Eric Bogosian
Punk Rock and Performance Art
October 30, 1996.
Just finished my run at The Knitting Factory here in New York. The new solo is almost there. Wonderful and wild shows. The club has great energy and intensity. First show Saturday, a couple of people had their feet up on the stage. I gave them a hard time about it. Suddenly the audience cools down. The audience doesn't like me anymore because I'm pissed off. I don't get it. Everything's going great and it gets interrupted. I received an e-mail from someone who has been to my shows a few times who observed that there's always some distraction going on in the audience and that I get pissed off frequently. Last week I was in Gainesville, Florida and I actually rehearsed responses to moronic audience behavior backstage before the show. Sure enough, someone in the audience was doing some annoying shit and I dealt with it without rancor. Just told the guy to stop it. We shook hands. What a nice guy I am. Happy audience, happy performer. Life on the boards.
The Knitting Factory week was followed by the New York Film Festival, where subUrbia debuted. The film received excellent notices from "The New York Times", "New York Post" and "Variety", but more importantly the audiences laughed and clapped. Richard Linklater and I answered questions from the stage after the screenings. The film really works, and I'm very happy. The film will come out in February and you can decide for yourself. (We've just been informed that the film will open the Sundance Festival in January.)
Amanda Burroughs, company manager and cyber-chief of Ararat Productions Inc. just got back from San Francisco where she saw the latest incarnation of "subUrbia" at the Actor's Theater of San Francisco (its run had been extended). In her words, "it rules." (She actually didn't say that, she said it was excellent.) I wish I could have seen it, but I was in Gainesville, Fla. performing to an audience that needed a break from championship college football.
Thought for the Day:
"The true artist in Hollywood is a sad sight, ego exposed, vulnerable, his shell of art torn off, feet in the air, wriggling. His ambition has become a torture wheel, upon which his back is broken."
"It's easier to make an audience love you than to get them to respect you."
Punk Rock and Performance Art
Punk rock aesthetic:
Be loud.
Be fast.
Have a sense of humor.
Be straightforward.
Be willing to embarrass yourself.
Performance art is something visual artists made up in the Seventies when they got bored in their studios. Some of it was incredible: Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, the Kipper Kids. It was a kind of theater, but it was not drama. Because the Seventies (and part of the Eighties) were also a time of Federal and State funding for the arts, a lot of precious stuff was supported and this included tons of performance art, since that was the new cool thing. Most of this stuff was forgettable. Also, the art world is a very insular place, prone to making effete work. Each arena of the arts has it's achilles heel, for every precious piece that pops out of the theater world there's a stupidly commercial piece coming out of the film world.
How do I reconcile the commercial and the precious? I don't. But I have heroes. Paddy Chayefsky, Tennessee Williams, William Shakespeare. It's rare, but it's possible to have pretensions to art and be commercial, especially in the world of dramatic endeavor.
I don't make performance art, never have.
