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Tim Barrus: Stealing Iconic Imagery is Protected Speech -- It's Also Art
from Art - recent posts - blip.tv (beta)
July 11, 2008

There is no such thing as "stealing" iconic imagery when one is making art. It is protected speech. I can involve satire and the examination of cultural identity. Take an art class. Grow up. Educate thyself. Visit the grave of Andy Warhol. Have some soup. -- Tim Barrus

Tim Barrus: Do I Look Like the Shell Answer man to You?
from Art - recent posts - blip.tv (beta)
July 11, 2008

Kilian Sullivan: I have asked Tim Barrus to respond on-line to a bunch of the email questions I get regarding Cinematheque and our schedule. What schedule. This is stuff only he can answer, Thanks, Timmy. -- K

TIM BARRUS: IT'S ALL PERFORMANCE ART
from recent posts - blip.tv (beta)
July 11, 2008

Everything You Can Imagine is Real: It's All Performance Art Tim Barrus Some Performance Art is like a comedy of horrors. You're in a horror movie. Is it real. What side are you on. What you see and what the audience will see is going to be vastly different. Do you believe in zombies and monsters. Or the gods. I do. Most of the zombies and the monsters and the gods in whose existence I believe in are cultural institutions. Banks. Education. Publishing. It's all Performance Art. Pornography is the Performance Art of exaggeration. Performance Art is dangerous. It can get you into all kinds of trouble. So. Who. Has been a Performance Artist. There are a lot of them. Most of them get culturally marginalized. Especially by mainstream commercial culture. They tend to be highly creative and they can be intense to know. Most of them draw a line between who they are and what they do. When they are performing. I am not one of those. My life is my art. "That I Am Alive At All" is my masterpiece. I don't need you to buy a ticket. I don't want you to buy a ticket. I don't really give a flying fuck what you think. You can slander me all you want to on the Internet. That is fine. I don't read it. I am surrounded by people who protect me from it. Besides, I'm too busy. Actually making things. For me, that is the line I draw in the sand. There are two kinds of people on the planet. People who make things. And people who don't. The thrill from Performance Art is in the risk-taking. So. Who has been a performance Artist. In my book, Hunter S. Thompson was a High Flying Performance Artist. It's not unlike diving naked into the Colorado River and testing the power of the white water rapids and the rocks only you don't have a boat and you don't have a raft and you don't have a canoe and you don't have a guide and you don't have a map and you don't know where the rocks really are -- you're guessing -- you don't really have a script (although I do read from them frequently but I change them at a moment's notice) and you don't have any kind of safety net whatsoever. The rocks in the water have been there for thousands of years. They never really change. Their purpose is to obstruct. To say: the power of our very presence can hurt you. If you challenge us, we will destroy you. And they can. They do it every day. Performance Art is swimming the English channel in the dark. What you're about to do has never been done before. The adrenaline rush is extraordinary. It's entirely possible that you will find yourself alone at sea. Whether or not you will survive is always, inevitably, the question. The first performance Art I ever did was in 1966 at the Lansing, Michigan, Civic Center. I was sixteen. I had prepared a piece where I played the role of a multitude of parents where the setting was obviously Lansing, Michigan. I made several references to the enormous stink the factories there had made of the Grand River. The Grand River is so polluted, you can see the shit float by, and the industrial waste and the sewage has turned the thing into a flowing swirl of poison. It cannot be saved. Nor could that town I lived in. The parents I played were people who abused and beat their children. I played teachers, too, who beat their students. This was what I knew. It was my frame of reference and my life. I only had one prop -- a bare stage -- the prop was a stick. There was a visceral hush among the audience. My drama teacher was in the front row where she was having a stroke. She had not previously approved any of this performance. I knew what I was going to do and I just did it. I beat up one nonexistent kid until he died. None of this was Thornton Wilder or Dylan Thomas or any of the approved performances I was supposed to have drawn from. I did pass drama class but only because they wanted to get me the hell out of there. I passed high school for the same reasons. The people of Lansing were outraged. Their town did not stink and they did not beat their children. Only it did. And they were the sort of cretin lowlifes who beat their children, their wives, and anything or anyone who challenged their values. They had no values. They survived. That was life in Lansing. You got by and you were lucky to do it. They said: well, he's rebellious. They had no idea. I soon learned that you could do Performance Art anywhere -- it could be a confrontative guerrilla theatre -- and it always, always attracted an audience. In the zillion years I have been doing Performance Art under a plethora of names. I have never not had an audience. Today, my audience can be found in my studio or on the Internet. I teach Performance Art to students who want to put it to video or film it. Before there was an Internet -- a digital landscape that has rendered the idea of place irrelevant -- I understood you could get away with performing in places that had nothing to do and everything to do with what most people see as the normal context of a stage. Obviously, a movie set can be a stage. But so can the steps of the Stock Exchange be a stage. The front door of the Selective Service can be a stage. The parking lot of a nuclear research facility where bombs are made in Los Alamos can be stage. The inside of a gallery in San Francisco can be a stage. The exact spot in Paris where heads rolled can be a stage. A pharmaceutical company headquarters can be a stage. The front yard of a crack house -- turned into a fake cemetery -- can be a stage. The public library can be a stage. A biological research facility run by the Navy can be a stage. The Lansing Civic Center can be a stage. Morphing any icon whatsoever can be a stage. The Angels of Light in San Francisco used to perform in front of hotels and all of them were stages. A website can be a stage. A blog can be a stage. The New York Times can be a stage. The New York Times Book review is a joke that can be a stage. A senate office can be a stage. The Bureau of Indian Affairs can be a stage. The lobby of a publishing house can be a stage. Esquire magazine can be a stage. Anyplace that symbolizes power and arrogance can be a stage. A book where you are not who you say you are -- the fundamental premise of acting -- can be a stage. A poem can be a stage. A golf course that only accepts white applicants into the club can be a stage. I would definitely do blackface there. It's not politically correct. Nevertheless, it's theatre. The little plot of grass at the main gates of the Dover Air Force Base where the dead bodies of soldiers arrive can be a stage. I would wear a uniform there. In an open coffin. The Pentagon can be a stage. Blip TV, an internet start-up can be a stage. Any department store window with a supporting cast of mannequins can be a stage. YouTube can be a stage. Tank TV can be a stage -- currently running at the Tate in London. The sidewalk at the Museum of Modern Art set-dressed to look like a bank with a fake ATM can be a stage. The point is that MOMA is about the money. Not the Art. Jesse Helms' funeral can be a stage. I recently appeared there playing the role of a photographer. The top of a limo parked in front of the capital building can be a stage but not a very big one. A floating barge complete with the Sex Pistols floating by Parliament and the Royals can be a stage. A record cover can be a stage. The Food and Drug Administration can be a stage. The front door of the J. Edgar hoover FBI building can be a stage but not a fun one. There are a zillion places that can be turned at the drop of a hat into a stage. I have performed -- only once nude -- in all of these places. The stages I am thinking of do not normally come with rent and one is often obliged to get off the stage as quickly as one can. Cops won't like you. Security guards won't like you. The military won't like you. The local paper drama critic will positively loathe you. Public librarians will throw books at you as will judges. Jails can be a stage. If you are thinking that a stage can be discovered just about anywhere you've got the idea. Theatre that satirizes the cultural status quo goes way back to the ancient Greeks. Euripides got Performance Art. Only a few of his plays survive. Euripides is known primarily for having reshaped the formal structure of traditional Attic tragedy by showing strong women characters and intelligent slaves, and by satirizing many of the heroes of Greek mythology. I want to be Euripides. I am Euripides. You are your history. The future will not even remember us. All we have is now. Never apologize. Never explain. Or at least try not to. Work that stands on its own without the accouterment of marketing is RARE to impossible to find. Charlie Rose is everywhere. My favorite thing with Performance Art has to do with the audience wondering who these people are and why are they doing this and there is a thrill that creeps up their spines, too. This is guerrilla theatre. There are three words that go to defining what Performance Art is: Nothing is sacred. People don't accept that. The dead are always sacred. The flag is sacred. Religion is sacred. In my little world, publishing and books are sacred. Don't go there. It's okay to be satirical in books but not about books. There is a difference. One must never profane the sacred. Tribalism and culture is sacred, sacred, sacred. I do not buy any of this. No icon is ever sacred. All of them are props. They are rarely the point. The point can me loyalty, god, violence, enslavement, hypocrisy, arrogance, war, on-and-on. But the flag is a prop. the church is a prop, the icon of the music video is a prop, Hollywood is a prop, institutions are props. Culture is almost ALWAYS (in everything I do) a prop. Sexuality can be a prop. Identity is the ultimate prop. They can all be morphed, changed, squeezed dry, strangulated, burned, photographed, let loose, dressed up, and satirized. Absolutely NOTHING is sacred. Andy Warhol took a tomato can and turned an icon into another icon. Andy Warhol did not seek the permission of the Campbell's Soup Company. He didn't have to. ART is protected speech. As is satire. Take the icon of the horror film. Turn what is senseless violence into the kind of represented violence that symbolizes the iconic violence that America is about. It's a political statement. Performance Art is dangerous. Nothing it addresses whether head on or obliquely is sacred. Not who you are, where you are, when you are, how you are, or if you are at all. This is hard for people to understand. But, often, that, too, is the point. Get a clue. Even something as benign as the teenage beach movie is culturally iconic and can be satirized. Truth to power. Someday, I want to recreate my stage at the Civic Center of Lansing, Michigan. I would add one more prop to the Performance Piece. And it would be a very loud whip and every time you cracked it the audience would jump. I would turn the stage into a hall of mirrors. You never know when I might appear or with who or how or where. It could be anywhere. I'm talking guerilla theatre here. The kind where intelligent slaves run amuck and the emperor is always naked. Everything you imagined is real. Performance Art is dangerous.

Tim Barrus: Writing is War
from me on blip.tv (beta)
July 08, 2008

definitely war/ words as weapons/ and as eros spins in graves/ all around you/ sand and blood/ all the raging tongues untied/ you have attempted to imbue this thing you make with grace/ but there was a violence to it you were not prepared for/ the slicing open of the guts/ always yours/ the spilling and the tearing and the teeth/ the choices were between death and terror where the last thing you expected was desire/ in the middle of it all/ the chaos and the killing/ the imploding and the going forth/ the secrets now escaped/ the weapons/ the fires and the drowning/ and/ there it was/ desire/ it did not fit/ desire/ dogging and haunting you with discontent/ swollen war/ the swirling violence all around you only was/ the writing of it was a savage thing/ it possessed its own brutality and ruthlessness/ one last great kiss/ the kind that comes with a tongue in your throat/ deep and unyielding/ all memory resolved to prisons/ all editorial collapse a surrendering/ all surrendering a whore/ writing is yet, too, an animal of war/ a ruin in the darkness where history is as inevitable as the repetition of a ticking clock/ the dust to be the dream/ midnight then/ who would exhume desire to hear or see the walking dead/ from crypts/ and them/ the screaming of the ravaged hordes/ my children/ and my swords/ my swords/

ROLLING STONE INTERVIEW WITH TIM BARRUS
from me on blip.tv (beta)
July 07, 2008

It cannot come as a surprise to anyone -- except perhaps to the people who know him intimately -- that Tim Barrus' real name is not Tim Barrus. ROLLING STONE'S investigative report...

Northwest Tissue Services - Steve Barrus Testimonial
from popular posts - blip.tv (beta)
July 01, 2008

Steve Barrus had his bone cancer removed though bone donated to Northwest Tissue Services.

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