Conducted April 2016
Zora Burden: You have a lot of new projects you’re working on, will you talk about some of them?
Ann Magnuson: I do, but they’ve been in the works for the past two years! I have a new CD I’ve just finished, wait, do people even call them CDs anymore? A new download? A new conglomerate of audio musings? Anyway, I will show my age and call it an album. I have a new album called Dream Girl which is a collection of original songs and spoken word dreamscapes and two covers, one of which is “Dreamboat Annie” by HEART. The album is loosely connected to a new web series I’ve been developing called Ann Magnuson’s Dream Puppet Theater. We’ve finished the first episode and hope to stream it in late May, around the time the “album” is released!
ZB: What inspired you to create Dream Puppet Theater? What was the process of creating it?
AM: Ann Magnuson’s Dream Puppet Theater a.k.a. AMDPT, evolved after L.A.-based filmmaker and musician Jonathon Stearns approached me about providing voices for another web series idea he had. That didn’t end up happening, but it got me to thinking: “Hmm, I have these dreams every night.”
I write most of them down every morning. I have an insane backlog of material, notebooks full of these dream stories (that’s where a lot of the Bongwater material came from, by the way). Also, I had recently found these fantastical and quite strange-looking dolls my Grandma Magnuson had made for her grandchildren in the 1950s and ‘60s back in West Virginia. Some of the first “shows” I put on as a kid (like so many kids) were puppet shows using my stuffed animals to tell my made-up stories. It didn’t take long to connect the two and voila! Ann Magnuson’s Dream Puppet Theater was born. The show presents my dream stories using the dolls as puppets, coupled with Jonathon’s unique animation skills. I created the characters and their voices and wrote the script, choosing one of my more archetypal dreams about “The Cosmic Man” to start us off. The Cosmic Man in my dreams bears more than a passing resemblance to Ziggy Stardust, with some Lord Krishna and Vishnu thrown in. He often comes to visit to take me on wild adventures.
Jonathon and I shot live footage in the studio of myself and the dolls. Then he animated sequences. After a lot of time and work, we are finally ready to stream our pilot. We are still settling on the right “platform” to host that. There is a Facebook page that features a trailer, with updates regarding when it will be available. The thing is, it seems to be too “out there” for the people who want to finance commercial web series, at least it was too out there for the folks I met at Warner Brothers. But we intend to put out the pilot and see what kind of reaction we get. Hopefully, there will be someone with more adventurous tastes who wants to finance more!
I am really proud of the pilot we made and can’t wait for people to see it. However, I am finding that I have less patience with mediums that require funding. Even though I had a lot of fun making AMDPT and this new CD, it still required writing checks! But it was money well spent. AMDPT was the impetus to get me back in the studio and start recording, since the first song on the new CD was initially recorded for the web series. It’s a folksy psychedelic tune called appropriately, “We’re All Mad.” Yes, it was in the dream. Anyway, I produced the CD very much on my own and it helped me find my original voice again, something I desperately needed to do after being in the acting profession! I got back to the Bongwater-style of story telling that I think is my strong suit.
I want to keep recording, but must find lower-cost ways of doing it. I think I may focus on writing my early ’80s memoir and taking a cue from Patti Smith poetry. Putting pen to paper costs nothing! Speaking of which, I just saw Patti Smith do a very intimate, acoustic show with songs and readings at the Getty Auditorium in connection with the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit. So inspiring, just like she was back in the mid-1970s. I used to see her walking down St. Mark’s Place when I first moved to NYC, and I felt like I’d died and went to Rock ‘n’ Roll Heaven which, in 1978, the East Village kind of was. I saw Jerry Nolan and Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls, and Richard Hell a lot, too. I broke out in a sweat every time I saw Richard Hell. So foxy!
ZB: Do you feel that working without a budget encourages more creativity and freedom for an artist? How does a person fund a project and keep their integrity and creativity intact?
AM: Working with absolutely no funding was my experience back in the day: there was NO money to be found in NYC during the bankrupt Seventies and well into the Eighties. No one I knew had money, until Jean-Michel Basquiat came back from Italy with hundred dollar bills pouring out of his paint-splattered designer suit. Then Keith Haring hit it big and the Reagan Eighties was off and running. That was a whole other ball of wax.
Before that, at Club 57 and in the other clubs and downtown spaces, there was nothing, so I think that contributed to the explosion of creativity and ingenuity that occurred then because it was all we had. We made so much from the trash that was always left out on the street, and there was some excellent trash left out then and lots of it! There was a moment in time when no one dreamed they could make any money off what they were doing, so it wasn’t even considered. There was an “art for art’s sake” euphoria happening that was very real. I have a fondness for that, but don’t want to romanticize poverty, it was tough and hard, and too often not fun at all. I think that’s why we at Club 57 were so dedicated to creating situations that were fun.
I always used any money I made from club work, some of the bigger clubs that appeared later paid well and then from mainstream acting work to keep me solvent and finance my most decidedly uncommercial creative ventures. Today there is such a focus on being a “brand,” but I think that is in direct conflict with the primal creative spirit that comes from somewhere deeper, a place the Surrealists certainly drew from a subconscious primal state which can’t be accessed through a bank account. In fact, money tends to close off conduits to that well. It can certainly poison it.
ZB: I just finished an article that focuses on Jung, Surrealism, Spiritual Alchemy and Taoism, which all deal with archetypes, the subconscious and the dream state, so your new work is really fascinating to me.
AM: That’s exactly what interests me now, and what the Dream Puppet Theater and the Dream Girl album are all about: the subconscious and the Jungian investigation of it. That’s the territory I want to go deeper into, since I’m deep in it every night of my life!
ZB: In regards to spiritual alchemy, have you ever practiced Hypnagogia? Jung and the Surrealists used to do this, kind of like lucid dreaming and meditation.
AM: I’d say I am more a practitioner of hypnopompia! Almost every morning I find myself in that in-between state of waking and dreaming. Sometime it’s not so pleasant, but it’s always interesting, and I can choose to prolong it or guide it. Usually, I just let the subconscious do what it wants. I have learned how to cut back on the nightmares, no documentaries about Nazis or other atrocities before bedtime, is one way!
ZB: Will you talk about what some of the episodes are about?
AM: There are so many episodes written for AMDPT, but until we can pay for making them I hesitate to discuss them. Many involve The Cosmic Man. And each doll (or puppet) has their own adventures, their own kind of dreams, and their own separate relationships with The Cosmic Man. There are other “archetype” characters like the Mother Goddess and The Trickster, etc. The Cosmic Man is a shape shifter and appears in all kinds of guises, Ziggy-era Bowie is one of the most frequent, but also appears as an amalgam of other deities, as well as other entertainers. One episode is called “Ginger Baker is The Cosmic Man”. Yes, the drummer from CREAM. I think I had just seen the documentary about him, Beware of Mr. Baker, plus my husband and I saw this Brit TV show about Jack Bruce, with all this incredible footage of CREAM playing at Royal Albert Hall in 1968. Of course all that permeated my dreams, thankfully! In this particular Cosmic Man dream Ginger Baker is a Jesus Christ kind of figure dressed all in white, building this huge art installation that is part shiny white plastic geodesic dome, part jungle gym and part drum kit. I can’t remember the details now, but it’s all written down.
Ginger was very joyful in it. I do recall feeling very healed when I woke up… so Ginger Baker’s Cosmic Man powers were transformative in the extreme! That one in particular would be hard to recreate. I mean, you can never accurately recreate dreams. They use a language from another dimension, a language that can’t cross the interdimensional blood-brain barrier. It’s like trying to explain what the machine elves are! You can use the imagery and language of this dimension, but it doesn’t begin to convey the transcendental nature of the Other Side.
ZB: Will you explain how your dreams play such an important role in your art and performance?
AM: Well, it’s instant material. And it comes from the depths. And it’s often so freaky and sometimes so nutty and hilarious, it’s like they say: you can’t make this stuff up! I don’t always use them, but I write them all down, and they are there if I need them.
I have dreams that fit into all kinds of categories that I’d like to one day assemble into different shows, or in AMDPT, or in recordings, or maybe in books. Self-published books really seem to be the best and most cost-effective way to proceed now, even a zine, how retro is that: The Dream Zine! I like that.
I have used the West Virginia dream in shows that are specifically about Appalachia. Several of those shows were commissions for a festival back in my hometown of Charleston. One was Back Home Again: Dreaming of Charleston, which is specifically about my hometown and my continued attachment to the place. However, I will say that having done some of these shows, I feel more freed of old attachments. I increasingly feel that my home is now here in Silver Lake, in spite of the vile gentrification and development or at least in our beautiful backyard, which is not unlike being in West Virginia during a perpetual spring!
I also feel that Joshua Tree, where we have a little retreat that continues to preserve what may be left of my sanity, is also my home, maybe because my family furniture is now there. And that the openness of the desert is so mentally liberating! But the pull towards West Virginia returns whenever I see photos of those hills and hollers. It’s often ferocious; I used to break down in tears from the feelings it brought up. But now I am happy to say I simply feel the swell of love. A lot of the pain came from losing my brother to AIDS in 1998. But now that so many of my New York friends have died, this isn’t so traumatizing on a daily basis as it used to be, the insurmountable sense of loss doesn’t have me in its grip as much. I think that can only come when one fully embraces the “e = mc-squared” side of things.
I put a lot of my West Virginia dreams in An Evening of SurRURALism, a show I did back in Charleston last summer. One involved the Mongol Hordes invading the holler just west of Charleston, up this road past the Glen Ferris Inn where we used to go for special Sunday dinners, then up a windy mountain road to a place called The Mystery Hole, this strange tourist trap, full of weird shit. That place always fascinated my brother and me, but my father would never stop there, in spite of our pleas. Once I got my driver’s license, it was one of the first places we all went to, stoned, of course!
There is a Bongwater song about The Mystery Hole. Actually, most of the Bongwater stuff is about West Virginia. I wrote almost all the stories and poems that would later become lyrics to Bongwater songs there when I was on vacation from the East Village during the ’80s. The LP Too Much Sleep is nearly all West Virginia; the song “No Trespassing” and “Junior” are all West, by gawd. And I actually had a “Psychedelic Sewing Room” when I was about twelve or thirteen.
ZB: Do you want to say anything about Bowie and Prince passing and what they meant to you?
AM: I so regret never seeing Prince live. Thankfully, I did get to see James Brown at the Irving Plaza in 1981 or ’82. I got to give him flowers at the end of his show. He gave me a big bear hug and a kiss and covered me with his sweat, it was glorious! But Prince, gosh, why didn’t I make more of an effort? You always think people like that will be around for a while. A major loss for me. I deeply regret not getting to see Jeff Buckley live. He was one we all thought would be around much longer. Regarding Bowie, I just saw Tony Visconti and Woody Woodmansey on their Holy Holy Tour doing the entire Bowie album The Man Who Sold the World. Incredible, the musicianship was extraordinary! I love seeing people in their older years kicking ass. They’ve honed their skills to a razor-sharp sushi knife that cuts deep and wide!
All my personal David Bowie stories will be going into the memoir, well, maybe not all, but who knows? Oh yes, there are some good ones! His death was quite a psychic jolt, but I had heard for years that he was ill, so it wasn’t a complete surprise. And yet, his death hit those of us who are a certain age and sensibility the way the death of a parent affects you. That is no exaggeration. It was the death of our youth in a lot of ways, pretty heavy for the Peter Pan generation. I have to say I felt that years before, when I heard Mick Ronson had died. Certainly, these kinds of passings remind us acutely of our own mortality and that time is tick, tick, ticking and then it just stops. That’s too freaky for our kinetic minds to handle. He still visits me in my dreams, though not as much as before. When it happens he looks a lot like an Alex Grey DMT painting! Bowie will forever be The Cosmic Man.
ZB: It’s as if Bowie seemed to use his art to explore his own inner realities as The Cosmic Man archetype, and we were just along for the ride.
AM: Yes, absolutely! Which is why he was one of several who defined what an artist can be, who defined what an artist is, for me. I’d like to put together an entire book of all my Bowie Dreams, especially if we can’t get the funding to make more episodes of AMDPT. But honestly, I’ve gotta give the Bowie material a rest. I did a few shows singing his songs, before he released The Next Day and no one was doing his stuff, which culminated in this show I did at SFMOMA in 2011 about both Bowie and Jobriath subtitled The Rock Star as Shaman, Myth Maker and Ritual Sacrifice. It was to illustrate the ritualistic nature of idols, and how we have to back away from this, or it will kill us and them.
It was a way to enjoy the Bowie songbook but also tell the story of Jobriath, the first openly gay rocker, glam or otherwise, that suffered a terrible fall from grace due to Hype and the ugliness of the Success/Failure ritual which kills youths as surely as the Aztec high priests killed them at the altar of Chichen Itza. So I kinda got Bowie out of my system, so to speak, in that show, while also eulogizing and celebrating the forgotten music and life of a “failed” artist who deserved better: Jobriath. That’s what I see theater and, if we must “performance art” as: a ritual cleansing; a form of individual and collective therapy besides an excuse to get out of the house and have some laughs! We first celebrated Bowie as a God, then sacrificed him . Whacking a piñata tricked out as Ziggy Stardust, which was enormous fun. This was to facilitate the resurrection of Jobriath, who could now metaphorically live again, through these surrogate rituals, and overcome the bullshit that destroyed his spirit! There was a lot more to it than that, it was a semi-religious experience. I did a baptism, gave communion to the crowd gluten-free wafers, by the way, this was San Francisco, after all! The whole thing was a wild ritualistic hoe-down.
ZB: I agree that musicians take on the Cosmic Man or Anti-Hero archetype, who act as a catalyst for us in our attempts to understand each other and ourselves in the collective unconscious. Archetypes are the universal language for “the artist as storyteller,” which you talk about as a big part of your work.
AM: I love the archetypes, they explain everything! Have you seen the documentary The Way of The Dream? It was made by the son of Jungian writer Marion Woodman. He interviews Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz who was a close colleague of Jung himself. Von Franz does incredible dream analysis, there is an analysis of a Marilyn Monroe dream that will blow your mind! I’ve actually flirted with the idea of going to the Jung Institute and taking classes. I’d rather be a Jungian analyst than an actress at this point; a good thing to do in one’s old age, I can wear a caftan and heavy jewelry! Actually, like most people in this Business we call Show, my interest in theater and acting stems from a deeper interest in the psyche and a fascination with human behavior. But only a handful of actresses get to explore the full spectrum of character in movies and TV. Theater offers better choices, but I’d rather create my own.
ZB: What were some of your early experiences with this; musicians and artists as storytellers?
AM: My mother was definitely the first story teller in my life. She would read to me before bed the usual “Wynken, Blynken and Nod” but then Mother Goose, the Brothers Grimm, and also some rather sophisticated fare. I still have the old illustrated book of Greek mythology she read to me and get this, she read Beowulf to me as a bedtime story when I was six! I was terrified to swim in lakes from an early age because of that; terrified of Grendel. The other storyteller was the television. Everyone my age was parked in front of the TV. My earliest heroes and influences were Bugs Bunny, Soupy Sales and Captain Kangaroo, Rocky and Bullwinkle. And let’s not forget Walt Disney. TV in the 1950s and ‘60s was a wondrous Pandora’s Box, plus there were all these snake-handling, strychnine, atonal gospel singers and backwoods preachers on the local TV and radio in West Virginia that I was fascinated with from the get-go. And of course, the Bible: archetypical storytelling at its finest! Also, Chiller Theater, I loved monster movies and The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. In fact, I ended up having so many nightmares after I watched Outer Limits that my mother forbade it, so I learned how to be crafty real fast and told her I was going over to a friend’s house to play, then convince them to put on the Outer Limits. My brother and I loved science fiction and especially anything with Ray Harryhausen animation. Anything with the Greek myths was a hit with us! And Jules Verne! We ate it all up, with relish!
ZB: I love how you said that in your portrayal of so many female archetypes through your art, it liberates you and how in society, women tend to be confined to only a few. Will you explain why women are so defined by these limiting archetypal roles in society?
AM: Women are absolutely imprisoned by just one or two archetypes. Guess which two? Especially actresses. That’s why you don’t see me act much anymore. Besides the fact that the profession is horrifically competitive and positively Sisyphean in terms of what little return there actually is for your time and investment. Really, except for a few roles that I can count on one hand, most have been as confining as the Spanx they made me wear! Usually I pursue it because I want to stay eligible for the SAG health insurance, where you have to earn a certain amount to be on the plan. But nobody wants to pay anyone anything anymore, in acting or any of the arts, so I’d rather focus on what I do have control of, and be a creative artist on my own terms. That doesn’t mean to say I’m not ready to learn my lines and show up! I just ain’t gonna sit around waiting for the phone to ring…
ZB: Do you see your art and performances as a kind of psychological tool for your own growth? Or as a kind of feminism and activism?
AM: Oh, yes, without a doubt. If I didn’t put on shows I would’ve died from god knows what. While others were getting hooked on heroin back in the day, performance was my drug. Plus, all these performances are a way to make sense out of a shit-ass crazy world! Not to mention the jumble of one’s own psyche. I can only hope anything I’ve done has helped someone else along the line. When I see a performer like Patti Smith or Diamanda Galas or a band like L7 who are on tour again, or gosh, so many people, too many to list, the very act of them being out there and doing it, is a political act. Call it “feminist” or “activist” or whatever, it’s the act of giving everything you got in the act of living life, and it’s all inspiring in that sense!
ZB: Which of the characters you’ve performed as, inspired by archetypes, were your favorite?
AM: Probably the best character I ever played was Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker. I was sixteen! This was for the Kanawha Players, a local community theater in my hometown. Decades later, in my fifties, I played the title character of “Liz” in Amy and David Sedaris’s play The Book of Liz. I was in the L.A. premiere of the play several years ago. Both are about the quintessential hero’s journey. Helen Keller finds her way out of the darkness with the help of a teacher who literally helps her find her “voice”, a way to communicate and express what has up to that point been denied her. I also liked playing Miriam, a home-shopping-club hostess who has a breakdown or breakthrough in an independent movie called Woman’s Picture, made by Memphis-based filmmaker Brian Pera. Miriam is being phased out of her job due to ageism. Her mother is dying. She finally comes to terms with the fact that her relationship sucks; it all comes crashing down, which allows her to throw off her false self and be open to a new path towards what Jung would call “individuation.” It’s not unlike Dante’s journey through the underworld. In fact, I did a show in 1981 at The Kitchen called After Dante that was this exact thing, although I knew nothing of Carl Jung at the time. But all of us have these archetypes in us, and all of us must take that hero’s journey in our own unique ways.
ZB: With the Tree of Life, the Fool’s Journey, and the passage through the Dark Night of the Soul, I see artists as beacons, the lights who help lead us through this journey and out of the darkness. They illuminate the world with revelations, the way you work with satire as a form of illumination.
AM: I am so into the Tree of Life, the Scandinavian version. Every now and then I google images for Yggdrasil, damn, those images are so cool! “The Well of Urd,” baby! Yes, I agree: artists are usually the ones whose journeys are in blazing technicolor, which help those who see in black-and-white or in only black or white! Artists have the high-powered flashlights, often embedded in their heads! The more anguished the artist, the brighter the light, although the batteries may die out sooner. But I think everyone takes the journey in their own way, artists are simply more colorful. And they are, more often than not, the stand-ins, the sacrificial lambs, the piñatas which have to be smashed so the populace can get the candy!
ZB: This responsibility on the artist to illuminate society is a heavy one, so many self-medicate to cope and this can lead to their demise. Artists and musicians are hyper-sensitive, more aware than the average person; they feel more, are more perceptive, live with intensity. A good artist has to learn how to be a good escape artist, too.
AM: Indeed! Even though his reasons were probably health-related, I found Bowie’s reclusiveness very inspiring. That he managed to carve out a sober private life for himself, after the madness of the seventies and eighties and he could continue to create, but in a very private way, a very wise move. I guess he went from Cosmic Man archetype to Wise Old Man archetype? Our culture, and certainly the youth-obsessed social media, blog, internet culture, does not value Wise Old anything. But I sure do! So Bowie’s latter years end up inspiring me just as much, if not more, than the early ones, actually, much more. I liked that last song “Lazarus” and the video for it, more than almost anything he’d ever done, certainly within the last few decades. It wasn’t mired in obfuscation; I felt the masks had all been dropped and he was letting us in deeper than he ever had before. Or could.
ZB: The Hermit as the Wise Old Man archetype is incredibly important during our journey, the Fool’s Journey.
AM: Ah yes, the Hermit. I’m totally digging my inner Hermit! And the Fool’s Journey: boy, does that ever sum up my life! [laughs] But every Fool is a Hero and every Hero a Fool, right? However, it’s the Magician I’m most keenly interested in manifesting more of and the Goddess! The Magician-Goddess and certainly Magician-Goddesses like Patti Smith, Diamanda Galas and Isadora Duncan and Bowie too, at his most androgynous, who have lit the pathway. Both are roles I hope to do justice to.
ZB: That is why the Alchemical Wedding in Spiritual Alchemy, is so fascinating, this idea of melding the masculine and feminine within us, to create wholeness, what Jung called the “individuation” process that results in integration, the concept of a perfect Third Being/Mind.
AM: Well, Bowie certainly did that: melded the feminine and masculine. Patti Smith does that, too. Actually, many unsung artists do. Antony, now Anohni. It was fascinating how the dolls in AMDPT took on different archetypes, which I guess were just aspects of my personality, quite by accident, although Jung said that nothing is accidental. By simply naming them and giving them particular voices, they suddenly become the Waif/Orphan, the Mother, the Lover, the Sage, the Magician, the Warrior. I think anyone whose personal history involves any kind of trauma will bring out the Warrior, favoring an aggressiveness usually associated with masculinity. I’m seeing Diana with her bow and arrow, Athena with her spear and shield, the Valkyries.
ZB: Which characters you performed as were based on the Warrior archetype? Female Warrior archetypes are greatly missing in society.
AM: Well, I’ve played more “bitch boss lady” characters on TV and movies than I would care to name. Women of authority are too often portrayed in the mainstream entertainment world as Medusas or Ice Queens. I’ve riffed on that subject in many of my performances, and in an essay or two. That’s why I loved playing “Liz” in the Sedaris’s play: she was more of the Innocent archetype who escapes her oppressive community. She is an Amish-type woman the Sedarises hilariously called the Squeamish, entering the outside world where she learns how to be autonomous, to break free of her old roles, and individuate as a whole person. She, like Helen Keller, learns a new language that lets her express her true inner self, the classic Jungian Hero’s Journey as told through the brilliant Sedaris Mind!
I used Giulietta Masina’s character from La Strada as the guiding spirit of the character. I loved that role; it’s a great, fully-realized older woman’s part, right up there with Mother Courage [Brecht]. The character I played in Woman’s Picture is definitely a Warrior Woman archetype. I saw even the most “bitchy boss” roles I was asked to play as the Warrior archetype. I created elaborate backstories for every one of them; they all had a lot to overcome. Of course, the end result or final cut may not have shown all or even any of those subtle shadings, but at least I had a foundation of something that resembled integrity to stand on when I had to report to set. Woman’s Picture was definitely one of the good projects. Brian Pera is a very smart guy. He was doing a contemporary riff on women’s pictures from the 1940s and ’50s, with some of Fassbinder thrown in. Douglas Sirk, of course, was the king.
ZB: Fellini was a master at depicting archetypes.
AM: Yes, he was! Alfred Jarry was an early hero of mine; I discovered him in college, as so many young thespians do. I love his quote, “Clichés are the armature of the Absolute.” I had that quote on the program for the After Dante show at The Kitchen which I did in 1981, along with an etching of a set from an old medieval morality play.
Giulietta Masina is my spirit animal! Nights of Cabiria saved my life; I saw it during a very low period. I have never sobbed so hard than I did when watching the end of that film for the first time. If she could smile and laugh through her tears while joining that parade of revelers at the end, then so could I! Again: the Hero’s Journey. Every story is about it!
ZB: I can see you as the female Alfred Jarry in a way, addressing absurdities in society.
AM: That is the best compliment Ever!
ZB: Your performances have been described as Neo-Dada theater. Many of your peers were inspired by the Theater of the Absurd, and the Surrealists. In honor of Dada100, if you were to put on a Dada production, what would it be? Who would be the Ubu Roi of today?
AM: Well, Donald Trump is the obvious choice. Kim Jong-Un a close second. Putin is a different kettle of fish, more Emperor Ming in the old FLASH GORDON serials. But also the so-called liberal billionaires, the “tech elite”, the people who put on that Burning Man for the 1%. I’d stage Ubu Roi like a TED talk. Steve Jobs would be an ideal updated Pere Ubu. Stage it like one of those Apple “innovation” rallies.
ZB: You’ve talked about ageism in performance, especially how bad it is in LA. Have you read Diamanda Galas’ essay “The Greek Vampire: A Threat To The Enemies of Artists,” in which she confronts, aggressively, ageism in music?
AM: I haven’t! I gotta read that. Ageism is so rampant. Actually one of the songs on my new CD addresses that. It’s called “Relieved to be Irrelevant.” I was forever seeing older artists, usually performers, being trolled with the accusation that they were “no longer relevant”. And it always irked me! Even when leveled at people I didn’t necessarily feel like defending. Because it was usually connected to age. I thought, “Jesus, everybody is irrelevant! And everybody is relevant!” Let’s take it to the quantum level: it’s all one, so let’s stop tearing each other down. Then I thought, “Wow, I’m relieved to be irrelevant in a world of Kardashians and American Idol.”
ZB: With social media rewiring our brains, no one is a critical thinker anymore. It’s created this world of superficiality and hive mind. People who never cared or needed the approval of others are now desperately seeking it on social media, this is really disheartening. It’s so strange to me: this self-policing and self-censorship, so called trigger warnings. We’re all our own Big Brother now. Because so much of your work is about spontaneity and engagement, how do you feel about what the internet is doing to society?
AM: Social media and the internet has its uses, but it’s highly addictive, and a major distraction from doing more nourishing things like watching the birds in the birdbath, my favorite pastime of late. I agree with you: I believe it’s rewiring our brains and not in a good way. We are our own Big Brother. It’s already like the East German Stassi: with people public-shaming others and ratting them out about all sorts of things. But that’s the price of “freedom.” As long as it all remains free! But is it? Doesn’t Apple and Google and Amazon own all of us now? But we are always the most effective prison wardens of our own minds. So one must constantly be vigilant regarding how any ideology or stale programming and old habituations take over our thoughts and behavior. I do think the pendulum will swing, though it always does. But where to, who can say? I rarely use Twitter and I’m not on Instagram but I think I have to get on it all so I can try to sell some CDs, so I can make some of my money back, if for no other reason that I need it to finance the next one!
ZB: I compare social media to a Panopticon.
AM: Panopticon, yes, exactly!
ZB: What is your opinion of artists who use the internet to create, or, as their platform? Do you think this has taken the “soul” out of art? It feels like the internet has killed ingenuity and the spontaneity you feel is important to make art genuine.
AM: Well, I think one has to accept that the internet or any new technology, is a new medium that any artist can use is any way they want. People leveled similar accusations at television and movies before that, and the telephone and telegraph and steam engine and maybe even the wheel! This is all part of our present evolution and how we use and abuse it is up to each individual. Actually it connects back to something Patti Smith was talking about the other night: that every artist has to remain true to their soul and not worry about whether they achieve the kind of “recognition” the outside world deigns to bestow. Not so easy when everything around us tells us we are worthless without fame or fortune!Maybe in that way social media is “good.” Everyone can feel they have a voice, everyone has their own “network” now. How this shakes down remains to be seen, but I think it’s good people wrested the power away from the old cabals. Of course, now The Who song comes to mind: “Meet the new cabal, same as the old cabal”!
ZB: Will you talk about the Club 57 show you’re co-organizing for the Museum of Modern Art?
AM: The Museum of Modern Art is going to put on a film series and gallery show celebrating Club 57, the “neo-Dada” club space I managed form 1979-1981 and performed in off and on until its demise in 1983. The show initially began as a film series curated by John Epperson, a.k.a. Lypsinka, who was a regular member there. The film curator Ron Magliozzi asked John to host a film series and after several discussions it was finally decided to make it about the films shows at Club 57. I was brought in at that time and encouraged them to do an accompanying gallery show and soon became the co-curator of said show. I had organized a show featuring art, video, photographs and ephemera along with Kenny Scharf for a gallery/kunsthalle-style place called Royal T in Culver City in 2011. The show was called “East Village West.” This MoMA show will be a much better organized and thorough version of that, it will open Spring 2017. By now it’s become quite a show. MoMA is doing a catalogue for it as well! And, I plan to put together a limited-edition art book of all the calendars, flyers and newsletters I made, as well as choice photos and memories. It will be mostly a visual book.
ZB: Can you describe some of the themes of the performances you did there?
AM: Oh there were so many, The Stay-Free Mini Prom, where those of us who skipped our high school proms threw a twisted, alternative prom; Putt-Putt Reggae, an evening of miniature golf in a Jamaican shanty town made form cardboard boxes, that we dragged in from the street, while dub music played; The Rites of Spring Bacchanal, where Pulsallama debuted and magic mushroom punch was served; Radio Free Europe, which indulged my obsession with life behind the Iron Curtain and debuted my Soviet pop chanteuse, Anoushka; the list goes on and on!
ZB: Will you talk about how you’ve addressed in your art and performances coping with the trauma of loss due to AIDS, especially the loss of your brother? How can people cope with the continued loss of loved ones to AIDS?
AM: Personally, my performances were the only way I could cope. I created so much with people who were HIV-positive and who have since died. It was their way of coping too, we had to laugh. We had to keep the show going, we got so much joy from it; it was the only life-affirming way out of the horror of it all. And there was activism, of course: so many benefits, so many ACT UP marches, so much rage against Reagan expressed in art as well as political activism. The voices got louder, people were not going to let Reagan sweep AIDS under the rug or make it a joke for his smarmy press conferences. It’s important to express the anger, the pain, the hurt, the confusion, the TRAUMA, even if it’s in roundabout ways.
Because my brother was so adamant about not telling anyone about his illness, I had to keep it a secret. I had several people close to me who wanted me to keep their secrets. That will kill a person, but you have to respect another’s wishes. So, many of my shows then were about expressing the anguish but not in a direct way. I let the subconscious run the show then. Bongwater was so much about the pain, the confusion, the psychosis of the time. People had so many different ways of dealing with it, imperfectly, to be sure. The fear factor then was off the charts! It was incurable, an instant death sentence, and no one knew how it was transmitted.
It is painful to look back and take in the enormity of all that. I think a lot of us who lived through those awful plague years are somewhat on the other side of “PTSD.” I’ve heard that from others. Now we are all able to talk about it without falling down into a black hole of grief and despair. That is yet another part of the journey: getting on the other side of pain, and letting wisdom rule. I lived in a major state of disassociation while everyone was dying, along with a host of other defense mechanisms that proved to be more detrimental in the long run. I do feel I am finally on the other side of all that, but boy it took a long time! Therapists can help; I recommend therapy to anyone brave enough to begin the deep exploration of self-examination. But choose wisely! 12 step programs are great, too. The 12 steps are basically Jungian; he helped devise the “spiritual solution.” I did some EMDR [a form of psychotherapy devised by Francine Shapiro] as well. I think that helped.
ZB: Will you talk about the art you want to create out of the answering-machine messages left behind by those you lost to AIDS?
AM: I have wanted to do something with all the answering machine messages I’ve saved since the ’80s. I really stopped saving them after answering machines stopped using cassettes, because it wasn’t as easy to do. Some of the earliest ones got lost, but a few of those are on the Bongwater records. One was from Klaus Nomi when I had called him to see if I could visit him. He called back and said he really couldn’t have visitors; that people meant well but it made him sicker than he already felt. It was heartbreaking.
I have a lot of messages from many, many people who have since died, including my brother. I actually haven’t listened to them much since I first heard them. I listened to some about a year after my brother died and it was so painful I couldn’t continue. I might be able to listen now—I’m not sure. I have a box full of those, as well as several boxes full of mixtapes people made me in the ’80s and ’90s. Those mixtapes, now, oh my god, vintage, are so special!
ZB: Do you think that we’ve lost a lot of our humanity via our use of communication through technology? We never use the human voice now that everyone uses texting. We’ve lost that intimacy that the human voice creates, like with those answering machine messages.
AM: Possibly. I know that when I take a few days off all internet activity, I feel liberated and able to get in touch with aspects of myself I feel haven’t been in full flower since childhood! Certainly since the days before iPhones, even before answering machines or Walkmans! That’s why I love, need, to go to the desert on a regular basis. We don’t have wi-fi where we live there, and there are so many places, like in that extraordinary national park, that don’t get any cell reception at all, I love it! On the other hand, the new technology has allowed me to connect with people I never knew were touched by a song or something I once did. And I learn more about others and what is happening in the world. There are pros and cons and, like so much in the world, we have to find a balance.
ZB: I like how you have said that much of the performances you did in the 1970s and ’80s were more about just having a laugh with friends, and the fun of entertaining each other and if the audience enjoyed it, so much the better.
AM: Oh yes! I always created shows, at least early on, with friends, just so we could make each other laugh. Especially at Club 57 and all the ’80s club performances. But now I also see that many of those performances were ritual exorcisms and ways to process experiences and shared memories of the collective unconscious that formed the cultural sensibilities and the rebellions against other sensibilities at the time. My friend William Fleet Lively, who also passed away from AIDS, wrote a lot of that early material with me. We laughed harder than I have ever laughed in my life.
I can see now that we, and many others in the club scene and beyond, used theater as a ritual and a way to keep us from going batty in a mainstream world we wanted no part of. But also, as a way to just share the joy of living, the pure joy of existing and just being in each other’s company. That to me is what Club 57 was. Here we all were in the bleakness of New York in the late ’70s, with the burned-out buildings and the crime and the abject poverty, and many of us feeling alienated by a culture that didn’t accept us, or by parents that were checked out or abusive, or by any of the many things that turn kids to art or punk rock. It was the “Island of Misfit Toys” and we needed to find joy in the creative act or wither and die trying to “fit in” with a world that produced Charlie’s Angels and gave us the Ronald Reagan presidency. In a nihilistic landscape, Club 57 was a hub of optimism, often snarky, sarcastic optimism but optimistic, nevertheless! That’s the way I saw it, at least.
ZB: Do you feel there are any taboos today to confront or have fun with, like there were during the 1970s and ’80s, when conservatism and censorship were so rampant?
AM: Oh sure, there are plenty of taboos today that would make the unbridled mad, mad, mad, off-the-hook D.I.Y. don’t-tell-me-what-do creativity of those times impossible.
First of all, there is the regressive left, what a crazy phrase, I feel like a Fox commentator even using it, but it’s a convenient shorthand, policing everyone for how they say things. But with the internet and instant-shaming and witch-hunting going on today, this stifles the urge to connect with a deeper primal energy, and do things in a messy, who cares if this works or not, or offends or doesn’t offend or whatever way. Because a) everyone is forced to fucking hustle every moment of the day and night in order to push their “brand” and try to make a living. Because b) everything now is so overpriced; real estate is way overvalued, and everyone is so obscenely underpaid.
I think that’s why so many people are moving to Joshua Tree, which kinda bums me out because all these monied folks are coming in and buying the shacks and turning them into airbnbs, so it’s gonna go the way of the East Village and Silver Lake. I watched both of those places that I called my home get transformed from affordable “edges of the universe” into grotesque advertisements for the Luxury Bohemian Lifestyle™. Joshua Tree’s only saving grace is that now all the airbnbs are being robbed by tweaker gangs. But I don’t want to be looking down the wrong end of 12-gauge, either!
I’m no longer so concerned with parsing the media or satirizing pop culture as I was back in the day, maybe because it’s all jumped a flotilla of sharks? As I am in exploring the human psyche through dreams and the collective subconscious. I’m older now and want my creative energies to go towards more divine pursuits. I’ve had enough of the Ridiculous and the Obscene. That doesn’t mean to say The Trickster is going away, she’s here to stay!
ZB: With gentrification in cities destroying the creative community, and money coming in so artists’ work becomes business rather than art, where could a new community of bohemians and artists thrive again? How can an artist find a “sacred” space today, especially if they live in these now gentrified communities?
AM: I think people are finding ways to create thriving communities all over the place, but usually outside of the big cities. Even those of us in the big cities are navigating our way around the negatives to keep on keeping on! I love Joshua Tree because the artist community there is much like it was in the East Village before Reaganomics took hold. Shari Elf is a perfect example of the kind of “pure” artist I admire, everyone should know about Shari! She has a gallery compound space in JT called ART QUEEN that also houses the “World Famous Crochet Museum.” Her art is made from found objects and bits and bobs that remind me so much of the stuff my Grandma used to make. Noah Purifoy’s Art Site is another joy to behold. He is a renowned “outsider artist” who created (he is deceased) what is now called Dada Junk Art. I love all that stuff! So I think of Joshua Tree as a sacred space… though it is getting discovered—and we all know what happens next! I just hope some of these city slickers will buy some of Shari’s art…
ZB: Much of your life and work was documented in The Art of Living: An Oral History of Performance Art by Dominic Johnson. But will we see an autobiography from you any time soon? Have any of your opinions or views changed since this book came out?
AM: Dominic Johnson’s book is the most articulate and thorough in terms of presenting my past, although it, like any history, is selective. He has interviews with a lot of unsung artists who I find fascinating, and who live their lives as art. I highly recommend that book for anyone interested in outré performance. I have plans for a memoir and have to finish the proposal soon; it will be more specific to my time in NYC in the early ’80s. An autobiography is much too much, plus, I feel my best years are ahead of me! I gotta focus on living and creating more, so I can have a boffo ending to the story!
Zora Burden: You have a lot of new projects you’re working on, will you talk about some of them?
Ann Magnuson: I do, but they’ve been in the works for the past two years! I have a new CD I’ve just finished, wait, do people even call them CDs anymore? A new download? A new conglomerate of audio musings? Anyway, I will show my age and call it an album. I have a new album called Dream Girl which is a collection of original songs and spoken word dreamscapes and two covers, one of which is “Dreamboat Annie” by HEART. The album is loosely connected to a new web series I’ve been developing called Ann Magnuson’s Dream Puppet Theater. We’ve finished the first episode and hope to stream it in late May, around the time the “album” is released!
ZB: What inspired you to create Dream Puppet Theater? What was the process of creating it?
AM: Ann Magnuson’s Dream Puppet Theater a.k.a. AMDPT, evolved after L.A.-based filmmaker and musician Jonathon Stearns approached me about providing voices for another web series idea he had. That didn’t end up happening, but it got me to thinking: “Hmm, I have these dreams every night.”
I write most of them down every morning. I have an insane backlog of material, notebooks full of these dream stories (that’s where a lot of the Bongwater material came from, by the way). Also, I had recently found these fantastical and quite strange-looking dolls my Grandma Magnuson had made for her grandchildren in the 1950s and ‘60s back in West Virginia. Some of the first “shows” I put on as a kid (like so many kids) were puppet shows using my stuffed animals to tell my made-up stories. It didn’t take long to connect the two and voila! Ann Magnuson’s Dream Puppet Theater was born. The show presents my dream stories using the dolls as puppets, coupled with Jonathon’s unique animation skills. I created the characters and their voices and wrote the script, choosing one of my more archetypal dreams about “The Cosmic Man” to start us off. The Cosmic Man in my dreams bears more than a passing resemblance to Ziggy Stardust, with some Lord Krishna and Vishnu thrown in. He often comes to visit to take me on wild adventures.
Jonathon and I shot live footage in the studio of myself and the dolls. Then he animated sequences. After a lot of time and work, we are finally ready to stream our pilot. We are still settling on the right “platform” to host that. There is a Facebook page that features a trailer, with updates regarding when it will be available. The thing is, it seems to be too “out there” for the people who want to finance commercial web series, at least it was too out there for the folks I met at Warner Brothers. But we intend to put out the pilot and see what kind of reaction we get. Hopefully, there will be someone with more adventurous tastes who wants to finance more!
I am really proud of the pilot we made and can’t wait for people to see it. However, I am finding that I have less patience with mediums that require funding. Even though I had a lot of fun making AMDPT and this new CD, it still required writing checks! But it was money well spent. AMDPT was the impetus to get me back in the studio and start recording, since the first song on the new CD was initially recorded for the web series. It’s a folksy psychedelic tune called appropriately, “We’re All Mad.” Yes, it was in the dream. Anyway, I produced the CD very much on my own and it helped me find my original voice again, something I desperately needed to do after being in the acting profession! I got back to the Bongwater-style of story telling that I think is my strong suit.
I want to keep recording, but must find lower-cost ways of doing it. I think I may focus on writing my early ’80s memoir and taking a cue from Patti Smith poetry. Putting pen to paper costs nothing! Speaking of which, I just saw Patti Smith do a very intimate, acoustic show with songs and readings at the Getty Auditorium in connection with the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit. So inspiring, just like she was back in the mid-1970s. I used to see her walking down St. Mark’s Place when I first moved to NYC, and I felt like I’d died and went to Rock ‘n’ Roll Heaven which, in 1978, the East Village kind of was. I saw Jerry Nolan and Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls, and Richard Hell a lot, too. I broke out in a sweat every time I saw Richard Hell. So foxy!
ZB: Do you feel that working without a budget encourages more creativity and freedom for an artist? How does a person fund a project and keep their integrity and creativity intact?
AM: Working with absolutely no funding was my experience back in the day: there was NO money to be found in NYC during the bankrupt Seventies and well into the Eighties. No one I knew had money, until Jean-Michel Basquiat came back from Italy with hundred dollar bills pouring out of his paint-splattered designer suit. Then Keith Haring hit it big and the Reagan Eighties was off and running. That was a whole other ball of wax.
Before that, at Club 57 and in the other clubs and downtown spaces, there was nothing, so I think that contributed to the explosion of creativity and ingenuity that occurred then because it was all we had. We made so much from the trash that was always left out on the street, and there was some excellent trash left out then and lots of it! There was a moment in time when no one dreamed they could make any money off what they were doing, so it wasn’t even considered. There was an “art for art’s sake” euphoria happening that was very real. I have a fondness for that, but don’t want to romanticize poverty, it was tough and hard, and too often not fun at all. I think that’s why we at Club 57 were so dedicated to creating situations that were fun.
I always used any money I made from club work, some of the bigger clubs that appeared later paid well and then from mainstream acting work to keep me solvent and finance my most decidedly uncommercial creative ventures. Today there is such a focus on being a “brand,” but I think that is in direct conflict with the primal creative spirit that comes from somewhere deeper, a place the Surrealists certainly drew from a subconscious primal state which can’t be accessed through a bank account. In fact, money tends to close off conduits to that well. It can certainly poison it.
ZB: I just finished an article that focuses on Jung, Surrealism, Spiritual Alchemy and Taoism, which all deal with archetypes, the subconscious and the dream state, so your new work is really fascinating to me.
AM: That’s exactly what interests me now, and what the Dream Puppet Theater and the Dream Girl album are all about: the subconscious and the Jungian investigation of it. That’s the territory I want to go deeper into, since I’m deep in it every night of my life!
ZB: In regards to spiritual alchemy, have you ever practiced Hypnagogia? Jung and the Surrealists used to do this, kind of like lucid dreaming and meditation.
AM: I’d say I am more a practitioner of hypnopompia! Almost every morning I find myself in that in-between state of waking and dreaming. Sometime it’s not so pleasant, but it’s always interesting, and I can choose to prolong it or guide it. Usually, I just let the subconscious do what it wants. I have learned how to cut back on the nightmares, no documentaries about Nazis or other atrocities before bedtime, is one way!
ZB: Will you talk about what some of the episodes are about?
AM: There are so many episodes written for AMDPT, but until we can pay for making them I hesitate to discuss them. Many involve The Cosmic Man. And each doll (or puppet) has their own adventures, their own kind of dreams, and their own separate relationships with The Cosmic Man. There are other “archetype” characters like the Mother Goddess and The Trickster, etc. The Cosmic Man is a shape shifter and appears in all kinds of guises, Ziggy-era Bowie is one of the most frequent, but also appears as an amalgam of other deities, as well as other entertainers. One episode is called “Ginger Baker is The Cosmic Man”. Yes, the drummer from CREAM. I think I had just seen the documentary about him, Beware of Mr. Baker, plus my husband and I saw this Brit TV show about Jack Bruce, with all this incredible footage of CREAM playing at Royal Albert Hall in 1968. Of course all that permeated my dreams, thankfully! In this particular Cosmic Man dream Ginger Baker is a Jesus Christ kind of figure dressed all in white, building this huge art installation that is part shiny white plastic geodesic dome, part jungle gym and part drum kit. I can’t remember the details now, but it’s all written down.
Ginger was very joyful in it. I do recall feeling very healed when I woke up… so Ginger Baker’s Cosmic Man powers were transformative in the extreme! That one in particular would be hard to recreate. I mean, you can never accurately recreate dreams. They use a language from another dimension, a language that can’t cross the interdimensional blood-brain barrier. It’s like trying to explain what the machine elves are! You can use the imagery and language of this dimension, but it doesn’t begin to convey the transcendental nature of the Other Side.
ZB: Will you explain how your dreams play such an important role in your art and performance?
AM: Well, it’s instant material. And it comes from the depths. And it’s often so freaky and sometimes so nutty and hilarious, it’s like they say: you can’t make this stuff up! I don’t always use them, but I write them all down, and they are there if I need them.
I have dreams that fit into all kinds of categories that I’d like to one day assemble into different shows, or in AMDPT, or in recordings, or maybe in books. Self-published books really seem to be the best and most cost-effective way to proceed now, even a zine, how retro is that: The Dream Zine! I like that.
I have used the West Virginia dream in shows that are specifically about Appalachia. Several of those shows were commissions for a festival back in my hometown of Charleston. One was Back Home Again: Dreaming of Charleston, which is specifically about my hometown and my continued attachment to the place. However, I will say that having done some of these shows, I feel more freed of old attachments. I increasingly feel that my home is now here in Silver Lake, in spite of the vile gentrification and development or at least in our beautiful backyard, which is not unlike being in West Virginia during a perpetual spring!
I also feel that Joshua Tree, where we have a little retreat that continues to preserve what may be left of my sanity, is also my home, maybe because my family furniture is now there. And that the openness of the desert is so mentally liberating! But the pull towards West Virginia returns whenever I see photos of those hills and hollers. It’s often ferocious; I used to break down in tears from the feelings it brought up. But now I am happy to say I simply feel the swell of love. A lot of the pain came from losing my brother to AIDS in 1998. But now that so many of my New York friends have died, this isn’t so traumatizing on a daily basis as it used to be, the insurmountable sense of loss doesn’t have me in its grip as much. I think that can only come when one fully embraces the “e = mc-squared” side of things.
I put a lot of my West Virginia dreams in An Evening of SurRURALism, a show I did back in Charleston last summer. One involved the Mongol Hordes invading the holler just west of Charleston, up this road past the Glen Ferris Inn where we used to go for special Sunday dinners, then up a windy mountain road to a place called The Mystery Hole, this strange tourist trap, full of weird shit. That place always fascinated my brother and me, but my father would never stop there, in spite of our pleas. Once I got my driver’s license, it was one of the first places we all went to, stoned, of course!
There is a Bongwater song about The Mystery Hole. Actually, most of the Bongwater stuff is about West Virginia. I wrote almost all the stories and poems that would later become lyrics to Bongwater songs there when I was on vacation from the East Village during the ’80s. The LP Too Much Sleep is nearly all West Virginia; the song “No Trespassing” and “Junior” are all West, by gawd. And I actually had a “Psychedelic Sewing Room” when I was about twelve or thirteen.
ZB: Do you want to say anything about Bowie and Prince passing and what they meant to you?
AM: I so regret never seeing Prince live. Thankfully, I did get to see James Brown at the Irving Plaza in 1981 or ’82. I got to give him flowers at the end of his show. He gave me a big bear hug and a kiss and covered me with his sweat, it was glorious! But Prince, gosh, why didn’t I make more of an effort? You always think people like that will be around for a while. A major loss for me. I deeply regret not getting to see Jeff Buckley live. He was one we all thought would be around much longer. Regarding Bowie, I just saw Tony Visconti and Woody Woodmansey on their Holy Holy Tour doing the entire Bowie album The Man Who Sold the World. Incredible, the musicianship was extraordinary! I love seeing people in their older years kicking ass. They’ve honed their skills to a razor-sharp sushi knife that cuts deep and wide!
All my personal David Bowie stories will be going into the memoir, well, maybe not all, but who knows? Oh yes, there are some good ones! His death was quite a psychic jolt, but I had heard for years that he was ill, so it wasn’t a complete surprise. And yet, his death hit those of us who are a certain age and sensibility the way the death of a parent affects you. That is no exaggeration. It was the death of our youth in a lot of ways, pretty heavy for the Peter Pan generation. I have to say I felt that years before, when I heard Mick Ronson had died. Certainly, these kinds of passings remind us acutely of our own mortality and that time is tick, tick, ticking and then it just stops. That’s too freaky for our kinetic minds to handle. He still visits me in my dreams, though not as much as before. When it happens he looks a lot like an Alex Grey DMT painting! Bowie will forever be The Cosmic Man.
ZB: It’s as if Bowie seemed to use his art to explore his own inner realities as The Cosmic Man archetype, and we were just along for the ride.
AM: Yes, absolutely! Which is why he was one of several who defined what an artist can be, who defined what an artist is, for me. I’d like to put together an entire book of all my Bowie Dreams, especially if we can’t get the funding to make more episodes of AMDPT. But honestly, I’ve gotta give the Bowie material a rest. I did a few shows singing his songs, before he released The Next Day and no one was doing his stuff, which culminated in this show I did at SFMOMA in 2011 about both Bowie and Jobriath subtitled The Rock Star as Shaman, Myth Maker and Ritual Sacrifice. It was to illustrate the ritualistic nature of idols, and how we have to back away from this, or it will kill us and them.
It was a way to enjoy the Bowie songbook but also tell the story of Jobriath, the first openly gay rocker, glam or otherwise, that suffered a terrible fall from grace due to Hype and the ugliness of the Success/Failure ritual which kills youths as surely as the Aztec high priests killed them at the altar of Chichen Itza. So I kinda got Bowie out of my system, so to speak, in that show, while also eulogizing and celebrating the forgotten music and life of a “failed” artist who deserved better: Jobriath. That’s what I see theater and, if we must “performance art” as: a ritual cleansing; a form of individual and collective therapy besides an excuse to get out of the house and have some laughs! We first celebrated Bowie as a God, then sacrificed him . Whacking a piñata tricked out as Ziggy Stardust, which was enormous fun. This was to facilitate the resurrection of Jobriath, who could now metaphorically live again, through these surrogate rituals, and overcome the bullshit that destroyed his spirit! There was a lot more to it than that, it was a semi-religious experience. I did a baptism, gave communion to the crowd gluten-free wafers, by the way, this was San Francisco, after all! The whole thing was a wild ritualistic hoe-down.
ZB: I agree that musicians take on the Cosmic Man or Anti-Hero archetype, who act as a catalyst for us in our attempts to understand each other and ourselves in the collective unconscious. Archetypes are the universal language for “the artist as storyteller,” which you talk about as a big part of your work.
AM: I love the archetypes, they explain everything! Have you seen the documentary The Way of The Dream? It was made by the son of Jungian writer Marion Woodman. He interviews Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz who was a close colleague of Jung himself. Von Franz does incredible dream analysis, there is an analysis of a Marilyn Monroe dream that will blow your mind! I’ve actually flirted with the idea of going to the Jung Institute and taking classes. I’d rather be a Jungian analyst than an actress at this point; a good thing to do in one’s old age, I can wear a caftan and heavy jewelry! Actually, like most people in this Business we call Show, my interest in theater and acting stems from a deeper interest in the psyche and a fascination with human behavior. But only a handful of actresses get to explore the full spectrum of character in movies and TV. Theater offers better choices, but I’d rather create my own.
ZB: What were some of your early experiences with this; musicians and artists as storytellers?
AM: My mother was definitely the first story teller in my life. She would read to me before bed the usual “Wynken, Blynken and Nod” but then Mother Goose, the Brothers Grimm, and also some rather sophisticated fare. I still have the old illustrated book of Greek mythology she read to me and get this, she read Beowulf to me as a bedtime story when I was six! I was terrified to swim in lakes from an early age because of that; terrified of Grendel. The other storyteller was the television. Everyone my age was parked in front of the TV. My earliest heroes and influences were Bugs Bunny, Soupy Sales and Captain Kangaroo, Rocky and Bullwinkle. And let’s not forget Walt Disney. TV in the 1950s and ‘60s was a wondrous Pandora’s Box, plus there were all these snake-handling, strychnine, atonal gospel singers and backwoods preachers on the local TV and radio in West Virginia that I was fascinated with from the get-go. And of course, the Bible: archetypical storytelling at its finest! Also, Chiller Theater, I loved monster movies and The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. In fact, I ended up having so many nightmares after I watched Outer Limits that my mother forbade it, so I learned how to be crafty real fast and told her I was going over to a friend’s house to play, then convince them to put on the Outer Limits. My brother and I loved science fiction and especially anything with Ray Harryhausen animation. Anything with the Greek myths was a hit with us! And Jules Verne! We ate it all up, with relish!
ZB: I love how you said that in your portrayal of so many female archetypes through your art, it liberates you and how in society, women tend to be confined to only a few. Will you explain why women are so defined by these limiting archetypal roles in society?
AM: Women are absolutely imprisoned by just one or two archetypes. Guess which two? Especially actresses. That’s why you don’t see me act much anymore. Besides the fact that the profession is horrifically competitive and positively Sisyphean in terms of what little return there actually is for your time and investment. Really, except for a few roles that I can count on one hand, most have been as confining as the Spanx they made me wear! Usually I pursue it because I want to stay eligible for the SAG health insurance, where you have to earn a certain amount to be on the plan. But nobody wants to pay anyone anything anymore, in acting or any of the arts, so I’d rather focus on what I do have control of, and be a creative artist on my own terms. That doesn’t mean to say I’m not ready to learn my lines and show up! I just ain’t gonna sit around waiting for the phone to ring…
ZB: Do you see your art and performances as a kind of psychological tool for your own growth? Or as a kind of feminism and activism?
AM: Oh, yes, without a doubt. If I didn’t put on shows I would’ve died from god knows what. While others were getting hooked on heroin back in the day, performance was my drug. Plus, all these performances are a way to make sense out of a shit-ass crazy world! Not to mention the jumble of one’s own psyche. I can only hope anything I’ve done has helped someone else along the line. When I see a performer like Patti Smith or Diamanda Galas or a band like L7 who are on tour again, or gosh, so many people, too many to list, the very act of them being out there and doing it, is a political act. Call it “feminist” or “activist” or whatever, it’s the act of giving everything you got in the act of living life, and it’s all inspiring in that sense!
ZB: Which of the characters you’ve performed as, inspired by archetypes, were your favorite?
AM: Probably the best character I ever played was Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker. I was sixteen! This was for the Kanawha Players, a local community theater in my hometown. Decades later, in my fifties, I played the title character of “Liz” in Amy and David Sedaris’s play The Book of Liz. I was in the L.A. premiere of the play several years ago. Both are about the quintessential hero’s journey. Helen Keller finds her way out of the darkness with the help of a teacher who literally helps her find her “voice”, a way to communicate and express what has up to that point been denied her. I also liked playing Miriam, a home-shopping-club hostess who has a breakdown or breakthrough in an independent movie called Woman’s Picture, made by Memphis-based filmmaker Brian Pera. Miriam is being phased out of her job due to ageism. Her mother is dying. She finally comes to terms with the fact that her relationship sucks; it all comes crashing down, which allows her to throw off her false self and be open to a new path towards what Jung would call “individuation.” It’s not unlike Dante’s journey through the underworld. In fact, I did a show in 1981 at The Kitchen called After Dante that was this exact thing, although I knew nothing of Carl Jung at the time. But all of us have these archetypes in us, and all of us must take that hero’s journey in our own unique ways.
ZB: With the Tree of Life, the Fool’s Journey, and the passage through the Dark Night of the Soul, I see artists as beacons, the lights who help lead us through this journey and out of the darkness. They illuminate the world with revelations, the way you work with satire as a form of illumination.
AM: I am so into the Tree of Life, the Scandinavian version. Every now and then I google images for Yggdrasil, damn, those images are so cool! “The Well of Urd,” baby! Yes, I agree: artists are usually the ones whose journeys are in blazing technicolor, which help those who see in black-and-white or in only black or white! Artists have the high-powered flashlights, often embedded in their heads! The more anguished the artist, the brighter the light, although the batteries may die out sooner. But I think everyone takes the journey in their own way, artists are simply more colorful. And they are, more often than not, the stand-ins, the sacrificial lambs, the piñatas which have to be smashed so the populace can get the candy!
ZB: This responsibility on the artist to illuminate society is a heavy one, so many self-medicate to cope and this can lead to their demise. Artists and musicians are hyper-sensitive, more aware than the average person; they feel more, are more perceptive, live with intensity. A good artist has to learn how to be a good escape artist, too.
AM: Indeed! Even though his reasons were probably health-related, I found Bowie’s reclusiveness very inspiring. That he managed to carve out a sober private life for himself, after the madness of the seventies and eighties and he could continue to create, but in a very private way, a very wise move. I guess he went from Cosmic Man archetype to Wise Old Man archetype? Our culture, and certainly the youth-obsessed social media, blog, internet culture, does not value Wise Old anything. But I sure do! So Bowie’s latter years end up inspiring me just as much, if not more, than the early ones, actually, much more. I liked that last song “Lazarus” and the video for it, more than almost anything he’d ever done, certainly within the last few decades. It wasn’t mired in obfuscation; I felt the masks had all been dropped and he was letting us in deeper than he ever had before. Or could.
ZB: The Hermit as the Wise Old Man archetype is incredibly important during our journey, the Fool’s Journey.
AM: Ah yes, the Hermit. I’m totally digging my inner Hermit! And the Fool’s Journey: boy, does that ever sum up my life! [laughs] But every Fool is a Hero and every Hero a Fool, right? However, it’s the Magician I’m most keenly interested in manifesting more of and the Goddess! The Magician-Goddess and certainly Magician-Goddesses like Patti Smith, Diamanda Galas and Isadora Duncan and Bowie too, at his most androgynous, who have lit the pathway. Both are roles I hope to do justice to.
ZB: That is why the Alchemical Wedding in Spiritual Alchemy, is so fascinating, this idea of melding the masculine and feminine within us, to create wholeness, what Jung called the “individuation” process that results in integration, the concept of a perfect Third Being/Mind.
AM: Well, Bowie certainly did that: melded the feminine and masculine. Patti Smith does that, too. Actually, many unsung artists do. Antony, now Anohni. It was fascinating how the dolls in AMDPT took on different archetypes, which I guess were just aspects of my personality, quite by accident, although Jung said that nothing is accidental. By simply naming them and giving them particular voices, they suddenly become the Waif/Orphan, the Mother, the Lover, the Sage, the Magician, the Warrior. I think anyone whose personal history involves any kind of trauma will bring out the Warrior, favoring an aggressiveness usually associated with masculinity. I’m seeing Diana with her bow and arrow, Athena with her spear and shield, the Valkyries.
ZB: Which characters you performed as were based on the Warrior archetype? Female Warrior archetypes are greatly missing in society.
AM: Well, I’ve played more “bitch boss lady” characters on TV and movies than I would care to name. Women of authority are too often portrayed in the mainstream entertainment world as Medusas or Ice Queens. I’ve riffed on that subject in many of my performances, and in an essay or two. That’s why I loved playing “Liz” in the Sedaris’s play: she was more of the Innocent archetype who escapes her oppressive community. She is an Amish-type woman the Sedarises hilariously called the Squeamish, entering the outside world where she learns how to be autonomous, to break free of her old roles, and individuate as a whole person. She, like Helen Keller, learns a new language that lets her express her true inner self, the classic Jungian Hero’s Journey as told through the brilliant Sedaris Mind!
I used Giulietta Masina’s character from La Strada as the guiding spirit of the character. I loved that role; it’s a great, fully-realized older woman’s part, right up there with Mother Courage [Brecht]. The character I played in Woman’s Picture is definitely a Warrior Woman archetype. I saw even the most “bitchy boss” roles I was asked to play as the Warrior archetype. I created elaborate backstories for every one of them; they all had a lot to overcome. Of course, the end result or final cut may not have shown all or even any of those subtle shadings, but at least I had a foundation of something that resembled integrity to stand on when I had to report to set. Woman’s Picture was definitely one of the good projects. Brian Pera is a very smart guy. He was doing a contemporary riff on women’s pictures from the 1940s and ’50s, with some of Fassbinder thrown in. Douglas Sirk, of course, was the king.
ZB: Fellini was a master at depicting archetypes.
AM: Yes, he was! Alfred Jarry was an early hero of mine; I discovered him in college, as so many young thespians do. I love his quote, “Clichés are the armature of the Absolute.” I had that quote on the program for the After Dante show at The Kitchen which I did in 1981, along with an etching of a set from an old medieval morality play.
Giulietta Masina is my spirit animal! Nights of Cabiria saved my life; I saw it during a very low period. I have never sobbed so hard than I did when watching the end of that film for the first time. If she could smile and laugh through her tears while joining that parade of revelers at the end, then so could I! Again: the Hero’s Journey. Every story is about it!
ZB: I can see you as the female Alfred Jarry in a way, addressing absurdities in society.
AM: That is the best compliment Ever!
ZB: Your performances have been described as Neo-Dada theater. Many of your peers were inspired by the Theater of the Absurd, and the Surrealists. In honor of Dada100, if you were to put on a Dada production, what would it be? Who would be the Ubu Roi of today?
AM: Well, Donald Trump is the obvious choice. Kim Jong-Un a close second. Putin is a different kettle of fish, more Emperor Ming in the old FLASH GORDON serials. But also the so-called liberal billionaires, the “tech elite”, the people who put on that Burning Man for the 1%. I’d stage Ubu Roi like a TED talk. Steve Jobs would be an ideal updated Pere Ubu. Stage it like one of those Apple “innovation” rallies.
ZB: You’ve talked about ageism in performance, especially how bad it is in LA. Have you read Diamanda Galas’ essay “The Greek Vampire: A Threat To The Enemies of Artists,” in which she confronts, aggressively, ageism in music?
AM: I haven’t! I gotta read that. Ageism is so rampant. Actually one of the songs on my new CD addresses that. It’s called “Relieved to be Irrelevant.” I was forever seeing older artists, usually performers, being trolled with the accusation that they were “no longer relevant”. And it always irked me! Even when leveled at people I didn’t necessarily feel like defending. Because it was usually connected to age. I thought, “Jesus, everybody is irrelevant! And everybody is relevant!” Let’s take it to the quantum level: it’s all one, so let’s stop tearing each other down. Then I thought, “Wow, I’m relieved to be irrelevant in a world of Kardashians and American Idol.”
ZB: With social media rewiring our brains, no one is a critical thinker anymore. It’s created this world of superficiality and hive mind. People who never cared or needed the approval of others are now desperately seeking it on social media, this is really disheartening. It’s so strange to me: this self-policing and self-censorship, so called trigger warnings. We’re all our own Big Brother now. Because so much of your work is about spontaneity and engagement, how do you feel about what the internet is doing to society?
AM: Social media and the internet has its uses, but it’s highly addictive, and a major distraction from doing more nourishing things like watching the birds in the birdbath, my favorite pastime of late. I agree with you: I believe it’s rewiring our brains and not in a good way. We are our own Big Brother. It’s already like the East German Stassi: with people public-shaming others and ratting them out about all sorts of things. But that’s the price of “freedom.” As long as it all remains free! But is it? Doesn’t Apple and Google and Amazon own all of us now? But we are always the most effective prison wardens of our own minds. So one must constantly be vigilant regarding how any ideology or stale programming and old habituations take over our thoughts and behavior. I do think the pendulum will swing, though it always does. But where to, who can say? I rarely use Twitter and I’m not on Instagram but I think I have to get on it all so I can try to sell some CDs, so I can make some of my money back, if for no other reason that I need it to finance the next one!
ZB: I compare social media to a Panopticon.
AM: Panopticon, yes, exactly!
ZB: What is your opinion of artists who use the internet to create, or, as their platform? Do you think this has taken the “soul” out of art? It feels like the internet has killed ingenuity and the spontaneity you feel is important to make art genuine.
AM: Well, I think one has to accept that the internet or any new technology, is a new medium that any artist can use is any way they want. People leveled similar accusations at television and movies before that, and the telephone and telegraph and steam engine and maybe even the wheel! This is all part of our present evolution and how we use and abuse it is up to each individual. Actually it connects back to something Patti Smith was talking about the other night: that every artist has to remain true to their soul and not worry about whether they achieve the kind of “recognition” the outside world deigns to bestow. Not so easy when everything around us tells us we are worthless without fame or fortune!Maybe in that way social media is “good.” Everyone can feel they have a voice, everyone has their own “network” now. How this shakes down remains to be seen, but I think it’s good people wrested the power away from the old cabals. Of course, now The Who song comes to mind: “Meet the new cabal, same as the old cabal”!
ZB: Will you talk about the Club 57 show you’re co-organizing for the Museum of Modern Art?
AM: The Museum of Modern Art is going to put on a film series and gallery show celebrating Club 57, the “neo-Dada” club space I managed form 1979-1981 and performed in off and on until its demise in 1983. The show initially began as a film series curated by John Epperson, a.k.a. Lypsinka, who was a regular member there. The film curator Ron Magliozzi asked John to host a film series and after several discussions it was finally decided to make it about the films shows at Club 57. I was brought in at that time and encouraged them to do an accompanying gallery show and soon became the co-curator of said show. I had organized a show featuring art, video, photographs and ephemera along with Kenny Scharf for a gallery/kunsthalle-style place called Royal T in Culver City in 2011. The show was called “East Village West.” This MoMA show will be a much better organized and thorough version of that, it will open Spring 2017. By now it’s become quite a show. MoMA is doing a catalogue for it as well! And, I plan to put together a limited-edition art book of all the calendars, flyers and newsletters I made, as well as choice photos and memories. It will be mostly a visual book.
ZB: Can you describe some of the themes of the performances you did there?
AM: Oh there were so many, The Stay-Free Mini Prom, where those of us who skipped our high school proms threw a twisted, alternative prom; Putt-Putt Reggae, an evening of miniature golf in a Jamaican shanty town made form cardboard boxes, that we dragged in from the street, while dub music played; The Rites of Spring Bacchanal, where Pulsallama debuted and magic mushroom punch was served; Radio Free Europe, which indulged my obsession with life behind the Iron Curtain and debuted my Soviet pop chanteuse, Anoushka; the list goes on and on!
ZB: Will you talk about how you’ve addressed in your art and performances coping with the trauma of loss due to AIDS, especially the loss of your brother? How can people cope with the continued loss of loved ones to AIDS?
AM: Personally, my performances were the only way I could cope. I created so much with people who were HIV-positive and who have since died. It was their way of coping too, we had to laugh. We had to keep the show going, we got so much joy from it; it was the only life-affirming way out of the horror of it all. And there was activism, of course: so many benefits, so many ACT UP marches, so much rage against Reagan expressed in art as well as political activism. The voices got louder, people were not going to let Reagan sweep AIDS under the rug or make it a joke for his smarmy press conferences. It’s important to express the anger, the pain, the hurt, the confusion, the TRAUMA, even if it’s in roundabout ways.
Because my brother was so adamant about not telling anyone about his illness, I had to keep it a secret. I had several people close to me who wanted me to keep their secrets. That will kill a person, but you have to respect another’s wishes. So, many of my shows then were about expressing the anguish but not in a direct way. I let the subconscious run the show then. Bongwater was so much about the pain, the confusion, the psychosis of the time. People had so many different ways of dealing with it, imperfectly, to be sure. The fear factor then was off the charts! It was incurable, an instant death sentence, and no one knew how it was transmitted.
It is painful to look back and take in the enormity of all that. I think a lot of us who lived through those awful plague years are somewhat on the other side of “PTSD.” I’ve heard that from others. Now we are all able to talk about it without falling down into a black hole of grief and despair. That is yet another part of the journey: getting on the other side of pain, and letting wisdom rule. I lived in a major state of disassociation while everyone was dying, along with a host of other defense mechanisms that proved to be more detrimental in the long run. I do feel I am finally on the other side of all that, but boy it took a long time! Therapists can help; I recommend therapy to anyone brave enough to begin the deep exploration of self-examination. But choose wisely! 12 step programs are great, too. The 12 steps are basically Jungian; he helped devise the “spiritual solution.” I did some EMDR [a form of psychotherapy devised by Francine Shapiro] as well. I think that helped.
ZB: Will you talk about the art you want to create out of the answering-machine messages left behind by those you lost to AIDS?
AM: I have wanted to do something with all the answering machine messages I’ve saved since the ’80s. I really stopped saving them after answering machines stopped using cassettes, because it wasn’t as easy to do. Some of the earliest ones got lost, but a few of those are on the Bongwater records. One was from Klaus Nomi when I had called him to see if I could visit him. He called back and said he really couldn’t have visitors; that people meant well but it made him sicker than he already felt. It was heartbreaking.
I have a lot of messages from many, many people who have since died, including my brother. I actually haven’t listened to them much since I first heard them. I listened to some about a year after my brother died and it was so painful I couldn’t continue. I might be able to listen now—I’m not sure. I have a box full of those, as well as several boxes full of mixtapes people made me in the ’80s and ’90s. Those mixtapes, now, oh my god, vintage, are so special!
ZB: Do you think that we’ve lost a lot of our humanity via our use of communication through technology? We never use the human voice now that everyone uses texting. We’ve lost that intimacy that the human voice creates, like with those answering machine messages.
AM: Possibly. I know that when I take a few days off all internet activity, I feel liberated and able to get in touch with aspects of myself I feel haven’t been in full flower since childhood! Certainly since the days before iPhones, even before answering machines or Walkmans! That’s why I love, need, to go to the desert on a regular basis. We don’t have wi-fi where we live there, and there are so many places, like in that extraordinary national park, that don’t get any cell reception at all, I love it! On the other hand, the new technology has allowed me to connect with people I never knew were touched by a song or something I once did. And I learn more about others and what is happening in the world. There are pros and cons and, like so much in the world, we have to find a balance.
ZB: I like how you have said that much of the performances you did in the 1970s and ’80s were more about just having a laugh with friends, and the fun of entertaining each other and if the audience enjoyed it, so much the better.
AM: Oh yes! I always created shows, at least early on, with friends, just so we could make each other laugh. Especially at Club 57 and all the ’80s club performances. But now I also see that many of those performances were ritual exorcisms and ways to process experiences and shared memories of the collective unconscious that formed the cultural sensibilities and the rebellions against other sensibilities at the time. My friend William Fleet Lively, who also passed away from AIDS, wrote a lot of that early material with me. We laughed harder than I have ever laughed in my life.
I can see now that we, and many others in the club scene and beyond, used theater as a ritual and a way to keep us from going batty in a mainstream world we wanted no part of. But also, as a way to just share the joy of living, the pure joy of existing and just being in each other’s company. That to me is what Club 57 was. Here we all were in the bleakness of New York in the late ’70s, with the burned-out buildings and the crime and the abject poverty, and many of us feeling alienated by a culture that didn’t accept us, or by parents that were checked out or abusive, or by any of the many things that turn kids to art or punk rock. It was the “Island of Misfit Toys” and we needed to find joy in the creative act or wither and die trying to “fit in” with a world that produced Charlie’s Angels and gave us the Ronald Reagan presidency. In a nihilistic landscape, Club 57 was a hub of optimism, often snarky, sarcastic optimism but optimistic, nevertheless! That’s the way I saw it, at least.
ZB: Do you feel there are any taboos today to confront or have fun with, like there were during the 1970s and ’80s, when conservatism and censorship were so rampant?
AM: Oh sure, there are plenty of taboos today that would make the unbridled mad, mad, mad, off-the-hook D.I.Y. don’t-tell-me-what-do creativity of those times impossible.
First of all, there is the regressive left, what a crazy phrase, I feel like a Fox commentator even using it, but it’s a convenient shorthand, policing everyone for how they say things. But with the internet and instant-shaming and witch-hunting going on today, this stifles the urge to connect with a deeper primal energy, and do things in a messy, who cares if this works or not, or offends or doesn’t offend or whatever way. Because a) everyone is forced to fucking hustle every moment of the day and night in order to push their “brand” and try to make a living. Because b) everything now is so overpriced; real estate is way overvalued, and everyone is so obscenely underpaid.
I think that’s why so many people are moving to Joshua Tree, which kinda bums me out because all these monied folks are coming in and buying the shacks and turning them into airbnbs, so it’s gonna go the way of the East Village and Silver Lake. I watched both of those places that I called my home get transformed from affordable “edges of the universe” into grotesque advertisements for the Luxury Bohemian Lifestyle™. Joshua Tree’s only saving grace is that now all the airbnbs are being robbed by tweaker gangs. But I don’t want to be looking down the wrong end of 12-gauge, either!
I’m no longer so concerned with parsing the media or satirizing pop culture as I was back in the day, maybe because it’s all jumped a flotilla of sharks? As I am in exploring the human psyche through dreams and the collective subconscious. I’m older now and want my creative energies to go towards more divine pursuits. I’ve had enough of the Ridiculous and the Obscene. That doesn’t mean to say The Trickster is going away, she’s here to stay!
ZB: With gentrification in cities destroying the creative community, and money coming in so artists’ work becomes business rather than art, where could a new community of bohemians and artists thrive again? How can an artist find a “sacred” space today, especially if they live in these now gentrified communities?
AM: I think people are finding ways to create thriving communities all over the place, but usually outside of the big cities. Even those of us in the big cities are navigating our way around the negatives to keep on keeping on! I love Joshua Tree because the artist community there is much like it was in the East Village before Reaganomics took hold. Shari Elf is a perfect example of the kind of “pure” artist I admire, everyone should know about Shari! She has a gallery compound space in JT called ART QUEEN that also houses the “World Famous Crochet Museum.” Her art is made from found objects and bits and bobs that remind me so much of the stuff my Grandma used to make. Noah Purifoy’s Art Site is another joy to behold. He is a renowned “outsider artist” who created (he is deceased) what is now called Dada Junk Art. I love all that stuff! So I think of Joshua Tree as a sacred space… though it is getting discovered—and we all know what happens next! I just hope some of these city slickers will buy some of Shari’s art…
ZB: Much of your life and work was documented in The Art of Living: An Oral History of Performance Art by Dominic Johnson. But will we see an autobiography from you any time soon? Have any of your opinions or views changed since this book came out?
AM: Dominic Johnson’s book is the most articulate and thorough in terms of presenting my past, although it, like any history, is selective. He has interviews with a lot of unsung artists who I find fascinating, and who live their lives as art. I highly recommend that book for anyone interested in outré performance. I have plans for a memoir and have to finish the proposal soon; it will be more specific to my time in NYC in the early ’80s. An autobiography is much too much, plus, I feel my best years are ahead of me! I gotta focus on living and creating more, so I can have a boffo ending to the story!