Performance Art

"A put-on is not necessarily a put-down. I liken what I do sometimes to a life game, as an adventure in absurdity, an adult fairytale in which I engage people emotionally and intellectually. The audience gets involved and has to decide for itself what's going on and what's to be learned from the experience. Everybody is a participant."

- Alan Abel

Don't ask me to define it, but some of the items in my collection seem to belong to the category of "performance art." Renegotiations of the social contract out of bananæsthetic desire or some less-easily-defined motive.

Some artists have specialized in the prank. Some who stand out in this regard are Joey Skaggs, Alan Abel, the team of Coyle & Sharpe, Luther Blissett, Michael Moore, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, Pedro Carvajal, Joe Matheny, and Paul Krassner. I notice a certain gender bias here, but nothing the Guerrilla Girls can't fix.

Won't go any further without a tip of the hat to Orson Welles' radio show The War of the Worlds which gripped the nation in media-hypnotized panic in 1938.

In San Francisco, a man by the name of Brian Anthony Young impersonated a state fish and game warden for three months, checking licenses, issuing citations and confiscating fish. He said that "boredom and drugs" led him to perform the inspections on more than 200 anglers, boats, restaurants and stores.

Brian G. Hughes struck it rich in the paper box and banking biz and decided to spend his cash and leisure time messing with people and their attitudes toward conspicuous displays of wealth: entering alley cats in cat shows (and winning!), dropping packages of glass jewels in front of Tiffany's, that sort of thing.

Here's a good story: A student at MIT spent her summer days at the Harvard football field, wearing a black-and-white striped shirt and tossing bird seed around while blowing a whistle. A few months later, football season began, and when the referee blew the whistle for the first home game, the field was suddenly covered with birds.

Five stars to a Mr. Lozier, who conceived of a brilliant hack in the early 1800s. He managed to convince a sizable crowd of New Yorkers that Manhattan was in imminent danger of tipping over under the weight of sprawling construction. After a few days, Lozier came up with the plan of cutting the island loose, towing it out into the Atlantic, turning it around and reattaching it to the mainland. He enlisted (I'm not kidding, folks) hundreds of people in this wacky scheme.

The Pieman (in various guises) has thrown pies at such targets as Bill Gates, Willie Brown, Oscar de la Renta, Milton Friedman, William Shatner, Maharaji, Howard Jarvis, William F. Buckley, Prince Charles, Anita Bryant, Daniel Moynihan, Quentin Kopp, G. Gordon Liddy, Andy Warhol, E. Howard Hunt, Eldridge Cleaver, Randall Terry, William Colby, and Jerry Brown. "We want to give people who are so overwhelmed by the terror of modern life the opportunity to laugh in the face of people who are destroying us," said a Biotic Baking Brigade member known as "Agent Apple."

Special categories of hoax performance art have been etched out by practitioners of The Great God Hoax and by magicians and miracle mongers.

P.T. Barnum was ever-creative in his use of ritual performance to manipulate behavior and belief. Points for tummult go to The Rensselaer Drop Squad for relentless dropping of big heavy things down tall staircases.

The Solid Gold Chart Busters have taken on guerrilla cell phone destruction as a hobby. View movie clips of their work on-line - they promise that "[a]ll the people concerned are real members of the public and no one was refunded for the loss of their mobile telephone."

Talk radio call-in shows are targeted by the performance artist-pranksters Goy Division, and football star-turned-actor O.J. Simpson targeted both the legal system and American racial politics in his brilliant satire, The O.J. Simpson Trial.

Sometimes it's very hard indeed to distinguish performance art from what is commonly labeled delusionary schizophrenic antics. What do you make of Rosie Ruiz and her non-victory at the 1980 Boston Marathon? Or the amazing claims of IdEAL ORDER Psychic TV.

William Topaz McGonagall made a name for himself as an undiscouragable author of awful poetry. Ronald M. Chroniak robbed a bank and then went outside and started handing out money to people, saying "I just robbed the bank; have a nice day," until his arrest.

Then there are those who want to carve a niche for their icon in the holy book of odd posterity: The Guinness Book of World Records. Recently spotted: Brad Hauter, 33, of Chicago, who's trying to drive across America on a Yard-Man Tractor lawnmower.

A hunter in Uganda was being sought by authorities upset over his habit of shooting gorillas with tranquilizer darts and then dressing them in clown suits.

People who transform their whole lives into performance art get special treatment in our Fake Folks and Impostors pages, but I'll highlight a handful here as well:

First and foremost was a fellow who called himself George Psalmanazar (his real name is lost to history). In the late 17th Century, George wandered around Europe pretending to be a cannibal prince from the exotic orient. He made up an alphabet and lectured widely about the pagan practices and exotic wildlife of his home nation, even teaching at Oxford on the subject. In 1704 he compiled these observations into the book "An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa."

When Psalmanazar died in 1763, his memoirs, in which he confessed to the decades-old hoax, were published. His life was revealed to have been one long work of amazing improvisational dramatic fiction.

One of my favorite performance artists was a San Franciscan named Joshua A. Norton who, in 1859, declared himself to be Emperor of the United States (and Protector of Mexico). The Emperor's visionary proclamations were printed up in the papers, his self-issued currency was often honored, he corresponded with other heads of state, and his renown was such that tens of thousands of people turned out at his funeral.

Lord Buckley, poet, performance artist, and hep cat, gets big points for spirit and inspiration, as does his fellow blue-blood Lady Hester Stanhope, the "Queen of the East."

Coyle & Sharpe
Coyle & Sharpe

Bill Gates get Pied
Bill Gates meets Pieman

Emperor Norton
Emperor Norton

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