“To produce someting is a way of creating some sign of life in response to that death.”
By 1995, over half a million people had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States; 62 percent of them had died. That year marked the high water line of HIV diagnosis and AIDS deaths in the US. The pandemic, which was first documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 1981, was not publicly acknowledged by the Reagan Administration until nearly five years later; by then more than 5,000 people, the vast majority of them gay men, had died. AIDS indelibly marked queer and artistic communities across the country, producing a deep urgency to affirm life, affirm presence, and affirm the importance of community in the face of the disease’s devastation and the federal government’s inaction.
In a wide-ranging interview, queer theorist, performance studies scholar, and UCLA associate professor Sean Metzger discusses the era and its impact on performance and art making with Gwyneth Shanks, curator of A Different Kind of Intimacy: Radical Performance at the Walker, 1990–1995, a new exhibit in the Walker’s Best Buy Aperture.
Gwyneth Shanks:
Thank you so much for talking with me, Sean. The exhibit, as you know, is entitled A Different Kind of Intimacy: Radical Performance at the Walker, 1990–1995 and focuses on a group of primarily queer performance-based artists. I wonder if you could begin by describing the context for what radical performance meant, or has come to mean, from the 1980s and ’90s?
Sean Metzger:
It means something very specific in the US. I mean, you could describe “radical art” from the 1960s or ‘70s in terms of Fluxus or feminist performance, but in the early ’90s that word had a very specific connotation: AIDS. HIV/AIDS is absolutely germane to any discussion as is the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). For instance, take the NEA Four [performing artists Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller, who had their NEA funding revoked by the Republican-controlled congress in 1990 based upon the perceived obscenity of their work]; at least three of the four were out queer artists, and the fourth—Finley—was invested in a kind of performance practice that dovetails a lot with queer art of the time. Art and politics at that moment was bound up with debates around sexuality and the queer movement as a whole. The fact that the Reagan and Bush Administrations did so little to address the AIDS crisis drove a lot of the art of the period. For me, if you’re going to put up an art exhibition about that time period in the US, you necessarily must invoke AIDS, and particularly gay male sexuality, as well as lesbian sexuality, if in a different kind of way. Art and performance, I would say, was also less about trans politics than today’s cultural work. I mean, AIDS discourses by and/or about gay men really drove the art scene in the late ’80s through the mid-’90s. I think that specificity provides a focus because if we say “radical” is attached to a certain particularly gay male or queer male aesthetic in the 1990s, then it’s easier to see what the critique of that particular radicalness would be. That moment of artistic production was important because of the losses the AIDS crisis produced, but at the same time a whole bunch of other social concerns weren’t being addressed because the epidemic was seen as so important. AIDS, at least in the US at that time, was very particular in terms of the demographics it was affecting.
GS:
What I hear you pointing to is the usefulness of resisting an overarching genealogy of radical artists or radical performing artists—resisting creating a chronology of sorts. In other words, radical performance from the 1960s is quite different from radical performance in the 1990s.
SM:
Yes, absolutely. That type of chronological thinking also assumes that there is this linear history worth tracing; maybe that’s not true. Actually, maybe there are other ways to think about the past that are equally, if not more, useful, rather than trying to forge connections. I’m just thinking of another performance artist who’s been revived recently, Yoko Ono.
GS:
That maybe holds true for a lot of cis-women performance artists from the late 1960s through the ‘70s, who do get this mantle of radicalism, but are largely and distinctly heteronormative in the way in which they position their aesthetic challenge to the male gaze and the sexism of the art market, and also positioned their bodies as desirable to a male gaze at the same time that they also undermined that desirability.
SM:
Yeah, I think that’s true, because radical is always relational; it depends on a set of specific conditions. You have to assume some sort of stable ground to create a grouping of radical artists across time,
GS:
Certain artists—like Ron Athey, Karen Finley, or Tim Miller—have become, within performance histories of the period, so canonic of that moment of solo performance, of queer politics—or radical feminist politics—and of early AIDS activism. In part, I think these artists get taken up again and again because their work became so enmeshed with NEA defunding debates.
SM:
I always think about those folks who were working at the same time but kind of ancillary to that work—people like Marga Gomez and Monica Palacios, who started in the ’80s and who both helped found and then worked with Culture Clash. I think people like Gomez and Palacios were never seen as central to this queer art movement, but they intersected and overlapped with it. There are younger people, like Denise Uyehara, who came out of this moment, and there are many other artists who had careers that preceded it or helped make a space like Highways [a queer performance, art, and community venue founded by Tim Miller in 1989 in Los Angeles] possible. I do think that’s a narrative that’s not often told, yet when you went to Highways, questions of race, ethnicity, queerness, and community-building started to intersect quite a lot, because these types of spaces became a center for people who were on the margins. That, for me, is an interesting genealogy that’s not discussed that much, and, also, of course is a huge part of California history and politics of the period.
GS:
I wonder if you could talk about some of the arts spaces that were particularly invested in queer politics or community building and how those spaces helped drive art practice in particular ways? Patrick’s Cabaret, for instance, here in the Twin Cities, was one of these venues, and that was the space actually that ended up hosting Ron Athey’s 1994 performance that became so controversial.
SM:
I think spaces like Highways and PS 122 in New York were really key. Highways, for instance, hosted not just performances but so many workshops that were an important part of how those spaces were constituted. I think very much they were also a product of their time, because those workshops were often gender segregated. There was the gay male performance workshop; there was one for women; there was one for queer men of color. It was very much part and parcel of the era’s investment in identity politics, right? So, you get the real rise of solo performance,
GS:
How did institutions like the Walker fit into this larger, national ecosystem of queer, arts spaces?
SM:
To go back to the focus on workshops and community building at places like Highways—the real value of those workshops is as a response to how larger institutions presented work by Ron Athey, Karen Finley, Bill T. Jones, and Arnie Zane, who are emblematic of a certain exalted aesthetics and a kind of radical feminist or queer or gay identity politics or BDSM subcultures getting played out. As a viewer to MoCA or the Walker, you weren’t called to participate in the aesthetic practice or the sort of sharing of co-experiences or intimacies in the same way that workshops aim to cultivate. Other performance groups, for instance major dance companies, they all had an HIV piece, and that’s part of the cultural climate as well, fueling how large and smaller scale presenting organizations are responding to the moment. So, for instance, if you’re a well-funded institution or a dance company like Alvin Ailey, it gives you opportunity to do certain kinds of things. I think PS 122 and Highways were interested in a democratization that other institutions either were not interested in or were not capable of. Other institutions didn’t have the mechanisms built in for a kind of participatory expansion of performance practice, and that’s especially true in terms of the mission of most museums. I mean, a museum is like other cultural institutions in all kinds of ways but democratization in the way a space like Highways—or it sounds like Patrick’s Cabaret—understood it, is often not seen as part of the articulated mission; not explicitly, right? I do think museums are invested in making things accessible, but making something accessible is not necessarily the same thing as making something democratic; those are different projects. But, you know, also Highways did not imagine children coming to see their performances. The audience also plays a role in the ecosystem you’re talking about.
GS:
I wonder, on the topic of children, if you could talk about the relationship between queer politics and kids. I know you worked for many years for the LGBTQ Center in Los Angeles working in the center’s youth programing departments.
SM:
I think there has long been a misunderstanding of youth particularly in regards to sex. In social services, for many years it was a real issue to try to get people to recognize that: “Yeah. I mean, kids may not be fully intellectually developed or even fully
GS:
Right. Or having conversations about sex on the floor of the Senate.
SM:
Yeah. Exactly. And therefore, in newspapers, on TV, in magazines. I remember when Newsweek or Time ran pieces in the 1980s which listed all the people—celebrities—who had passed away from complications from AIDS. It was just gigantic, this huge list of people, and it was also quite affecting; I still remember it from when I was a kid. Now when you think about the politics of death and disease, they do have less urgency in the US than they used to. On the other hand, when I work in South Africa [Metzger’s upcoming book, in part, looks at performance practices in South Africa], that posture of remembrance, those politics, are still very much part of quotidian life.
GS:
Yeah, exactly. It’s interesting that the last big fight over NEA funding happened in relationship to work being made in the wake of people—or artists—dying. It does feel like we are in a somewhat parallel moment of NEA defunding—although perhaps it’s more rhetorical than anything on the current administration’s part—but there are such different stakes to those fights, right? One can’t argue, as one could in the 1990s, “This funding supports making art that is about people dying, and that’s what you’re eliminating.” That urgency, which starts with that sort of top-level landscape of how art and institutions get funding, isn’t at play in the same way.
SM:
In a big way, arguments about defunding the arts are tied to broader efforts linked to privatization and neoliberalism, which also reminds us of Trump, of course. So, these arts debates have shifted from specific content concerns to just like, “Oh, well there will be no funding for the arts, period.” But it’s true that the specific kind of notion of art that’s urgent, that’s locatable, is quite different, partly because there’s so much on the table right now. Everything is going crazy at the same time.
GS:
Yeah. Right. That these practices of underground artists who were making highly counterculture, challenging, difficult-to-watch work were suddenly at the vanguard of federal discussions about what art was. I don’t know that that has happened again, since that moment.
SM:
Yeah, I think I mean: if we looked at other, urgent issues, there is a kind of rapid replacement of the issue of the day. So, on one day it’s North Korea. On one day it’s Black Lives Matter. On another day it’s gun control and schools. Those things are not necessarily always unrelated, but it does forestall efforts to organize. Because people, by the time you get organized, the conversation has moved on to the next thing. I think that’s a real shift because with HIV, and AIDS research particularly, there was a sense of like, “Okay, we have to figure out something or more and more people will continue to die,” and that was kind of a given. Although we could say the same thing about police violence today, there’s quite a lot of disagreement about that assertion.
GS:
Certainly, there was not something apolitical about how AIDS disproportionately affected communities, but there is something strategically apolitical about deadly diseases. We can all agree that they will kill you. Who the “you” is is quite politicized and specific, and those “yous” aren’t cared about equally, certainly.
SM:
There’s this notion of contagion, as
GS:
Right. That sense of contagion you’re discussing does play out in the local and the national press around Athey’s performance here. The contagion of his body and his blood was right in front of you—and “you” mostly being the consumer of all these news articles about his performance—and was going to get you. To shift topics a bit, as a professor, what is important to articulate about this period? What would be important to convey to people studying queer theory or performance studies or the intersection between the two?
SM:
I think the primary issue to remember is some historical knowledge about HIV and AIDS, and that it was an urgent issue. A lot of the students that I have now literally say, “Oh, AIDS is an African disease.” I guess that’s what successful medical treatments have done in this country,
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Ron Vawter as Jack Smith in Roy Cohn/Jack Smith. October 31, 1996 The Kitchen, New York. Photo: Paula Court
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Ron Vawter as Roy Cohn in Roy Cohn/Jack Smith. October 31, 1996 The Kitchen, New York. Photo: Paula Court
GS:
That had an affect?
SM:
Absolutely. I think under those conditions people produced differently. So, in that way, it makes sense to me that so many young artists were getting attention because they were surrounded by death. To produce something is a way of creating some sign of life in response to that death. That sensibility is hard for students to recognize particularly those in university now.
GS:
Because of just a lack of knowledge about these histories?
SM:
Yes, and also because our discourse has changed so much around how we talk about universities.
GS:
What do you think aesthetically from this moment of performance art in particular, but also the spectrum of theater practice and choreography, from the early 1990s is useful to discuss with students?
SM:
A lot of the forms coming out in the 1990s, in particular, are a kind of self-performance, but the context for that
GS:
My last question for you is: having worked as a performance study scholar, a performer, and as a social worker activist in the LBGTQ Center in LA, what are different outcomes or strategies of activist practice, on the one hand, and performance practice, on the other hand? How do you see them informing each other?
SM:
When I was in social services, one of my goals was to innovate more: to get artists into the mix because it was a useful way to narrativize social issues in ways that audiences would respond to. In part, that was because of the demographics we were
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