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Lin Hixson, Hey John, Did You Take The El Camino Far? 1984. Photos: Basia Kenton.
What’s important here is that it all will happen on TV, where we are all immortal, where we never grow old, where there are no real bullets and the blood is fake. Except of course when what we are looking at on the screen is really happening. In Dispatches, his book about Vietnam, correspondent Michael Herr described it this way:
You don’t know what a media freak is until you’ve seen the way a few of those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads, doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire, getting their pimples shot off for the networks. […] We’d all seen too many movies, stayed too long in Television City, years of media glut had made certain connections difficult. The first few times I got fired at or saw combat deaths, nothing really happened, all the responses got locked in my head. It was the same familiar violence, only moved over to another medium; some kind of jungle play with giant helicopters and fantastic special effects, and actors lying out there in canvas body bags waiting for the scene to end so they could get up again and walk it off. But that was some scene (you found out), there was no cutting it.2
In Hey John Hixson revealed these conflicting realities not by pairing up war movies with war footage, but by juxtaposing two sets of opposing worlds — old TV shows and the live enactment of a TV fiction, actual combat footage from Vietnam and a made-for-TV propaganda piece. Two TVs were rolled onto the empty loading dock. The real Ed Sullivan was intercut with Lucky singing One Last Kiss and Laura and her family. This was followed by footage of helicopters circling and landing in a jungle swamp environment, burning land, grenades exploding on a house of grass, villagers running, rice paddies, a Vietnamese POW being repeatedly dunked in water and then shot. The tape then cut to a platoon of good American soldier boys marching and singing, “I’m a soldier, a coming-home soldier …,” intercut with healthy happy GI’s packing up to return from Vietnam to the USA, as if they were coming back from Boy Scout camp, as if everything would be the same as when they’d left, as if they would forget instead of being forgotten.
When the doors rolled up again two women in identical gray coats were standing in the now darkened street. The tape with men in the Vietnam jungle continued to play silently. Laura was now a woman who had to come to terms with her sense of failure. One part of her remained back there in the distance, pacing back and forth, as if waiting for someone. The other Laura played by Cleator came forward onto the platform, into the present to face us. She spoke slowly, letting each sentence fall to the floor.
I was walking on the Jersey shore. I was waiting for him. I was looking at that big house. And that’s when I decided I was going to go with it. I remember saying to myself “I’m going to go with it.” And that’s when it started. It started to roll, and it rolled over me for seven years. It was like that. Except for those times that stick out. See, John and I drove up the road … The pump was in the front yard and the pump was in the back yard. And that was the night John took all the furniture and pushed it in the corner of the room and slept behind the couch with a knife in his hand. And the papers were on the floor so he could hear if people were coming or not. (She turned and looked back at the street.) Yeah, that was the night he pushed the furniture and he put down all the papers. And in the morning … we went to look for all the rocks and all the snakes under the rocks. John, he really liked that. (Back to us.) And you know sometimes I’m driving and I see the back of someone’s head and think it’s you John. I could swear it’s you John. (Pause.) How you doing? (She put her hands in her pockets.) How you doing?
The question hung in the air, unanswered. It is still unanswered. John’s guilt about what he did or thought he did in Vietnam, and Laura’s guilt about John.
In the 1980s, our mass denial of what John and Laura stand for, and our fear of acknowledging and accepting that part of ourselves as a society, combined with a false nostalgia for an idealized fictional past that nobody actually believed in, manifested itself as profound cynicism. Innocence, like virginity, cannot be restored. 1984 was a year of mass-media-induced self-delusion that swept Ronald Reagan back into the White House, and Hey John was a paradigm of our deepest contradictions.
For Hixson, Hey John was a rite of passage, a personal “coming out,” an artistic coming of age. Simultaneously, Los Angeles had its own coming of age. The success of the Olympic Arts Festival thrust LA into the international cultural spotlight, surprising everyone with the enthusiasm and size of its audience for sophisticated interdisciplinary performance. The Art of Spectacle festival, of which Hey John was a part, followed immediately afterward. Overnight LA became the new place to be, flooded with East Coast art-world transplants. One era came to an end and another began.
Early in 1985 Hixson and Squier sold their building to LACE, which was suddenly growing up from a 1970s-style artists’ space into a 1980s-style nonprofit arts institution. Hixson moved to Santa Monica (which has since become the center of LA’s booming art scene) and her old studio became LACE’s new performance space. Without a studio for more than a year, Hixson concentrated on writing and on teaching workshops. Hey John had opened a door for her through which she could never return. By the end of 1986 her relationships with both Squier and Dibbell had ended.
Molly Cleator, Hey John Did You Take The El Camino Far? 1984. Photo: Basia Kenton.
It was time for Lin Hixson to go home. In January 1987 she returned to Chicago, to a teaching job at the School of the Art Institute. With actor Matthew Goulish, to whom she is now married, and his colleagues Tim and Greg McCain, she formed Goat Island. She stripped her work to the bare essentials — no props or lights or tech or spectacle. Goat Island’s first piece began with the unanswered question: What kind of soldier was John? What makes a soldier? What does American society do to men? The result was Soldier, Child, Tortured Man (1987), a stark, physically demanding work of unrelenting intensity, performed in a gymnasium. Hixson didn’t just offer answers to the questions. She put us through the process with the performers, who were pushed to the limit of endurance. Hixson politicized the body, made it the arena of struggle.
Three years later, after Desert Storm, do people really know it’s not a cross between Nintendo and Lawrence of Arabia?
In real-time multiple projection, cinema becomes a performing art; the phenomenon of image-projection itself becomes the “subject” of the performance and in a very real sense the medium is the message.
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema 1970
Time, Space, and Questions of Otherness (1989)
Ever since the invention of telephones, radio, automobiles, airplanes, and ultimately television and computers, and certainly since Albert Einstein introduced the Theories of Relativity, our concepts about, and experience of, time and space have been radically altered. Throughout this century we have kept trying to “locate” and situate ourselves while being continually dislocated. The difference between outside and inside, history and memory, fact and fiction, experience and perception has slowly dissolved. As if by magic, or the wonders of technology, the document in your hand this second can materialize minutes later on the other side of the planet, while the sender and receiver discuss its contents. If time and space are relative, so too perhaps are mind and matter. Where are the boundaries of “reality” in a world where everyday life looks and feels more like a movie and movies are just like dreams?
In a century during which the arts have understandably been preoccupied with issues of time and space, it is no wonder that at its end artists should seek to explore those issues in relation to consciousness and otherness. David Henry Hwang/Philip Glass/Jerome Sirlin, as well as Ping Chong