The Performance Artist

Eunice makes her own contexts to perform in—parties, alleys. She brings lights, makes invitations on matchbooks and hands them out at other performances. She performs for a weekend in a decommissioned gym by the ocean. She rehearses and sleeps there the week before. There are rats. It doesn’t occur to her until then that there can be rats by the ocean.

She is asked to lecture in college classes. Annually, a few instructors feel they should teach their students something about performance, but they haven’t seen much performance art. Eunice turns what is supposed to be a $200 lecture into a performance. If she’s feeling good, she also teaches the students some simple wiring and costuming, how to make it look like parts of their bodies are lighting up from within.

Eunice’s kitchen has all handmade ceramic dishes and hand-blown glassware she collects. She has ten stools she got when her neighborhood diner closed. They were just sitting outside with the trash.

Eunice wears T-shirts as much as she can, preferring them even for more formal events. They hang by color in her closet. She mends their holes. She learned how to fix leather shoes, becoming good enough as a cobbler to take in work from her friends and her friends’ friends. She maintains a rigid diet and teaches herself to crave nothing else but granola, bananas, tea, rice, and fish. She is not at all concerned with the live recording of performances or preservation of artifacts related to her performances.

She knows how to tell fortunes. When people come over, she asks if she can wash their hands for them. Sometimes she offers to wash their feet.

She has performed in hundreds of other people’s performances and videos. She wears masks, plays clowns, politicians, a baker, a plush heart with pointy aggressive fingers. She climbs in and out of trash cans, washers and dryers, piles of flags and bodies.

She sleeps on a mattress on the floor.

She dropped out of a teacher training program. The language was always about inspiration, which she still can’t understand. She doesn’t wait around for inspiration. She is always working on something.

People call her poet, actor, teacher. She doesn’t affirm or correct them.

She’s a waiter. Other waiters talk about what they will do when they don’t have to wait tables anymore. She has no problem being a waiter.

She shows up for protest marches she hears about. Her son is in medical school. He grew up in the suburbs with her former other half who pays for everything.

She likes to wrap things around her body. Laptops using a web of belts.

She collects wind-up toys that she imitates. She collects old hand tools that she also learns to imitate—egg beaters, 1940s staplers. Her apartment is filled with TVs and video recorders. She captures scenes she likes and learns their dialogue. The newscaster, the patients, and commandos about to die.

She will pay for one matinee movie ticket at the megaplex and stay all day and all night. She volunteers at the community center where, in the summer, she teaches the kids how to swim.

Her friends say she’s a darling to the critics. This means that her performance work gets written about. When this started, Eunice thought it would lead to more—some travel perhaps. It doesn’t. She asks her friends why. They don’t know.

The critics write about her ability to transform overlooked spaces, about her capacity as a mimic. They try to justify her resistance to photographs. Once, a critic described her open mouth.

The Host

Eric’s Labradoodle. His first dates.

Being older and getting into online dating.

He likes dried fruit and buildings painted white, how they catch so much sun.

He watches a man carry his cello down the street.

He wears a leather jacket and a ring of keys on the belt of his tight black jeans.

He always goes out for lunch at the deli. For dinner, he eats peanut butter sandwiches while reading. He likes mystery novels.

Occasionally art students ask him to do studio visits. He knows the custom is an hour per visit. He usually stays longer. Once, he was asked to contribute to a group show. He sent along a box of his to-do lists. They hung with T-pins.

Missing frying pan in artist housing
Return microphones
Order light bulbs
Thursday dinner reservations, coffee before panel

Eric takes exquisite care of his car. It’s nothing special but always spotless.

Eric realizes you can’t control anything. People cancel, get sick, are mean or late, curse, miss their planes, get so nervous. Still, the speakers he hosts always remark how perfect the projector is, how impeccable the sound and lights.

He has keys and access to everything.

His family is close by now, but they never come to the events he hosts. He likes buying toys for the kids, his niece and nephew, the crafty kind of toys. He asks his local store to hand-deliver them. He suspects his brother-in-law returns them.

He watches a girl on her bike without a helmet.

He went to Johns Hopkins for economics and there discovered the screenings for the film courses and got a student subscription to the symphony. He worked at a big public library in a small city then at a college in the woods. Every time he moves apartments, he moves somewhere smaller and more expensive.

He sends a student to pick up the guest speakers at the airport and take them to dinner. He never goes. He makes excuses when asked to come along.

He was hit by a car once. Cars are so quiet now.

He goes to watch a climbing performance. A woman scales a building with no ropes.

Once a year, he hosts a professional development panel—people with different jobs talk about how they get by. Every two years, he hosts a film series on a theme. On alternate years, a panel discussion on a different theme.

He likes to travel by train.

He likes first dates and thinks he is pretty good at them. If only they could be a thing in and of themselves. He doesn’t want other dates to follow.

His hair is gray.

On his train travels, he copies poems and memorizes them. He recites these in the shower at night.

When he is with other people, if he doesn’t plan carefully, he is usually at a loss about where to go. When he is on his own, he discovers good chocolate, shoes he can afford, another white shirt to replace the one that just got stained.

His doctor tells him to give up bagels. His dentist tells him to give up red wine. This is Eric’s draft list in progress of potential film series topics:

Rage and Cultural Appropriation
Marijuana and Art
Killers of Sheep
Art After 9/11 After Trump

He goes to his sister’s every Sunday. She calls him The Lonely Heart. His desk fan, his clipboards, his half-size index cards.

Eric loves his Labradoodle, Charlie. Walking with Charlie he gets mugged by a group of kids. They run off with his wallet, full of cash and credit cards. One of the kids comes back a few moments later with the wallet, now empty. The kid, short and sheepish, asks: “Do you want this thing?”

Eric imagines raising a family with the roommate he shared a place with after college, his roommate who ran every morning and married a comedian.

The Renegade

So many of Nann’s friends seem to know the history of almost everything, where it was published, and who really did the work to publish it. Books and artworks are everywhere in her loft apartment. There are canvases stacked four and five deep in the guest room with the folded blankets. Her friends are awkward in groups, having spent so much time alone. Warbly on social legs, they’re like loose drawings without frames. She’s a lot like them.

She hosts a Sunday conversation on housing then one on voter redistricting. She likes the energy of these events, artists waking up, realizing they can’t be neutral.

She gets a telemarketing phone call saying she’s won a cruise. She hangs up on the chipper recorded voice and calls her nephew. He doesn’t answer.

She looks at her canvases and the work of former students kitchen-hung in cohabitation with the dented pots she uses. Where would all of this go later, when she dies? Her sister’s family wouldn’t do anything about it.

Her friends seem to read the rest of everything she doesn’t read. Her lovers talk about their CVs, about what is missing from them, why they won’t get the awards they think they should be considered for. They tell her this from her shower, from the toilet, at the folding TV table she uses for meals.

Nann didn’t spend more than a few days in college and was always an annoyance to her teachers in high school—not showing up, reading more than they did. She moved to New York with a lover, with a duffel bag. She taught for a stint in California, in a sculpture department, driving around in her red convertible, before they didn’t ask her to come back. Even when she was there, she was still a New Yorker.

She attended a whistling concert in Central Park once and, every year or so, the opera. She knows how to make some vegan dishes that she thinks are pretty good, but she isn’t vegan. She avoids her landlord, who is rent-controlled and does not fix the elevator.

She almost always asks a question during question-and-answer and people at talks usually think she sounds frustrated. She can draw anything just as it is with seemingly few marks—a crumpled piece of notebook paper, an elbow, an ankle.

Every weekend, she pulls a couple of dead leaves off her plants, and if they are leaning too much toward the sun, she rotates them to help them straighten up.

Even when she can’t really afford to, she gives money to the still cash-strapped nonprofits that had earlier produced her performances. She spends time on the phone convincing her friends to buy the work of a young painter she likes who makes black-and-white cartoons that look sort of like they’re doing yoga.

When she doesn’t want to leave the house, her friends tell her she just has to show up and show her face, that she will be adored. After all, she is well-collected. There are her portraits; they are known. But, she is nervous anyway. She always feels unprepared.

She keeps soap slivers and seems to never finish a bottle of shampoo. In her bathroom, you can hardly see the edges of the tub. She’s known Jack Whitten, Paul McCarthy, Yoko Ono, Richard Foreman, Anne Waldman, and Sylvia Sleigh. She knows all the words to a number of Russian and Irish folk songs she sings at Thanksgiving.

She knows the streets. She can feel in her body when they are about to get busy. She knows where Lead Belly lived in New York with his wife Martha. She knows where Susan Sontag lived in Chelsea, where Alan Sonfist built his primordial park, and where Gordon Matta-Clark arranged railroad ties into a small park trellis and amphitheater.

She knows all the diners in the city and the waiters and waitresses recognize her, know what she likes (soup, turkey clubs, lite beer), how she sweats from below her sideburns in droplets that spring up there, and how she whips her hair. She is alone again now, without a lover, but probably not for long.

She is surprised by how often people wear sneakers, but she does too. Hers are bright orange. She goes to a place called the Performance Garage in Delaware to see one of her students win an award. She says: “We used to wear ties and dresses to performances. We weren’t capable of constant contact the way people are now—this weird digital intimacy. But we looked nicer.”

She responds to all of her emails graciously within a few days or apologizes for being grumpy which no one perceives because they value her critique of their play or her response to their boyfriend’s comments about the president.

Nann says, “Come on over.”

She gets up from her chair and hardly ever ponders over a passage in a painting, but she loses herself for days worried about a faraway hurricane. She watches news talk shows. She reads a book about North Korea then the second edition of a book she’s read before on race and sociology. The people who come to visit her show her their thesis drafts or their ‘zines and hand-sewn verses. Her bedroom ceilings are long-past peeling.

She likes cannoli.

When she paints, it has to be all texture, like a swamp with sticks. She has puppets, a bugle she can play, underlined articles she likes or that piss her off.

The landlord probably doesn’t mean to be a prick, she thinks. His son could get more for her apartment and the building. She eats crackers. She doesn’t mind them stale. She makes coffee and goes for leftovers in the fridge.