Penny Arcade: part 1

Penny Arcade's provocative approach to performance has made her appear as an archetypal Live Artist: unafraid of addressing controversial issues (her response to the mainstreaming of queer culture was to participate in an early Gay Shame event), rejecting the props and sets and formats of theatre (Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! is more like a club night) and determinedly sticking to her personal agenda, she was there in the 1960s when pop art was encouraging artists to get out of the usual boxes. 


But unlike many countercultural figures, her attitude has not softened in the past decades. Coming to wider attention in the 1980s, Arcade has both a strong sense of history and an uncompromising commitment to personal authenticity.

"I began working in the Playhouse of The Ridiculous at seventeen," she says. "This was the original glitter/glam, pre punk, queer, political, rock and roll experiemental, improvisational theatre of NY’s late 1960s: so when I started to create my own work I was twenty seven. I spent from twenty one to thirty one THINKING of what that might be."

Arcade's first experience of New York soon led to her falling into Warhol's circle: she appeared in his Women in Revolt but soon fled the scene to travel around Europe. It wasn't until 1981 that she returned to New York, and began performing her own monologues. She also performed alongside Quentin Crisp and well as becoming part of the post punk bohemian community. Her 2002 work, New York Values examined the commodification of rebellion, a process that the mainstream has become adept at, transforming, for example, the ferocity of punk into another branded version of pop.

Although Arcade could be said to have defined the nature of performance art, she maintains a strong sense of respect for the previous generation of artists. "So someone like me had the standards for inquiry, experimentation and excellence from the very brave, highly original self individuated older artists whose work I respected and whose standards I wanted to emulate," she says. "I wanted to copy their standards for excellence not their WORK not Their VOICE. The entire point was to find my own voice."

The connection between community and aesthetics has never been ignored by Arcade: she has been part of a project to document the artists of the Lower East Side, and is clear that it is both politics and community that inspires art. "One  can’t separate the advent of 80’s performance art from the political and artistic culture of NY’s East Village/Lower East Side," she explains. "There was a lineage then…there wasn’t this awful mono-generational, erasure of history."

"In the early 80s performance was the domain of women, queers and minorities. I had come from the highly experiemental period of the 60s - influenced by artists who had been experimenting since the 40s, 50s and early 60s. Work that today would still be highly original."

"The truth is the genre that I helped create , solo performance was based very much on what I saw in fragments from older artists like Taylor Mead, HM Koutoukas…people who drew from their own imaginations. I was lucky enough to be in an artistic community that had SELF INDIVIDUATION as its key element and also had a thriving AUDIENCE that wanted to be there and watch you walk that tight rope. You cannot have new art forms if you do not have the audience that midwives these forms with their attention and support."

"I waited a long time to start performing my solo stuff , I was thirty four when I did my first solo show and that stuff was all improvisation, drawing from my natural ability as a story teller, unscripted, out on the high wire. I never wrote anything down for seven years!!! And then I burst into flames as a writer and wrote four full length shows when I was forty and it just kept pouring out. I think this process is refered to as priming the pump!"

"I focused always on seeking the answer to this question : What am I seeking to express?"


15- 23 December, The Albany