I Love Dick (20 page)

Morphine

What we are waiting for is one last fling

At the dizzy height of each passing day

We dread the sleepless dark and cannot pray.

Sunshine we hate, it doesn't mean a thing.

We never pay attention to the mail.

The pillow we sometimes favor with a silent

All-knowing smile, between fits of violent

Activity to shake the fever chill.

Let others join the struggle to survive

We rush helplessly forward through this life,

Dead to the world, dreaming on our feet.

The blackness just keeps coming down in sheets.

Emmy Hennings wrote this poem in 1916 and Dick, it was just so thrilling to discover there were people in the past like Ball and Hennings, making art without any validation or career plans when my friends and I were living in the East Village, New York City in 1983.

Reading about them saved my life, and so to stage the diaries I invited the nine most interesting people that I knew to comb through Ball and Henning's writings for the parts that best described themselves. There were the poets Bruce Andrews, Danny Krakauer, Steve Levine and David Rattray. There were the performers Leonora Champagne and Linda Hartinian, the actress Karen Young, the art critic Gert Schiff and me.

And since three of these nine people are dead now, and since I'd recently read Mick Tausig's account of Ball in his book
The Nervous System
(who regrets the historical absence of Dadaist women, but doesn't look too hard to find them—Dear Dick, Dear Mick, I'm just an amateur but I found three: Emmy Hennings, Hannah Hoch and Sophie Tauber), I wanted to take another look at the play.

As instigator of the piece I played the role of hostess/tour guide, giving my friends a chance to speak and filling in the expository holes. To do this I stole the character of Gabi Teisch, a German high school history teacher created by Alexandra Kluge for her brother's film
The Patriot
. Because she is unhappy in the present, Gabi Teisch decides to excavate the whole of German history to find out what went wrong. I was unhappy too. And until we own our history, she thought, I thought, there can be no change.

To get into the role I found a sensible tweed skirt flecked with tiny rhinestones and a long-sleeved lacy blouse: a costume that reminded me of an arcane archetype, the Hippie Intellectual High-school Teacher, of her, of me.

So on Thursday afternoon I stood around the Film/Video Arts dub room watching myself at 28 as Gabi Teisch: a scarecrow with bad hair, bad skin, bad teeth, slouched underneath the weight of all this information, every word an effort but one worth making because there was just so much to say.

To perform yourself inside a role is very strange. The clothes, the words, prod you into nameless areas and then you stretch them out in front of other people, live.

Chris/Gabi was a mess, persona-less, trying to lose herself in talking. Her eyes were open but afraid, locked in neutral, not knowing whether to look in or out. While she was in rehearsal for the play, Chris had started having sadomasochistic sex with the downtown Manhattan luminary Sylvère Lotringer. This happened about twice a week at lunchtime and it was very confusing. Chris would arrive at Sylvère's Front Street loft after doing errands on Canal Street. She'd be ushered into Sylvère's bedroom, walls lined with books and African water bags and whips and he'd push her down onto the bed with all her clothes on. He held her, squeezed her tits until she came. He never let her touch him, often he wouldn't even fuck her and after awhile she stopped wondering who this person even was, revolving on his bed deeper through time tunnels into memories of childhood. Love and fear and glamour. Browsing through his books she realized she was up against some pretty stiff competition, reading some of the inscriptions: “To Sylvère, The Best Fuck In The World (At Least To My Knowledge) Love, Kathy Acker.” Afterwards they'd eat clam soup and talk about the Frankfurt School. Then he showed her to the door…

So what was Chris performing? At that moment she was a picture of the Serious Young Woman thrown off the rails, exposed, alone, androgynous and hovering onstage between the poet-men, presenters of ideas, and actress-women, presenters of themselves. She wasn't beautiful like the women; unlike the men, she had no authority. Watching Chris/Gabi I hated her and wanted to protect her. Why couldn't the world I'd moved around in since my teens, the underground, just let this person be?

“You are not beautiful but you are very intelligent,” the Mexican gigolo says to the 38-year-old New York Jewish heroine of the film
A Winter Tan.
And of course it's at that moment that you know he's going to kill her.

All acts of sex were forms of degradation. Some random recollections: East 11th Street, on the bed with Murray Groman: “Swallow this mother 'til you choke.” East 11th Street, in the bed with Gary Becker: “The trouble with you is, you're such a shallow person.” East 11th Street, up against the wall with Peter Baumann: “The only thing that turns me on about you is pretending you're a whore.” Second Avenue, the kitchen, Michael Wainwright: “Quite frankly, I deserve a better-looking, better-educated girlfriend.” What do you do with the Serious Young Woman (short hair, flat shoes, body slightly hunched, head drifting back and forth between the books she's read)? You slap her, fuck her up the ass and treat her like a boy. The Serious Young Woman looked everywhere for sex but when she got it it became an exercise in disintegration. What was the motivation of these men? Was it hatred she evoked? Was it some kind of challenge, trying to make the Serious Young Woman femme?

2. The Birthday Party

—late '70s disco song

Joseph Kosuth's 50th birthday party last January was reported the next day on
Page 6
of the
New York Post
. And everything was just as perfect as they said: about 100 guests, a number large enough to fill the room but small enough for each of us to feel among the intimates, the chosen. Joseph and Cornelia and their child had just arrived from Belgium; Marshall Blonsky, one of Joseph's closest friends and Joseph's staff had been planning it for weeks.

Sylvère and I drove down from Thurman. I dropped him off outside the loft, parked the car and arrived at Joseph's door at the same moment as another woman, also entering alone. Each of us gave our names to Joseph's doorman. Each of us had names that weren't there. “Check Lotringer,” I said. “Sylvère.” And sure enough, I was Sylvère Lotringer's “Plus One” and she was someone else's. Riding up the elevator, checking makeup, collars, hair, she whispered, “The last thing you want to feel before walking into one of these things is that you're not invited,” and we smiled and wished each other luck and parted at the coat-check. But luck was something that I didn't feel much need of because I had no expectations: this was Joseph's party, Joseph's friends, people, (mostly men, except for female art dealers and us plus-ones) from the early '80s art world, so I expected to be patronized and ignored.

Drinks were at one end of the loft; dinner at the other. David Byrne was wandering across the room as tall as a Moorish king in a magnificent fur hat. I stood next to Kenneth Broomfield at the bar and said a tentative hello; he hissed and turned away. A tighter grip around the scotch-glass, standing there in my dark-green Japanese wool dress, high heels and makeup… But look! There's Marshall Blonsky! Marshall greets me at the bar and says that seeing me reminds me of the party we attended some 11 years ago when I was Marshall's date. And of course he would remember because the party was given by Xavier Fourcade to celebrate the publication of Marshall's first book,
On Signs,
at Xavier's Sutton Place town-house. It was late winter, early spring, Aquarius or Pisces and I remember guests tripping past the caterers and staff to walk around the green expanse of daffodils and bunny lawn that separated us from the river. David Salle was there, Umberto Eco was there, together with a stable-load of Fourcade's models and a reviewer from the
New York Times
.

At that time I was living in a tenement on Second Avenue and studying charm as a possible escape. Could I be Marshall Blonsky's perfect date? I'd given up trying to be as sexual as Liza Martin but I was small-boned, thin, with a New Zealand accent trailing off to something that sounded vaguely mid-Atlantic. Perhaps something could be done with this? By then I'd read enough that no one guessed I'd never been to school. Marshall and I'd been introduced by our mutual friend Louise Bourgeois. I loved her and he was fascinated by her iron will and growing fame. “It is the ability to sublimate that makes an artist,” she told me once. And: “The only hope for you is marrying a critic or an academic. Otherwise you'll starve.” And in the interest of saving me from poverty, Louise had given me, for this occasion, the perfect dress: a straight wool-boucle pumpkin-colored shift, historically important, the dress she'd worn accompanying Robert Rauschenberg to his first opening on East 10th… Most of Marshall's friends were men—critics, psychoanalysts, semioticians—and he liked that he could walk me round the room and I'd perform for them, listening, cracking jokes in their own special languages, guiding the conversation back to Marshall's book. So French New Wave… Being weightless and gamine, spitting prettily at rules and institutions, a talking dog without the dreariness of a position to defend.

Dear Dick, It hurts me that you think I'm “insincere.” Nick Zedd and I were both interviewed once about our films for English television. Everyone in New Zealand who saw the show told me how they liked Nick better 'cause he was more sincere. Nick was just one thing, a straight clear line:
Whoregasm
, East Village gore 'n porn, and I was several. And-and-and. And isn't sincerity just the denial of complexity? You as Johnny Cash driving your Thunderbird into the Heart of Light. What put me off experimental film world feminism, besides all it's boring study groups on Jacques Lacan, was its sincere investigation into the dilemma of the Pretty Girl. As an Ugly Girl it didn't matter much to me. And didn't Donna Haraway finally solve this by saying all female lived experience is a bunch of riffs, completely fake, so we should recognize ourselves as Cyborgs? But still the fact remains: You moved out to the desert on your own to clear the junk out of your life. You're skeptical of irony. You are trying to find some way of living you believe in. I envy this.

Jane Bowles described this problem of sincerity in a letter to her husband Paul, the “better” writer:

August 1947:

Dearest Bupple,

…
The more I get into it…the more isolated I feel vis-àvis the writers whom I consider to be of any serious mind …I am enclosing this article entitled
New Heroes
by Simone de Beauvoir … Read the sides that are marked
pages 121
and
123
. It is what I have been thinking at the bottom of my mind all this time and God knows it is difficult to write the way I do and yet think their way. This problem you will never have to face because you have always been a truly isolated person so that whatever you write will be good because it will be true which is not so in my case… You immediately receive recognition because what you write is in true relation to yourself which is always recognizable to the world outside… With me who knows? When you are capable only of a serious approach to writing as I am it is almost more than one can bear to be continually doubting one's sincerity
…

Reading Jane Bowle's letters makes me angrier and sadder than anything to do with you. Because she was just so brilliant and she was willing to take a crack at it—telling the truth about her difficult and contradictory life. And because she got it right. Even though, like the artist Hannah Wilke, in her own lifetime she hardly found anybody to agree with her. You're the Cowboy, I'm the Kike. Steadfast and true, slippery and devious. We aren't anything but our circumstances. Why is it men become essentialists, especially in middle age?

And at Joseph's party time stands still and we can do it all again. Marshall walks me over to two men in suits, a Lacanian and a world banker from the UN. We talk about Microsoft and Bill Gates and Timothy Leary's brunches in LA until a tall and immaculately gorgeous WASP woman joins us and the conversation parts away from jokes about interest rates and transference to make room for Her…

(As I write this I feel very hopeless and afraid.)

Later Marshall made an academic birthday speech for Joseph that he'd been scribbling on all night. And Glenn O'Brien, looking like Steve Allen at the piano, performed a funny scat-singing recitative about Joseph's legendary womanizing, wealth and art. Everybody clapping, laughing, camp but serious and boozy like in the film
The Girl Can't Help It
, men in suits playing TV beatniks but where's Jayne Mansfield as the fall girl? Then David Byrne and John Cale played piano and guitar and people danced.