museum opening, discussing art in exaggerated Art Forum jargon. Later, Cleator knocked mannequin body parts off the pedestals. A cadre of slim model-type women in red cocktail clothes and big-brimmed hats of collaged newspaper tabloid headlines performed synchronized military movements choreographed by Redlich to a rock song about camouflage fashion.
Lin Hixson/ Hangers, Birds on Pedestals with Bomber Ladies 1981. Photos: Courtesy of the artist.
Hixson and Doug Humble did a dance duet in which they kept falling down. They discussed buying real estate in LA while slides of death squad activity in El Salvador were shown. Dibbell appeared in a grainy Super 8 black-and-white film as the alleged Irish terrorist Bernadette Devlin making statements to the press. Dibbell’s text was based on a Village Voice article in which Devlin talked about assassination attempts on her life. At the same time Cleator, Redlich, and Hixson, protected by motorcycle helmets, repeatedly fell down and hit their heads on the ground. Later Dibbell, dressed in a bright green cocktail dress, sang phrases extracted from the Devlin interview, “Wrap yourself in a blanket. Wrap the children too. It’s gonna be a long time til we’re through.” The song segued into the finale, in which the entire cast, now in white cocktail garb with camouflage leaves on their backs, crawled towards Barrileaux in his cop clothes, who snipped at them with a giant garden shears.
After Birds, Hangers split up. Bonkemeyer went on to pursue an architectural career. Casey and Nagler continued to perform with Hixson as they developed their own work, forming their own company, Shrimps in 1986. Dibbell joined up with Hixson to collaborate on four more pieces. And everyone in LA seemed to be working out in Rudy Perez’s Art Moves workshops on Monday nights in Hixson’s loft, including Casey, Nagler, and Hixson; the former Otis crowd Homler, Wexler-Ballard, Kovacs, and Joan Hugo; UCLA student Martin Kersels, who had been in Faris and Redlich’s Sleepwalkers, performed in Sway Back, and later became a founding member of Shrimps; performance/video artist Ulysses Jenkins; and myself, newly transplanted from NYC and a former Perez collaborator.
At exactly the time that performance was becoming the medium of star personas, and people were debating if what Hixson was doing was performance art or theatre, she decided to stop performing and take on the role of director. For Hixson, stepping outside gave her both the safety and the freedom to gradually reveal the deeper emotional content hidden within her subject matter. Hixson found her themes by peering into the deep schism in American consciousness between innocence and loss, fiction and fact, dreams and nightmares, the images we have invented of ourselves and who we really are. From Sway Back to Hey, John the heavily coded map of Hixson’s personal odyssey mirrors America’s. Hixson’s cheerleader facade covered a darker, more troubled, reality. She straddled the crack in the mirror while her two collaborators, Dibbell and Cleator, became her alter egos on either side. Dibbell was ten years older than Hixson, just on the other side of a generational divide. A woman past forty, she supplied the darker tone, the hard edges. She made loss visible. Cleator, on the other hand, was ten years younger than Hixson, a child born and bred of media culture, barely past twenty-one. She made innocence tangible, and loss inevitable. She was the comic ingénue to Dibbell’s tragic leading lady.
In Sway Back (1982) Cleator, as the media-smart Molly, awkwardly disco-danced and shouted her way through her autobiographical monologue like an overwrought escapee from a Robert Altman movie. How was she going to keep up and get it right — the acting career, the art career, the fashions, the boyfriends, the politics? Her dilemma took on the characteristics of a sitcom. She used to date an Italian Communist but now she’s dating a realtor, and her Republican father is going to run for mayor. Molly is unable to reconcile her opposing realities or cope with what she perceives as her inability to live up to and keep pace with the images imposed on her. At the same time she embraces and aspires to an ephemeral state of celebrity. We laugh with her, like knowing accomplices in the same conspiracy.
In Flatlands (1983) Cleator portrayed someone who does not perceive herself as separate from the images that have shaped her unattainable desires. Wearing a white slip, Cleator stood on a green lawn behind a white picket fence, an updated vision from Tennessee Williams or Faulkner, telling us in a soft southern drawl of her dream to “make something of herself” — to become a singing airline stewardess and do little testimonial commercials in flight. She recited her accomplishments and virtues and the advice of a TV evangelist preacher who promises prosperity. But we do not laugh at her, for her pathos is in her betrayed innocence. In contrast, a tough-looking teenager (Dominique Dibbell) in a leather miniskirt stood waiting at the side of a flat anonymous highway like a hitchhiker in a Road Warrior future. But the road is an illusion, a looped film projection that ran throughout the piece, and the future illusive, a place we keep looking for as if we remembered it but cannot find it.
Filmic illusion and allusion were central to Hixson and Dibbell’s sprawling outdoor pieces Rockefeller Center (December 1982) and Sinatra Meets Max (May 1983), both of which felt as if they were taking place on location film sets where the fictional reality of the actors is framed by the mechanisms that produce it. Rockefeller Center, set at the old Claremont train station on a chilly late-autumn night, evoked romantic memories, nostalgic yearnings associated with 1940s movies and old-fashioned Christmases, and a pervasive sense of loss. A man (Nagler) appeared with a suitcase. A woman (Casey) waved to him from across a field. In slow motion for the duration of the piece, they approached and then passed each other, strangers waiting for someone who never arrives or waving to someone already gone. Our response to this familiar reenactment takes on a double meaning as we identify not with the actual event but with the filmic recollection. Other such disjunctive images included a six-year-old boy in a suit and sunglasses singing Strangers in the Night into a microphone, mimicking Frank Sinatra. Lit by the headlights of cars, people glided across the green lawn as if they were ice skating at Rockefeller Center. Linda Albertano, in a blue 1930s gown, rode across the field on horseback, singing a rock song. A real train announced its approach with a long mournful whistle and stopped at the station, but no one boarded.
In 1983 Ronald Reagan was at the height of his Soviet “evil empire” Cold War saber-rattling. At the same time, he soothed our repressed nuclear holocaust anxieties with feel-good old-fashioned American family values talk. Sinatra Meets Max deconstructed the myths of family and the myths of the hero through a montage of tableaux fraught with similar contradictions. The values, style and aspirations of the Sinatra era collided with those represented by Max, the Road Warrior — the silent lone hero of a post-holocaust future. The 1950s met the 1980s head-on on the grassy knoll of the Claremont college town complete with lots of fake Tudor buildings.
Various performers recited the opening narration from The Road Warrior in different styles ranging from melodrama to irony. Max was played by the statuesque Linda Albertano, a stripe of platinum blonde in her newly cropped dark hair, clad in a cut-off black leather motorcycle jacket, with an ammo belt and a leg holster that held a knife made for her by the participating motorcycle gang. She crooned Come Softly Darlin’ from a rooftop and later belted out Hang on Sloopy from a little hill, the last note signaling the arrival of a roaring herd of Harleys.
In addition to the motorcycle gang, the cast of forty included an anonymous crowd in overcoats carrying suitcases and briefcases; a family rushing in with living room furniture, sitting stiffly as if for a family portrait and then dashing out again; a man with a dog on a leash; a robed choir with ghetto blasters; a mob of hand-holding punk teens coming over the hill dancing; and Casey and Nagler rolling together on the lawn like Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr making love in the surf in From Here to Eternity. Lots of Sinatra songs were performed live and on tape.
Both pieces were initiated by Dibbell but in a sense were works-in-progress for Hixson. While Dibbell, Cleator, and everyone else made substantial contributions to all of these pieces, in the final analysis it was Hixson’s concerns and artistic vision that guided this body of work. The same underlying themes appeared over and over in a clear progression from Kicked Upstairs to Hey John, Did You Take the El Camino Far and would persist in her work even after leaving the Hangers people and LA. They are themes that have been even more