JUDAS!

I am sure many among you are are wondering how these tattered missives laid at the alter of Truth can be so contaminated by such colorful and thrilling strains of fanciful mendacity… Let me tell you that only a fool believes that the path to Truth lies by any way other than that of a tangled web of lies. It is true that I am a student of a sort, and a teacher, that I inhabit a demi-world that few indeed can understand, never mind negotiate with stylish aplomb as I do minute-by-sweltering-minute here in the heart of Dixie. To satisfy your puerile hunger for understanding let me divulge a secret, a part of my life that I have never told anyone, a small nugget of experience from the mid nineteen-nineties that might begin to explain what exactly it is that I am “getting at” as you all are so fond of saying.

Like all serious artists, I was for a time (some ten years ago) very interested in so-called “performance art” and the revolutionary possibilities such a form presented. I observed in this phenomenon some intriguing dynamics in regard to more outward pushing on the boundaries of what art is, what theater is, indeed what is performance, what is the observer and what is the observed. Undermining this revolutionary dynamic of course was an annoying tendency on the part of performance artists to draw attention to themselves. It was all about the artist and whatever radical or extreme gesture he was presenting to the void. What, I began to ask myself, would it mean if these radical acts were done entirely in secret? Would that not at last and in deed break the bonds between the artist and the void itself and offer reconciliation of a kind between artist and Muse? My first performance piece was a form of communication confined to only myself and my muse. For an entire year I did my grocery shopping with no lists other than those I found abandoned in other grocery carts or in the grocery store parking lot. On the days I found no lists, I bought no groceries. It was a tough year. I can not really express the desperation experienced by a guy walking into a store who just wants to buy some sausage but who instead must restrict himself to “Lettuce, paper towels, tonic water, kitty litter…”

Half way through the year I began another piece: I noticed through my job as a landscaper that the county landfill charged five dollars to drop of a load of brush. This brush was then ground up and left to compost for a while and then sold as “mulch” for thirty dollars a cubic yard. This mulch was highly suspect as such, especially since I was one of the guys dropping off the brush on the front end. The composting process was supposedly hot enough to neutralize all the weed seeds, but I knew that all of the most pernicious weeds of the region (microstegium, Japanese honeyscuckle, English Ivy, Kudzu…) were part of the mix, seeds and all. It was a mulch of last resort. What would it mean, I wondered, if you drove up the road a couple of miles, to J.V. Brockwell’s mulch and topsoil factory in Calvander, and purchased two yards of mulch for twenty-four dollars, and then drove that load not to a client’s house but straight to the dump, and you told the guy at the gate I got brush, paid the five dollars and then backed up to that massive pile and forked that load of shredded hardwood bark right off the truck right there. Why, that would be just so danged asinine, so absurd on its face, it would be damn near psychotic. And as such, indistinguishable from most performance art –except for the fact that nobody, and I mean NOBODY would know that you were doing it! And in the end, you would be contaminating that noxious, weed breeding shit the dump was selling with ACTUAL MULCH, such that, every now and then, some poor ignorant sap would back up to the pile and get loaded with quality product.

I probably spent about five hundred dollars over two or three years playing this little game, buying Brockwell’s mulch and immediately dumping it at the Orange County landfill. Times were hard, I wasn’t making much money landscaping, but I refused to cut the funding on this little project until I had made my point, until I had made it even between me and my Muse. Then one day when I felt the time was right I just stopped. My career as a performance artist had ended, I determined, and I moved on to other things.

I have never told anyone about this. Well, actually, that is not true. At one point, deep in the winter of ’02-’03, I went wandering the halls of the UNC art department, seeking out somebody who understood performance art. My revolutionary sensibilities were still somewhat intact, I guess, but something deep inside me craved some sort of acknowledgement of what I had done. I did not need to know that it was right or wrong, or even that it was art, but I needed to share with somebody…and I thought that the undocumented status of the project was its crowning glory. But the person I talked to (I don’t remember if it was a professor, an associate professor, or what…) was only interested in documentation. Do you have any photographs? Any receipts? Any records at all? he asked. No, no, I said, you see, that is the whole point…it wasn’t recorded, that is the truly radical thing, it is unencumbered by archival concerns, it is a TRUE AND UNIMPEDED GESTURE AGAINST THE VOID. He just shook his head. How can I believe you? How do I know that you did this thing? No record, no art, he said. FOOL! I repled. JUDAS! My statement holds true to a five-thousand-year-old tradition! If a tree does or does not fall down in the forest, and somebody is or is not there to observe…

The gentleman calmed me down and took me into his office for a cup of tea. Here is what you do, he said, let some time pass. Five years. Ten years. Create a web page. A page no one reads. A page no one visits. There, tell your story. Then you can call yourself an artist.