Nonsite Performance/Lecture/Demonstration
Marcus Civin
November 2009
Draft/Sticky Script
[Pre-set a thin, wobbly presentation table full of holes, and with a lamp attached. The two table legs are slight. All the connection points of this table are tenuous.
Costume: All white, like a house painter...
Make sure the lamp on the table is as secure as possible.
Light a match. Speak: “Legs!”
Look around, and make eye contact with members of the audience. Hold the match till it goes out, burns a little.
Hang from the table, a rope with three gory, plaster and plastic, paint-splattered balls; the balls wag, wag the wobbly table.
One end of the ball string is tied around some playing cards. Put the playing cards in a clear box filled with Blue Blood/Orgone Matter.
Some other objects on the table, or through holes in the table, or under, or around table: plastic ice cube tray filled with cruddy, plaster teeth-like ice cube objects; white, grey-black and green pvc pipe spear with three various wood shellacked spear heads. Treat all the objects roughly.
Alternate through a stack of four black-and-white Silent Film Intertitle Style Photograph Cards that read:
We can no longer afford to be generous.
A priest, a rabbi, and a minister are fishing in a canoe on a lake.
The priest says: ‘I’m gonna go get beer’, steps out of the canoe, and walks on water, to shore.
Those herders can’t figure out how to get a bottle of water? I say: screw ‘em.
Do this action: pull empty pockets out. Look at audience.
Dig out fingerprinting pad. Perform registration, fingerprinting, pull out ID, perform self-ID check. Fingerprint self, on T-shirt.
Put plaster teeth ice cubes in Blue Blood/Orgone Matter. Fill mouth with plaster teeth cubes and Orgone Matter. Fill armpits; fill back behind neck, fill behind knee. Dangle and drip cubes. Prostrate self.
Sort the playing cards. The cards are sticky. Throw the face cards on the ground, calling out: “King!”... or... “Queen!”... or... “Jack!”
Have a member of the audience pick a card. Rub the other cards out with sandpaper. Show the card, name its number and suit, however many.
Fill however many orifices, joints, body crevices, with the teeth ice cubes—count off outloud to reach the number on the card.
Make lumber crayon marks on the presentation table to signify completions of various activities.]
[Speak the following lecture points at the presentation table.]
1. ACTION
All objects open. A cabinet plays an old song. Tables are sandwich boards. I will wear a table. Rock is just crumpled up paper, so much chewing gum. Walls and floors have compartments inside, underneath. Hold to the scrawled wall. Stay close to the wall. Cover the mirrors, cover the pictures, look for the safe.
In the last year, the price of a wall safe has skyrocketed. “In some parts of the country, the metal vaults are so popular that shoppers are depleting store supplies... Afraid that cash isn’t secure behind the thick walls of banks, more people are turning to something that has protected money since the days of Jesse James and Bonnie and Clyde: safes.” (LA Times Archive, October 16, 2008)
Performance, to me, is opening objects, safes. Set the water to boil, boil it. Cool it. Put the water in a safe behind a picture frame, transference of the last drinkable water. What works?
In 1961, Claes Oldenburg wrote: “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.” (I Am For An Art)
[Spearhead rotation: boggle and boggle spear heads and finger guard in spear, in order to find a way to make/find a strange spear.]
What works: Marat, incapacitated in his bathtub from unbearable skin disease, writes about absolute human freedom. This is real imagination. Charlotte Corday, a radical, kills Marat because he is too radical. On the eve of guillotine, Corday requests her portrait be painted. Corday wants her image to speak for her, for eternity.
The walls are pock-marked, intimately endangered. I hear the sirens, prisoners throwing helicopters and sand bags on the dams. The situation, as I understand it: Complete collapse. The violence grows from a volatile mix of food and water insecurity. There are many other parts of the world where such problems will arise. We can safeguard villages and homes, help rebuild homes, but what to do about the essential dilemma—the fact that there’s no longer enough good land to go around? Beginning this summer, a political dialogue between rebel leaders and the government culminating in formal negotiations for peace. The initial steps, we are taking. Ultimately, however, a real solution to the troubles involves a sustained economic development. Precisely what shape that might take is unclear. But we must begin thinking about it. New technologies can help, such as genetically modified grains that thrive in arid soils, and irrigation, and water storage techniques. There must be money for new roads and communications infrastructure, not to mention health, education, sanitation, and social reconstruction programs. (collaged from Ban Ki-Moon, Security General of the UN, on Darfur.)
[Play 10 minutes of video from B O U N T Y, from near beginning, preserving and transfering water, to cymbal crashing rat cage shut.]
A politics of action: What do we have guts for? All systems fail; no matter what, complicity. I am not a person who is concerned really with systems, but more concerned really, personally, with our moral responsibilities to one another as human beings.
[Paint an audience member’s tongue with Blue Blood/Orgone Matter...]
2. OBJECTS
I make, collect, and alter objects. Ink blotch for a tongue, I have plates, napkins, handkerchiefs, towels, flags, photographs, drawings, and t-shirts I marked with my ink tongue. I am that kind of person: In order to discover something, I have to wring it out, or at least draw it. My favorite objects: worn tools, scratched negatives, bones of indistinct origin.
My collection of orange things is growing. The collection includes: dried oranges; ground-up, dried oranges; dried-orange-peel and plaster cast axes; orange-scented bathroom sanitary spray; orange-flavored chocolate treats; little, packaged, orange treat cake; orange Caltrans T-shirt; antique Orange County postcard; spray-painted orange, metal-and-wood box that you sit inside and feel vibrations; orange piggy bank that looks like a pile of three small oranges; orange clock. Orange just happened. I showed up in Orange County, almost by accident. Now, orange is an obsession.
From listening to the news while reading, my Johnny Angel collection became about democracy and about Michael Jackson. The collection includes: The five great noir novels of James M. Cain; The Johnny Angel Pulp Noir Mystery Series; Michael Jackson shin guards and armbands in Iran colors... I twist the blinds: Are you in there, Mir Hossein?
The orange collection started because, when I was a kid, I was afraid of my grandfather, but I enjoyed this parlor trick he’d do for me: he could peel an orange in one piece.
My collection of Historically Problematic Figures Who Are Maybe Innovators: Al Jolson, who spoke the first words in a motion picture—in blackface; Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s filmmaker; Colonel Paul Tibbets who coordinated the first atom bomb drops; You can have your DW Griffith DVD back... Who else? What other Historically Problematic Figures Who Are Maybe Innovators can I add to my collection? More figures, and I could have a timeline.
I am rehearsing a bathtub performance: In this performance, I sit in Jean-Paul Marat’s Jacobin tub that Charlotte Corday assassinated him in; I sit in Jean-Jacques David’s noble Marat as Democracy martyr tub; I sit in the seething Marquis de Peter Brook Marat/Sade body tub. Joseph Beuys’ tub accuses Duchamp’s urinal of being little. Robert Rauschenberg’s tub accuses of vanity, all who are caught up with heroism. Says Rauschenberg: Suck it up, Marat, clean out the gutters, and quit goin’ on and on about your skin!
“Everybody brought you souvenirs in those days, steel arrows that pierced horses’ heads, pieces of bombshell, ink-wells made out of pieces of bombshell, helmets; someone even offered us a piece of a Zeppelin or an aeroplane, I forget which.”
For Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, The War—the steel arrows piercing heads at least—happens elsewhere. The objects Gertrude and Alice usually handle: figs, forks, paintings, pens, doorknobs, and manuscript pages.
Gertrude Stein as Alice B. Toklas: “I had been so confident and now I had an awful feeling that the war had gotten out of my hands” (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933)
David Byrne as Gertrude Stein as Alice B. Toklas as David Byrne sings: “The sound of gunfire, off in the distance, I’m getting used to it now.” (Life During War Times, 1979)
I hold the bottle balanced at the top of a turning gear. From another bottle, I move water from faucet, up ladder, through funnel, to another bottle, down pipe, to pot, to spoon, to spoon, to spoon, to kettle. How to hold this hole?
[Do this action: pull empty pockets out.]
Water, this trickling, bubbling, moving, shape-shifter actualizes the space between things. To place, freeze together, and tuck away. To find, unlock, push open, drink down. From a height, to pour water, while playing an old song, stir, humming. To spill, drip, catch, cup. To purify, to set a trap, be ready... to chop, to bottle water, to replace. Like money, water actualizes, or refuses to actualize space. Water is seeping in, the caulk is spent. Running under the plywood, into all the space within a vast system of exchange. Is flooding.
Before I drown, please wash out my wound; I feel flat, like a picture plane.
Wash you?
You, wash you? [Point to audience member]
4 bucks.
Plaster begins as powder. Mix with water, stir, knead lumps away with cracked hands. Set all kinds of careful boundaries to contain the plaster. Plaster sets; it gets warm, hot, then stubborn and resistant, rock. The water and the plaster mix, harden.
3. ON THE GROUND
The difference between funny and absurd, in performance:
Funny wants to be liked, funny is marketing, funny is clever, funny decides what is within appropriate decorum, stays within appropriate decorum. Funny plays on types.
Absurd takes its own time in performance. Absurd is combination, 21st century collage, chillingly cool hysteria—a private panic made public of unfamiliar made familiar, familiar made unfamiliar. Absurd is heights, extremes of small and large, loud extensions, awkward that might resonate as true. Absurd is Buster Keaton, Stuart Sherman, and Samuel Beckett. Absurd is a feeling character + action. Buster Keaton knows he has nothing in his pockets, he knows he is penniless, but he must pull out his empty pockets, all the way inside out, as far as they will pull out, to really know pennilessness. This pulling action is for the camera—this is for the audience, but it is not a plain illustration: This poor pulling is also for Buster. What does the inside of a pocket look like? What does it feel like to have empty side sack pooches for appendages? It feels... It feels...
Funny helps us agree as groups—funny is little boy macho funny. Absurd is what can’t be funny, but must be funny. The realities of what we want, like poverty is absurd. No fantasy, no to nobility, ABSURD.
Personally, I think we’re sick.
Who could stand in the way of BLUE MATTER... “As you climb the stairs to his second-floor office, you find pictures of stellar nebulae along the walls. You find Reich to be a heavy-set, ruddy, brown-haired man of 50, wearing a long white coat and sitting at a huge desk. Between periods of training students in his theories and putting patients into orgone accumulators, he will tell you how unutterably rotten is the underlying character of the average individual walking the streets, and how, in the room across the hall where he works on his patients, he peels back their presentable surfaces to expose the corrupted “second layer” of human personality. For the masses of the people, says Reich, “are endemically neurotic and sexually sick.” Reich has come a long way since his early days in Vienna. (The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich, By Mildred Edie Brady, The New Republic, May 26, 1947)
4. CONCLUSION
I assume, I would know what I would do in an extreme situation, but I need practice. I am no machine. Every time I do my ritual, it is slightly different. Rituals of extreme situations are different than actual extreme situations.
[Play section from end of JohnnyAngel recording where I turn the table I made with Sandy deLissovoy into a large, wearable sandwich board.]
