Queer Networks: Ray Johnson’s Correspondence Art by Miriam Kienle

-The Arts Fuse

Ray Johnson was an enigmatic and reclusive artist who emerged as part of the Fluxus New York scene in the early 1960s. The movement’s ethos was to use everyday materials to challenge what is considered art. His work encompassed collage, mail art, performance, photography, repurposed found objects, and artist books.

Johnson is best known for his foundational role in instigating the mail art movement. He meticulously (and obsessively) collaged together newspaper clippings and photos from gay physique magazines along with pictures of dead celebrities, advertisements, and personal letters to create what he called ‘moticos.’ He mailed them to friends, art world colleagues, and sometimes strangers. He encouraged ‘on-sending” by asking recipients to “please send to…” or “please add to and send to…”

Miriam Kienle’s Queer Networks: Ray Johnson’s Correspondence Art analyzes this body of work through an academic lens. She argues that the artist’s mail art used camp and homoerotic imagery, as well as insertions of innuendo, to create coded queer assemblages — radical statements that were distributed through the postal service during pre-Stonewall days. In addition, his list of addressees, which including prominent LGBTQ contemporaries, can be seen as a precursor to algorithmic networks of the 21st century.

While Kienie’s thesis is astute, she focuses on only one component of this artist’s oeuvre. Johnson’s collages are extraordinary, but his performative acts, which the artist called ‘nothings,’ were just as radical. There are those who believe that his 1995 death by suicide should be considered as his final performance. Johnson told a friend a few days prior “he was working on the biggest work he’s ever done in his life.”

Posthumously, Johnson left behind a vast archive. Over three thousand photographs found in this cache were shown in the 2022 Morgan Library & Museum exhibition Please Send to Real Life: Ray Johnson Photographs.

Kienle’s perceptive centering of queerness in Johnson’s artmaking would illuminate this work as well.

Distance Is Malleable: A Conversation on Duet Projects

-motor dance journal

John Killacky: I’ve known your work for forty-two years as an audience member, presenter, commissioner, collaborator, and friend. With your husband, Koma, you created a movement and performing style that was sculptural, primal, and existential. In 2014, you began performing A Body in Places, a series of site-specific solo projects. Three years later, you started The Duet Project – often working with artists of different disciplines, ages, races, and cultures – forging new aesthetic ground resulting in interdisciplinary projects. These works are imbued with ferocious kineticism, simultaneously audacious, feral, and fragile.

Eiko Otake: You are one of my Duet Project partners and I have long admired the media works you’ve created. In July 2018 at Jacob’s Pillow, we were sitting near ‘Sam’s tree’; there was a planting ceremony a day before to honour Sam Miller, our mutual friend, who had helped me conceive The Duet Project. It occurred to me then to invite you into the project. As with my other collaborators, I had no idea what we might do, but you said ‘YES!’ We ended up sharing our eulogies, in which we spoke to our mothers. We recorded and edited them together at Vermont PBS studio with Brian Stevenson as another collaborator.

Was our talking to camera a dance? Was my talking after you a duet? YES, in ways that extend what people might think of a dance or a duet. Our work was a layered duet; not only between us, but each of us with our dead mothers and with Brian, the cameraman. Speaking in English in my artwork was new to me at the time. I could not have done that without your encouragement.

with Koma Otake

JK: You continually amaze me as you immerse yourself in myriad collaborations that are quite different from the body of work you and Koma made for decades.

EO: I worked with Koma from 1972 to 2014 and I feel proud of the work we created together. Eiko & Koma collaborated with others, mainly music artists, but we worked within defined roles. When our Retrospective Project (2009–2012) ended, I was sixty years old. At that age, ten- and twelve-year Chinese/Japanese cycles both align for the first time with that of one’s birth year: it is a full cycle and also a new beginning. I wanted to test myself to see if I could stand on my own feet and look at the world directly without the ‘house’ of Eiko & Koma. To do so, I decided to liberate myself from theatres and expose my body to a wide range of audiences.  I enjoyed arriving at a community with only the luggage I could carry and taking time to study a performance site. People talk to me more when I work alone.

After performing solo in more than seventy places, I invited artists, mostly already friends, to converse and experiment with me. Doing so, I hoped, would help me answer my lingering question, ‘Why am I still in America after so many years?’ I didn’t come here to assimilate. I left Japan to encounter others. I have to continue that path. Talking thoroughly with other artists was not easy. I had to work hard to articulate myself and to listen to others without the pressure to agree. I learnt that I think better with such effortful conversations. 

I do not work well alone in a dance studio. I crave the heat from other eyes and minds. Performing solo in public has given me that, but working with another artist has also offered the tension I need to be performative. That is why I do not have to put every duet experience on a stage to be seen by audiences. Experimentation is not a rehearsal towards a public performance. Working with others, one at a time, pushing beyond each of our norms, is densely performative. Two artists getting to know each other on a deeper level feels radical but doable. Once that happens, we cannot go back to our prior selves.

with William Johnston

JK: With photographer William Johnston, you travelled five times between 2014-2019 to the irradiated lands surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant. His opulent photos captured you embodied in the desolate detritus and had many manifestations resulting in exhibitions, books, and media components.

EO: It was December 2013 when I asked Bill if he would come to Fukushima to photograph me. Bill immediately agreed, which I had expected. By teaching a course on the atomic bomb together, I knew his academic and personal interests. I knew his photography and humanity. What I did not know then is that our collaboration would change both of our lives.

I had previously visited the area without him in 2011, five months after the meltdowns and hydrogen explosions of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant. In observing the Philadelphia train station where I was to perform a durational solo, I felt I had to go back to abandoned stations in Fukushima: I wanted to use my body as a conduit between very different stations 6,700 miles (11,000 km) apart.

Our photographs could not have been produced without each other. I never told him when and how to shoot. Instead, I thought about the dead people swept away by tsunamis. I mourned the land covered by radiation. I danced with regret, sorrow, and anger. When Bill takes photographs, he moves physically, runs to different viewpoints, walks backward, and squats. I had asked him to photograph my solo, but we danced a series of duets in Fukushima!

Photographs capture moments, not duration. Bill’s photos allowed me to reflect on how my body is seen in landscapes and how some moments are dense with possibilities. Our duet does not end with Bill’s click. He is merciless in selecting photos. As a performer, I felt sympathetic to some unselected photos and the moments captured in them. I did not go to Fukushima to create beautiful photographs. I went there to see, feel, and remember what happened in Fukushima. I learnt to edit videos so I could ‘rescue’ some of the unselected photos and moments I might otherwise forget.

Inserting words and sound, I created a feature-length film, A Body in Fukushima, which has been screened in film festivals in many countries. In museums and theatres, I performed with both projected videos and large prints. Bill photographed these performances. Our recent exhibitions included layers of my body working with layers of Fukushima landscapes. Dimensions of our work have grown without a master plan.

Bill said, ‘One photograph can be a performance when a person really looks into it.’ That notion encouraged me to create media works which do not betray my identity as a performer.

with David Harrington

JK: For the video component of the Fukushima project, David Harrington of Kronos Quartet improvised in response to your film. You have a long relationship with David and Kronos. Earlier this year, you created a score and performed with them at Carnegie Hall, and in July he performed live as part of your video installation at Colorado Springs Fine Art Center.

EO: Yes, David has been incredibly generous. Eiko & Koma had two evening-length collaborations with Kronos, which made us friends. David said he was challenged by my remark, ‘I do not really need music for my work.’ So right before the Covid lockdown, David visited me at my home and improvised for two days while watching my Fukushima film. I recorded him with my phone, which allowed me to move intimately with the details of his body and that of his violin. Then I was ready to dance with him in our first improvised duet.

David's granddaughter filmed him playing in the Redwood Forest in California, where he put the strings of his over 200-year-old violin onto moss to create music, imagining Fukushima an ocean away. Over the years, David allowed me to manipulate and even to ‘hide’ his sound into soundscapes I mixed. He knows I did not want my work to be helped too much by music. However, his sounds brought my film to a subtly elevated realm, and his compassion lifted and redirected my spirit when I felt desperate about nuclear matters.

When he invited me to dance at Kronos’ Carnegie Hall concert in January, I proposed instead that the five of us move, scream, and make sounds. The piece was a series of four duets between me and each member of the quartet. Next, David arrived alone in Colorado where he performed with me both at a cemetery and in the museum. These were his first public performances without Kronos.

David said he could not play his violin while walking, but he did. He did so with bare feet, even lying down. We improvised, trusting ourselves and each other. Friendship, collaboration, and duet are instigators that challenge us and move us to the unknown.

David wore the late Sam Miller’s raincoat in the museum gallery in Colorado. He chose to end the performance by playing toward the video of my speaking to my dead mother from Elegies. David then sat up, stopped playing, and watched the video. That made everyone there listen to my voice. I saw my mother in my face and heard her in my voice.

with Joan Jonas

JK: Your collaboration with video and performance pioneer Joan Jonas presented in Danspace Project and Castelli Gallery in New York highlighted work and conversations you two had over several years.

EO: Joan is my senior of sixteen years, though she does not behave like one. How persevering and articulate she is! Joan is instinctive and playful, yet she seriously studied art history. I did not.

Joan came to my home for our first dinner in December 2018, a day after she travelled back from Japan. She then invited me to perform privately and recorded it on video. In 2019, we worked intensely for several days in her summer home in Nova Scotia. At our ‘goodbye,’ she said, ‘Now we are friends.’ In 2021, she took the lead in creating a video work together. This spring, we collaborated more fully. We danced, sang, and banged on the walls of Castelli Gallery. In all, she was fierce. I realised how in Japan I had been conditioned about age-appropriateness. Joan’s vigour gives me a different perspective on ageing.

We are both busy, but we have made our duets happen, not only by performing, but by strolling, watching films, and putting our videos side by side. Joan is a faithful friend and an agitator. She said we could perform together again in two years. I cannot wait.

with Chikua Otake

JK: You often honour your dead: at Fukushima, commemorating 9/11, and in cemeteries. This month, you will be performing in the galleries of the Asia Society in New York with a painting by your grandfather Chikuha Otake (1878–1936), an eccentric Japanese artist. And you consider these duets.

EO: We only get to know death by attending to the dying or to the dead. Dancing with the dead not only makes me know death but also life.

My grandfather died sixteen years before I was born, so I had no attachments. But by performing with his paintings in museum galleries, I began to care about this scandalous artist. Encountering him this way, my stomach churned, and I had a slight headache. I made a series of movement decisions, responding to what I sensed was his core. I felt in myself his excessiveness and his performative hospitality.

By looking at works by artists who passed away, savouring their lines, hearing episodes of their lives, and touching what they left, I feel more acutely that they are now dead but they were once alive.

Each duet brings me to a singular place, both strangely familiar but scarily new. I dance in that place with each duet partner, grateful for their willingness. I allow myself to imagine the same willingness from the dead. Though dead people do not get to know me, they probably wished that their work and stories would provide such encounters. When our sense of distance lessens or collapses, we can no longer be indifferent to the other. That feels rich. I like this as a way of life.

Eiko Otake’s video installations are currently on view at Asian Artists Initiative and Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. For more information on Eiko’s Duet Project, please visit https://www.eikootake.org/the-duet-project.

“Lou Reed: The King of New York” — The First Monarch of Indie/Alt Rock

- The Arts Fuse

As a writer and commentator for Rolling Stone and NPR, Will Hermes has zestfully illuminated the zeitgeist of various musical movements, contextualizing them within historical and cultural frameworks. His latest book is a sumptuous examination of the complicated genius of Lou Reed, the drug-addled gender queer musical avatar of leather, goth, glam, and punk scenes. Many books have been written about the legend but Lou Reed: The King of New York may well be the definitive biography.

Hermes provides a detailed catalogue raisonné of Reed’s early Velvet Underground albums and examines his later recordings as well including the David Bowie produced Transformer, which featured “Walk on the Wild Side” as well as recordings that were ignored at first (but now venerated): the operatic Berlin, the nihilistic Metal Machine Music, and the politically charged New York.

Reed’s early life was undistinguished. Growing up on Long Island, he played doo-wop in a high school band. In his first year at New York University, the musician had an emotional breakdown and underwent electroconvulsive therapy — it is unclear whether he was treated for depression or for being gay. Reed was an unreliable source about history. Researching the biography, Hermes found the musician often changed stories about his past depending upon the audience.

Reed transfers to Syracuse University. There he met guitarist Sterling Morrison and contacted hepatitis from dirty needles due to injecting heroin. After graduation he quickly thrives in New York’s avant-garde scene, performing in happenings with Morrison, John Cale droning on his viola, and Moe Tucker on drums — the musicians call themselves The Velvet Underground.

The quartet fell into Andy Warhol’s demimonde, with its drag queens, starlets, sex, drugs, and all forms of art-making. Warhol offers to produce the band’s album, but insists Nico join the group as their chanteuse. Warhol gets top billing on the front cover via his now infamous silk-screened photograph of a banana. The Velvet Underground & Nico only receive billing on the backside of the album.

Because of its vitriolic sound and transgressive lyrics, the record garnered little radio play. Within a year, Nico was out, and Reed fired Warhol. After the group’s second release, the jazz-inflected White Light/White Heat, went nowhere, Reed kicked Cale out of the band. The remaining members soldiered on for two more studio albums before Reed finally left in 1970.

Over time, these early records have achieved cult status, their songs covered by David Bowie, Patti Smith, REM, and Cowboy Junkies, among others. Reed once joked with Brian Eno that, although sales for these albums were meager, “everyone who bought a copy started a band.”

During the ’70s and ’80s Reed’s perpetually shapeshifting musical output (and provocative personas) made him the godfather of indie/alt rock. While the musician’s street cred grew, Hermes reminds the reader much of Reed’s output at the time was also initially maligned. In addition to music, the restless Reed continues to pursue writing at a high level: pieces of his appeared in The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. He also published three photobooks.

In 1989, Reed and Cale reunited to present Songs for ‘Drella – A Fiction, a stark, elegiac homage to their estranged mentor Warhol, who had died two years before. (Their nickname for him was “Drella,” a contraction of Cinderella and Dracula; Reed was called “Lulu,” according to Cale.) Performances premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.

Amphetamines, heroin, cannabis, and alcohol fueled Reed’s prodigious output, but this appetite wreaked havoc on bandmates, road crew, colleagues, friends, and family. Hermes delves into the musician’s destructive behavior, particularly toward Cale, the ethereal violist whose monotonal surround sound provided such an effective contrast to Reed’s four-chord beats and primal lyrics. Another target of Reed’s misbehavior — in this case domestic violence — was Rachel Humphreys, his trans partner during the ’70s.

Reed and Humphreys separated, and the musician married Sylvia Morales in 1980. She helped Reed get clean, and successfully licensed his work for use in films and commercials. In the ’90s, Reed blissfully settled down with multidisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson. They became the quintessential New York hipster elders before Reed died — after a failed liver transplant — in 2013 at the age of 71. Even as he was beset with failing health, Reed was planning new projects.

Anderson described his death to Hermes: “His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open … He wasn’t afraid.” Lou Reed’s final words: “Take me into the light.”

In eulogies, poet and musician Patti Smith called him, “our generation’s New York poet, championing its misfits as Whitman had championed its workingman and Lorca its persecuted.” Michal Stipe praised him as a “queer icon” who, in the late ’60s “proclaimed with beautifully confusing candidness a much more 21st century understanding of a fluid, moving sexuality.”

Will Hermes reveres Lou Reed’s music, and he expounds on his love in this voluminous, well-researched biography. Every album of Reed’s is accompanied with discussions filled with riveting backstories as well as sympathetic analysis of various interpretations of the musician’s songs. So, on the one hand, Lou Reed: The King of New York is a delightfully deep dive into what looks to be a canonical legacy. On the other hand, Hermes should also be credited for not shying away from looking at the harsher realities of Reed’s life, the abusive behavior driven by his personal demons. He was a brilliant, but flawed, monarch.

Meredith Monk. Calling

“Meredith Monk. Calling” an exhibition featuring multi-sensory installations drawn from the artist’s ground-breaking oeuvre of innovative music, performance, dance, film, and video opens October 21 at Oude Kerk, Amsterdam with a second component opening November 11 at Haus der Kunst, Munich. I was asked to contribute a short personal essay for the catalogue.

I moved to New York in 1973. A workshop in Meredith Monk’s loft forever changed my aesthetic worldview.

 The following year, I was utterly captivated watching Paris in a church gymnasium. This intimate duet with Ping Chong amplified the quotidian of their lives into a mythic travelogue.

In 1976, the large-scale Quarry premiered at La MaMa. Mining her Eastern European Jewish roots, she created a multiphonic nightmare of Holocaust horror. Her performance as a sick child plaintively calling out remains seared into my brain.

I marveled at her masterwork films, Ellis Island (1981) and Book of Days (1988), particularly her creation of simultaneous time through the juxtaposition of black-and-white footage with occasional color images.

These works are timeless. The closing image in Ellis Island is a photograph of Manhattan seen from the island with the World Trade Center towers in the background. Book of Days, a medieval morality play about antisemitism and a longing for spiritual redemption in the time of plague, can also be read as an AIDS lament.

While I was a curator at the Walker Art Center, we were a co-commissioner of her opulent ATLAS (1991), a spiritual quest through fantastical cultures, climates, and landscapes featuring a cast of eighteen and a chamber orchestra. Another triumph with more fully realized production values and orchestration for the operatic stage.

Afterward, she told me she wanted to go back into the studio alone to recharge and challenge herself anew—resulting in Volcano Songs (1994), a Buster Keaton-esque solo rumination on aging. This process is emblematic for her, beginning again, letting the material determine its structure.

Another Walker project was the initial planning for the exhibition Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones (1998). Monk’s bountiful gallery included performance photos, slides, posters, programs, scores, storyboards, drawings, sets, props, and costumes as well as sound and film excerpts. A whimsical timeline featured thirty years of shoes worn by Monk and her performers. 

In 2010, our professional lives intermingled again as a co-commissioner of Weave, her composition for two voices, chamber orchestra, and chorus performed by the St. Louis Symphony and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Initially chorus members were confused saying they were used to singing words. She reminded them in the gentlest manner that they sang notes.

In program notes for her latest sonorous hymn, Indra’s Net, premiered at the Holland Festival in June 2023, Meredith wrote that early conceptualization of the new work began when composing Weave in 2010. Now Indra’s Net has come into sumptuous being. Lush arrangements, amazing performers, and luminous stage design celebrate the interdependence of all living things—a necessary prayer for our world.

Through the years, we shared many public conversations in Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, Burlington, and New York discussing the backstories of her resplendent achievements. In the fifty years I have known Meredith Monk, I continue to find respite and hope in her intrepid explorations. I am grateful.

Somali resilience is now part of Vermont

-VTDigger

Brad Kessler’s 2021 novel North is a beautifully wrought chronicle of disparate lives: a Somali woman seeks asylum in Canada and is unexpectedly sheltered at a Vermont monastery. This sparks a crisis of faith; eventually she is aided by an Afghan war veteran.

While researching his fictional tale, Kessler met with a number of Somalis who had resettled in Vermont over the last 20 years. These conversations inspired the author to work with community members on a project that would preserve their stories. The result is Deep North (Onion River Press), a volume of first-person narratives that details survival and resilience.

The volume contains the harrowing journeys taken by a farmer, a camel-herder, and a single mother of seven after the 1991 civil war shattered their lives. As Kessler notes in the book’s afterword, “Stories and memories: the two things they were able to carry with them when everything else was stripped from them.”

Shadir Mohamed grew up along the lower Juba River in a farming community, but fled because, as a member of the Somali Bantu ethnic minority, he was attacked. Escaping to Kenya, he spent 15 years shuttling among a succession of squalid refugee resettlements. While in the camps he married and started a family. In 1999, the US Embassy in Nairobi accepted his application for a visa, which was finally approved in 2004. He and his wife landed in Burlington with one bag between them and four children.

Abdihamid A. Muhumed was a nomadic camel-herder, constantly moving with his family between Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya with their animals. The civil war escalated and a gunman killed one of his brothers and father and stole their animals. He walked for weeks, wandered through the forests toward Kenya, and lived in desolate fenced-in camps with one brother and his family until, in 2008, they resettled in Winooski.

Fardusa A. Abdo and her family fled southern Somalia and relocated to Yemen. She did not attend school, staying home to do household chores. At 19 a marriage was arranged, and eventually the couple had seven children, two with disabilities. Her husband illegally crossed into Saudi Arabia to find work and was deported back to Somalia. She single-handedly raised the children. Her application to immigrate to America was approved in 2014, and they settled in Winooski.

Deep North chronicles the trauma of dislocation as well as what it took to rebuild shattered lives. The authors will be in conversation with community leader Abdirashid Hussein and editor Brad Kessler at the O.N.E. Community Center, 20 Allen Street, Burlington, VT, on October 8 at 4 p.m.

Queer resiliency — let’s learn from the battles of the past

-VTDigger

Fifty years ago, I attended my first gay pride festival in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. Bette Midler sang “You Got to Have Friends.” We sure needed them. 

At that time, queer people had no legal protections. We could not be out as teachers, could be evicted, and were often physically attacked late at night with no police protection. Same-sex sexual activity was only legalized in 1980 in New York. 

Those of us gathered that day danced on the shoulders of activists a generation before, including Harry Hay of the Mattchine Society and Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon of Daughters of Bilitis who organized in the 1950s to counter police entrapment, McCarthyism, and the American Psychiatric Association labeling us sociopathic.

And of course, the 1969 Stonewall riots were a watershed moment when disenfranchised drag queens fought police harassment at New York’s Stonewall Inn. Drag queens also fought police intimidation in San Francisco and Los Angeles. They had nothing left to lose and said, “Enough!” We owe those queens; their struggles catalyzed the LGBTQ+ movement for civil rights.

Another wave of political action erupted during the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and ’90s. People fought for their lives. Care circles and memorials defined our chosen families. The community demonstrated fierce resiliency — mobilizing information, support, treatment, and advocacy. When few would care for us, we took care of our own.

Pride festivals evolved from celebrating sexual freedom and affirmation to funeral processions mourning the unrelenting AIDS carnage. Then legal protection, adoption, and marriage equality came to dominate agendas as we assimilated. Vermont led the nation here, granting civil unions in 2000 and full marriage rights in 2009.

As our community organized, political leaders emerged. Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man elected in California to the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco in 1977. I was there when he was assassinated one year later. 

Karen Clark, elected in 1981, was the first out lesbian to serve in the Minnesota Legislature. Ron Squires, Vermont’s first openly gay legislator, elected to the House in 1990, died from AIDS in 1993. 

These pioneers were outliers. Now there are 1,174 LGBTQ+ elected officials serving in city, state and federal offices. In Montpelier, we have 14 Vermont legislators in the Rainbow Caucus. And our self-described “scrappy little dyke” Becca Balint is serving us in Congress.

While there has been much progress politically, we still face tremendous prejudice and fearmongering. Little has changed to guarantee basic human and civil rights for queer people internationally, and whatever legal advances we gained nationally are at risk with an emboldened right wing and conservative Supreme Court. 

Protections are being rolled back for queer and transgender kids as well as military personnel. LGBTQ+ seniors are increasingly isolated as Baby Boomers age. Gender-affirming health care is being denied, state by state. Book banning, curriculum purging, and outlawing drag shows — there is much left to do.

As we celebrate this month, let’s learn from the battles of the past to build upon their legacies of resilience. From those ferocious drag queens in the ’60s to the vehement AIDS activists of the ’80s, I could not be who I am today without them. I love my idiosyncratic family.

Fluxus Artist Nye Ffarrabas Turns 91 — Celebrating “The Friday Book of White Noise”

-The Arts Fuse

Nye Ffarrabas and others in Fluxus created intermedia events that pushed the boundaries of prevailing norms in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, architecture, and theater.

Nye Ffarrabas (formerly Bici Forbes and Bici Hendricks), one of the central figures in the Fluxus art movement of the 1960’s, lives quietly in Brattleboro, Vermont. To commemorate her 91st birthday, C.X. Silver Gallery is publishing The Friday Book of White Noise, an annotated gathering from her notebooks of drawings, poems, essays, event scores, exhibition concepts, and quotidian life entries that illuminate the inspiration behind her extraordinary praxis.

She and others in Fluxus created intermedia events that pushed the boundaries of prevailing norms in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, architecture, and theater — erasing distinctions between art and life with an eye on reimagining our perception of daily activities. Their radical aesthetics influenced subsequent postmodern performance and visual art.

Ffarrabas’ work in particular made considerable impact. There have been international exhibitions of her poems, performance scores, political sculptures, found objects, mail art postcards, and word boxes. Her pieces are in museum collections around the country, including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

I met the artist at the C.X. Silver Gallery in Brattleboro where several of her works are on permanent display. The gallery also serves as the repository of her archives. Touring the exhibition, Ffarrabas told me, “I work with what I find around me, either objects or words, and I go from there. Art has no obligation to be pretty. It does have an obligation to be relevant in its time.”

Her early pieces were revelatory. A simple, everyday object — a whole egg — is encased in a plaster cube bearing the red, rubber-stamped text: “EGG/TIME EVENT   ONE HEN EGG    DO NOT OPEN  FOR 100 YEARS” and dated “Mar 21 1966.” Just as compelling was her “Dinner Service” (1966), a table setting for four with hubcaps as plates, pliers, hammers, and screwdrivers as silverware.

At that time, she also founded the Black Thumb Press, “a pipe dream that did a bit more than dream,” she recalled.  She and her husband Geoff Hendricks and artist friends put words and illustrations on cards — labeling it mail art. One of Ffarrabas’ cards was a conceptual invitation that read, “Imagine that today’s newspaper is a book of mythology.”

Yoko Ono’s 1967 six-minute film No. 4 included Ffarrabas in its montage of the buttocks of fellow female artists. At one screening, a man sitting behind her exclaimed “Jesus Christ!” when she was on screen, but “I never knew if he approved or disapproved,’ she jovially reminisced.

As colleagues and friends, Ffarrabas and Ono visited city playgrounds with their preschool daughters. She said that “we were mothers in the park, friends who admired each other’s work. We exchanged ideas about art, and bitched about our husbands, the necessity of making money in ways that contradicted our lives as artists, and just talked about our lives, in general. We were thinking along similar lines in many, many ways.”

Her first solo show, 1966’s “Word Work,” was at New York’s Judson Gallery. Here is how Village Voice reviewer John Perreault described it: “flags, messages, wall poems, signs, changing displays, meditations, irreverent icons, emblems, eggs, tea parties, field trips and giveaways all by Bici Hendricks who presides pleasantly over this intermedia mélange of tricks, jokes, art, and party favors. All of these hijinks are delightful, even the slide projectors of poems or instructions, and some of it is definitely art.”

Judson continued to welcome her work. She was an active participant in its Destruction in Art Symposium (1966). The artist recounted how her infamous 1969 Fluxpiece, “Terminal Reading,” came about: “I had wanted to write a novel, and it was awful. So, I thought, “I’ll burn it!” After some deliberation, as an event in its own right, she set up four music stands, like a string quartet with four readers, and a lighted hibachi in the middle. Each stand held a black folder containing a quarter of what she had written. “The idea was to start reading, and then somebody else would start,” she said. “They would just come in on top of one another, and soon it sounded like the beginning of a fugue. Readers would also snatch pages from other readers and reread passages they liked. After each page was read, it was crumpled and consigned to the flames. None left, the reading was over.”

Ffarrabas participated in several of cellist Charlotte Moorman’s Avant Garde Festivals. For these outdoor extravaganzas, she crafted two large calligraphic banners for a parade and performed “Universal Laundry” (1966), in which she washed clean diapers in a pond in New York’s Central Park and hung them to dry on a clothesline. One was dyed light blue and painted with the United Nations insignia. “Universal Laundry” signified the ubiquity of such maternal chores,” she told me. In a 1978 festival held in Cambridge, MA, she offered psychic readings in a tent.

Moorman is fondly remembered: “She was a good cellist, and an amazing entrepreneur. She would send valentines on lace paper doilies, and they would say ‘I love you.’ It was so very nice, unlike some others being so hard edged.”

In 1971, her husband asked what they should do for their 10th anniversary. “Let’s get a divorce,” she answered jokingly. ‘A FLUX Divorce!’ they both exclaimed at once, “and we were off and running,” she laughed. Kate Millet, Ono and John Lennon, neighbor Louise Bourgeois, and other art world friends came to the party at the couple’s brownstone. Cultural critic Jill Johnston improvised on the piano and wrote about the event later in her weekly column in the Village Voice.

The couple’s daughter, Tyche, recalled this occasion in the 2018 New York Times obituary of her father: “It was a public ritual they created to symbolize an end to their marriage as it had been and the beginning of a new chapter that would include a non-monogamous, open relationship that made space for same-sex partners. They strung barbed wire through the front door and up the stairs, and sawed their bed in half. They donned a pair of overcoats sewed together back to back; then the women pulled my mother and the men pulled my father until the coats tore asunder.”

After the divorce, Ffarrabas dropped her married surname, Hendricks, and continued creating under her given name, Bici Forbes. She and her two children moved to a sixth-floor loft in the nascent SoHo arts district in lower Manhattan. “I didn’t have any marketable skills, and the kids were going crosstown to school,” she said. “It was complicated, so we moved back home to Cambridge, MA to live with one of my sisters.” Life changes ensued: “I wasn’t trying to put myself forward as an artist [in Cambridge]; they weren’t ready for this stuff.” She went back to school to become a psychotherapist and practiced for a few years, “but it was hard being near my family. I’d been in New York too long for a conservative Boston family to understand.”

In 1982, she moved permanently to Brattleboro, where she continued her creative endeavors while working for a time as a psychotherapist. In 1993, she changed her name to Nye Ffarrabas. “I wanted to just be me,” she recalled. “I spent the first 60 years of my life with other people’s ideas of who I was — the next 60 is all mine!”

In 2011, Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art presented Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, a show that included Ffarrabas’s piece “Stress Formula” — a ‘prescription’ bottle inscribed with suggested dosage “One capsule every four hours for laughs.” The artist tells me what is inside the container: “Stress Formula” proposes that humorously ironic newspaper slip-ups can be the stuff of good medicine too. The bottle contains clear capsules with little rolled pieces of paper printed with nonsensical newspaper goofs inside.”

Her work in the Dartmouth exhibition caught the attention of Brattleboro’s Cai Xi and Adam Silver. In 2014, their C.X. Silver Gallery hosted Nye Ffarrabas: A Walk on the Inside, her 50-year retrospective exhibition, accompanied by a catalogue. In it, her first curator, Jon Hendricks, reminded readers that “careers have been made on the back of her pioneering artwork.”

I’m grateful for this visionary design of integrative health care

- VTDigger

Adapted from remarks at the Integrative Pain Management Conference presented by Osher Center for Integrative Health at UVM.

The Comprehensive Pain Program at University of Vermont Medical Center offers an innovative 16-week program for those grappling with debilitating chronic pain. I am currently a participant. It is quite a wondrous paradigm of care and well-being.

Twenty-seven years ago, I had spinal cord surgery to remove a tumor at C2 that left me with Brown Séquard syndrome. My right side has no sense of touch or temperature. My left lost proprioception. I have no kinesthetic connection to the ground. 

After six weeks in the hospital, I was sent home in a wheelchair. Over the years, physical therapy, swimming, water running and yoga incrementally expanded motor skills, coordination, balance and strength. Initially quadriplegic, I incrementally regained function and within months used a cane or walker with the chair as backup. 

One unpleasant aftereffect: Neuropathy is unrelenting on my right side. My foot feels swollen and on fire. Electric shocks punctuate every step. Excruciating throbbing pulses through my hip. 

Trying to lessen the distress, I ricocheted to body workers, chiropractors, acupuncturists and herbalists. Everything was scattershot, with little or no medical advice. Insurance sometimes covered limited treatments, most times not.

Pharmaceuticals tempered spasticity and misery but distanced me from family and friends. Falls, accidents and setbacks were emotionally fraught. Chasing relief seemed futile.

Ambulation became even more complicated two years ago when I slipped in a restaurant and fractured my right fibula, adding intense burning on top of persistent neuropathic torment. On a scale of 1 to 10: 15.

Blessedly, I am in one of three cohorts involved in the Comprehensive Pain Program. Thanks to BlueCross BlueShield of Vermont for making it possible for me to engage in these immersive offerings.

Group meetings as well as individualized hands-on sessions provide practical tools. Nutritional, medical, physical and occupational therapy, and health coaching consults are tailor-made for each of us, dealing with different afflictions. Yoga and meditation, even cooking, augment the curriculum. Partners have a support group as they, too, are impacted.

No one turns on a stopwatch as they come into the room, and therapists listen intently. All come informed as to what is happening with the other modalities in this marvelous team-based approach. As the weeks proceed, I feel I am being carried by the entire crew. 

Each participant articulates values and is helped to define action steps to realize them. Resiliency strategies are discussed for all aspects of our biopsychosocial selves instead of focusing solely on recovery from injury.

Most powerful are the acupuncture, craniosacral therapy, and Reiki sessions. For 27 years, I obsessed on the neuropathy in my right hip and foot, amplified with the fractured fibula two years ago. In this program, I now realize I ignored the left side of my body. 

How thrilling it has been to work with these gifted practitioners to recircuit my forgotten and dormant limbs. As energy vibrates through, I am heartened. 

While initial intentions were focused on lessening the agony, we now target a more balanced holistic body. This is profound and transformational, providing enormous physical, psychological and emotional healing. How truly revelatory to factor in lived experience with my thinking, physical and spiritual selves. 

I am extremely grateful for this visionary design of integrative health care and to insurance companies understanding lives can be improved and ultimately dollars saved longer-term. Medicaid begins coverage for its subscribers later this summer, increasing further access to this extraordinary opportunity to enhance one’s quality of life. 

Television Review: “Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV” — An Artist Who Humanized Technology

- The Arts Fuse

Amanda Kim’s documentary on multidisciplinary artist Nam June Paik (1932-2006) brings long overdue mainstream recognition to a prescient creative rebel. A plethora of his performance and video works, along with actor Steven Yeun reading Paik’s writings, illuminate the man’s sui generis explorations.

Paik once said, “It’s an artist’s job to think about the future.” This compelling film underscores why Paik should be considered the progenitor of video art, his work prophesying an “electronic superhighway…where everybody will have his own TV channel” a decade before the internet even existed.

During the Korean War, Paik’s family fled Seoul and relocated to Japan where he attended the University of Tokyo. In 1956, the twenty-four-year-old went to Munich to study composition with composer Arnold Schoenberg. His artistic trajectory was radically upended when he attended a 1958 concert by John Cage and David Tudor. Most of the German audience booed and walked out. Paik was transfixed and became a Cage accolade as well as life-long friend. Poignant footage of their interactions over the ensuing decades highlights their mutual admiration.

Paik also found a home in the Fluxus art movement, which was made up of anti-elitist creatives who deconstructed prosaic activities via performative events that pushed the boundaries of prevailing norms in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and theater. Toppling pianos, smashing violins, dousing himself with water, and dipping his head into a bowl of ink became part of Paik’s repertory of shenanigans, gloriously documented in photos and performance videos.

For his first gallery show, presented in 1963 at Wuppertal, Germany, Paik dismantled old televisions and encouraged audience members to manipulate the pieces as part of the exhibition. Critics derided the set-up as a “room of broken TV’s” — scholars now consider it the birth of electronic art.

Moving to New York in 1964, the artist continued to source, appropriate, and mutate media images from popular culture; his goal was to re-engineer/re-imagine media into sculptural and robotic installations. He also began a decades-long collaborative partnership with cellist Charlotte Moorman, crafting video components for her performances. Infamously, both were arrested after she performed topless during a happening – charges were later dropped.

Galleries did not know what to do with Paik until 1974, with the arrival of a sculpture that featured a seated Buddha statue viewing its own image on a monitor via a closed-circuit video loop. This simple — yet profound — image resonated to the point of becoming a popular icon. Soon Paik was included in group exhibitions that showcased emergent technologies. In 1982, New York’s Whitney Museum mounted its first ever video art retrospective devoted to his work.

Paik continually pushed boundaries. With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, he went to Boston’s WGBH to learn how to edit and then collage video imagery. Given how labor intensive and costly the operation was, he worked to build a synthesizer that would democratize the process so “you can play the television yourself, like a piano.”

Further experiments with New York’s WNET culminated in 1984’s Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, a live international simulcast seen by 25 million people on New Year’s Day. It featured many of Paik’s art world friends, including George Plimpton, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Charlotte Moorman, Allen Ginsberg, and Laurie Anderson. As you view archival footage of the program, you can’t help but be impressed — it is amazing that he somehow pulled this ambitious broadcast off.

That same year, after a 34-year hiatus, Paik was welcomed back to Korea as a national hero and was given the resources he needed to create large scale installations. The artist also served as an aesthetic conduit that connected Korean artists to their international contemporaries. For example, he helped bring the Whitney Biennial to Seoul and was instrumental in founding the Gwangju Biennale. Paik also established the Korea Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Debilitated by a stroke in 1996, Paik continued to create intermedia installations until his death in 2006. His Jacob’s Ladder filled the entire rotunda of New York’s Guggenheim Museum: the piece was built out of 100 TV monitors and a seven-story cascading waterfall of lasers.

Nam June Paik’s aesthetics remain strikingly contemporary: for him, artistic agency was about defying limitations at the service of humanizing technology. Perhaps we have finally caught up with the future that he imagined. More than ever, we need Nam June Paik.

Eileen Myles’ Pathetic Literature

- The Arts Fuse

In the anthology Pathetic Literature (Grove Press, 672 pages), Lambda award-winning poet and writer Eileen Myles, whose work illuminates the sublime quotidian of everyday life, has gathered together what could be seen as a global anthology. The book’s 106 contributors reinvigorate the meaning of pathos – their words inspire deep-seated emotions. Among the volume’s lesser known and emerging literary voices, there are selections from the work of Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Simone Weil, Rumi, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jorge Luis Borges, and Victor Hugo.

Myles writes about their editorial approach: “This gathering is not so much queer, as adamantly, eloquently strange, and touching, as if language itself had to pause.” Another prerequisite for inclusion in the anthology — “undermining of normalcy.”

While the luminaries provide the conceptual palimpsest for the compilation, contemporary artists realize its ambitious vision. Sex abounds with Bob Flanagan’s sadomasochist kink, Samuel Delany’s celebration of public sex, and Kevin Killian’s boyhood trysts. Death permeates various narrations, such as  Rebecca Brown’s and Robert Glück’s AIDS caregiving as well as Rose Feliu-Pettet’s detailing of Allen Ginsberg’s deathbed machinations.

Trauma, addiction, and resiliency are examined by Porochista Khakpour while surrealism infuses Can Xue’s vision of her mother’s death and Dennis Cooper’s conversations with a snowman. Identity is upended in various ways: Michelle Tea’s visit to Poland, Kathy Acker’s childhood memories, Jack Halberstam’s investigation of nothingness, and Tongo Eisen-Martin’s wariness of whiteness.

Andrea Dworkin rages against convention, Judy Grahn ruminates on the fragility of life, Chantal Akerman’s converses with her elderly mother, and Layli Long Soldier conjures up the execution of 38 Dakota men. Some of the more arcane selections include Myles’ own 1991 campaign announcement for US President and a play by Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol because he wouldn’t produce it.

This far-flung, idiosyncratic collection of transgressive poems, plays, and prose is laser-focused on celebrating the outsider. The result is a resplendent affirmation of humanity that has become so essential and necessary today. In the acknowledgments, Myles hints that Too Pathetic might be forthcoming. Let’s hope so.

Remembering the Culture Wars of the ’90s

-The Arts Fuse

Because libraries and school curricula are currently under assault regarding the appropriateness of diverse representations and gender expression, it seems like a good time to look at the homophobia and Culture Wars of the ’90s, a time when conservative forces organized, successfully, to destabilize arts funding

I was curator of Performing Arts at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1988 through 1996. Our mission was to be “a catalyst for the creative expression of artists and the active engagement of audiences.” We presented 100 performances each season in theaters ranging from 100 to 4,800 seats. Given the mission, I at times produced identity-based performance work, some of which became entangled in the Culture Wars of the ’90s.

First some context: in 1989, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) awarded $8.4 million in artists’ fellowships. This represented the apex of these awards. It was also the year photographer Robert Mapplethorpe died of AIDS and Senator Jesse Helms eliminated New York Gay Men’s Health Crisis’ grant of $600,000, objecting to queer content in sex education material.

In 1989, two NEA grants came under political fire. The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania used a NEA grant to mount a retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, entitled The Perfect Moment, that included homoerotic photographs that some in Congress deemed pornographic. The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC canceled this exhibition, anticipating that the content would generate a political storm on Capitol Hill. Some politicians also objected to The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts in Winston-Salem re-granting NEA dollars to Andres Serrano because of his Piss Christ photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine.

Cultural Infidels
To mark the start of the ‘90s, the Walker put together a multidisciplinary festival, Cultural Infidels. Historical films by iconoclasts Andy Warhol and Jack Smith were juxtaposed with John Greyson’s Urinal and Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston. Kathy Acker read from her latest writing, and we exhibited one of David Wojnarowicz’s lithographs. Art and culture were politicized; this is nothing new, and we were eager to support the present-day provocateurs.

Karen Finley performed her profoundly moving We Keep Our Victims Ready. The first night was sold out. Two plainclothes police officers introduced themselves, telling me they were sent to determine if the performance should be closed down. Since this was the first night, I wondered why someone had complained to the police without having seen the work. The vice squad left midway through; there was nothing pornographic.

Critical and audience reaction was rapturous. However, syndicated columnists Evans and Novak wrote about the vice squad visit in The Washington Post, which caught the attention of Senator Helms’ staff. No mention was made of the quality of the performance, only that the vice squad visited the museum in Minneapolis.

Two months later, Holly Hughes made her Walker debut reading an excerpt of Raw Meat as part of P.S. 122’s Field Trips. She returned twice more to perform World Without End and No Trace of the Blonde.

Later that year, still in 1990, choreographer Bill T. Jones spoke to me about a new dance he wanted to create. His partner Arnie Zane had given the piece its title on his deathbed: Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I invited Bill to be in residence in partnership with the University of Minnesota.

Still grieving Arnie’s death from AIDS, Jones wanted to find hope as a gay Black man in America. He envisioned a final resolving tableau of fifty-two nude bodies of all shapes, sizes, ethnicities, ages, and genders. Local dancers, including students from the University of Minnesota’s dance department, augmented his company.

Before the performance at Northrop Auditorium, word came down that the university did not want students to be nude. Despite the warning, they all danced nude.

Some months later, Rev. Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church crowd protested Last Supper At Uncle Tom’s Cabin when it was performed in their home state at the University of Kansas.

Also in 1990: Keith Haring, who designed Bill T. Jones’ Secret Pastures, died of AIDS, and Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center’s Dennis Barrie was charged with obscenity for exhibiting Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs — though after a ten-day trial, all charges were dropped.

Senator Helms pressured the NEA, and individual artist grants to Karen Finley, John Fleck, Tim Miller, and Holly Hughes were denied after being recommended by a peer panel. In a lawsuit, the defendants alleged that the NEA and its Chairperson John E. Frohnmayer violated their constitutional rights by wrongly turning down their applications for grants. (The Supreme Court eventually ruled against the artists in 1998.)

In 1990, “Decency Amendment” language was added to reauthorization language for the agency. All NEA recipients were required to sign a “decency” form. The Walker signed it. There was nothing “indecent” in what we presented.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival, New York’s Public Theater, Bella Lewitzky, Elisabeth Streb, and a few other artists refused. I spoke to Bella about it later. During the McCarthy hearings in the ‘50s, she was subpoenaed to appear before the committee, but slammed the door on the agent telling him, “My dear, I am a dancer, not an opera singer.” She was not going to capitulate forty years later.

The following year, 1991, on Easter Sunday, I presented Diamanda Galás’ Plague Mass at The Guthrie Theatre. The Goth kids loved their high priestess’ depiction of unbearable grief from the AIDS pandemic.

1992 saw Walker presentations of Ron Vawter’s brilliant Roy Cohn/Jack Smith juxtaposing the closet conservative lawyer with the flamboyant performance artist as well as Reza Abdoh’s visceral treatise on serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, The Law of Remains. Abdoh’s piece was performed in an empty warehouse. The audiences followed deconstructed tableaus of violence, madness, and mayhem, moving through the building, and sitting on the raw floor.

Tim Miller performed My Queer Body that spring. On World AIDS Day, Will Parker sang from the AIDS Quilt Songbook; it was his last concert before he died of AIDS. Two years later, the Minnesota Composers Forum, Arts Over AIDS, and the Walker produced a Minnesota AIDS Quilt Songbook entitled Heartbeats.

Ben Cameron, then head of the NEA’s Theater Program, asked me to be on the Individual Artists panel that year. Given whom I had presented, I wondered if he knew who I was. “Of course, I do, that’s why I want you on the panel,” he assured me. Holly Hughes and Tim Miller received grants.

David Wojnarowicz died of AIDS at age thirty-seven in 1992, two years after he won a historic Supreme Court Case against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association, who had distorted his visual art in a conservative fund-raising campaign.

In 1993, Huck Snyder, designer for Bill T. Jones’ Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin, died of AIDS. The Walker showed Derek Jarman’s film Blue. The screen was filled with Yves Klein blue, devoid of moving images, with voice-over narration from Jarman’s diaries. This blue was the color Jarman experienced while being administered eye drops to fend off blindness from AIDS. A year later, Jarman was dead.

Actor Ron Vawter died of AIDS in 1994, as did the fierce Marlon Riggs, who became another flashpoint in the NEA funding controversy when his Tongues Untied was broadcast on the PBS series P.O.V. His black queer ‘reel-ness’ became a lightning rod for malicious conservative outrage.

Bill T. Jones brought Still/Here to Northrop Auditorium in 1994. To develop the piece, he held workshops across the country with people facing terminal illnesses. Newsweek called it “a work so original and profound that its place among the landmarks of twentieth-century dance seems ensured.” Arlene Croce refused to see it, but wrote about the performance in The New Yorker anyway, dismissing it as “victim art.”

Ron Athey
In 1994, I presented Ron Athey’s Four Scenes in a Harsh Life. The work opened with a campy burlesque dance by a Black man, Divinity Fudge, covered in balloons. Ron burst the balloons with a cigar. There was a transition to a scene in which he raised the tattoos on Divinity’s back by cutting stylized marks, patting with paper towels, and sending these blood-marked prints along pulleys toward the audience. Operative words to note: blood-marked prints and toward the audience.

In another section, Ron inserted needles into his own arm as he talked about overcoming addiction and suicide attempts. The iconography of Jesus’ Passion was then evoked with a crown of thorns pierced into Ron’s scalp with acupuncture-like needles. The evening culminated with two performers, Julie Tolentino and Pigpen, being pierced, and ecstatically dancing in a queer wedding ceremony officiated by Ron, now clothed in a business suit, exhorting in a booming revivalist voice, “There are so many ways to say ‘Hallelujah!”

The sold-out performance was well received by an audience of about 100. Post-show discussions with the artist, attended by eighty people, were thoughtful and engaging. Theater and dance critics had been invited — none chose to attend.

Three weeks after the event, a visual art critic from the Minneapolis StarTribune called, wanting to verify someone’s distorted, fantastical version of the performance. She did not want to meet in person and then warned me to look for her lead story on the front page the next morning. Here are some quotes from that initial article: “Knife-wielding performer is known to be HIV-positive” and that the audience “knocked over the chairs to get out from under the clotheslines.”

This was the first of more than twenty articles the newspaper published about a performance its critic had not seen. Vituperative arguments about Athey’s work escalated into fodder for that summer’s NEA’s reappropriation battle because the Walker had received a grant to subsidize the full season of performances, including Athey’s.

When Jane Alexander, the head of the NEA at that time, defended the Walker from the “erroneously reported” and “inaccurate coverage,” the disgruntled local critic fueled the fires by writing directly to Alexander and to Congress, “Your attempts to blame the press for criticism of your agency merely trivializes the issue and obscures the facts.” By advocating directly to Congress, she inserted herself into the narrative; still the newspaper let her continue her coverage.

That local critic also wrote an op-ed piece. While admitting “State health officials agreed there was little risk of audience members contracting the AIDS virus from the performance,” she fired off that presenting this work was “akin to adding blowfish to the buffet of a Japanese restaurant without warning the clientele…potentially poisonous fish whose flesh is said to deliver a peculiar high.”

Walker Director Kathy Halbreich was quoted, “I find the negative responses to this troubling, not because of the artistic issues, but because they’re suggestive of the fear we have of people with AIDS.” The critic’s response was, “Given the complexity of the issues that’s a disturbingly facile response. Somewhere in the background I hear an echo of Clarence Thomas accusing his critics of racism.” Even after this incendiary commentary, the writer continued her reporting for the Minneapolis StarTribune.

Senator Helms called Athey “a cockroach” on the Senate floor. Representative Bob Dornan termed him a “porno jerk” and Senator Clifford Stearns ranted about how Athey endangered the audience’s life by the “slopping around of AIDS-infected blood.”

Minnesota’s Senator Paul Wellstone supported the Walker, as did Congressman Martin Sabo in the House, and Senator David Durenberger criticized the “highly inflammatory reporting…less to do with the Walker — or any single performance — than with the fundamental differences over whether and how the Federal Government should be funding the arts.”

Televangelist Pat Robertson went about tarnishing the Walker’s good name while the American Family Association raised funds by exploiting Athey’s performance. But the strangest solicitation came from the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression. It asked for contributions to defend artists such as Athey. But, to my amazement, the organization used the same decontextualized and demonized descriptions of the artist’s work that the right was using — perpetuating lies and misrepresentations. Good intentions can have unintended consequences.

My mother telephoned after watching Rush Limbaugh. “Buckets of AIDS-tainted blood were intentionally thrown at the audience,” he snidely commented and “the audience ran for their lives.” When I told my mother Limbaugh was a liar, she responded, “But it was on television.”

The amount of hate mail and hostile phone messages I received was astounding. Example: “We got the abortion doctor, you’re next.” Blood-red graffiti was painted on the glass doors of the Walker. The police included my house in their regular drive-bys. Any time I left my home, I would hesitate and look out the windows.

Through it all, Walker director Kathy Halbreich was extraordinary. Leaders do not always get to choose their battles. Halbreich was gracious and supportive under intense pressure, as were the Walker board and staff. Colleagues from the National Performance Network, Dance USA, and Association of Performing Arts Presenters defended the Walker and buoyed my resolve. Local artists, too, rallied. One, Malka Michelson, created a campaign button: “Safe Sex, Not Art — Be a John.”

In 1995, Reza Abdoh, the Artaud of our day, died of AIDS. This was the last year grants to individual artists were awarded by the NEA, except for literature fellowships and honorifics in jazz and folk arts. Art, love, and politics collapsed — an extraordinary epoch was over.

For many artists, validation had not come (at least initially) from the marketplace. The federal government, often leveraging other local and regional support, was crucial. Ending these fellowships had dire consequences, signaling artists were no longer valued on a national level. Many state agencies followed suit. We have been living with the detrimental impact ever since.

Reflections
During the entire summer of the Athey media whirl, not one museum director called Kathy Halbreich to offer support. Peter Zeisler, then head of Theatre Communications Group, called me irresponsible for presenting Ron Athey, although he had never seen him perform.

Other arts organizations facing controversy experienced the same. Few museums supported each other against the vicious, dishonest polemics generated by Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, Joel-Peter Witkin, and Chris Ofili. Directors and boards ran for cover when colleagues came under fire. They buried their heads in the sand until they, too, were challenged.

Regional theatres didn’t support performance artists under fire — Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, and Tim Miller — until the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Corpus Christi firestorm or the various protests accompanying Angels in America and The Laramie Project sprung up across the country.

The art world failed to defend its own. The lesson: freedom of expression is a more precious commodity than taste. Conservative critics were very clear about their moral imperative; they confidently vilified artists and terrorized institutions. No one won the culture wars — we lost them.

Angelo Madsen Minax’ Surreal Documentaries

-The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide

ANGELO MADSEN MINAX creates audacious experimental films of trans embodiment by discordantly juxtaposing present-day footage with Super 8 home movies, animation, staged rituals, and ethereal voice-overs. Chaos and anarchy are embedded in his hybrid cinema of survival, acceptance, and transcendence.

His work has been screened throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, and Mexico—winning awards at many prestigious festivals. His “North by Current” was screened nationally on PBS’ POV series in November 2021. In this feature, shot over five years in an auto-ethnographic style, he returns to his family of origin and grapples with the death of a niece, addiction, incarceration, misguided religious fervor, and rejection of his gender transition.

His experimental shorts are equally compelling. Gorgeous landscapes, queer rituals, and cinema-vérité ruminations provide kaleidoscopic glimpses of his artistic and personal explorations. Some are rooted in the particularity of location—utilizing archival news clips from a television station in Dallas or exploring Memphis’ geographic and sexual underground. His surrealist short “Two Sons & a River of Blood” (2021) is a poignant meditation on pregnancy and desire with a self-made family of “two dykes and a trans man.”

 This past spring he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Minax is also an educator, currently an associate professor of media studies at the University of Vermont. He was doing pre-production work on his next project when he took time out to speak with me on the phone.

John Killacky: Please talk about your process in making these extraordinary films.

Angelo Madsen Minax: Working within vérité documentary, you can’t make predictions. You adjust your expectations and goals, and you’re in a constant state of revision—shooting, shooting, shooting and lots of looking at things. I don’t separate out the process between production and post-production. I begin editing right away, otherwise I can’t get a shape of what the story will be. When I shoot again, the process dictates how and what I shoot in the future. In my films, you will find trails of information I find interesting rather than attempts to entertain the audience. I hope the audience will overlap with what I find interesting.

JK: You describe your projects as spanning “documentary filmmaking, narrative cinema, essay film, media installation, sound and music, performance, text and collective practices.” However, you’ve also said: “I don’t tell stories. I explore ideas and concepts.” What do you mean by this?

AMM: Content is more interesting to me than narrative. The narrative is what allows anyone to access it, which I think is important, but the content is doing the heavy lifting in terms of making people ask questions about the world around them, which is the difference between art and entertainment.

JK: You’ve changed your name twice. Can you share this journey with readers?

AMM: I changed my name to Madsen in 2005. It felt like the right thing to do. I came of age in punk, feminist, and BDSM cultures. It was a different world—throwing parties and working multiple jobs to pay for our surgeries. We had to go to therapists to tell us we weren’t crazy to get hormones. A few years ago, I added Angelo to my first name. It feels like some reconciliation with my childhood, and I like that. As I get older, I have more of a need for reconciliation than differentiation.

JK: Your films have been shown in festivals and you co-curated a “Cinema of Gender Transgression: Trans Film” series at Anthology Film Archives in New York. Is there a distinctive queer/trans æsthetic?

AMM: I don’t know, but lots of people think so. I know that I am not interested in one-dimensional content, and work about identity can be one-dimensional. Work where identity is one of many nuanced layers in a conversation is better. Unfortunately, queer film festivals are usually not interested in formal rigor or in people leaving the theater with questions. They assume people want to leave feeling fulfilled. My goal is not to tell you that everything will be okay. I don’t think that’s fair to people, and I don’t think it fulfills their deeper need to question their humanness.

JK: With your recent Guggenheim Fellowship, you are developing a documentary on Fakir Musafar, an icon of body modification and what was called “The Modern Primitives Movement.” What interests you about him?

AMM: During the last ten years of his life, I was part of his community. There was a Radical Faeries gathering in the late ’80s where a group of leathermen attended and were thrown a lot of shade for their S/M practices. The next year, that group developed their own collective, which I got introduced to in 2004 and started participating in. Fakir and his partner were largely active in that community. It’s all about this desire to stretch the limits of the body in both its physical and spiritual dimensions and find meaning in community. When he passed, his wife and I started talking about the archives. I was blown away by what was there.

JK: By creating such raw intimate works, do you see them as political as well?

AMM: I am not of the camp that believes visibility is equal to politics. You have to be more than alive in the body. The personal will always be political. Resistance to various forms of oppression is important. My politics work best if I can generate empathy or compassion or insight—this is where I do my best work.

Boston’s “Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide” — Still Going Strong After Three Decades

-The Arts Fuse

Despite the demise of print publications, Boston’s own Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide(G&LR) just published its 159th issue. The magazine began in 1994 as the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review. In 2000, “Harvard” was dropped from its name and “Worldwide” added. In its early years, the G&LR was printed in black and white, gradually evolving to full color in 2011.

The glossy bimonthly journal features erudite essays from queer historians, scholars, writers, and political figures investigating relevant history, politics, and culture as well as artist interviews and reviews of books, exhibitions, movies, and plays. Organized as a nonprofit, G&LR currently has a print run of 11,000 per issue and is supported by 8,000 subscribers and 750 donors.

Driving the vision is editor-in-chief and founder Richard Schneider. He received a PhD in sociology from Harvard in the early ’80s and founded the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review (first as a volunteer in 1994, full-time since 1999), and continues as editor today.

Originally, he was recruited to produce a newsletter for the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus alumni organization, where he learned editing and desktop publishing. Almost immediately they realized it could be a national magazine. As the enterprise developed, it became independent of Harvard in 2000.

In a 1998 feature in the New York Times, Schneider spoke about his initial aspirations: “In 1993 there was nothing in the gay world corresponding to the New York Review of Books or the Times Book Reviewor Atlantic Monthly or the New Yorker that featured intelligent essays,” he said. “There was a huge niche or vacuum in gay and lesbian letters which I hope we somewhat filled.”

From its inception, trenchant writing, and interviews from such literati as Edmund White, Barney Frank, Jill Johnston, and Jewelle Gomez differentiated the magazine with its focus on high culture. “It is our intellectual journal.… If you want to deal with scholarly intelligent arguments, there’s really no place else we can publish,” writer/activist Larry Kramer was quoted as saying in that same New York Times article from 1998.

Over the years, astute analysis of literary icons has been a hallmark. The work of Thom Gunn, Hart Crane, Truman Capote, and Oscar Wilde as well as Susan Sontag, Eileen Myles, Leslie Feinberg, and Willa Cather has been featured.

In a recent phone conversation, Schneider filled me in on the history, philosophy, and plans for the journal. Currently, donations and subscriptions each account for about 40 percent of the income, while advertising fills in the last 20 percent. Readership is predominately male, 70 percent are over 60 years old with 66 percent holding an advanced degree. The renewal rate is very high.

Part of its continuing success, he feels is that the “somewhat older readership is still committed to hard copy. We have very loyal readers; many have been with us since the beginning. Some save every issue. The look of the magazine is still similar to what it was a long time ago — typeface, layout, design,” so it remains “favorite comfort food” for intellectually engaged readers. As well, much of the content online is behind a paywall, further encouraging print subscriptions.

Issues are organized thematically, sometimes intentionally and other times organically given what material is in house. An upcoming issue will focus on the 50th anniversary of the American Psychiatric Association delisting homosexuality as a mental illness.

More than 1,400 writers have been featured in G&LR’s uninterrupted run over the last three decades. As an editor, Schneider finds “working with every writer is different. Every story that we run is in itself a story in its own way.” He tries to be as “not heavy handed as possible to make a piece work. I run everything by the author, and we will negotiate a little bit.”’

One steadfast presence has been Andrew Holleran, who is having a critical resurgence at the age of 80 with his latest acclaimed novel, The Kingdom of Sand, a melancholic depiction of isolation, despair, and desire in older gay men. His first essay in G&LR (1994) was taken from a speech he gave at Harvard detailing his coming of sexual age in Greenwich Village in the ’70s. Since then, Holleran has written over 100 articles.

Celebrating the magazine’s 25th anniversary in 2019, Holleran wrote: “We’ve all seen many of our favorite mainstream magazines shrink if not disappear, which makes me all the more grateful for the G&LR. A writer has one basic dream: to see his or her words in print.… And I’m always thrilled when someone mentions a piece I’ve written because one forgets that one does reach people, people we may never hear from, but who are out there — in the dark. Quite literally, being published in the G&LRhas been a reward in itself — it’s kept this writer going in the horror vacui of the digital age.”

Schneider loves working with the author on features: “He writes very quickly, producing 2,500-3,000 words. He likes to work (on editing) over the telephone, so I get to talk with Andrew Holleran for an hour or two every couple of months.”

Another favorite writer is Laurence Senelick, theater artist and professor at Tufts University. Schneider calls him “a fabulous scholar and historian who does extensive research on odd little social customs.” In a 2021 essay, he elucidates the slang catchphrase, “Whoops, M’dear” as code words for men cruising other men in the early 20th century.

I too am fortunate to be supported by G&LR; my published pieces include commentaries on John Cage, Keith Haring, Peter Hujar, and Sarah Schulman, along with interviews with Alison Bechdel, Janis Ian, Bill T. Jones, and Tim Miller. Most recently, I profiled trans filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax. As an editor, Schneider is always open to ideas and he wields an appreciated editing scalpel that cuts for focus and clarity.

Drawing upon its treasure trove of queer writing, G&LR published two compilations of past articles. The first, In Search of Stonewall (2019), coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, explicating historical precedents, realities, and the impact of the protests. First-person eyewitness reports detail the 1969 events often credited as the beginning of the LGBTQ civil rights movement.

As well, foundational essays from 1995 featured Harry Hay alongside Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, founders of Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis respectively — two West Coast groups organized in the ’50s to support safe spaces and political action on behalf of queer people. Telling, and clarifying, forgotten histories remains central to the magazine decades later.

The second book, Casual Outings, (2021) celebrated Charles Hefling’s illustrated portraits accompanying profiles on 27 artists such as Marcel Proust, Vita Sackville-West, Frida Kahlo, Yukio Mishima, Lorraine Hansberry, Leonard Bernstein, and Langston Hughes. In his introduction to the collection, Schneider writes, “Casual Outing thus refers to the fact that we are in some sense “outing” people who tried to hide their sexuality at least some of the time.” This is essential truth-telling, especially when families, estates, and biographers so often obfuscate complex truths.

One reprint in development is with historian Martin Duberman, now in his 90s, revisiting 14 of his pieces for the G&LR (starting in 1999) with three additional essays on his customary exploration of the intersection of LGBTQ and leftist politics. Schneider is also hoping to work with Holleran on a compendium of profiles of pre-Stonewall writers from his prodigious contributions.

Collaborating with Schneider on the operational side of the publishing endeavor is his partner of 23 years, Stephen Hemrick, who is the publisher. After recent Supreme Court decisions, they are planning a civil ceremony wedding later this month.

Arts Appreciation: Long Overdue — Homage to Julius Eastman, Fierce Black Queen Iconoclast

-The Arts Fuse

Scorned and consigned to oblivion in his day, Julius Eastman is finally being celebrated for his unabashed talent and the sheer audacity of his inimitable genius. Brava diva!

In ’70s New York, Julius Eastman was an outrageous presence in the avant-garde performance scene as a composer, singer, and pianist. Black and openly gay, he was an outsider. He died homeless and forgotten in 1990. As the music world grapples with righting the canon, there is resurgent interest in this sui generis maverick.

He was nominated for a Grammy for his recording of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King(1974) and was as easily at home performing with Meredith Monk on Dolmen Music (1979). Monk fondly recalled Eastman in a recent conversation, saying he was “full of contradictions, but so intelligent with an essential love and devotion to music itself. He taught me a lot about theory and harmony.”

His own compositions challenged prevailing aesthetic norms that were very straight, very white, and very male. All so not him. Eastman told The Buffalo Times in 1976 he aspired: “To be what I am to the fullest: Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a homosexual to the fullest.”

While classically trained in voice and composition at Curtis Institute of Music, structurally he was a proto-minimalist, frequently utilizing multiple grand pianos awash in overtones. He called it “organic music.” His titles were, at times, provocative — Crazy Nigger (1978), Gay Guerilla (1979), and Nigger Faggot (1978) — while the music was transcendently spiritual. He conducted his 1974 symphony, Femenine, wearing a dress. Vocal and piano scores as well as disco recordings round out his genre-fluid oeuvre.

Whether on stage at Carnegie Hall or in gay clubs, his outsized persona captured the public’s gaze. However, Eastman became increasingly erratic, struggling economically as well as with addiction. Evicted for nonpayment of rent in 1981, sheriffs threw his scores, papers, and belongings into the trash. He lived in homeless shelters and outdoors in a city park in addition to couch surfing with friends, while still sporadically performing and composing.

Monk said Eastman would occasionally show up at her loft at odd hours, and she would feed him. “Afterward we would play four-handed piano pieces and one night sang the Henry Purcell songbook,” she reminisced. Monk loaned her upstate cottage to him for three months. “He was not of this earth, just needed someone to take care of him.”

In 1986, choreographer Molissa Fenley commissioned Eastman to create a score for two sections of her Geologic Moments performed at Brooklyn Academy of Music. She told me, “Working with Julius was always surprising. I often had to telephone his brother to find him for rehearsals.” Backstage he would fall fast asleep in his dressing room: “He was very sick at the time, but once on stage, he’d be unbelievable, brilliant, completely obsessed. People loved him.”

He eventually disappeared from Manhattan and died destitute in obscurity in a Buffalo hospital in 1990 at the age of 49. An obituary was not published in The Village Voice until eight months later, so unsure people were whether he was dead or alive.

Eastman’s legacy languished in limbo until composer Mary Jane Leach and other colleagues published a book of essays, Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music (2015). Fragments of scores were reconstructed aided by tapes of early performances and that jump-started a resurgence, first in alternative performance spaces and then going mainstream with Los Angeles Philharmonic and Orchestra of St. Luke’s. In June, the American Modern Opera Company guest curated some of his music at the Ojai Music Festival.

The contemporary music collective, Wild Up, has also been championing Eastman’s compositions, committing to a seven-part anthology on New Amsterdam Records. Last year they released Julius Eastman Vol.1: Femenine. The album was hailed “a masterpiece” by The New York Times and NPR placed it among its top 10 records of 2021. The propulsive 70-minute symphony, built on circular phrasing and expanding repetitions, generates an ecstatically immersive experience of cascading lyricism.

Last month, Wild Up released Julius Eastman Vol. 2: Joy Boy. His idiosyncratic compositional style — open-ended scores that interweave multiple genres and whose instrumentation is not always specified — is lovingly realized by an ensemble whose background encompasses classical, jazz, and improvisational music.

Exuberance abounds throughout this recording. The title (and first) track features the never-before-recorded Joy Boy,  a buoyantly discordant stepping stone to the trippy undulations of Buddha (Field). Two radically different versions of Touch Him When showcase Wild Up’s virtuosic musicians veering from placid minimalism to metallic drones. The record culminates with Stay On It, a dance-inflected work of harmonic convergence that induces incantatory rapture through a cacophony of chaotic sounds.

Artistic Director of Wild Up, Christopher Rountree writes in the recording’s press material that he wants listeners “to find themselves in these pieces. And in their multiple iterations. We want this work to be quintessentially queer. Every moment full of choice.”

Julius Eastman: the fierce black queen iconoclast, scorned and consigned to oblivion in his day, is finally being celebrated for his unabashed talent and the sheer audacity of his inimitable genius. Brava diva!

1960s Fluxus Artist Nye Ffarrabas Celebrated at Brattleboro’s C.X. Silver Gallery

-Seven Days

She went to happenings with Allan Kaprow and on mushroom treks with John Cage. She was in a Yoko Ono film, performed in avant-garde festivals and dined with Marcel Duchamp. Nye Ffarrabas, aka Bici (Forbes) Hendricks, was a central figure in the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s. She and others created intermedia events that pushed the boundaries of prevailing norms in painting, sculpture, poetry, music and theater. They erased distinctions between art and life as they celebrated daily activities. Their radical aesthetics influenced subsequent postmodern performance and visual art.

Ffarrabas' works are in museum collections around the country, including at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. But several factors conspired to blur art history, leaving far too few who remember Ffarrabas' legacy. After divorcing her husband, Geoff Hendricks, she left New York, had multiple careers while still making art and changed her name.

In 1982, she moved permanently to Brattleboro, where she has created art and worked as a psychotherapist ever since. There, at C.X. Silver Gallery, her legacy is known and celebrated. In 2014, the gallery hosted "Nye Ffarrabas: A Walk on the Inside," a 50-year retrospective. Many of Ffarrabas' works are still on exhibit at the gallery, which serves as the repository of her archives.

This fall, C.X. Silver Gallery will publish Friday Book of White Noise (1964-1969), Ffarrabas' early journals of ideas and concepts that often led to art pieces and performances. The book was "originally a shared effort between her and her former husband," gallery co-owner Adam Silver said, but "she took ownership of it over time and is annotating it for publication."

In March, over lunch in the gallery with Silver and photographer Dona Ann McAdams, Ffarrabas talked about her life as an artist. Then she took the group on a tour of her works.

Ffarrabas' early pieces were revelatory, particularly her "Egg/Time Event" sculpture — a simple, everyday object reconfigured. A real egg is encased and hidden in an irregularly shaped plaster block with rubber-stamped red text: "February 22 [19]66" and "DO NOT OPEN FOR 100 YEARS."

McAdams was wowed by "Dinner Service" (1966), a table setting for four with hubcaps as plates and pliers, hammers and screwdrivers as silverware. "The most amazing thing was when she sat down at her table installation," McAdams enthused, "and she did an impromptu performance with the hubcaps. Fluxus is always a part of it."

Ffarrabas spoke about the art zeitgeist of the '60s. Growing up in the Boston area, she first met Hendricks while attending Vermont's Putney School. (Her name at the time was Bici Forbes.) He invited her to attend "A Spring Happening," a performance art event organized by Allan Kaprow in 1961. She was enchanted: "walking around, the sound of bacon frying, someone singing in the shower," she said. It was unlike anything she had ever experienced. From there, she "kind of oozed into Fluxus and loved it."

She joined Hendricks in Manhattan. They married in 1961 and had two children, Tyche and Bracken. The couple participated in events together, but Ffarrabas, known then as Bici Hendricks, continued creating her own work. It was a fertile time for them both as they became stars in the burgeoning Fluxus movement.

"I work with what I find around me, either objects or words, and I go from there," Ffarrabas said of her artistic practice.

Her husband's brother Jon Hendricks was an artist and curator. At dinner one evening, he looked through her notebooks. "I started showing him a few things I was fiddling with," Ffarrabas said. He invited her to put on a solo show at New York's Judson Gallery.

Village Voice reviewer John Perreault didn't quite know what to make of that 1966 Judson exhibition, titled "Word Work." It was composed of "flags, messages, wall poems, signs, changing displays, meditations, irreverent icons, emblems, eggs, tea parties, field trips and giveaways all by Bici Hendricks who presides pleasantly over this intermedia mélange of tricks, jokes, art, and party favors," Perreault wrote. "All of these hijinks are delightful, even the slide projectors of poems or instructions, and some of it is definitely art."

Judson continued to exhibit Ffarrabas' work. She recounted how her 1969 Fluxus piece "Terminal Reading" came about. "I had wanted to write a novel, and I was writing this stuff and it was bad. So I thought, I'll burn it."

She set up four music stands with a hibachi in the middle. Each stand held a black folder containing a quarter of what she had written. "The idea was to start reading, and then somebody else would read," she said. "Somebody else might come in on top, and soon it sounded like the beginning of a fugue. After each page was read, the pages had to be crumpled and thrown in the fire until there were no pages left."

A common practice in this period was mail art — artists sending small-scale works through the postal service to friends. Ffarrabas founded Black Thumb Press, "a pipe dream that did a little more than dream," she recalled. She and her husband created words and/or pictures to mail to others, along with other artists, including Robert Watts and Ono. One of Ffarrabas' cards was a conceptual invitation that read, "Imagine that today's newspaper is a book of mythology."

Ono's 1967 six-minute film "No. 4" included Ffarrabas in its montage of buttocks of famous artists. As colleagues, she and Ono would visit playgrounds with their children. "We were mothers in the park at times, and we were just friends talking about our work," Ffarrabas recalled. "We were doing similar stuff. We would talk about art and money and this and that."

Ffarrabas participated in Charlotte Moorman's Annual Avant Garde Festivals from 1966 to 1978. For these outdoor extravaganzas, she crafted two large calligraphic banners for a parade, offered people Reiki on a park bench and performed "Universal Laundry" (1966), in which she washed clean diapers in a pond in New York's Central Park and hung up four or five to dry. One was dyed light blue and painted with the United Nations insignia.

Unfortunately, Ffarrabas' husband received more notice within the art world than she did. At the Happening & Fluxus festival in Cologne, Germany, in 1970, "He had his cubicle, and I had my cubicle," she recalled. "People would come up to me and say, 'Oh, wasn't it nice that you could come, too.' And I would say, 'That's mine!'" as she pointed at her art.

In 1971, her husband asked what they should do for their 10th anniversary. "'Let's get a divorce, a Flux Divorce,'" she recalled saying, "and we were off and running." Friends Ono, John Lennon, Kate Millett and other art world luminaries attended the party at the couple's brownstone. Cultural critic Jill Johnston played the piano and wrote about it later in her weekly column in the Village Voice.

The couple's daughter, Tyche, spoke about the divorce celebration for the 2018 New York Times obituary of her father:

It was a public art ritual they created to symbolize an end of their marriage as it had been and the beginning of a new chapter that would include a non-monogamous, open relationship that made space for same-sex partners. They strung barbed wire through the kitchen. They sawed their bed in half. They donned a pair of overcoats, sewed together back to back; then the women pulled my mother and the men pulled my father until the coats tore asunder.

After the divorce, Ffarrabas dropped her married surname, Hendricks, and continued creating under her given name, Bici Forbes. She and her children moved to a sixth-floor loft in the nascent SoHo arts district in lower Manhattan. But "I didn't have any marketable skills, and the kids were going crosstown to school," she said. "It was complicated, so we moved to Cambridge, [Mass.], to live with one of my sisters."

Life changes ensued: "There I wasn't trying to put myself forward as an artist; they weren't ready for this stuff." She went back to school to become a psychotherapist and practiced for a few years, "but it was hard being near my family. I'd been in New York too long for a conservative Boston family!"

Ffarrabas had attended the Putney School as a teen and loved that part of Vermont. Her ex-husband's family, whom she also loved, lived in Putney. (His father, Walter Hendricks, founded Marlboro College.) She didn't want to be "in their backyard," so in 1982 she moved to Brattleboro.

There, she continued writing poetry, creating calligraphic drawings and found-object sculptures, and repurposing wooden chairs with agitprop messaging. She worked for Child Protective Services in the Vermont Department for Children and Families, and she volunteered in AIDS hospice work.

In 1993, she changed her name to Nye Ffarrabas. "I wanted to be me," she recalled. "I spent the first 60 years with somebody else's idea of me, and the next 60 is mine." Through genealogy research, she had discovered that Ffarrabas was a variant of Forbes and that Nye was a wonderfully complementary Welsh first name.

C.X. Silver wasn't the first Vermont gallery to take notice of her art. Windham Art Gallery in Windham and the Michael S. Currier Center at the Putney School exhibited a group of her repurposed political chairs in 2008 and 2010, respectively. She called them "an abbreviated history of our country, told in rocking chairs."

In 2011, Dartmouth College's Hood Museum of Art presented "Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life," an exhibit of works organized into 14 themes. The press release described one of Ffarrabas' pieces, grouped under the "Happiness?" theme, this way:

Stress Formula proposes that we need more jokes than drugs. A vitamin bottle whose label is inscribed with the suggested dosage, "Take one capsule every four hours, for laughs," Stress Formulacontains clear capsules with little rolled pieces of paper, presumably printed with humorous messages. Fluxus artists seem to agree that happiness is something we make for ourselves, not the result of something that happens to us.

Dartmouth's Fluxus exhibition caught the attention of Cai Xi Silver and her husband, Adam. Cai Xi contacted Ffarrabas for a paper she was writing on Fluxus for the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

A few years later, C.X. Silver Gallery mounted Ffarrabas' 50-year retrospective. Its catalog is replete with essays, anecdotes and exaltations. In it, Ffarrabas' first curator, Jon Hendricks, reminds readers that "careers have been made on the backs of her pioneering artwork." A 1968 quote from the artist herself particularly resonates: "Art has no obligation to be pretty. It does have an obligation to be relevant in its time."

In 2019, Ffarrabas completed a Möbius strip installation of text on paper for the gallery, and her writing is featured in the Brattleboro Words Trail. She made her most recent piece, "When All the Water Is Gone" (2022), a calligraphy and oxtail bone installation, in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe over the Dakota Access Pipeline.

On June 21, Ffarrabas turns 90. She is "in the midst of several new Fluxus projects," she said, including working with the gallery on Friday Book of White Noise.

When asked whether she had any advice for her 20-year-old self, without hesitating she smiled and said, "Forget the 1950s."

That's a wrap - legislative session in review

Here’s a snapshot of what we accomplished in the General, Housing, and Military Affairs Committee.

Expanding Safe and Affordable Housing

Given Vermont’s critical housing needs, bolstering our housing stock is a top priority. Through federal COVID relief funds, over $42 million was earmarked this year in S.210 and S. 226 to help Vermont renters and homeowners. With this funding, we were able to:

●  Dedicate $20 million toward forgivable loans to property owners to bring rental properties not up to code back online, plus incentivize the construction of new Accessory Dwelling Units to expand Vermont’s rental housing stock.

●  Direct $22 million to subsidize new construction to lower costs for middle-income homebuyers, plus $1 million to the Vermont Housing Finance Agency (VHFA) for down payment grants for first-generation homebuyers. Repair and improvement grants will also be available for manufactured homes.

●  Reform zoning laws, expand tax credits, and create pilot projects to encourage denser development and more vibrant town centers.

●  Create an Advisory Land Access Board, composed of representatives of groups that have faced historic discrimination in land and home ownership. The new board will work with the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board and its partners to reduce current disparities as a result of that discrimination.

●  Extend additional protections from discrimination and harassment for renters and homebuyers.

●  Create a statewide contractor registry to protect against consumer fraud in residential construction projects with a value of over $10,000.

●  Use federal relief money to increase the capacity of the Department of Fire Safety to conduct rental inspections.

Establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission

In May 2021, the legislature passed J.R.H.2, apologizing and expressing sorrow and regret to all Vermonters and their families and descendants who were harmed because of state-sanctioned eugenics policies and practices. As a follow-up,H.96 creates a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to research and investigate systemic discrimination caused or permitted by state laws and policies, and to propose action to the Legislature or governor to remedy the impacts on affected communities.

The charge is to listen, research, learn, acknowledge and propose remedies. The work is expected to take three years, delivering detailed findings and recommendations for actions to eliminate and to address harm caused or permitted by state laws. Public input is integral to the entire process.

Supporting our National Guard and Military Members

Vermont is the only state that elects its National Guard’s Adjutant and Inspector General. After many years of debate in the General Assembly, H.517 defined the eligibility criteria for candidates. To enhance recruitment and better support our military families, we also developed several programs, including enhanced tuition benefits for Guard members seeking additional academic training, allowing remote registration of student for families being relocated to Vermont under military orders, and securing in-state students will not lose these benefits if a family member is transferred on military orders or retires. Also, the Agency of Education may now designate a school district as a “Purple Star Campus” to support military-connected students and connect them to resources.

Expanding Burial Options

To provide Vermonters another option to burial and cremation, H. 244 allows for the natural organic reduction of human remains, a method in which an unembalmed body is broken down with organic materials like wood chips and straw for several weeks inside of an enclosure until it becomes soil. Washington, Oregon, and Colorado permit these kinds of processing facilities.

Expanding Worker Protections

S.81 streamlined the arbitration process for employees of the Vermont judiciary and H.477 extended unpaid leave to the family members of crime victims.

Ready-to-Drink (RTD) Beverages

The General Assembly passed H.730, which defines Ready-to-Drink Beverages as a specific category of alcoholic beverage and moves the sale and distribution of RTDs under 12% Alcohol by Volume (ABV) from the Department of Liquor and Lottery to the private sector. It also doubled the tax on RTDs from 55 cents to $1.10 per gallon. Fortified wines will remain in DLL/802 Outlets. The bill also added a refined definition of cider, with a tax adjustment scheduled to take effect in the next fiscal year.

To learn about what bills passed this session, join me and representatives Maida Townsend and Martin LaLonde, along with Sen. Tom Chittenden at this season’s final legislative forum on Monday, May 23, at 6:30 p.m. in the community room on the second floor of the South Burlington Public Library. To attend the meeting on Zoom, find the link at the library’s event page.

I have learned so much in the People's House

In the final days of this legislative session, I am filled with gratitude for the opportunity to serve in the Vermont House of Representatives these past four years. 

I will not be seeking reelection as it is now time for me (turning 70 next month) to focus on other aspects of my life, including new artistic projects.

Most powerfully, I learned from so many as they shared lived experiences and traumas of surviving poverty, incarceration, addiction and discrimination. Visiting with women involved in the criminal justice system and folks living in homeless encampments was profound, life-changing indeed, as I worked with fellow legislators to create more equitable policies.  

My committee work had a diverse portfolio. In any given month, we grappled with amending alcoholic beverage laws and updating statutes to reflect the current roles and duties of the Vermont National Guard to allocating tens of millions of dollars expanding affordable housing for unhoused and low-income Vermonters.

Emotional victories included renaming Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day and working on a eugenics apology to all Vermonters and their families who were harmed because of state-sanctioned policies and practices. Apologies are insufficient, so a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was proposed to investigate systemic discrimination caused or permitted by state laws and policies and to propose legislative or administrative actions to remedy the effects on affected communities.

My regrets include the Legislature failing to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour and not overriding governor’s veto on paid family and medical leave in my first biennium. 

The biggest disappointment was being unable to get a bill passed to improve the quality and increase the number of recovery beds throughout the state. Advocates worked at cross-purposes, and we could not come to consensus on a path forward despite overdose deaths at an all-time high.  

My tenure coincided with the infusion of billions of dollars of federal Covid-relief funds to rebuild our social, economic and civic lives, including business and creative sector recovery; schools and universities; extended unemployment; keeping people housed with rental, mortgage,and property tax arrearages subsidies; and providing food to our communities as well as sheltering the homeless in hotels. 

I am proud to be part of the deliberate process to support workforce development, child care, broadband buildout and infrastructure needs, climate policies, and resolving pension liabilities for educators and state workers. Balanced budgets providing tax relief and addressing the fraying societal safety net were delivered.

Some actions seem prescient in hindsight. Four years ago, we initiated the process of amending the state Constitution guaranteeing women’s reproductive freedom. Vermont voters will now decide in November on this very timely issue. As well, a bill banning the LGBTQ panic defense in court cases, passed in May 2021, came into high relief with the tragic murder of transwoman Fern Feather last month.

As my public service ends, I offer some reflections for the General Assembly. Current compensation of approximately $20,000 is not sustainable for diverse representation, skewing the demographics. Term limits would further expand participation. 

Legislative protocols and hierarchies are moribund with tradition and need to evolve to reflect current-day realities. And to my colleagues in both the House and Senate, I urge all to listen without telling, question without judgment, believe without doubt, and speak with humility. 

Often when visitors are acknowledged during floor sessions, we ask the Speaker to welcome guests to the “People’s House.” As we invite the public into the “People’s House,” remember it’s theirs, not ours. Maddeningly, people who use wheelchairs cannot access public seating in the balcony or at the back of the well of the House. I have more than once flinched when hearing the invocation to welcome all while excluding some.

And representation matters. Museums curate and contextualize collections, as should the Statehouse. Although we formally apologized last year for the Eugenics 1931 bill, “An Act for Human Betterment for Voluntary Sterilization,” the portrait of Governor Wilson, who signed this bill into law, still hangs on the wall. 

Furthermore, look more closely at the art exhibited throughout the building. All Vermonters do not see their lived histories portrayed in the corridors. Laudably, a newly commissioned portrait of Alexander Twilight, Vermont’s first state legislator of African descent, was unveiled last week.

Finally, serving as a part-time citizen legislator has been indeed an honor and privilege. As someone whose professional career had been in the arts, these four years have been transformational. I learned so much and tried to contribute as best I could. 

Working on behalf of neighbors has been such a gift. I appreciate my constituents’ belief and support. Thank you.

State establishes truth, reconciliation commission to address past wrongs

My work in this last month of the legislative session will focus on two Senate bills that proactively address Vermont’s affordable housing crisis. I will report details as they are finalized in my next column. However, this week I wanted to share with you the work my committee did on establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that is now in the Senate.

In May 2021, the Legislature passed J.R.H.2 apologizing and expressing sorrow and regret to all Vermonters and their families and descendants who were harmed because of state-sanctioned eugenics policies and practices. The original eugenics bill was signed in 1931 and impacted generations of Vermonters. The General Assembly recognized an apology was insufficient and further legislative action should be taken.

As a follow-up to the apology, H.96 establishes a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to research and investigate systemic discrimination caused or permitted by state laws and policies and to propose legislative or administrative action to the Legislature or governor as appropriate to remedy the effects on affected communities.

Over the past year my committee took extensive testimony from myriad advocates and those affected and broadened the framework beyond eugenics. The committee’s work was further informed by ongoing consultation from the International Center for Transitional Justice that works worldwide with countries and communities developing truth, justice, reconciliation and reparation programs.

We learned there have been approximately 40 over the years, each different from the next. From South Africa to Tunisia, from Canada to Maine, North Carolina and Maryland, each focused on distinct communities and organized differently. We heard from participants in processes from Maine, Canada and Maryland. Working with legislative counsel, we adapted elements from these preexisting commissions.

The charge is to listen, research, learn, acknowledge and propose remedies. Three commissioners will be appointed through an iterative process and then hire administrative staff. Commissioners, in consultation with impacted populations, will establish committees to examine institutional, structural and systemic discrimination and work with commissioners to identify potential programs and activities to create and improve opportunities to eliminate existing disparities.

Commissioners should be appointed by March 2023. The work is expected to take three years, with annual reports to the Legislature and a final report due by June 2026 detailing findings and recommendations for actions to eliminate and to address the harm caused or permitted by state laws.

Public input is integral to the entire process. Committees will invite extensive testimony as they examine long-standing discrimination in Vermont. Recommendations will also be further vetted by the affected communities.

To not address ongoing institutional, structural and systemic discrimination only perpetuates harm and disparities. The goal of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is to truly bring all Vermonters together.

I will have more details on the commission as well as an update on affordable housing legislation at the upcoming legislative forum on Monday, April 25, 6:30 p.m., in the community room on the second floor of the South Burlington Public Library. To attend the meeting on Zoom, find the link at the library’s event page.

Important bills face crossover deadline: Legislature tackles consumer protection, social justice

This week and next are the two most crucial times in the legislative calendar as all bills voted in the House and Senate must make crossover so that the other body has sufficient time to deliberate and iterate with further amendments.

Investing federal stimulus funds has been a central focus to undergird the economy. Workforce development, child care and housing shortages are being addressed. Pension liability fair to teachers, state employees and taxpayers was proposed, and strategies to combat our climate crisis outlined. Broadband buildout was implemented. Balancing budgets, both in the mid-year January adjustment and the proposed fiscal year 2023 budget is a priority.

In my committee, the House Committee on General, Housing and Military Affairs, we are making progress on Vermont’s housing shortage and are focused on multiple issues relating to housing Vermonters. A few statistics:

• Federal relief funds totaling more than $57 million have helped Vermont renters stay in their homes and helped make landlords whole.

• Federal relief and general Fund dollars have enabled the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board to develop 475 new units of rental housing and to bring several projects online that will result in over 1,100 new rental units by 2023.

• Federal dollars allowed 1,300 households to exit homelessness in 2021, with continued work to be appropriated in the months ahead.

This year in the annual budget adjustment, the House included $50 million to support more mixed-income units, multi-family rentals and to increase shelter capacity, with priority given to populations who may be displaced from the motel voucher program or are currently without housing.

Between now and the end of the session in May, we expect to allocate up to $25 million to rehabilitate 400 existing units that are offline because of code violations as well as a pilot for middle-income buyers.

Consumer, worker protections

Other committee bills focused on consumer and worker protections. H.157 created a “light-touch” registry for construction contractors, along with requiring a contract for work over $3,500. The governor vetoed this bill, but we hope to find a compromise.

Worker protection bills included S.78, streamlining the arbitration process for employees of the Vermont judiciary; H.320, prohibiting agreements that prevent an employee from working for an employer following the settlement of a discrimination case; and H.477, enabling employees to take crime victim leave and expanding to family members who also qualify for this leave from work.

National Guard, liquor laws, human remains

The committee also worked on various bills concerning the Vermont National Guard, the Department of Liquor and Lottery and an alternative method for the final disposition of human remains.

H. 571 extends the National Guard tuition benefit program as an enhanced recruitment tool supporting members seeking a master’s degree, a second baccalaureate degree or appropriate certificate training.

H.244 allows a new method of organic reduction giving Vermonters another option for their permanent disposition choices.

The commissioner of liquor and lottery requested technical corrections and updates of statutes which will be developed along with other liquor bills.

These are expected to pass out of committee and onto to the House floor this week.

Racial and social justice

As I mentioned in last month’s column, the committee also took extensive testimony on H.96, which establishes a truth and reconciliation process, and H.273, which promotes equity in land and home ownership. Details are still in development, but hopefully these two important bills will also make cross-over in the next two weeks.

To catch up on what bills finally did make cross-over, join me and your other elected legislators at South Burlington Library’s legislative forum on Monday, March 28, 6:30 p.m., in the community room on the second floor of the library. It will be great to meet in person once again.

In committee, from reparations to human composting

I sit on the House Committee on General, Housing and Military Affairs. There are over 80 bills currently on our wall for consideration. I want to share some of the myriad issues currently under discussion to give readers a scope of the portfolio. Not included are National Guard and housing bills, among many other concerns for upcoming agendas.

Most proposed bills stay on the wall in each of the 11 House committees. Legislating is an iterative process, and bills change dramatically while in committee. What I am sharing are the initial proposals prior to vetting and amending. If taken up in the full House and passed, bills are then sent to the Senate for consideration. Bills originating in the Senate follow a similar process.

The crossover deadline is March 11 to allow adequate time for each chamber’s deliberations. Finally, when both House and Senate agree, final bills are sent to the governor to sign or veto. Only a fraction of bills introduced each session become law. Here’s just a sampling of some of my committee considerations:

Human composting

H.244 allows for the natural organic reduction of human remains, a method in which an un-embalmed body is broken down with organic materials like wood chips and straw for several weeks inside of an enclosure until it becomes soil. Washington, Oregon and Colorado permit these kinds of processing facilities. This would provide Vermonters another option to burial and cremation for their permanent disposition choices.

Liquor licensing

The committee looked at several bills that recommend changes in liquor licensing, reflecting the ever-evolving business environment:

• H.591 and H.638 allow in-state manufacturers to mail products directly to consumers.

• H.613 legally defines “on farm” malt or vinous beverages as products in which 51 percent of ingredients (other than water) are grown on the farm that sells them.

• H.684 allows food trucks to hold first- and third-class alcoholic beverage licenses.

Worker protections

H.329 amends current laws prohibiting discrimination by establishing a uniform six-year statute of limitations to file claims; reiterates that a claim is viable regardless of whether an employee filed a complaint through the employer’s internal grievance process; adds harassment as an unlawful employment practice; and lowers the severe and pervasive burden for establishing a claim of harassment or discrimination.

H.477 clarifies a statute enacted in 2018 that enables employees eligible to take crime victim leave and expands family members who also qualify for leave from work.

Truth, reconciliation, reparations

Over the past several weeks, the House Committee on General, Housing and Military Affairs has taken extensive testimony from advocates, scholars and community members on several bills related to racial and social justice: H.96 establishes a truth and reconciliation process; H.387 establishes a task force to study and develop reparation proposals for the institution of chattel slavery; and H.273 promotes racial and social equity in land and home ownership.

We also reviewed several bills related to Indigenous land rights: affirming access to state lands for hunting, trapping, farming and sacred rituals (H.618); identifying, protecting access to and exempting historic and sacred Indigenous sites from taxation (H.668); and creating a study committee to examine possible mechanisms for the repatriation of traditional Abenaki lands to the tribes.

To follow issues being discussed, visit the Vermont General Assembly website and search both House and Senate committees to see agendas and pertinent documents for each day’s discussions. Links are provided to livestream every committee meeting.

To learn more about any bill, merely type in the number in the search function. Contact me at jkillacky@leg.state.vt.us if you have trouble accessing links or if you want to share your thoughts.