is a performer and co-writer in Lin Hixson’s latest production Hey John, Did You Take The El Camino Far? No longer working with Jane Dibbell, Hixson has taken conceptual and directorial control, the result being a major step in both the structural and thematic cohesion and clarity of the work. Based on original stories by Hixson, Hey John, Did You Take The El Camino Far? was developed and scripted in collaboration with Cleator and performer and video producer Valerie Faris. Employing production methods closer to the making of a television show or film than anything resembling what we have called Performance Art, Hixson’s team includes musical director-composer Bobbi Permanent, choreographer Peggy Margaret, and video director-producer Jonathan Dayton.
In all of her work Hixson has juxtaposed conflicting realities and fantasies of American life. On one side of the schism lies the optimistic, innocent, and bountiful idealized teenage America of Father Knows Best and American Graffiti. On the other side is the matter-of-fact violence of the evening news with all that it implies. Hixson’s nostalgic “Americanism” is ironic in its unsentimental subversion of what is both longed for and lost. In Hey John, Did You Take The El Camino Far? Hixson succeeds in developing this dialectic to a far greater degree than in her earlier works.
Hixson establishes two contrasting narrative themes in two distinct “plays,” the second functioning as a counterpoint flashback. She then ties them together in an epilogue rather than fragmenting them in the multi-scene tableau structure for which she has become known. The fragmentation occurs internally, both within the characters and the structure of the first story that is about a relationship between Laura, an innocent young college girl, and John, a Vietnam veteran whom she meets at school and marries circa 1969–72. At the center of this relationship is John’s nightmare tale in which he claims to have thrown a grenade into his sadistic kill-crazed commanding officer’s tent, killing him because he shot John’s dog. Appropriating the format of the television game show To Tell The Truth, Hixson faces us with four women, all of whom claim to be Laura. Each presents her version of the relationship as she remembers it, a series of “snapshots” culminating in multiple accounts of John’s story. John, played by Lance Loud, talks about himself in both the first and third person in a talk show moderator style. Later he aggressively and accusingly interrogates the women as if they are on trial. On a TV screen we watch the gesture of an American soldier throwing something. The image has been extrapolated from the real Vietnam TV footage broken down frame by frame, then repeating over and over until completed. The text has been deconstructed in a similar manner, thus bringing into question its very definition.
In the second act, Hixson transposes us into the world John and Laura were promised, the world they grew up with and in, but not into. She appropriates the story from the hit musical Bye Bye Birdie and stages a condensed version with new songs, two convertibles, the Venice High School Cheerleading Squad, and a chorus line of dancers. Rock star Lucky Loud (Lance Loud) has been drafted and will give one last kiss on the Ed Sullivan Show. A high school teen (Peggy Margaret) must choose between her steady boyfriend whom she says she loves and the chance to be kissed by the Presley-like star on national television.
In the final episode two women bring two halves of a table together in the present. They have a conversation at the table soap opera-style while on TV soldiers sing about going home. How did we get from Bye Bye Birdie to Vietnam to our disillusioned and anxiety-ridden present? Not in an El Camino but on TV. Hixson places two sides of the same coin side by side — an America before and after the Fall. The Fall is nothing more or less than John and Laura’s respective losses of innocence, a denouement that is also our own.
Twenty-five-year-old Tim Miller’s performance Postwar (1981) recently presented at LACE in Los Angeles has much in common with Hixson and Cleator’s in both style and its subject matter. Miller speaks for his own generation — its fear and desire — with a genuine innocence. He begins by telling us his parents got married because they loved each other, had children, and bought their house for $14,000, and that back then anyone could do that. His tone is one of amazement and yearning with an underlying suggestion of betrayal, emphasizing how remote and unattainable those simple aspirations seem in this time when few people envision growing old together, and only the affluent can afford to buy a house.
Born in 1959 Tim Miller grew up in the southern California town of Whittier, home town of Richard Nixon, and at nineteen he went to New York to make his name. His work personifies the experience of growing up in white middle-class suburban America with backyard barbeques, lawnmowers, television, the Star Spangled Banner, and the Bomb, inflation, assassination, and designer labels. His inflated desires, stimulated by a childhood and adolescence bombarded with advertising, are aptly expressed in the names of detergents and breakfast cereals — Bold, Cheer, Cold Power, Total, Trix, Kix, and Life. And what is more, he wants it all — love, fame, fortune, power — and he wants it now because tomorrow might not come. Most of all he wants to stay alive and he alternately seduces and destroys as he tries to “figure it all out” before it’s too late. His anxiety is conveyed by his frenetic delivery. The pitch and tone of the entire performance is cacophonous and chaotic within a tightly controlled, densely layered structure combining slides, text, movement, and music. A glut of information — family album photos, close-up product shots, politicians, statistics, death, destruction, and the American flag — flash by while the verbiage pours forth like machine gun fire.
Miller wants the nightmare to go away. In all of his youthful urgency he desperately wants to believe once again in the American Dream. It made a wrong turn somewhere and he wants to find out how and why and somehow set it right. In his newest work, Democracy in America, to premiere this fall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Miller searches for the America he was taught about as a child and can’t find as an adult. He’s been following the election campaign trail, collecting material Studs Terkel-style, doing video interviews with all kinds of Americans about their attitudes and perceptions of the American political process and its institutions. In his own stories, Miller tells us that when he was a little boy he “really did want to be President,” but not anymore.
Like Hixson, Miller’s work is grounded in popular culture and media imagery, and like Cleator, autobiographical material is still the vehicle. Unlike them he still retains an innocence that expresses itself in bewilderment and indignation rather than irony. The irony lies in Miller’s shrewd self-aware exploitation of that innocence in the exportation of his work to Europe where it takes on iconographic significance. In that context Postwar becomes a pop American product occupying the same territory as the pop culture symbols and products it draws its imagery from. Miller plays himself like a combination of a recognized star and a candidate running for office. His individuation is based on identification with a representative composite, a brand-name likeness rather than any idiosyncratic uniqueness.
Performance in the 1980s is at the center of a changing relationship between art, media, and contemporary culture. These young artists and others are attempting to carve out a vital new territory between the art world and the world of entertainment, a synthesis of performing, visual and media arts. Not only do they appropriate television, they want to be on it.
The way the media has insidiously infiltrated every aspect of our post-industrial, image-saturated, information-overloading lives and replaced the reality of direct experience with replication, a simulation, turning us into voyeuristic “consumers,” has been the dominant subject matter of art in the 1980s. Much of this art simulates its subject matter, appropriates its imagery and assumes a posture of irony or criticism. Unfortunately the guise of “deconstruction” often ends up as just another academic intellectual exercise mouthing familiar rhetoric in a cul de sac, doing little more than remind us that we are trapped in a world of Quaker Oats boxes holding up Quaker Oats boxes ad infinitum.
Favoring theory over emotional content, art rarely approaches the subject of the media on a visceral or psychological level. The latter approach is what made Psycho-Opera such a startlingly powerful and unusual theatrical experience. Conceived and directed by David Schweizer, written and performed by John Fleck, with media-slick