the first time with that of one’s birth year: it is a full cycle and also a new beginning. I wanted to test myself to see if I could stand on my own feet and look at the world directly without the ‘house’ of Eiko & Koma. To do so, I decided to liberate myself from theatres and expose my body to a wide range of audiences.  I enjoyed arriving at a community with only the luggage I could carry and taking time to study a performance site. People talk to me more when I work alone.

After performing solo in more than seventy places, I invited artists, mostly already friends, to converse and experiment with me. Doing so, I hoped, would help me answer my lingering question, ‘Why am I still in America after so many years?’ I didn’t come here to assimilate. I left Japan to encounter others. I have to continue that path. Talking thoroughly with other artists was not easy. I had to work hard to articulate myself and to listen to others without the pressure to agree. I learnt that I think better with such effortful conversations. 

I do not work well alone in a dance studio. I crave the heat from other eyes and minds. Performing solo in public has given me that, but working with another artist has also offered the tension I need to be performative. That is why I do not have to put every duet experience on a stage to be seen by audiences. Experimentation is not a rehearsal towards a public performance. Working with others, one at a time, pushing beyond each of our norms, is densely performative. Two artists getting to know each other on a deeper level feels radical but doable. Once that happens, we cannot go back to our prior selves.

with William Johnston

JK: With photographer William Johnston, you travelled five times between 2014-2019 to the irradiated lands surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant. His opulent photos captured you embodied in the desolate detritus and had many manifestations resulting in exhibitions, books, and media components.

EO: It was December 2013 when I asked Bill if he would come to Fukushima to photograph me. Bill immediately agreed, which I had expected. By teaching a course on the atomic bomb together, I knew his academic and personal interests. I knew his photography and humanity. What I did not know then is that our collaboration would change both of our lives.

I had previously visited the area without him in 2011, five months after the meltdowns and hydrogen explosions of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant. In observing the Philadelphia train station where I was to perform a durational solo, I felt I had to go back to abandoned stations in Fukushima: I wanted to use my body as a conduit between very different stations 6,700 miles (11,000 km) apart.

Our photographs could not have been produced without each other. I never told him when and how to shoot. Instead, I thought about the dead people swept away by tsunamis. I mourned the land covered by radiation. I danced with regret, sorrow, and anger. When Bill takes photographs, he moves physically, runs to different viewpoints, walks backward, and squats. I had asked him to photograph my solo, but we danced a series of duets in Fukushima!

Photographs capture moments, not duration. Bill’s photos allowed me to reflect on how my body is seen in landscapes and how some moments are dense with possibilities. Our duet does not end with Bill’s click. He is merciless in selecting photos. As a performer, I felt sympathetic to some unselected photos and the moments captured in them. I did not go to Fukushima to create beautiful photographs. I went there to see, feel, and remember what happened in Fukushima. I learnt to edit videos so I could ‘rescue’ some of the unselected photos and moments I might otherwise forget.

Inserting words and sound, I created a feature-length film, A Body in Fukushima, which has been screened in film festivals in many countries. In museums and theatres, I performed with both projected videos and large prints. Bill photographed these performances. Our recent exhibitions included layers of my body working with layers of Fukushima landscapes. Dimensions of our work have grown without a master plan.

Bill said, ‘One photograph can be a performance when a person really looks into it.’ That notion encouraged me to create media works which do not betray my identity as a performer.

with David Harrington

JK: For the video component of the Fukushima project, David Harrington of Kronos Quartet improvised in response to your film. You have a long relationship with David and Kronos. Earlier this year, you created a score and performed with them at Carnegie Hall, and in July he performed live as part of your video installation at Colorado Springs Fine Art Center.

EO: Yes, David has been incredibly generous. Eiko & Koma had two evening-length collaborations with Kronos, which made us friends. David said he was challenged by my remark, ‘I do not really need music for my work.’ So right before the Covid lockdown, David visited me at my home and improvised for two days while watching my Fukushima film. I recorded him with my phone, which allowed me to move intimately with the details of his body and that of his violin. Then I was ready to dance with him in our first improvised duet.

David's granddaughter filmed him playing in the Redwood Forest in California, where he put the strings of his over 200-year-old violin onto moss to create music, imagining Fukushima an ocean away. Over the years, David allowed me to manipulate and even to ‘hide’ his sound into soundscapes I mixed. He knows I did not want my work to be helped too much by music. However, his sounds brought my film to a subtly elevated realm, and his compassion lifted and redirected my spirit when I felt desperate about nuclear matters.

When he invited me to dance at Kronos’ Carnegie Hall concert in January, I proposed instead that the five of us move, scream, and make sounds. The piece was a series of four duets between me and each member of the quartet. Next, David arrived alone in Colorado where he performed with me both at a cemetery and in the museum. These were his first public performances without Kronos.

David said he could not play his violin while walking, but he did. He did so with bare feet, even lying down. We improvised, trusting ourselves and each other. Friendship, collaboration, and duet are instigators that challenge us and move us to the unknown.

David wore the late Sam Miller’s raincoat in the museum gallery in Colorado. He chose to end the performance by playing toward the video of my speaking to my dead mother from Elegies. David then sat up, stopped playing, and watched the video. That made everyone there listen to my voice. I saw my mother in my face and heard her in my voice.

with Joan Jonas

JK: Your collaboration with video and performance pioneer Joan Jonas presented in Danspace Project and Castelli Gallery in New York highlighted work and conversations you two had over several years.

EO: Joan is my senior of sixteen years, though she does not behave like one. How persevering and articulate she is! Joan is instinctive and playful, yet she seriously studied art history. I did not.

Joan came to my home for our first dinner in December 2018, a day after she travelled back from Japan. She then invited me to perform privately and recorded it on video. In 2019, we worked intensely for several days in her summer home in Nova Scotia. At our ‘goodbye,’ she said, ‘Now we are friends.’ In 2021, she took the lead in creating a video work together. This spring, we collaborated more fully. We danced, sang, and banged on the walls of Castelli Gallery. In all, she was fierce. I realised how in Japan I had been conditioned about age-appropriateness. Joan’s vigour gives me a different perspective on ageing.

We are both busy, but we have made our duets happen, not only by performing, but by strolling, watching films, and putting our videos side by side. Joan is a faithful friend and an agitator. She said we could perform together again in two years. I cannot wait.

with Chikua Otake

JK: You often honour your dead: at Fukushima, commemorating 9/11, and in cemeteries. This month, you will be performing in the galleries of the Asia Society in New York with a painting by your grandfather Chikuha Otake (1878–1936), an eccentric Japanese artist. And you consider these duets.

EO: We only get to know death by attending to the dying or to the dead. Dancing with the dead not only makes me know death but also life.

My grandfather died sixteen years before I was born, so I had no attachments. But by performing with his paintings in museum galleries, I began to care about this scandalous artist. Encountering him this way, my stomach churned, and I had a slight headache. I made a series of movement decisions, responding to what I sensed was his core. I felt in myself his excessiveness and his performative hospitality.

By looking at works by artists who passed away, savouring their lines, hearing episodes of their lives, and touching what they left, I feel more acutely that they are now dead but they were once alive.

Each duet brings me to a singular place, both strangely familiar but scarily new. I dance in that place with each duet partner, grateful for their willingness. I allow myself to imagine the same willingness from the dead. Though dead people do not get to know me, they probably wished that their work and stories would provide such encounters. When our sense of distance lessens or collapses, we can no longer be indifferent to the other. That feels rich. I like this as a way of life.

Eiko Otake’s video installations are currently on view at Asian Artists Initiative and Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. For more information on Eiko’s Duet Project, please visit https://www.eikootake.org/the-duet-project.

“Lou Reed: The King of New York” — The First Monarch of Indie/Alt Rock

- The Arts Fuse

As a writer and commentator for Rolling Stone and NPR, Will Hermes has zestfully illuminated the zeitgeist of various musical movements, contextualizing them within historical and cultural frameworks. His latest book is a sumptuous examination of the complicated genius of Lou Reed, the drug-addled gender queer musical avatar of leather, goth, glam, and punk scenes. Many books have been written about the legend but Lou Reed: The King of New York may well be the definitive biography.

Hermes provides a detailed catalogue raisonné of Reed’s early Velvet Underground albums and examines his later recordings as well including the David Bowie produced Transformer, which featured “Walk on the Wild Side” as well as recordings that were ignored at first (but now venerated): the operatic Berlin, the nihilistic Metal Machine Music, and the politically charged New York.

Reed’s early life was undistinguished. Growing up on Long Island, he played doo-wop in a high school band. In his first year at New York University, the musician had an emotional breakdown and underwent electroconvulsive therapy — it is unclear whether he was treated for depression or for being gay. Reed was an unreliable source about history. Researching the biography, Hermes found the musician often changed stories about his past depending upon the audience.

Reed transfers to Syracuse University. There he met guitarist Sterling Morrison and contacted hepatitis from dirty needles due to injecting heroin. After graduation he quickly thrives in New York’s avant-garde scene, performing in happenings with Morrison, John Cale droning on his viola, and Moe Tucker on drums — the musicians call themselves The Velvet Underground.

The quartet fell into Andy Warhol’s demimonde, with its drag queens, starlets, sex, drugs, and all forms of art-making. Warhol offers to produce the band’s album, but insists Nico join the group as their chanteuse. Warhol gets top billing on the front cover via his now infamous silk-screened photograph of a banana. The Velvet Underground & Nico only receive billing on the backside of the album.

Because of its vitriolic sound and transgressive lyrics, the record garnered little radio play. Within a year, Nico was out, and Reed fired Warhol. After the group’s second release, the jazz-inflected White Light/White Heat, went nowhere, Reed kicked Cale out of the band. The remaining members soldiered on for two more studio albums before Reed finally left in 1970.

Over time, these early records have achieved cult status, their songs covered by David Bowie, Patti Smith, REM, and Cowboy Junkies, among others. Reed once joked with Brian Eno that, although sales for these albums were meager, “everyone who bought a copy started a band.”

During the ’70s and ’80s Reed’s perpetually shapeshifting musical output (and provocative personas) made him the godfather of indie/alt rock. While the musician’s street cred grew, Hermes reminds the reader much of Reed’s output at the time was also initially maligned. In addition to music, the restless Reed continues to pursue writing at a high level: pieces of his appeared in The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. He also published three photobooks.

In 1989, Reed and Cale reunited to present Songs for ‘Drella – A Fiction, a stark, elegiac homage to their estranged mentor Warhol, who had died two years before. (Their nickname for him was “Drella,” a contraction of Cinderella and Dracula; Reed was called “Lulu,” according to Cale.) Performances premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.

Amphetamines, heroin, cannabis, and alcohol fueled Reed’s prodigious output, but this appetite wreaked havoc on bandmates, road crew, colleagues, friends, and family. Hermes delves into the musician’s destructive behavior, particularly toward Cale, the ethereal violist whose monotonal surround sound provided such an effective contrast to Reed’s four-chord beats and primal lyrics. Another target of Reed’s misbehavior — in this case domestic violence — was Rachel Humphreys, his trans partner during the ’70s.

Reed and Humphreys separated, and the musician married Sylvia Morales in 1980. She helped Reed get clean, and successfully licensed his work for use in films and commercials. In the ’90s, Reed blissfully settled down with multidisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson. They became the quintessential New York hipster elders before Reed died — after a failed liver transplant — in 2013 at the age of 71. Even as he was beset with failing health, Reed was planning new projects.

Anderson described his death to Hermes: “His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open … He wasn’t afraid.” Lou Reed’s final words: “Take me into the light.”

In eulogies, poet and musician Patti Smith called him, “our generation’s New York poet, championing its misfits as Whitman had championed its workingman and Lorca its persecuted.” Michal Stipe praised him as a “queer icon” who, in the late ’60s “proclaimed with beautifully confusing candidness a much more 21st century understanding of a fluid, moving sexuality.”

Will Hermes reveres Lou Reed’s music, and he expounds on his love in this voluminous, well-researched biography. Every album of Reed’s is accompanied with discussions filled with riveting backstories as well as sympathetic analysis of various interpretations of the musician’s songs. So, on the one hand, Lou Reed: The King of New York is a delightfully deep dive into what looks to be a canonical legacy. On the other hand, Hermes should also be credited for not shying away from looking at the harsher realities of Reed’s life, the abusive behavior driven by his personal demons. He was a brilliant, but flawed, monarch.

Meredith Monk. Calling

“Meredith Monk. Calling” an exhibition featuring multi-sensory installations drawn from the artist’s ground-breaking oeuvre of innovative music, performance, dance, film, and video opens October 21 at Oude Kerk, Amsterdam with a second component opening November 11 at Haus der Kunst, Munich. I was asked to contribute a short personal essay for the catalogue.

I moved to New York in 1973. A workshop in Meredith Monk’s loft forever changed my aesthetic worldview.

 The following year, I was utterly captivated watching Paris in a church gymnasium. This intimate duet with Ping Chong amplified the quotidian of their lives into a mythic travelogue.

In 1976, the large-scale Quarry premiered at La MaMa. Mining her Eastern European Jewish roots, she created a multiphonic nightmare of Holocaust horror. Her performance as a sick child plaintively calling out remains seared into my brain.

I marveled at her masterwork films, Ellis Island (1981) and Book of Days (1988), particularly her creation of simultaneous time through the juxtaposition of black-and-white footage with occasional color images.

These works are timeless. The closing image in Ellis Island is a photograph of Manhattan seen from the island with the World Trade Center towers in the background. Book of Days, a medieval morality play about antisemitism and a longing for spiritual redemption in the time of plague, can also be read as an AIDS lament.

While I was a curator at the Walker Art Center, we were a co-commissioner of her opulent ATLAS (1991), a spiritual quest through fantastical cultures, climates, and landscapes featuring a cast of eighteen and a chamber orchestra. Another triumph with more fully realized production values and orchestration for the operatic stage.

Afterward, she told me she wanted to go back into the studio alone to recharge and challenge herself anew—resulting in Volcano Songs (1994), a Buster Keaton-esque solo rumination on aging. This process is emblematic for her, beginning again, letting the material determine its structure.

Another Walker project was the initial planning for the exhibition Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones (1998). Monk’s bountiful gallery included performance photos, slides, posters, programs, scores, storyboards, drawings, sets, props, and costumes as well as sound and film excerpts. A whimsical timeline featured thirty years of shoes worn by Monk and her performers. 

In 2010, our professional lives intermingled again as a co-commissioner of Weave, her composition for two voices, chamber orchestra, and chorus performed by the St. Louis Symphony and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Initially chorus members were confused saying they were used to singing words. She reminded them in the gentlest manner that they sang notes.

In program notes for her latest sonorous hymn, Indra’s Net, premiered at the Holland Festival in June 2023, Meredith wrote that early conceptualization of the new work began when composing Weave in 2010. Now Indra’s Net has come into sumptuous being. Lush arrangements, amazing performers, and luminous stage design celebrate the interdependence of all living things—a necessary prayer for our world.

Through the years, we shared many public conversations in Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, Burlington, and New York discussing the backstories of her resplendent achievements. In the fifty years I have known Meredith Monk, I continue to find respite and hope in her intrepid explorations. I am grateful.

Somali resilience is now part of Vermont

-VTDigger

Brad Kessler’s 2021 novel North is a beautifully wrought chronicle of disparate lives: a Somali woman seeks asylum in Canada and is unexpectedly sheltered at a Vermont monastery. This sparks a crisis of faith; eventually she is aided by an Afghan war veteran.

While researching his fictional tale, Kessler met with a number of Somalis who had resettled in Vermont over the last 20 years. These conversations inspired the author to work with community members on a project that would preserve their stories. The result is Deep North (Onion River Press), a volume of first-person narratives that details survival and resilience.

The volume contains the harrowing journeys taken by a farmer, a camel-herder, and a single mother of seven after the 1991 civil war shattered their lives. As Kessler notes in the book’s afterword, “Stories and memories: the two things they were able to carry with them when everything else was stripped from them.”

Shadir Mohamed grew up along the lower Juba River in a farming community, but fled because, as a member of the Somali Bantu ethnic minority, he was attacked. Escaping to Kenya, he spent 15 years shuttling among a succession of squalid refugee resettlements. While in the camps he married and started a family. In 1999, the US Embassy in Nairobi accepted his application for a visa, which was finally approved in 2004. He and his wife landed in Burlington with one bag between them and four children.

Abdihamid A. Muhumed was a nomadic camel-herder, constantly moving with his family between Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya with their animals. The civil war escalated and a gunman killed one of his brothers and father and stole their animals. He walked for weeks, wandered through the forests toward Kenya, and lived in desolate fenced-in camps with one brother and his family until, in 2008, they resettled in Winooski.

Fardusa A. Abdo and her family fled southern Somalia and relocated to Yemen. She did not attend school, staying home to do household chores. At 19 a marriage was arranged, and eventually the couple had seven children, two with disabilities. Her husband illegally crossed into Saudi Arabia to find work and was deported back to Somalia. She single-handedly raised the children. Her application to immigrate to America was approved in 2014, and they settled in Winooski.

Deep North chronicles the trauma of dislocation as well as what it took to rebuild shattered lives. The authors will be in conversation with community leader Abdirashid Hussein and editor Brad Kessler at the O.N.E. Community Center, 20 Allen Street, Burlington, VT, on October 8 at 4 p.m.

Queer resiliency — let’s learn from the battles of the past

-VTDigger

Fifty years ago, I attended my first gay pride festival in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. Bette Midler sang “You Got to Have Friends.” We sure needed them. 

At that time, queer people had no legal protections. We could not be out as teachers, could be evicted, and were often physically attacked late at night with no police protection. Same-sex sexual activity was only legalized in 1980 in New York. 

Those of us gathered that day danced on the shoulders of activists a generation before, including Harry Hay of the Mattchine Society and Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon of Daughters of Bilitis who organized in the 1950s to counter police entrapment, McCarthyism, and the American Psychiatric Association labeling us sociopathic.

And of course, the 1969 Stonewall riots were a watershed moment when disenfranchised drag queens fought police harassment at New York’s Stonewall Inn. Drag queens also fought police intimidation in San Francisco and Los Angeles. They had nothing left to lose and said, “Enough!” We owe those queens; their struggles catalyzed the LGBTQ+ movement for civil rights.

Another wave of political action erupted during the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and ’90s. People fought for their lives. Care circles and memorials defined our chosen families. The community demonstrated fierce resiliency — mobilizing information, support, treatment, and advocacy. When few would care for us, we took care of our own.

Pride festivals evolved from celebrating sexual freedom and affirmation to funeral processions mourning the unrelenting AIDS carnage. Then legal protection, adoption, and marriage equality came to dominate agendas as we assimilated. Vermont led the nation here, granting civil unions in 2000 and full marriage rights in 2009.

As our community organized, political leaders emerged. Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man elected in California to the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco in 1977. I was there when he was assassinated one year later. 

Karen Clark, elected in 1981, was the first out lesbian to serve in the Minnesota Legislature. Ron Squires, Vermont’s first openly gay legislator, elected to the House in 1990, died from AIDS in 1993. 

These pioneers were outliers. Now there are 1,174 LGBTQ+ elected officials serving in city, state and federal offices. In Montpelier, we have 14 Vermont legislators in the Rainbow Caucus. And our self-described “scrappy little dyke” Becca Balint is serving us in Congress.

While there has been much progress politically, we still face tremendous prejudice and fearmongering. Little has changed to guarantee basic human and civil rights for queer people internationally, and whatever legal advances we gained nationally are at risk with an emboldened right wing and conservative Supreme Court. 

Protections are being rolled back for queer and transgender kids as well as military personnel. LGBTQ+ seniors are increasingly isolated as Baby Boomers age. Gender-affirming health care is being denied, state by state. Book banning, curriculum purging, and outlawing drag shows — there is much left to do.

As we celebrate this month, let’s learn from the battles of the past to build upon their legacies of resilience. From those ferocious drag queens in the ’60s to the vehement AIDS activists of the ’80s, I could not be who I am today without them. I love my idiosyncratic family.

Fluxus Artist Nye Ffarrabas Turns 91 — Celebrating “The Friday Book of White Noise”

-The Arts Fuse

Nye Ffarrabas and others in Fluxus created intermedia events that pushed the boundaries of prevailing norms in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, architecture, and theater.

Nye Ffarrabas (formerly Bici Forbes and Bici Hendricks), one of the central figures in the Fluxus art movement of the 1960’s, lives quietly in Brattleboro, Vermont. To commemorate her 91st birthday, C.X. Silver Gallery is publishing The Friday Book of White Noise, an annotated gathering from her notebooks of drawings, poems, essays, event scores, exhibition concepts, and quotidian life entries that illuminate the inspiration behind her extraordinary praxis.

She and others in Fluxus created intermedia events that pushed the boundaries of prevailing norms in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, architecture, and theater — erasing distinctions between art and life with an eye on reimagining our perception of daily activities. Their radical aesthetics influenced subsequent postmodern performance and visual art.

Ffarrabas’ work in particular made considerable impact. There have been international exhibitions of her poems, performance scores, political sculptures, found objects, mail art postcards, and word boxes. Her pieces are in museum collections around the country, including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

I met the artist at the C.X. Silver Gallery in Brattleboro where several of her works are on permanent display. The gallery also serves as the repository of her archives. Touring the exhibition, Ffarrabas told me, “I work with what I find around me, either objects or words, and I go from there. Art has no obligation to be pretty. It does have an obligation to be relevant in its time.”

Her early pieces were revelatory. A simple, everyday object — a whole egg — is encased in a plaster cube bearing the red, rubber-stamped text: “EGG/TIME EVENT   ONE HEN EGG    DO NOT OPEN  FOR 100 YEARS” and dated “Mar 21 1966.” Just as compelling was her “Dinner Service” (1966), a table setting for four with hubcaps as plates, pliers, hammers, and screwdrivers as silverware.

At that time, she also founded the Black Thumb Press, “a pipe dream that did a bit more than dream,” she recalled.  She and her husband Geoff Hendricks and artist friends put words and illustrations on cards — labeling it mail art. One of Ffarrabas’ cards was a conceptual invitation that read, “Imagine that today’s newspaper is a book of mythology.”

Yoko Ono’s 1967 six-minute film No. 4 included Ffarrabas in its montage of the buttocks of fellow female artists. At one screening, a man sitting behind her exclaimed “Jesus Christ!” when she was on screen, but “I never knew if he approved or disapproved,’ she jovially reminisced.

As colleagues and friends, Ffarrabas and Ono visited city playgrounds with their preschool daughters. She said that “we were mothers in the park, friends who admired each other’s work. We exchanged ideas about art, and bitched about our husbands, the necessity of making money in ways that contradicted our lives as artists, and just talked about our lives, in general. We were thinking along similar lines in many, many ways.”

Her first solo show, 1966’s “Word Work,” was at New York’s Judson Gallery. Here is how Village Voice reviewer John Perreault described it: “flags, messages, wall poems, signs, changing displays, meditations, irreverent icons, emblems, eggs, tea parties, field trips and giveaways all by Bici Hendricks who presides pleasantly over this intermedia mélange of tricks, jokes, art, and party favors. All of these hijinks are delightful, even the slide projectors of poems or instructions, and some of it is definitely art.”

Judson continued to welcome her work. She was an active participant in its Destruction in Art Symposium (1966). The artist recounted how her infamous 1969 Fluxpiece, “Terminal Reading,” came about: “I had wanted to write a novel, and it was awful. So, I thought, “I’ll burn it!” After some deliberation, as an event in its own right, she set up four music stands, like a string quartet with four readers, and a lighted hibachi in the middle. Each stand held a black folder containing a quarter of what she had written. “The idea was to start reading, and then somebody else would start,” she said. “They would just come in on top of one another, and soon it sounded like the beginning of a fugue. Readers would also snatch pages from other readers and reread passages they liked. After each page was read, it was crumpled and consigned to the flames. None left, the reading was over.”

Ffarrabas participated in several of cellist Charlotte Moorman’s Avant Garde Festivals. For these outdoor extravaganzas, she crafted two large calligraphic banners for a parade and performed “Universal Laundry” (1966), in which she washed clean diapers in a pond in New York’s Central Park and hung them to dry on a clothesline. One was dyed light blue and painted with the United Nations insignia. “Universal Laundry” signified the ubiquity of such maternal chores,” she told me. In a 1978 festival held in Cambridge, MA, she offered psychic readings in a tent.

Moorman is fondly remembered: “She was a good cellist, and an amazing entrepreneur. She would send valentines on lace paper doilies, and they would say ‘I love you.’ It was so very nice, unlike some others being so hard edged.”

In 1971, her husband asked what they should do for their 10th anniversary. “Let’s get a divorce,” she answered jokingly. ‘A FLUX Divorce!’ they both exclaimed at once, “and we were off and running,” she laughed. Kate Millet, Ono and John Lennon, neighbor Louise Bourgeois, and other art world friends came to the party at the couple’s brownstone. Cultural critic Jill Johnston improvised on the piano and wrote about the event later in her weekly column in the Village Voice.

The couple’s daughter, Tyche, recalled this occasion in the 2018 New York Times obituary of her father: “It was a public ritual they created to symbolize an end to their marriage as it had been and the beginning of a new chapter that would include a non-monogamous, open relationship that made space for same-sex partners. They strung barbed wire through the front door and up the stairs, and sawed their bed in half. They donned a pair of overcoats sewed together back to back; then the women pulled my mother and the men pulled my father until the coats tore asunder.”

After the divorce, Ffarrabas dropped her married surname, Hendricks, and continued creating under her given name, Bici Forbes. She and her two children moved to a sixth-floor loft in the nascent SoHo arts district in lower Manhattan. “I didn’t have any marketable skills, and the kids were going crosstown to school,” she said. “It was complicated, so we moved back home to Cambridge, MA to live with one of my sisters.” Life changes ensued: “I wasn’t trying to put myself forward as an artist [in Cambridge]; they weren’t ready for this stuff.” She went back to school to become a psychotherapist and practiced for a few years, “but it was hard being near my family. I’d been in New York too long for a conservative Boston family to understand.”

In 1982, she moved permanently to Brattleboro, where she continued her creative endeavors while working for a time as a psychotherapist. In 1993, she changed her name to Nye Ffarrabas. “I wanted to just be me,” she recalled. “I spent the first 60 years of my life with other people’s ideas of who I was — the next 60 is all mine!”

In 2011, Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art presented Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, a show that included Ffarrabas’s piece “Stress Formula” — a ‘prescription’ bottle inscribed with suggested dosage “One capsule every four hours for laughs.” The artist tells me what is inside the container: “Stress Formula” proposes that humorously ironic newspaper slip-ups can be the stuff of good medicine too. The bottle contains clear capsules with little rolled pieces of paper printed with nonsensical newspaper goofs inside.”

Her work in the Dartmouth exhibition caught the attention of Brattleboro’s Cai Xi and Adam Silver. In 2014, their C.X. Silver Gallery hosted Nye Ffarrabas: A Walk on the Inside, her 50-year retrospective exhibition, accompanied by a catalogue. In it, her first curator, Jon Hendricks, reminded readers that “careers have been made on the back of her pioneering artwork.”

I’m grateful for this visionary design of integrative health care

- VTDigger

Adapted from remarks at the Integrative Pain Management Conference presented by Osher Center for Integrative Health at UVM.

The Comprehensive Pain Program at University of Vermont Medical Center offers an innovative 16-week program for those grappling with debilitating chronic pain. I am currently a participant. It is quite a wondrous paradigm of care and well-being.

Twenty-seven years ago, I had spinal cord surgery to remove a tumor at C2 that left me with Brown Séquard syndrome. My right side has no sense of touch or temperature. My left lost proprioception. I have no kinesthetic connection to the ground. 

After six weeks in the hospital, I was sent home in a wheelchair. Over the years, physical therapy, swimming, water running and yoga incrementally expanded motor skills, coordination, balance and strength. Initially quadriplegic, I incrementally regained function and within months used a cane or walker with the chair as backup. 

One unpleasant aftereffect: Neuropathy is unrelenting on my right side. My foot feels swollen and on fire. Electric shocks punctuate every step. Excruciating throbbing pulses through my hip. 

Trying to lessen the distress, I ricocheted to body workers, chiropractors, acupuncturists and herbalists. Everything was scattershot, with little or no medical advice. Insurance sometimes covered limited treatments, most times not.

Pharmaceuticals tempered spasticity and misery but distanced me from family and friends. Falls, accidents and setbacks were emotionally fraught. Chasing relief seemed futile.

Ambulation became even more complicated two years ago when I slipped in a restaurant and fractured my right fibula, adding intense burning on top of persistent neuropathic torment. On a scale of 1 to 10: 15.

Blessedly, I am in one of three cohorts involved in the Comprehensive Pain Program. Thanks to BlueCross BlueShield of Vermont for making it possible for me to engage in these immersive offerings.

Group meetings as well as individualized hands-on sessions provide practical tools. Nutritional, medical, physical and occupational therapy, and health coaching consults are tailor-made for each of us, dealing with different afflictions. Yoga and meditation, even cooking, augment the curriculum. Partners have a support group as they, too, are impacted.

No one turns on a stopwatch as they come into the room, and therapists listen intently. All come informed as to what is happening with the other modalities in this marvelous team-based approach. As the weeks proceed, I feel I am being carried by the entire crew. 

Each participant articulates values and is helped to define action steps to realize them. Resiliency strategies are discussed for all aspects of our biopsychosocial selves instead of focusing solely on recovery from injury.

Most powerful are the acupuncture, craniosacral therapy, and Reiki sessions. For 27 years, I obsessed on the neuropathy in my right hip and foot, amplified with the fractured fibula two years ago. In this program, I now realize I ignored the left side of my body. 

How thrilling it has been to work with these gifted practitioners to recircuit my forgotten and dormant limbs. As energy vibrates through, I am heartened. 

While initial intentions were focused on lessening the agony, we now target a more balanced holistic body. This is profound and transformational, providing enormous physical, psychological and emotional healing. How truly revelatory to factor in lived experience with my thinking, physical and spiritual selves. 

I am extremely grateful for this visionary design of integrative health care and to insurance companies understanding lives can be improved and ultimately dollars saved longer-term. Medicaid begins coverage for its subscribers later this summer, increasing further access to this extraordinary opportunity to enhance one’s quality of life. 

Television Review: “Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV” — An Artist Who Humanized Technology

- The Arts Fuse

Amanda Kim’s documentary on multidisciplinary artist Nam June Paik (1932-2006) brings long overdue mainstream recognition to a prescient creative rebel. A plethora of his performance and video works, along with actor Steven Yeun reading Paik’s writings, illuminate the man’s sui generis explorations.

Paik once said, “It’s an artist’s job to think about the future.” This compelling film underscores why Paik should be considered the progenitor of video art, his work prophesying an “electronic superhighway…where everybody will have his own TV channel” a decade before the internet even existed.

During the Korean War, Paik’s family fled Seoul and relocated to Japan where he attended the University of Tokyo. In 1956, the twenty-four-year-old went to Munich to study composition with composer Arnold Schoenberg. His artistic trajectory was radically upended when he attended a 1958 concert by John Cage and David Tudor. Most of the German audience booed and walked out. Paik was transfixed and became a Cage accolade as well as life-long friend. Poignant footage of their interactions over the ensuing decades highlights their mutual admiration.

Paik also found a home in the Fluxus art movement, which was made up of anti-elitist creatives who deconstructed prosaic activities via performative events that pushed the boundaries of prevailing norms in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and theater. Toppling pianos, smashing violins, dousing himself with water, and dipping his head into a bowl of ink became part of Paik’s repertory of shenanigans, gloriously documented in photos and performance videos.

For his first gallery show, presented in 1963 at Wuppertal, Germany, Paik dismantled old televisions and encouraged audience members to manipulate the pieces as part of the exhibition. Critics derided the set-up as a “room of broken TV’s” — scholars now consider it the birth of electronic art.

Moving to New York in 1964, the artist continued to source, appropriate, and mutate media images from popular culture; his goal was to re-engineer/re-imagine media into sculptural and robotic installations. He also began a decades-long collaborative partnership with cellist Charlotte Moorman, crafting video components for her performances. Infamously, both were arrested after she performed topless during a happening – charges were later dropped.

Galleries did not know what to do with Paik until 1974, with the arrival of a sculpture that featured a seated Buddha statue viewing its own image on a monitor via a closed-circuit video loop. This simple — yet profound — image resonated to the point of becoming a popular icon. Soon Paik was included in group exhibitions that showcased emergent technologies. In 1982, New York’s Whitney Museum mounted its first ever video art retrospective devoted to his work.

Paik continually pushed boundaries. With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, he went to Boston’s WGBH to learn how to edit and then collage video imagery. Given how labor intensive and costly the operation was, he worked to build a synthesizer that would democratize the process so “you can play the television yourself, like a piano.”

Further experiments with New York’s WNET culminated in 1984’s Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, a live international simulcast seen by 25 million people on New Year’s Day. It featured many of Paik’s art world friends, including George Plimpton, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Charlotte Moorman, Allen Ginsberg, and Laurie Anderson. As you view archival footage of the program, you can’t help but be impressed — it is amazing that he somehow pulled this ambitious broadcast off.

That same year, after a 34-year hiatus, Paik was welcomed back to Korea as a national hero and was given the resources he needed to create large scale installations. The artist also served as an aesthetic conduit that connected Korean artists to their international contemporaries. For example, he helped bring the Whitney Biennial to Seoul and was instrumental in founding the Gwangju Biennale. Paik also established the Korea Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Debilitated by a stroke in 1996, Paik continued to create intermedia installations until his death in 2006. His Jacob’s Ladder filled the entire rotunda of New York’s Guggenheim Museum: the piece was built out of 100 TV monitors and a seven-story cascading waterfall of lasers.

Nam June Paik’s aesthetics remain strikingly contemporary: for him, artistic agency was about defying limitations at the service of humanizing technology. Perhaps we have finally caught up with the future that he imagined. More than ever, we need Nam June Paik.