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A new generation of performance artists is emerging in the 1980s whose concerns, influences, and expectations, as well as their style and content, are distinctly different from the generation preceding them. Breaking down the barriers between art and life, artist and spectator, the act or process of making art and the art itself is no longer the primary issue. Quite the opposite. There is an ironic twist to the art/life interface that has dominated the avant-garde visual and performance arts for three decades.

Simultaneously, in our media-dominated culture, the boundaries between fact and fiction have rapidly collapsed, often making it difficult to differentiate between the two. In a society consumed by “spectacle” on a daily basis, so-called “real life” and the language surrounding it have been theatricalized. The world is a stage. More than a decade ago innovators of new theater and performance art replaced “acting” as someone else with “performing” as oneself. Andy Warhol declared that everyone should be a star for fifteen minutes, and in Santa Barbara an American family named Loud allowed a TV crew to move in with them and broadcast their lives. Today a recent TV poll tells us that the American public is “bored with Beirut.” The world is a television or film soundstage on which daily life is played out and played back. The presentation of image subsumes ideology and identity; performance is paramount. Even our personal emotions are suspect of being merely behaviorally conditioned, media-induced responses. It is indeed possible that if the 1984 season had featured a prime-time weekly series about a man running for President, its star might have had a better chance of beating Ronald Reagan than Walter Mondale does.

In terms of art history, the intellectual position and philosophical ideals of the Modernist avant-garde were rooted in a belief in the future — the notion of progress, and of the artist as revolutionary and/or explorer on the frontiers of the unknown in an ever-expanding universe of unlimited possibilities. Unlike twenty years ago, visions of the future, art or otherwise, are hard to come by these days, and the artist has become more translator than prophet. The stance of postmodern performance artists of the 1980s is characterized by a non-linear synchronic relationship to past, present, and future, the recycling and reinterpretation of already existing information, manipulation rather than invention. Their work is distinguished by their use of conventional television, film, theater, and cabaret formulas and structures, allusionism, and deconstruction. Their sources of reference are popular culture, Hollywood, rock ‘n’ roll and new technologies, rather than conceptual, process, visual or feminist-based works of performance art in the 1970s.

This new generation of artists born between the end of the Korean War and the advent of the Vietnam War are the first children of television. Their experience of the world is significantly different from that of the preceding generations, and it is not surprising that their work reflects a view of the world profoundly influenced by that ubiquitous box. This is the emergence and coming of age of the Diet Pepsi and jeans generation that grew up on game shows, talk shows, soaps, sit-coms, and old movies on the Late Show, Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, and Walter Cronkite, and commercials promising spotless kitchens, perfect teeth, dry armpits, hot fast cars named after animals, sugar-free sex and eternal youth, beauty, romance, prosperity, and stardom. At the same time they are also the first generation to grow up watching daily installments of real wars, assassination, and social protests in living color. At its best their performance work portrays the contradiction and tension between the desire for the world they were promised and the unrelenting anxiety and confusion of the world they are living in.

At the forefront of this emerging group is Los Angeles artist Lin Hixson. Although her training has been primarily in the visual art world — she studied art and dance at the University of Oregon and did graduate work at Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles — Hixson now prefers to call herself a director. From 1979 to 1981 she was a founding member of the now-extinct collaborative performance ensemble Hangers whose eighteen members came from dance, theater and visual arts backgrounds. They produced seven pieces, the final one being Birds on Pedestals with Bomber Ladies (1981)— an hour- long, twenty-scene, multimedia extravaganza about art, politics, and the all-pervasive media, featuring twenty-one performers, with Jane Dibbell as Bernadette Devlin¹. When Hangers disbanded in 1981 Hixson continued to collaborate with Dibbell. Together they expanded and experimented with the collaborative process, and a methodology whose precedents are in the work of Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater and Richard Schechner’s Performance Group in the mid-to-late 1960s, and Elizabeth LeCompte and Spalding Gray’s Wooster Group in the 1970s. In the past year and a half Hixson and Dibbell conceived and developed, produced and directed four interdisciplinary/intermedia, large-scale collaborative group performance works: Sway Back (1982), Rockefeller Center (1982), Sinatra Meets Max (1983), and Flatlands (1983).

Hixson’s strength has been in her innovative staging and often arresting and memorable imagery. There is no one else in LA whose work resembles hers. Hixson’s central concern is with the application of cinematic syntax and montage techniques in all her recent works — photographically composed and framed scenes, cutaways and lap dissolves from scene to scene, and live action played against a film loop background, shifting events from real time to filmic illusory time. Her aim is to create an awareness of the illusory nature of the cinematic experience while simultaneously manipulating emotional response through the use of cinematic allusion in both images and texts.

By deconstructing form and subject matter and re-contextualizing it, she seeks to restore meaning. Conversely by reconstructing and re-enacting the structure and contents of films in a live situation, she believes that the performers become a “bridge” for the audience between the “fact” of their own lived reality and the “fiction” of the reality of the cinema. The audience’s identification and connection with the vulnerability of the performers resituates them within and in relation to that dichotomy. In addition, two of her recent productions — Rockefeller Center and Sinatra Meets Max — took place “on location” outdoors at night, giving them the look and feel of film sets.

Hixson is an inveterate newspaper clipper, intrigued and concerned by the way the media transforms real events from the trivial to the profound, into disposable fictions. She is interested in the various ways to tell the same story and the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated stories. Her non-linear narratives are without plot development, and her performers play themselves as well as the “characters.” Hixson’s scripts intercut appropriated texts from newspapers, television, movies, and literature with monologues developed by the performers.

In Sway Back the Film Director played by Jane Dibbell glamorously dressed in a man’s suit and fedora hat, voyeuristically observes the “action” within the performance. The piece opens with her watching a home movie of the yet-to-appear cast. Her appearances at the culmination of dramatically loaded scenes diffuse these scenes and “fictionalize” them. They become so many frames from the “film.” Dibbell’s final monologue is taken from a newspaper interview with film director Bernardo Bertolucci in which he talks about his next film to be based on a “real-life” story he read in a newspaper.

In Rockefeller Center performed outside at a train station in Claremont, California, a series of overlapping highly choreographed tableaux evoke romantic memories, nostalgic yearnings, and a sense of loss. A man appears with a suitcase. A woman waves to him across a field. They approach each other in slow motion. Our response to this familiar re-enactment takes on a double meaning. We identify with the filmic recollection, not the actual event.

Lin Hixson, Sway Back 1982. Photos: Courtesy of the artist.

Sinatra Meets Max relies heavily on movie allusions and romantic idealization. Various performers recite the opening narration from The Road Warrior in different styles ranging from melodrama to irony. Songs by Sinatra are sung live and on tape. The cast of forty includes a real motorcycle gang, groups of school children, a crowd of people in dark overcoats carrying suitcases and briefcases, a crowd of people carrying “ghetto blasters,” family tableaux, and a fat man with a dog on a leash, all in a floodlit park-like setting with hills, trees, and paths. The values, style, and aspirations of the Sinatra era collide with those represented by the Road Warrior Max — the silent loner, cult-hero of a post-holocaust future. The 1950s meets the 1980s head-on.

In Flatlands, an American road story about the place we remember that never was and the horizon line we never get to, Molly Cleator appears in a white slip, sensuously brushes back her hair and sighs deeply. She stands on a green lawn behind a white picket fence, an updated vision from Tennessee Williams or William Faulkner, and tells 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 recites her accomplishments and virtues and the advice of a TV evangelist preacher who promises prosperity. She is contrasted by a tough-looking teenager in a leather miniskirt standing at the side of a flat anonymous highway (a film projection loop that runs throughout) like a hitchhiker into a Road Warrior future. There are excerpts of text from The Great Gatsby and the flight log of a Florida plane crash, personal anecdotes and one-sentence recitations of unidentified disasters in the news. The power of Hixson’s work is in the way she transforms her appropriated material into metaphors with a larger meaning.

Lin Hixson, Flatlands 1983. Photos: Courtesy of the artist. Montage: Jacki Apple.

Hixson’s work has also provided a context in which other young emerging performers could develop their styles and material. At twenty-five, Molly Cleator is one of the most promising new talents. She first met Hixson as a student at Otis Art Institute, performed in several Hangers pieces, and was memorable in both Sway Back and Flatlands. Encouraged by Hixson and Jane Dibbell, who is a skilled actress, Cleator enrolled in the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute where she studied for a year and a half. Cleator developed her autobiographical monologues as metaphors for larger social issues. Her approach is intimate and vulnerable, and she builds her “characterizations” to an unexpectedly high-tension pitch. She has a presence and quality most often found in the women in Robert Altman’s films.

Private Molly, Public Molly, created, written, and performed by Molly Cleator and directed by Lin Hixson, premiered at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in October 1983. It is about performing and performance, about name brands, style, charisma, image, packaging, our fantasies of “stardom,” and our idolization of performers. It is also about desire, the quest for approval, recognition, and love. It portrays our existential ennui and our detachment from “real life,” the vicarious lives we live through media to fill the terrible void at the center, and the private fears, insecurities, anxieties, and bad dreams that occupy that void. Finally, Private Molly, Public Molly is the product of growing up and living in LA, the dream center of the world with Hollywood at its heart.

Cleator, like Hixson, is fascinated by the power that media has over our sense of identity, movies, and rock ‘n’ roll in particular. Private Molly, Public Molly is built around the tension between the appropriated material and Cleator’s personal confessions. Under Hixson’s skillful direction and staging, Cleator walks a precarious tightrope. We are repeatedly seduced by her, manipulated into identification and complicity, then jolted back into the relationship of audience to performer. Cleator slips in and out of her public and private selves, her daydreams and nightmares, as facilely as she changes her clothes. She puts a pair of high-heeled sandals in a bookshelf and says, “That is Marilyn Monroe,” and then, “If I stand here I am Marilyn Monroe.” She tap-dances to Tom Waits. She lounges in a pale pink swimsuit by a turquoise swimming pool, then tells us how inspired she is by Aretha Franklin who lives in Encino and how what she really wants is to do a concert with her. She plays another song by Tom Waits whose last lines are, “I never saw your tears till they rolled down your face,” and then tells us that when she closes her eyes she sees a ball of brown lava getting bigger and bigger and rolling towards her. She sits on a hard wooden chair under a painting of an empty road in perspective, wearing a gray coat and clutching a large black purse against her. She stares into space, tensely waiting, as a video tape plays featuring her being interviewed about sexual inhibitions on a real talk-show.

In a low-backed black sheath dress she “performs” an Aretha Franklin song to a record, using a bare-bulb standing lamp like a microphone. Every so often a telephone rings and a little girl’s voice on the answering machine tells us Molly isn’t home. The differentiation between fantasy and reality collapses in the final scene. In an intimate tone she asks us. “You can hear ‘em, can’t you? They’re sitting over there talking about her.” She describes the woman adoringly, almost worshipfully, telling us over and over, “I remember that I loved her,” shifting the emphasis to a different word each time. Only when she refers to the woman walking over to a young man in a snakeskin jacket who plays the guitar, does it become apparent that this narrative is related to an earlier scene in which Cleator in a voice filled with longing, talks to the man, then turns to us and asks if we have “any corrections” regarding her “performance.” Switching to the first person Cleator becomes the woman and in a soft southern accent says, “I don’t care what you say about me…I am who I am.” The “scene” is from Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending. In the end when she finally answers the ringing telephone, it is Elvis Costello singing to her, I Write the Book.

How many scenes do we each play out in our lives in which we re-enact lines, gestures, and postures from strangely familiar scenarios? Cleator makes us aware of how we mold ourselves to resemble the public personalities whom we admire, the stars and celebrities whose projected images are often as fictional as our own impersonations.

Cleator 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.