ARTS Still Life With Hell’s Angel And Microphone

When Greg Metz came to Dallas in 1979, twenty-eight years old, a serious young artist fresh from a master’s degree program in printmaking. he wondered how he could quickly make his mark on the local art world. He knew there was already a lot of competition-some artists were developing reputations for their modernistic western art, while others were filling the Dallas galleries with excellent neo-expressionistic paintings. In this closely knit, quiet arts community, it was tough for someone new to be recognized, let alone get his work sold.

Then Metz heard about an exhibit being formed at D-Art, a gallery near downtown that would take chances with new artists. The gallery was looking for artists who wanted to show surreal-styled works. The ambitious Metz realized it was the opening he had been waiting for.

Metz began rummaging through piles of junk that were around his house. He went to a livestock rendering plant, bought the head of a dead pig, wrapped a tuxedo around the head, and then stuck the pig in a little homemade coffin plastered with “Have a Nice Day” bumper stickers. He go) a live billy goat and he persuaded a huge, tatoo-covered I car repairman who worked in a body shop near his studio to be a part of his art exhibit.

On opening night, as the chic art aficionados entered the gallery, they saw various artists displaying their work. Then, turning to observe the other side of the room, they were stopped dead in their tracks by the sight of a dead pig in black tie, a billy goat harnessed to the top of a table, a floor strewn with old paintbrushes and dusty magazines, and a man who looked like a Hell’s Angel shouting violently into the microphone, “Hey, (his is art! Come over and see! And because we call it art. we get to charge you money for it.”

It was, as the art critics like to say, a sensation. While the skinny, mildly preppy Metz. the last person you would expect to create a controversy, stood by and watched, the gallery goers found themselves berated by this coarse man who would explain why one of Metz’s old paperweights was “art,” then quickly change the subject and try to guess the weight of one of the portly ladies standing before him.

Before the evening was over, the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had been notified about the gallery’s mistreatment of animals, other artists were furiously protesting the exhibit, and someone threatened to call the police. But no one present ever forgot the name of Greg Metz.

Metz’s introduction to Dallas was, in many ways, a classic case of “performance art.” a controversial and bizarre style of art that rejects the traditional materials of a two-dimensional canvas or a brush and chisel, ’ and instead uses. . .well, anything imaginable, from a truckload of dirt to whatever is in a trash can, from exploding automobiles 10 naked women covering themselves with paint and then writhing over a canvas, in order to present “art.”

Performance artists freely combine any number of elements-music, theater, sculp-lure, painting, film, video, poetry, and always a large helping of fantasy-to express their feelings on culture. The genre began to take shape in the late Fifties as part of a New York movement (first called “Happenings” and later “performance art”) in which well-known artists like Allen Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg began to do such things as push power lawnmowers through museums or cover gallery walls with strawberry jam.

Some of the funniest stories in the world of art deal with this fertile period of experimentation. At the opening of one major show, New York artist Chris Burden sat beside a live electric wire in a gallery. Next to the wire was a bucket of water and behind him on the wall was a sign that read, “Please kick over the bucket of water” Burden cast hopeful looks at everyone who walked by. There was Jim Dine, who dressed in a red smock and drank from jars of paint while daubing the words, “1 Love What I Am.” There was the Japanese artist Kazuo Shiraga. who for one performance painted several logs red, stacked them against one another like the frame of a teepee, stood underneath them, and began to chop at the logs with an ax until they all collapsed upon him.

Although such exhibitionist antics are often derided as a stupid way to make a statement about anything, a “performance” piece by an artist can stick like a rusty nail in the mind of an observer long after the details of A Great Runting seen in an art museum have faded from memory. After years of staring mystified at abstract paintings, never free from the lurking fear that the painter is pulling off a massive hoax, an art lover can be strangely refreshed by the sight of an artist, in the middle of a clean, well-lighted gallery, calmly taking a sledgehammer and. in the name of art, beating the hell out of one of his own compositions.

In Dallas, performance art is enjoying a comeback of sorts, as local avant-garde artists once again recognize that by a “performance,” they can shock normally glassy-eyed audiences into reassessing their own notions of their lives. The work can be seen in other areas besides strictly visual art. For example, some of the highly stylized “new music” bands, usually performing in the Deep Ellum underground nightclubs, emphasize theatrics and visual gimmickry as much as their music.

Dallas has also seen a growth of experimental theater, in which the audience is bombarded with a mixture of monologues, half-finished dialogue, obscure poetry, slapstick comedy, and sketchy plot lines. Members of the improvisational music quartet BL Lacerta will “play art” by sitting in front of a painting and musically interpreting all the brush strokes on the canvas; or suddenly, in the middle of a piece, rolling tennis balls across the stage. The group, which has performed at Carnegie Hall, has developed a surprisingly loyal local following.

“There comes a point when you realize that putting a painting on a wall is not enough,” says Greg Metz, who teaches art at Richland College. He created another sensation during the 1984 Republican National Convention here when a gallery displayed one of his sculpture works, “Reagan’s Temple of Doom,” in which the president’s head rose up out of a toilet.

“After doing a lot of work with your own inner vision, you find yourself ready to do something that will immediately make your audience respond.” Metz says.

But when art invades life, audience reactions can be mixed. Bill Mclean, another local performance artist, once stormed into a meeting of artists and gallery owners at the Fort Worth Museum of Art, holding up a toy pistol and what looked to be a Molotov cocktail. It was part of a designed performance piece called “How to Survive as an Artist” in which Mclean was trying to demonstrate the plight of the starving artist. But the plot backfired. People began screaming and rushing madly for the doors. The police came. And Mclean indignantly stood there and said it was all a work of art.

Many gallery owners have never forgiven Mclean for the Fort Worth stunt and thus won’t show his work. But he did demonstrate his zany talents at one of his last performance exhibits, shown at the progressive 500X Gallery. Mclean spent four days living in trash as part of his statement about the kind of environment from which artists emerge.

“1 didn’t have the slightest idea what kind of thing he was going to do,” recalls P.M. Summer, the president of the gallery and an occasional performance artist himself (one of his performances, with more than forty expectant gallery patrons in attendance, consisted of his walking around the gallery, sipping cognac and circling, with a black pen, all the nail holes in the walls). “I showed up in the gallery while all this trash was being brought in. and I got furious. I didn’t know who was responsible. I yelled that there would be no trash in mis gallery. And someI one told me it was going to be art.”

Indeed, performance art often can lose its

special edge. For one exhibit, well-known local artist David McCullough lit large torches on an abandoned floor of the West End’s White Swan building, while an opera singer walked amongst the gaping spectators singing and reading from a monologue. McCullough was trying to create a dreamlike sensation, but it didn’t exactly work that way. The heat from the torches caused the singer, already dizzy from the smoke, to swoon, and then firemen, seeing smoke pouring out of the windows, burst through the door and tried to hose down the place.

Dallas got a late start in the performance an field. It never saw these aesthetic oddities until 1962. when the New York artist Olden-burg came to the now-defunct Dallas Museum of Contemporary Art in Oak Lawn and had a bunch of local artists, dressed in Indian garb, simulate an attack on an old sharecropper’s cabin. The piece, or event, or whatever, was entitled, significantly, “In-juns.” To this day, those who remember the event cannot explain exactly why it was artistic. But they do remember it.

In the late Sixties, with only one or two galleries willing to show contemporary art, the biggest avant-garde focal performance , movement in art was a kind of absurdist theatre that attracted artists. One local group, named the Theatrical Metaphysicians, smashed up watermelons one Easter Sunday and handed them out to the audience as a form of Communion.

But a series of yearly events in the mid-Seventies called the “New Arts Festival” gave many young artists the chance to try performance art. One of the most memorable pieces was done by a local woman named Lancy Yarber, who used a mixture of sculptures and dance and theatrics to depict Patty Hearst in a psychic struggle with her

alter-ego, Patty Duke. Odd? Yes, but oddly intriguing. Nearly 200 people showed up for the performance. When Will Hipps and Richard Childers bought the 500X Gallery in 1974, performance art found a home in Dallas and took a quantum leap further into the absurd. The 500 displayed some genuinely outlandish stuff. A young woman named Pam Burnley performed a twenty-three-minute piece called “The Weaving,” Surrounded by two video monitors that flashed pictures of her childhood, she stood before the audience in a white dress and white stockings and systematically began to pour blood on herself.

Burnley’s message was that the major passages in the lives of women are marked by one of two images-a white dress (christening, high school graduation, marriage) or by blood (birth, menstruation, childbirth, and death). Throughout the piece she recited a monologue about the life of women and then did a slow dance. By the end her body was soaked in blood. Most people walked out of the gallery bug-eyed with shock.



By 1982, John Held Jr., a bright young librarian in the fine arts division of the Dallas Public Library, opened a gallery off lower Greenville Avenue called Modern Realism, mostly devoted to the most bizarre new art he could find. Held took all kinds of chances. At one of his openings, he sent out invitations announcing that the well-known artist G.X. Jupitter-Larsen would do an art performance piece “by not performing.” Those who dared to show up got what was coming to them. The artist did nothing but stare back at the people who came through the door. To no one’s surprise, Held’s gallery closed after three years.

But Held did promote a number of local artist types who were trying nearly anything. He was the first to lake seriously as “art” the rantings of a wildly theatrical young Dallas man named Doug Smith, who in 1978 created something he called the Church of the SubGcnius. Calling himself the Rev. Ivan Stang, Smith-thin, curly-haired, bespectacled-put together a patchwork of slogans and liturgy from such diverse sources as fundamentalist Bible tracts. Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlets, and books on the occult, all directed in praise of the church’s mythic leader, a pipe-smoking, crewcut cartoon figure named Bob.

The first performances of the SubGenius were held in the Oak Lawn backyard of one of Smith’s cohorts, and they were utterly ridiculous, complete with a band that twanged out a kind of pathetic country music and another preacher waving a golden golf club that he called “the bleeding head of Arnold Palmer.” Huge backdrops showed Bob and weird guests such as “The Unknown Millionaire from Fort Worth” who came out with a bag over his head. Home movies featured stuffed animals being beaten, But the bulk of the show consisted of inspired babblings from Smith (a.k.a. the Rev. Stang). who implored people to shuck off their monotonous lifestyles and live with what Smith called “Slack.” “Stand up for your abnormalities!” Smith would cry. “Relax in the safety of your own delusions! If you act like a dumbshit, they’ll treat you as an equal.”

After Held brought the Church of the SubGenius to Modern Realism, the “cult” began to take off. Smith and followers appeared, albeit infrequently, in other places around Dallas. At one point. Smith wrote down all his rarnblings, sent the manuscript to the respected New York publisher McGraw-Hill, and to nearly everyone’s astonishment found himself with a published book in 1983. Now, the Church of the Sub-Genius has become a national phenomenon (Smith has toured on both coasts; the church has even given a “revival” in a New York art gallery) and is written about in avant-garde art magazines. Smith’s book has now sold 11,000 copies.

When Smith was asked whether his work was art, he said, “I guess so. Stick a pipe in it and everything’s art these days.”

That credo has had its effect on Dallas. Now. many groups call themselves practitioners of ’’performance art,” including the long-running Dallas avant-garde theatrical group, Victor Dada. which juxtaposes silly comedy skits (in one. the Three Stooges find a wallet belonging to Immanuel Kant) with deeply philosophical dramatic scenes about unhappiness and other assorted weirdness, such as an actor dressed as a huge crayon reciting a poem on the pointlessness of intellectual life.

Performance artists have also embraced the new music that has come out of the post-punk era. The point is not so much the sophistication of the music (much of it is unabashedly amateur) but the style of the presentation. The impulse to be “artistic” can be found in groups like Spazbot, who play while hiding behind boxes as a woman in the middle of the stage sits drawing at a table; or Peyote Cowboys, whose members knock over lava lamps and crawl around on stage, all the while exhorting the audience to join them. For its exhibit opening parties, the 500X used to hire an “arts” band called Beep Squawk. They played a sort of anti-dance music: whenever the audience would come out on the floor to dance to a song, the band would immediately change the tempo just to confuse everyone.

“There is definitely a trend to turn your act into more of a performance art than just a music concert,” says Carl Finch, leader of the popular “nuclear polka” band, Brave Combo, which plays such songs as (he Christmas carol, “O. Holy Night” to a cha-cha beat. Finch, who holds a master’s degree in drawing and painting, says he turned to music “as part of the conceptual art process. We’re trying to alter people’s perceptions of what things should be. to have their senses messed with, to see up as down.”

Which is all well and good, but at some point, someone needs to stop and ask what all this means. You don’t, of course, have to completely understand art to appreciate it, but surely it would help, as long as everyone is going to this enormous trouble to “perform” art. to find some significance in it.

“What does it all mean? Is that what you want to know?” responds Summer of the 500X. “Oh, dear, I never ask those kinds of questions. I’m afraid someone might tell me.”