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Lin Hixson’s personal history reads like fiction, movie fiction, a montage of American dreams and nightmares, from The Magnificent Ambersons to The Deer Hunter. She spent her childhood in a fifty-room Tudor-style mansion with three-and-a-half acres and an orchard in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, Illinois, where two decades later they made Ordinary People. Every 4th of July hundreds of people came to her family’s catered parties, played polo and croquet on the lawns, and watched movies in their basement screening room. Her father, Henry Haley Hixson, Jr., was a second-generation coffee importer who had a revolving oak desk and a brass spittoon in his office. Her mother was a beautiful paranoid schizophrenic who was periodically confined in a country club sanitarium. Hixson was really brought up by Mary Dean, a black woman from the South who was a nutritionist and whose husband, Dean Dean, worked at the coffee plant.

In 1961 John F. Kennedy was inaugurated and Hixson turned the corner into adolescence. Her parents divorced and her father remarried. The year of the Cuban missile crisis, an unfortunate deal involving the government, left her father bankrupt and they had to move to an eight-room house. The following year (1963), America watched as Kennedy was assassinated and his alleged killer Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot point-blank by Jack Ruby on TV. Hixson was fourteen that year, the same year her mother, who lived alone in a cabin in Lake Bluff, put a pistol in her mouth and shot herself. She succeeded in blotting out her mind, but failed to kill herself, surviving for another ten years in a state institution. Five years later, in an America torn asunder by the Vietnam War, Hixson’s adored father died of stomach cancer. In 1969, at the end of her sophomore year at Wittenberg College in Ohio, Lin Hixson, the former high school cheerleader and homecoming queen, married a recently returned Vietnam veteran.

Fugitives on the run from the past, Hixson and her husband moved twelve times during the next seven years, leaving no tracks as they went from Ohio to Colorado, Mexico, New Mexico, and Oregon, where they lived barricaded in a lighthouse for a short time. But bolted doors and drawn window shades do not keep out ghosts. Quite the opposite. They keep them close. One morning, Hixson, who had managed to graduate from the University of Oregon despite the constraints of her troubled marriage, packed a suitcase and left. (The image of someone carrying a suitcase appears over and over in her early work.) In 1977 Hixson, the political science major who once wanted to be a dancer, arrived in Los Angeles to become an artist. She left her history in the closet like old clothes, and came to LA.

People used to say that LA was a place that had no history, a place without a past, as if it had been invented by Hollywood. A fallacy, of course. What they really meant is that Los Angeles is a place with no memory. It erases itself every day. It lives in a state of perpetual present. Like TV. It’s where you come to start over, where you can invent yourself anew. This is the lure of LA. This is the myth. But beneath LA’s ever-present “newness” is a hidden, unspoken sense of loss. Hollywood’s fictions have been at the heart of Lin Hixson’s work over the past decade.

No one, except perhaps Rachel Rosenthal, has had a greater influence than Hixson on the direction LA performance art took in the 1980s. Hixson became the person around whom a new scene coalesced, not because she chose to lead but because she intuitively understood LA and its myths as the state of mind of her own generation. Born in 1949, Hixson is part of the “baby boomer” generation, the children of the Cold War, from Korea to the onset of Vietnam, the first children to be born into and grow up in the world of television and the Bomb. Most telling is this quote from a 1984 interview in which Hixson stated: “I think my work is very American in that it doesn’t feel like it has a history other than a pop history”¹ What she really was saying was that white Americans of her generation and younger have no sense of a cultural history other than media culture.

Though she shares with her art-world colleagues a sensibility shaped by media culture, Hixson uses that material differently. Unlike so much of the work of the 1980s, which was based on postmodern and poststructuralist theories, Hixson’s performance pieces were neither critical analyses nor tongue-in-cheek parodies of media clichés. Hixson’s work never fit comfortably into the 1980s deconstructive cubbyhole. In the light of 1990s multiculturalism, Hixson’s approach to media culture takes on an entirely different meaning. It can best be understood as the cultural autobiography of a white American of the TV generation. Her imagery inevitably confronts the mythologies of friendship, love, and family and the deep sense of loss, absence, and yearning. Each of her increasingly more complex collaborative productions of the early 1980s struggled with the contradictions and tensions between our longing for the world we have been promised, and the unrelenting anxiety and confusion of the world we actually inhabit. While Hixson captured the same ineffable collective yearning for an idealized past that put Reagan in the White House and kept him there, her nostalgic “Americanism” was unsettling rather than sentimental. Without ironic cynicism she intentionally subverted what was longed for and lost.

Historically, Hixson’s coming of age and personal loss of innocence coincided with America’s. Yet, in a medium dominated by individual personalities and autobiographical narrative, Hixson’s personal life was never directly alluded to in her work until Hey John, Did You Take the El Camino Far, the 1984 production that was the culmination of her LA years. She chose instead to focus on the denied and unexpressed sense of betrayal, disappointment, fear, and alienation that resides in the gap between the TV world of spotless kitchens, perfect teeth, dry armpits, fast cars named after wild animals (usually an endangered species), sugar-free sex, eternal youth, beauty, romance, prosperity, satisfaction, and stardom, and our daily experience. The daily installments of sanitized violence in living color — the media spectacle of real wars, assassinations, and all manner of criminal acts — and the actual carnage became parallel subtexts.

In Sway Back (March 1982) the cast entered dressed in Edwardian whites looking like they’d all watched too much Masterpiece Theater, posed for family snapshots, and reclined as if sunning themselves at a country picnic. The effect, however, was not of well-being but of an unnamed longing for family and social stability. The image was contradicted by anxious, fragmented chatter about bomb shelters in the suburbs and seemingly random disasters such as crib death.

Intrigued and concerned with the way media transforms real events, from the trivial to the profound, into disposable fictions, Hixson became an obsessive newspaper clipper. In Birds on Pedestals with Bomber Ladies (May 1981) she began to explore various ways of telling the same story, at the same time juxtaposing seemingly unrelated stories. The result resembled switching TV channels back and forth, cutting in and out of the same story at different points in time. She expanded on this technique in Sway Back, using two newspaper articles as the structural skeleton. The first described the police arrest and subsequent drowning of three adolescent boys on an outing at Lake Mexia. The second was an interview with the Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci. According to the LA Times three black youths accused of smoking marijuana were handcuffed. The boat capsized. The officer swam to shore. The black youths drowned. Hixson reconstructed this all too familiar story of police abuse with racist implications in musical vignettes, from Gregorian chants to Latin pop by Linda Albertano. The tragic reality was neutralized as it evolved from melodrama to a TV commercial for fast food chains on Lake Mexia’s shore.

The Bertolucci interview took the process one step further by making the film director an observer/commentator on the performance. The piece concluded with Jane Dibbell as Bertolucci speaking about his next film, which was to be based on a newspaper story about the kidnapping of a wealthy industrialist’s son: “[B]ut the father isn’t so sure he wants to give up the cheese factory, the villa in Roma […] after all, he hardly knew the boy […]. It’s going to be a wonderful film. Make lots money.” Then turning to a pathetic naked baby doll, “You like the cinema, eh? […] You know, children are the real enemy … It’s the eyes, so SAD. … You don’t know if they are going to respect you, or kill you ….” He sums it up with “I like being film director … my finger is always on the pulse.”

Hixson’s LA pieces were all collaborative efforts that began with images and gestures lifted from films. These images were not imitated by the performance but digested and reconstructed. Likewise, everyday activities were distilled to a specific set of images and gestures and extracted from context. The two were montaged together, simultaneously erasing the boundary between our two levels of experience — mediated and direct, and pointing out the disjuncture. This technique was applied to texts taken from newspapers, television, movies, plays, and novels, and intercut with monologues and dialogues developed by the performers from their own undramatic, pedestrian personal experiences and observations. In Flatlands (July 1983), an American road story about the place we remember that never was and the horizon line we never get to, excerpts from The Great Gatsby, the flight log of a Florida plane crash, personal anecdotes, and one-sentence news headlines of unidentified disasters were juxtaposed without giving any one category of information greater weight or significance than the others. This leveling out of fact and fiction, tragedy and triviality, severs events from their consequences, as history is cut loose from memory.

Had Hixson chosen to go to New York instead of Los Angeles her work, no doubt, would have taken a very different course. But she didn’t. She came to LA in the late 1970s when suntans were chic, Venice was cheap with artist studios down by the beach, and everyone was still “laid back.” Hixson got a job as a waitress in Venice, then the hangout of macho sculptors and light-and-space conceptualists. She met and moved in with her new lover, urban planner Gary Squier and, in 1978, enrolled in Otis Art Institute’s graduate program. Hixson and Squier left Venice for a loft on Industrial Street in LA’s budding downtown art scene.

Unlike New York, with its geographically concentrated art community in downtown Manhattan, southern California’s sprawling network of universities and art schools was the breeding ground for the performance art activities of the 1970s. Hixson’s entrance into performance was through this system. Kristin Bonkemeyer, a sculpture student at Claremont graduate school, sculptor Steve Nagler, a recent Claremont graduate, and his girlfriend, choreographer Pam Casey, a student in the experimental dance program at Cal. State-Fullerton headed by choreographer Lynn Hachten, had been working with Hachten on a collaborative piece combining sculpture and dance. Bonkemeyer introduced Hixson to the group and invited her to work with them. Also invited to join were two other Fullerton faculty members — dancer/choreographer Wilson Barrileaux, and director/performer/ theater teacher Ron Wood who was also Hachten’s husband.

The seven became an official collaborative performance group when the piece Invention #1 was to be presented as a work-in-progress at Claudia Chaplin’s Santa Monica loft space, IDEA. Her associate, Peggy Dobreer, insisted that the group had to have a name in order to be on the program. Hixson and Bonkemeyer ducked into a closet for a hasty consultation. Picking up on the only thing available for inspiration, the object-oriented Bonkemeyer dubbed the group Hangers. Between 1979 and 1981 Hangers created and presented six collaborative pieces. In a town that had no geographically locatable art community, no institutional support structure for this kind of work, no rules of procedure, and no high-visibility publicity mechanism, not only was self-producing a necessity, it was and still is in keeping with the free-wheeling entrepreneurial spirit of LA.

Invention #1 was performed in the summer of 1979 at the Pilot Theater, a tiny black-box space on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. At $2.50 a ticket it sold out its ninety-nine seat house on two consecutive weeknights, and launched a group that would become the spawning ground for many of today’s most prominent LA performance artists. Hangers served as a kind of laboratory, not unlike the early days of the Judson Dance Theatre in New York, but given the nature of LA without any single location or space identified with it. The group quickly followed up in the fall of 1979 with Invention #2 at Stage One, a new gallery in Orange near Fullerton, and Invention #3 in the winter of’1979/80 at the Hyperion Theater in Hollywood.

The energy and conceptual structure of the pieces was the result of a collective decision-making process and a rotation of roles in which everyone functioned as director/choreographer and as performer. Content, derived from images and objects brought by each performer, was determined by an associative improvisational process. At first, what held these montages of seemingly unrelated, movement-based tableaux together was a common aesthetic involving the performers’ relationships to ordinary objects and pedestrian movement. Actions contradicted visual images, and costumes played a key part in Hangers’ vocabulary of social signage, often raising questions of gender stereotypes, an issue later to become central to Casey and Nagler’s work. Early in 1980 Ron Wood brought Jane Dibbell, an actress in the theatre program at Fullerton, into the group. Dibbell introduced texts from both literature and newspapers. Using them like objects, she developed monologues to counterpoint the movement-based images of the group. Dibbell became Hixson’s prime collaborator between 1981 and 1983.

While Hixson was experimenting with a way of working and beginning to find her own image vocabulary with Hangers, she was exposed to two other people who were to have a profound influence on LA performance — Rudy Perez and Rachel Rosenthal.

After nearly two decades in New York’s downtown dance scene, choreographer Rudy Perez came to LA in the fall of 1978 to teach a term at UCLA. His performance at IDEA early in 1979 of his famous 1964 Judson Church piece, Countdown, and other solo works was more than just an inspiration for Hixson and Hangers. It became a foundation on which to build. Seduced by the climate, the light and space, and the raw “youngness” of LA with its air of unlimited possibility, Perez stayed on to form a new company and teach workshops. In the next six years he created an impressive body of new work, and with the demanding eye and hand of an eccentric and unorthodox drill sergeant he provoked, prodded, and nurtured an entire generation of emerging performance artists. Hixson was one of them. She credits his big multimedia pieces Take Stock and Traces, presented at Royce Hall in 1981, in which he collaborated with visual artist Mark Stock, as having a direct influence on the final Hangers piece, Birds on Pedestals with Bomber Ladies, particularly on the way she worked with pedestrian movement. After Hangers disbanded, Hixson invited Perez to use her Industrial Street loft for his now legendary Art Moves workshops.

During this period Hixson also met Rachel Rosenthal, who was teaching performance classes in the continuing education program at Otis. Hixson took the class in the spring of 1980 and later did Rosenthal’s intensive DBD workshop held downtown at 240 S. Broadway — the building that housed LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in its early years, the brand-new High Performance magazine, and the studios of Linda Burnham and Barbara Smith. In Rosenthal’s classes Hixson met Joyce Wexler-Ballard, J.P. Kovacs, Anna Homler, and Molly Cleator, all of whom later became performers in Birds, with Cleator becoming one of the core collaborators. While Perez provided Hixson with a conceptual and structural model for orchestrating movement, combining everyday gestures and objects, and utilizing space, Rosenthal introduced her to her own inner voice and demonstrated how to tap into the essence of and transform personal experiences and emotions into representative images.

This became immediately evident in the next Hangers piece, Kicked Upstairs, performed in May 1980 at Hixson’s Industrial Street loft. Eight additional performers were added to the eight-member group, and for the first time Hixson’s personal sensibility was revealed and brought a distinctive point of view to the piece, giving it a cohesive conceptual and emotional underpinning. The issues around sexual roles and stereotypes for the first time pointed out the social disjuncture between the way things were supposed to be and the way they are, with images that alluded to both TV role models and Hixson’s own all-American Midwestern adolescence. In addition, the use of space reflected both Perez’s influence and Hixson’s installation work in the Otis graduate program.

A group of women wearing slips and underwear came up on the freight elevator dancing to a raunchy Patti Smith song. The men in tuxedos came down a ladder from the roof. Hixson did a monolog about early teenage sexual experience while blow-drying her hair. The women strung clotheslines across the space and the men hung paper party plates and cups on them while talking about war games. The men put “1950s pastel prom dresses on the women. Hixson and Bonkemeyer jogged in the prom dresses and heels and talked about staying in shape and getting jobs after graduation. The men went into the elevator and the women stood outside with their backs to the men, slowly pulled down their underpants, stepped out of them, and got into the elevator, leaving the panties behind as the elevator descended. This piece contained many of the raw ingredients that eventually came together with power and complexity in Hixson’s recent work with Goat Island, We Got A Date (1989).

Kicked Upstairs, which played to a packed house, toured the local colleges and was adapted to each new space. It was a significant turning point, not only artistically but in terms of Hixson’s role in the community. It marked the initiation of Hixson’s Industrial Street loft as the nexus for independent performance activity in downtown LA. During the fall of 1980, Hangers performed Cowboy. The Cartesian Memorial Orchestra, who later created music scores for a number of Perez’s major company pieces, and Karen Goodman, a member of Perez’s company at the time, and now an established choreographer/solo dancer, presented new works, and two of Molly Cleator’s friends, UCLA students Valerie Faris and Tobi Redlich, did a dance performance called Sleepwalkers. A decade later Redlich opened Caravan, her own Hollywood dance studio, and Faris is half of a film producing/directing team with Jonathan Dayton, known for their innovative rock films. In addition, Hixson took the job of performance coordinator at LACE in October 1980.

At the same time, Rachel Rosenthal turned her west-side studio on Robertson Boulevard, not far from the fast-declining LAICA (Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art), into a performance space called Espace DBD, where she held workshops and weekly performances, many by emerging young artists and former students. Cleator, who was one of Rosenthal’s Otis protégées, introduced Hixson to Linda Albertano and Elisha Shapiro, who were to later participate in Hixson’s post-Hangers collaborative spectacles. From 1977 to 1979 Cleator had resided with Shapiro and Redlich, who was married to him at that time, in the Nihilist Housing cooperative, which produced the Xeroxed proto-punk mail art OK Magazine and held performance events on the roof of the I930s apartment building on Wilshire Boulevard and Beverly Glen. One of the regular performers was a new-wave band called Willys (Charles Duncan, Martin Ingle, Kyle C. Kyle, Steve Hagel) which sometimes featured the six-foot-four-inch singer/poet/performer Linda Albertano, then a UCLA film school graduate. Albertano has since become one of LA’s luminary performance personas, and Shapiro is the notorious conceptualist who has produced such media events and videos as the 1984 Nihilist Olympics and the 1988 Nihilist Party Presidential Campaign.

Cleator, who was still at Otis, asked Hixson and Jane Dibbell, who had joined Rosenthal’s classes, to collaborate with her, Albertano, Redlich, and Shapiro on Rest Area #17, otherwise known as The Pink Piece. A more divergent and eccentric assemblage of sensibilities and personalities is hard to imagine, yet they became primary players in Hixson’s first post-Hangers piece, Sway Back, which was, along with Hey John, Did You Take the El Camino Far, the most fully resolved and conceptually cohesive work of her LA years. Composed of autobiographical monologs, vignettes, and visual tableaux, Rest Area #17 was performed at Hixson’s loft in January 1981. At the same time, Birds on Pedestals with Bomber Ladies was being work-shopped. Although officially presented as a Hangers piece, Birds was as much an outgrowth of the activities in Rosenthal’s class, with Rest Area #17 as the impetus.

Hangers was beginning to splinter as its members’ interests and energies diverged. Hachten was pregnant, and Hixson had expanded her field of activity to encompass other groups, with Dibbell aligning herself with Hixson. When the opportunity presented itself to do a Hangers piece at LACE, Hixson and Dibbell saw it as a chance to do a spectacle-scale piece, and they invited Cleator and the Rosenthal/Otis crowd to collaborate with Hangers. In addition, Dibbell brought in her own contingent from Claremont, a group that included composer Michael Montleone and her teen children Julian and Dominique and their friends, with whom she had been putting on events for some time. The coalescence of such a large and diverse group of young talent and energy resulted in a kind of creative fission that made Birds a groundbreaking performance masterpiece. With a cast of more than twenty and nearly as many scenes, produced without any funding or the guiding hand of any single “auteur,” the hour-long Birds on Pedestals with Bomber Ladies was performed one time only at LACE in May 1981. It can now be cited as an important historical turning point for performance in LA, the performance that triggered the emergence of the TV generation.

This spectacle bore little resemblance to work going on in New York at the same time — neither the techno-pop virtuosity of Laurie Anderson, the hard-edged solos of Eric Bogosian, nor East Village punk rock. Birds was essentially a movement-based piece. Though it owed some debt to the visual theatre of Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Ping Chong, the Wooster Group, and Mabou Mines (which Hixson and some of the others had read about but not actually seen), it was vastly different in its subject matter, tone, and style.

Birds was a truly collaborative work in the way that a TV series is a collaborative enterprise, with Hixson, Dibbell, and Cleator functioning as producers, masterminding the conceptual structure and shaping the individual episodes created by independent teams of artists into a coherent whole. What could have ended up as little more than a variety show was held together not so much by a shared aesthetic, but by a commonality of both cultural experience and the response to it. In many ways Birds was truly a product of an LA sensibility in its methodology, its content, and its look or style. A similar worldview showed up shortly afterwards in the early New York work of the young Tim Miller, who grew up in LA County.

As in all of Hixson’s pieces to follow, Birds traversed the blurred boundaries between public and private realities, between the world on the screen and the world in your living room. War is represented as fashion. Fashion postures as art. Art parodies entertainment. Entertainment sanitizes violence. Politics and entertainment wear the same clothes. Camouflage is chic. Appearances are everything and nothing is what it appears to be. Everyone is a chameleon in media culture. In fact, camouflage itself was the meta-text.

The piece was set in an American landscape of media, art, and entertainment genres which subsume politics. In retrospect, Birds on Pedestals with Bomber Ladies was an eerie forecast of the decade to come — the Reagan era of image, in which an actor President quoted movie fictions instead of history and called terrorists “freedom fighters” — a decade which would culminate in a George Bush/Saddam Hussein image war on videotape, a battle resembling an election-year TV ad campaign. The set itself had the ambiance of a live TV show. Wilson Barrileaux dressed as a motorcycle cop in black leather, boots and helmet, was mistaken by the audience for a hired security guard as he cruised the set. Ron Wood crooned a bad piano-bar/cocktail-lounge medley at an electric keyboard. Barrileaux fractured assumptions based on image when he returned later, first with a feather boa added to the police uniform, and then in drag in a sequined floozy dress and hat singing the 1970s disco song I Love the Night Life by Alicia Bridges.

The piece had a highly designed, glossy stylishness. Costuming was thematic, and props were part of the costume or camouflage. Everyone was either in black, white, red, or green camouflage fatigues or shifty shrubbery, both tropical and suburban. A crowd of women and men in black cocktail dresses and suits postured with champagne glasses. A gun went off. Everyone hit the ground. The entire cast in formal attire fell into military drill formations, panting like new recruits at boot camp. Eight goggled bomber ladies perched on sculpture pedestals spread their arms back like wings (birds or airplanes?). Next they struck classical statue poses, as Hixson and Cleator roamed around as if at a 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 fully realized in her work with the Chicago company, Goat Island, in Soldier, Child, Tortured Man (1988) and We Got A Date (1989).

If Flatlands attempted to map the terrain of unnamed fears in a landscape of perceptual dysfunction, Hey John, Did You Take The El Camino Far was the crossroads where what was lost and what we are running away from meet.

Until Hey John Hixson’s work leaped back and forth from the 1950s to the 1980s, skipping what happened in between as neatly as did Ronald Reagan’s media campaign. In the early 1980s no one wanted to talk about the 1960s. Everyone played the game of “let’s pretend it never happened.” “America is BACK!” said grandpa with a chuckle. But behind the façade Hixson knew it wasn’t really okay. Ghosts kept in dungeons turn into demons that eat their way out from the inside.

Hey John was about America’s journey from Camelot to Vietnam to our disillusioned present. It might also be described by two lines from a song by the Supremes — “Reflections of the way life used to be, reflections of the love you took from me.” Or, reflections of what we expected life and love to be. While the piece was a personal exorcism — Hixson’s coming to terms with her past, and her marriage in particular — it also mirrored a deeper social need. Not surprisingly, Hixson, whose personal history could be read as cultural autobiography, anticipated the national subconscious two years in advance of the onslaught of Vietnam movies, and TV shows, a mass-culture catharsis — Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Garden of Stone, Born on the Fourth of July, “China Beach,” “Tour of Duty,” etc.

Like all of Hixson’s earlier work, Hey John was a collaborative effort, a Hollywood-style spectacle with a cast of American stereotypes — cheerleaders, 1960s convertibles, a brooding leather-jacketed bad boy rocker on a motorcycle, lots of pop songs and dances, and Ed Sullivan and game shows on TV. Directed by Hixson, with a script by Hixson, Cleator, and Valerie Faris, based on stories by Hixson, on the musical Bye Bye Birdie, and on texts about Vietnam, outwardly Hey John was about Laura and John, an innocent Midwestern college girl and the Vietnam vet she meets at school and marries. But Hey John was about the place we can never go back to and the place we are in. It asked us to confront how we got from one to the other, and most important, to face the fact that we don’t know and are afraid to find out.

For a lot of people the 1960s evokes images of social upheaval and revolution, blood in the streets, protests, the war that divided us down the middle. For others it was the civil rights movement, riots in the cities, raised expectations, crushed hopes. Or psychedelia, hippies, rock ‘n’ roll, liberated sex — the kind that gave you joy not death, and drugs — the kind that were about love and peace and cosmic consciousness, not violence, money, and death. Yes there was the counterculture and Woodstock. But first there was the pop culture. Motown and surf music and big cars, go-go boots and miniskirts and Laugh-In, Andy Warhol and Twiggy and the Beatles, black light and Day-Glo and plastic. All our leaders and heroes had been killed but, my God, we’d seen the planet from heaven and we were going to the moon. It was simultaneously a time of innocence and the end of innocence. It was the last time we had a vision of the future.

Hey John traveled back and forth between before and after. Before Laura knew John. Before Vietnam came into American living rooms every night on TV. Before John threw the grenade and fragged his commanding officer. And after John came home. Once again Hixson’s vehicle was television, and the game show To Tell the Truth was used as both a structural device and a self-referential subtext, a means of questioning the veracity of perceptual reality. Things are not necessarily the way they appear. Who is the real Laura? Is John’s story real, true, or an imagined nightmare, a fabrication? How do we discern guilt from innocence, good from evil? Which twin has the Toni? Will the real Laura Huntley please stand up? If we are living our lives through the media, and if the representation is fiction, then what is the real meaning of those images and the values they promote?

There were five Lauras all identically dressed in black vinyl miniskirts and go-go boots, hot pink blouses, and black bouffant wigs. The game show host, interrogator, rock star, and John were all played by Lance Loud, who came to public attention in 1972 when his Santa Barbara family was displayed on national television before millions of viewers in the unscripted “real life,” real time, video verité series An American Family.

The first half of Act I took place on a game show set on a loading dock inside an industrial warehouse. At first the Lauras were like windup dolls, good girls responding obediently to the MC who spurred them on, describing how John and Laura met and asking provocative questions like, “Where were you when he told you what he had done?” They relayed fragments of information about John — he had long legs, he drove a Karman Ghia, he loved Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. Each Laura recounted a different version of a trip they took to Hershey, PA. “I thought I was pregnant. John thought I was pregnant. He slapped me,” they recited in unison. The MC told the story of how John’s commanding officer in Vietnam shot John’s dog one day for no reason, then barked an order, “Jump, Laura, jump.” One Laura came forward and did a cheerleader’s jump. Lights flashed, the Beatles sang Money Can’t Buy You Love, a dozen dancers did the pony as stagehands dismantled the set, and the Lauras broke into Laugh-In-style two-line jokes about John.

The emotional and political reality of John and Laura’s lives have been denied, repressed, neutralized, made into a digestible disposable fiction so that we as a nation do not have to acknowledge our complicity or take any responsibility. They are not real; therefore, we do not have to deal with them. We can turn off the TV and they will go away. But of course they do not go away, because we are all John and Laura. We are all betrayers and betrayed.

In scene two on the stark, bare loading dock in front of a corrugated steel garage door, Hixson confronted us with our moral dilemma — Is John a killer or a hero? Which kind of killing is the crime? Who is the victim? Who is the criminal? The Lauras, who had removed their wigs, stood in a glaring spotlight with their backs to the garage door as if in a police line-up. A man interrogated them as if they were on trial — “Did you trust John? After he had told you what he had done … After he told you what he had done in Vietnam?”

One of the Lauras came up onto the loading dock. She tried to explain. She recounted the story of when John told her about Plummer, the commanding officer, and how he made them use Vietnamese women and children as shields, about the men sitting around talking about killing him. She switched to John’s voice telling how it happened — the fire fight, the confusion, the panic, he was running, Plummer’s tent was there … He pulled the pin and threw the grenade.

The other Lauras joined her. They went through it again, the way it was when John and Laura were together in the beginning, as if the answers were in these snapshots frozen in memory, as if it could be justified. They took a trip. Glenn Campbell was singing Galveston on the radio. John began screaming in the night the seventh time Laura slept with him. There was a Pendleton blanket on the bed. On the trip to Hershey, where they make the chocolate kisses, John showed her how to shoot a gun. “Sweat, Laura, sweat,” he cried when they made love. The Lauras sat down on the edge of the platform facing the garage door as if it were a big movie screen, their backs to the audience. The door rolled up, revealing a brilliantly lit street filled with teenage girls waving placards reading “I love you Lucky.” LIGHTS. CAMERA. ACTION!

Act Two, which was a re-contextualized version of the musical Birdie, was a flashback to an idealized America in which the Lauras were all sweet sixteen, and the Johns were all the boy next door. A huge Cadillac convertible and a green Mustang convertible filled with girls drove up to the loading dock. Telephones rang. The girls leaped out, dancing and swooning, and singing, “They’re Going Steady, John and Laura, Laura and John.” And as if that wasn’t enough to make any girl’s dreams come true, a voice announced that Laura had been chosen out of all the teenagers in America to kiss rock ‘n’ roll idol Lucky Loud on The Ed Sullivan Show! (Lucky has been drafted, `a la Elvis Presley.) Seventeen girls in colorful choir robes lit by star patterns spiraled in the street, as the Ed Sullivan song from Bye Bye Birdie blasted from speakers and Laura’s family lip-synched the lyrics. Lucky arrived on a motorcycle. The girls shrieked and screamed. He sang One Last Kiss and embraced Laura. Everyone fainted in ecstasy. CUT! The doors rolled down.

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?