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One time we were all invited to see this very avant-garde video artist who was presenting his work for one night only at Cal Tech of all places. My Kathleen had a scientist friend who heard about it and of course thought of her. She mentioned that she was performing in a show and he told her to bring all of us. The video moved slowly through a series of oil tints on other oil tints. It was very, very reminiscent of the old lava lamps only this was the late 1970s, no body had those anymore (although they did make a comeback later like a kind of potty Sylvester Stallone). I didn’t get the magic even then. I wasn’t getting it now. The soundtrack was either a Sex Pistols cover band or the actual Sex Pistols played very loudly, assaultively so I thought. Every once in a while there would be a sharp cut collage of black and white, end of video tape segments, suddenly a long still moment on a frame that to my ignorant eyes seemed about equal to the very similar frames before and after it.
As I sat there in the warm dark, it was August and even with air-conditioning a full auditorium breathes and in this case woops and applauds and guffaws with laughter. I felt like I was the only person at a Rorschark Test that didn’t know it was about sex. (Wait…am I?). It was that kind of unsettling moment of self doubt. We, via Kathleen, had been invited to this show because we were actors and other participants in the theater. Other audience members owned galleries, taught art, wrote about art or actually made art. This video artist was already pretty popular in those heady circles. What did they get that I did not?
When the video (finally) ended, the film-maker, let’s just call him Chris. and a panel of other panel people turned on the lights and invited questions from the audience. Most of them were not questions, they were hagiography of the lowest sort, wax dummies of actors who have been dead so long that they cannot fight back, such as: “How would you describe the dynamism of the soundtrack with the images? Which one inspired the other?” To which Chris, without smirking, replied with the pretentious vocabulary of a man who expects to get written about and written about well, eventually came to a mutuality, which he called something else. Other ‘questions’ pretty much amounted to: “Why are you so damn cute?!?”, It took me a minute to see that the main point of the question was to introduce the questioner, put a face to the name of the title/rank/administrator for future reference, should the need arise.
Then suddenly I saw a familiar strawberry blonde head (we were seated rows apart)(because we were late)(because we were in a show together and it was a Monday ,our only night off), saw someone reach across and pass the mic to her and her my friend Kathleen stood up and began talking in her near cowboy girl drawl.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Kathleen. And what I want to know is, what is the actual difference between this work and, say, a bean painting of Jesus?.”
A hush then descended on the great, gray room in which, I think, I’ve never been prouder to call her “friend”.