I Just Ain't That GoodAuthor(s): Frank MooreSource: Art Journal, Vol. 56, No. 4, Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice atthe End of This Century (Winter, 1997), pp. 62-63Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777724 .

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I Just Ain't That Good FRANK MOORE

Readers' Digest once asked me what was the symbolic/ social significance of wrapping nude dancers in cello-

phane . . . and got pissed when I answered, "I like seeing skin under plastic."

After one of my all-nighters, a "scout" from a gallery said, "But it was a ritual, not a performance."

Both of these encounters reveal a basic ignorance of what performance is, thinking the performance is the creation of the artist for some linear purpose, such as entertainment.

I can't claim to be the creator ... except of different

catchy titles for the "same" performance to trick people who think that the same form means the same experience, that you are in a rut if you repeat a performance on more than one tour.

A performance is a living being, an ever-changing, ever-evolving creature reacting with different audiences, casts, environments. This creature is made up of modules and is giving birth to new modules, which can either become a part of the performance and/or become different

performances. My job is to take care of, protect, respect these creatures.

One of the "simplest" modules in my care is Wrap- ping/Rocking. Wrapping/Rocking uses the simple but mag- ical gesture of rocking to provoke images of comfort and

suffering, of childhood and old age, of sex and war, of

insanity and play. I am sitting in my chair nude. A nude woman sits on my lap, rocking out all of these primal events, moaning singing these events, rocking under a strobe light to body music. Nude, body-painted dancers create a structure on these rocking figures out of household materials such as toilet paper, ribbon, cellophane, and tin foil. Unexpected visual and sound effects are created by this structure. A poem is read over and over. The audience is linked to the surreal, moving, wrapped being by materi- al strands looped around them by the dancers. They are

slowly transported into the distant past . . . back into the

magic of childhood, back into unlimited dreams, back into the primal cave where the shaman rocks. Everyone rocks in the hot ocean of foil and cellophane, connected within the trance created by the two nude bodies rocking, rubbing beyond sex.

I am not that good to be the creator. Where did it come from? Looking back, I can see the roots ... the pri- vate ritual when a woman got out of a suicidal depression by rocking with me ... having guys in audiences sit on my lap and rock ... the time when, to use the spools of ribbon a store had donated, I had a mummy slowly unwind, revealing a nude dancer ... the performance when I spent

Frank Moore's Wrapping/Rocking, Berkeley, 1990.

Frank Moore's Journey to Lila, Berkeley, 1990.

a long time convincing a woman in the audience to be the nude rocker with me while a video played . . . the end of

that video turned out to be that woman rocking with me. I can see the elements popping up in these older

creatures. But I don't know how they came together in

Wrapping/Rocking in 1986 for the Babel group show. And even now I don't really understand why or how Wrap- ping/Rocking works. I just ain't that good!

FRANK MOORE directed the 1970s cabaret show The

Outrageous Beauty Revue. He was targeted by Senator Jesse Helms. Moore publishes/edits the underground zine, The Cherotic r(E)volutionary.

ART JOURNAL

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