The Homeless Critic Penny Arcade Blues

Hey Penny Arcade

Let me tell you, let me tell you... because I'll think you'll understand.

I'm sitting in the front row and I'm listening to you preach. And I know you are right, I know you're right.

Forgive me for being so rude, we haven't been introduced. I'm the Vile Arts, the homeless critic, known as the Ghost Derrida, Criticulous or when my hormones are high, Mad Cyril.

I'm sitting in the front row and I'm listening to you preach, and yeah. I know you are right.

But let me tell you, it's the homeless critic. It's voice I'm sure, a voice not ready to be silenced and I wonder what you think of critics. 

I mean, I wouldn't blame you, the quantifiers of aesthetic worth. They hold up passion to the light as if through a jeweller's eyepiece and pronounce.

Pronounce, not preach. And here's the expert opinion, a reading from the state of grace.

But I'm not like the other boys. I'm the homeless critic, I'm Mad Fucking Cyril and when I hear the objective truth, I pray to God to save me from delusion.

Because I'm not mean enough, not yet. People think that critics are mean, but a homeless critic is the meanest mother fucking you are going to meet. Set up a homeless man against a salary man, and see. One of them is fighting for survival, the other for comfort. 

Could be a homeless woman, could be a salary woman. We know some things go past gender now, don't we?

Some people have sex for pleasure, some people make love to reproduce. The homeless critic will seduce because it means night underneath a roof.

Who speaks with authority - you know. It's those outside.

Hey Penny Arcade, I want to hear you preach. I want you to say the thoughts I have, about the young adrift from history, the sinking of the human mind into the mire of advertising and the soft police state.

You said the 1960s were a police state. You said 2015 is 1984. You said you took acid for five years (hey, we both know that tolerance means you'd have felt nothing after a week of tripping unless you were on a tab to the power of 5 000 after about a year, but hell, the kids don't know). You speak truth and you speak it staring 
into their eyes.

I love you Penny Arcade, and I don't want to be safe either. But I'm homeless and I don't seem to have your address in my email, or your press release. 

Preach, Penny, preach.

I'd like to tell you because I think you'd understand.

Penny Arcade: Interview (Complete)

GKV: First of all, thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. I am sorry that they are a little long - and probably pretty dumb when I get round to actually asking a question. I am trying to get away from being too predictable in my questions. 
 
As I get older, I have started to become more and more obsessed with the idea that younger generations have less interest in the past than is necessary - especially in the case of performance art, which might be one of my first loves but seems stuck in a cycle of re-inventing the wheel (nudity gets "discovered" as a radical tactic every two to three years, I think). I am not saying there isn't good performance art, but it is starting to become a career path, rather than a place where the artist ends up when nothing else will quite encapsulate their work. 
 
That said. you were a performance artist before the genre existed - and then were instrumental, I think, in encouraging the cabaret revival. How would you describe the foundations of your performance work - and how did you end up creating a genre when you were working with people who, despite being experimental, still existed in fairly recognisable art forms?

Penny Arcade: I began working in the Playhouse of The Ridiculous at 17. 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 27. I spent from 21 to 31 THINKING of what that might be.

Younger artists today at completely at the mercy of the brainwashing they have received that rather than developing INTO artists, they are instantly artists after four years of art school and must immediately start making PRODUCT which naturally because they have little life experience can only mean that they immediately start stealing the ideas, modalities and often entire identites of  highly achieved artists and they think no one sees this! 

So we are left with a scene that is highly derivitive and this has been true since the early 90’s…so we are looking at twenty years of virtual stagnation. In the early 80s performance was the domaine of women, queers and minorities. I had come from the highly experiemental period of the 60’s influenced by artists who had been experimenting since the 40s , 50s and early 60s work that today would still be highly original.

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…there was a lineage then…there wasn’t this awful mono-generational, erasure of history.

So someone like me had the standards for inquiry, experiementation and excellence from the very brave, highly original self individuated older artists whose work I respected and whose standards I wanted to emulate.I wanted to copy their standards for excellence not their WORK not Their VOICE. The entire point was to find my own voice.

Remember we are talking about a dissident, outsider, highly individualistic culture which has now been cooked down and commodified into a fit in at all costs culture. I KNEW it was going to be hard, I knew I would fail, I knew I had to take real risks and that I had to have a rigorous inquiry.

The great Jack Smith said “These young people think art is made in fits of ecstacy! When making art is long , boring , tedious work.”  The truth is we were experimenting in the 80’s because there was no spotlight on us, there was nothing to get, there were no ‘gigs” except the ones we created ourselves. The focus was DEVELOPMENT not career yet if one would be honest there is no career without development. I see lots of work were the desperation to succeed is palpable..that is what I see on stage, not artistic seeking and sadly that will not result in a lifetime pursuit of your own development. 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 and I was lucky enough to be in an artistic community that had SELF INDIVIDUATION as it’s 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 34 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 4 full length shows when I was 40 and it just kept poring out. I think this process is refered to as priming the pump!

But to answer your question succinctly I focused always on seeking the answer to this question : What am I seeking to express?


 
GKV: Another category - although it is a category that likes to defy categorisation and gets me all excited about the failure of definitions - that gets used lazily these days seems to be "queer" - and while I am not happy to simply put you into a category, much of your work has challenged notions of "mainstream" identity. Has the battleground of identity changed during your career, or are the things worth discussing and fighting over much the same as twenty years ago?
 
Penny Arcade: The sad truth is that human nature doesn’t change. Every oppositional stance gets co-opted. Queer means you have no friends, have withstood a period of rejection, exclusion and ostracisation so profound that it marks you as an outsider forever. Today Queer means fitting in, being an insider and worst of all judging other people on THEIR sexual orientation. It is SO MUCH about fitting in. People talk about being gender queer and  yet are more gendered than ever!  The simple truth is that there is NO SUPPORT in the word for INDIVIDUALITY and some of us  are preternaturally ‘different” we can’t hide what we are. Quentin Crisp said to me “Miss Arcade , People like you and I have to work hard at being accepted.”

I know my own longing for acceptance and also how hard it is to come by and the price for fitting in is to pretzel yourself out of self recognition.

You know the adage “Write About What you Know?” Well, that is what I know about so that became the sphere of my work.


GKV: There is a strong sense of location in your work - it comes from, and explores, the culture of New York - in many ways, you have defined a certain sort of performance from the city. Is that circumstance, or is that sense of location important to you?

Penny Arcade: Well as am immigrant, factory girl from a small New England town, who was martyred for being different from the age of 11, NY was a true sanctuary for me and I got there and found out that it was for a whole lot of other people from everywhere, who escaped there to be able to breathe!

You need to understand – I didn’t “go” to NY, there was no plan, I was escaping a very painful , constricting enviorment and I just washed up on the streets of NY. So you think you are the only one suffering like this and then you start meeting lots of people JUST LIKE YOU , Same story different details, and these people are AMAZING! Damaged and wounded but brilliant and they are all trying to make sense of themselves and their lives by making art.

NY and the life I found there nurtured me, it was a harsh environment, one that accepted no bullshit, accepted no pose, one was forced to survive and thrive or  die..metaphorically, metaphysically but the truth is that I feel that sense of place , I look for that sense of place everywhere I am , because as you know where ever you go , there is always you . So I have been able to draw from that sense of place wherever I find myself. NY taught me HOW to do that..because like the song says “if you can make it there you can make it anywhere” but “make it” refers to survive and thrive not ‘become successful!” I am able to go to other cities and countries and talk about myself in and from those places..and in my work that is what I do.

I spent all summer in London, did 38 shows talking about myself in London, not myself in NY.
 
GKV: My own awareness of your work goes back to the early 2000s, when you appeared at Glasgow Ladyfest - you were more than happy to confront the audience then -   but has mostly been in terms of your influence (at least in the context of seeing performance), the most recent being Lajohnjoseph at the fringe this year. Are there any collaborations, or mentoring processes, that particularly stand out for you?

Penny Arcade: I came to Ladyfest Glashow expecting it to be full of working class Glasgow girls and it turned out none of the working class Glasgow girls I knew could afford to go or were even wanted!I confronted the audience because of that! It made me angry! I try to be as available as possible to younger artists, because people, artists did that for me when I was young. 

I work with people who need me, who are seekers, I am currently working with Raquel Alazan, a young 34 years old Spanish writer and performer who wrote a brilliant feminist piece on how pornography has absorbed our world called Porning The Planet . We have been working on it for 3 years. I have been shaping and directing the piece. I am also working, mentoring Theo Edmunds from Louisville Kentucky on a new piece of his about being queer in the back woods of Kentucky.
 
GKV: This is usually the question I ask after seeing a performance - sometimes in anguish, but other times in the hope of finding out how to keep going myself. Here, it's the latter. What keeps you making work in this way?
Penny Arcade: The simple answer is I have no other choice. It all comes down to that and to making the choice to continue, not knowing what will come next over and over.

Here is what my old friend Bobby Beers said to me
 
“So many people are obsessed about getting older and losing function as they get older but some things you get better at as you get older and making art is one of them.  And after you make art for about 30 years you can either do it or you can’t.  It is not a matter of being talented, of being promising, being bright, being precocious, being innovative. It’s about “Ok, well, can you just make the fucking art please? Just write the book, do the painting and in spite of everything, in spite of the chaos that is going on around us, when no one cares about my book, when no one cares about my painting, fine! I am making them because that is what I do. That is my function as a human.

I am the artist human and there have always been people like me and there always will be and for just no reason at all we write it down, take pictures  of it, paint it, dance about it, sing about it, whatever it is that they do and there’s no stopping them!”

I will say this to you and to everyone who reads your blog:

Notice your fears, your longings, your dreams, your nightmares. Face them as soon as possible because they will be with you always and the sooner you enter into a real relationship with all of yourself the better. Aim for a rigorous inquiry, a rigorous honesty with yourself. Respect your own development. Believe me, it is worth it because we all get stuck with ourselves for life. Amora Fati, the love of ones own fate. You have a fate you know? No one escapes that. Build the life you want, build the person you want to be. It is ok to have heroes , to understand how others have created themselves as humans and as artists but don’t just copy and hope for the outcome you want. Actively pursue your innate values because values must be grown by each of us and they are bought and paid for on the installment plan of life though our own experience. There is no one like you. Isn’t it wonderful? You are in competition with no one when you choose to develop yourself. But you have to choose this over and over. It never stops being an active choice. Ever.



The alternative Christmas show...

More Penny Arcade

As I get older, I have started to become more and more obsessed with the idea that younger generations have less interest in the past than is necessary. It might be the result of my education in Classics, which encourages the study of ideas across long historical cycles, or the desperation of an aging critic trying to claw back some authority in an age of instant gratification. Either way, my reliance on Wikipedia undermines any moral position I might hold on the matter, so I have to trust to other artists to justify my angst.

When I interviewed Penny Arcade, I did ask her about the way in which Live Art - which didn't really exist when her generation started to make it - has become ossified into a category. Part of the problem is critics like me, spending far too long trying to define every single performance into a genre, but there is a broader context. The professionalisation of all work - a post-graduate qualification is necessary these days to be a chef - is reflected in the arts and while I am reluctant to criticise academic institutions for offering opportunities to study the arts in a recognised context, the homogenisation of training, where a degree becomes an appropriate vehicle for dance training, is problematic. 

On a practical level, the skills of a dancer have no parity with those of an academic historian - not better, nor worse, but different. Penny Arcade, however, has more serious concerns. 

After explaining her own extended gestation period, Arcade contrasts this with the contemporary situation. "Younger artists today at completely at the mercy of the brainwashing they have received: that rather than developing INTO artists, they are instantly artists after four years of art school and must immediately start making PRODUCT which naturally because they have little life experience can only mean that they immediately start stealing the ideas, modalities and often entire identites of highly achieved artists and they think no one sees this!"

Having expressed my worries about a Live Art scene that appears to reinvent itself in short cycles - a lack of historical perspective leading to the same "original" ideas appearing every few years, I had asked Arcade why this might be the case. She continues.

"So we are left with a scene that is highly derivitive and this has been true since the early 90s. So we are looking at twenty years of virtual stagnation. 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."

Arcade herself has always been concerned with history - the revival of Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! is a reminder of how she has been making queer theatre since the 1990s, and challenges the notion that contemporary performance is stuck in the present - and she quickly responds to my moaning about getting old by being positive about the process.

“So many people are obsessed about getting older and losing function as they get older but some things you get better at as you get older and making art is one of them," she says. "And after you make art for about thirty years you can either do it or you can’t. It is not a matter of being talented, of being promising, being bright, being precocious, being innovative. It’s about: 'Ok, well, can you just make the fucking art please?' Just write the book, do the painting and in spite of everything, in spite of the chaos that is going on around us, when no one cares about my book, when no one cares about my painting, fine! I am making them because that is what I do. That is my function as a human."

The Albany, 15- 23 December 2012

Me and Penny Arcade (triptych)

Yes, it's the weekly Vile existential crisis! We don't really need to go into the exact reasons behind the dour face and the moaning emails to friends who would rather be hearing about... well, anything rather than the doubts of a man who has set himself an impossible task. Let's just say I am disappointed that I didn't get into any of the categories for the Creative Scotland Awards...

On the positive side, I do have a massive interview with Penny Arcade, and I'll have enough material for another half a dozen articles before I decide to release the unadorned text. And I have been looking for a good place to put her final message to me - and the readers of the blog. I think it's perfectly framed by a spot of my misery. 

Getting something like this in my inbox is thrilling: I have only ever seen Arcade perform once - but I reckon I can nip into The Albany on my way home for Christmas this year - but she is one of the personalities that fascinated me as I was being seduced into my love of performance-that-will-not-fit. When I opened this email, it was like having William Burrough's Words of Advice for Young People turn up with a new dedication, just for me.

I will say this to you and to everyone who reads your blog:
Notice your fears, your longings, your dreams, your nightmares. Face them as soon as possible because they will be with you always and the sooner you enter into a real relationship with all of yourself the better. 

Aim for a rigorous inquiry, a rigorous honesty with yourself. Respect your own development. Believe me, it is worth it because we all get stuck with ourselves for life. 

Amor Fati, the love of one's own fate. You have a fate, you know? No one escapes that. Build the life you want, build the person you want to be. It is okay to have heroes, to understand how others have created themselves as humans and as artists but don’t just copy and hope for the outcome you want. 

Actively pursue your innate values because values must be grown by each of us and they are bought and paid for on the installment plan of life though our own experience. There is no one like you. Isn’t it wonderful? You are in competition with no one when you choose to develop yourself. But you have to choose this over and over. It never stops being an active choice. Ever.

Okay, so I am being a shameless fan-boy here: but that is kind of the point of being a critic, at least for me. It's part of the job to voice concern, to identify those parts of an art-work that don't function, to assess the impact and skill. More importantly, however, is the need to be inspired, to believe that art has a purpose. If I stop believing that, if I stop being enthusiastic about artists, it's time for me to get back in the classroom and teach Latin grammar.

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

Penny Arcade comes to the Albany

Performance art, despite being a handy tag to include everything that happens in real time and space, isn't that old as a genre. Even ignoring the various controversies around its definition - when does something become Live Art or theatre? what section of The Skinny is this supposed to be in? - performance art tends to stir up the shit: it is frequently the artistic vehicle of choice for creatives who want to examine ideas that don't fit with the mainstream. 

Penny Arcade was right in at the start of it - and her work from the 1960s until today has been challenging, original and determinedly personal. In recent years, she has become a mentor to emerging artists - the wonderful LaJohnJoseph acknowledges her role in her practice - while still touring pieces that refuse classification. She is arriving at The Albany in December to reprise Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!

There's more confrontation in the title than in most venue's entire season: the event is part night club, part series of monologues and features male and female exotic dancers. Originally designed as a reaction to attempts by the American right to limit funding to controversial works, Arcade did describe the show as a "fuck you" to censorship.

Featuring roles from a receptionist in a brothel to meditations on the rise of the New York gay scene, BDFHW! is less interested in mainstreaming queer culture than representing it. Connecting to Arcade's presence within the Gay Shame movement - an attempt to disavow the rush to mainstream acceptance by a counterculture, BDFHW! is an extended provocation.


Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! Is coming to the Albany from December 15-23 for a final London run coinciding with the Albany's 30th anniversary.