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.