If You Lived Here You'd Be Home Now: Performance in Los Angeles

Meiling Cheng, In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art, University of California Press, 2002. "High Performance: The First Five Years," organized by Jenni Sorkin, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 2003. Tim Miller, Body Blows, Laguna Art Museum, 2003.

In southern California, the land of the freeways and the brave, banners bearing the slogan "If You Lived Here You'd Be Home Now" are ubiquitous. Ostensibly advertisements to entice renters and buyers, these banners promise much more than a shorter commute and a place to live. The word home, in combination with the conditional "would," activates the cycle of desire and longing in the reader. If you lived here, you would have a home, be centered, be the center, belong. It all seems so simple. But here—and home—turn out to be slippery concepts. First, where is here/home? Which of the many banners that dot the ruined urbanscape of Los Angeles actually peels back to reveal "home?" And who is the "you" whom the banner interpellates? Do you/I really want to live here? And what would happen if we did?

Hillary Mushkin, in a short and very funny video aptly titled after the query posed by the banners, suggests that no matter how close to "here" you are, you are never actually "there." The single channel video opens with shots of these banners, all bearing the same slogan, strung up on various balconies, garages, and fences while a traffic report plays in the background. If You Lived Here You'd Be Home Now quickly moves from the general to the specific, following Mushkin down a street in LA, through an airport, into her car, her apartment, and finally her bed. "What if I'd left . . . moved to . . . I would have been happier. . . I might have been . . . someone quicker, sweeter, gone . . . I could have been . . . a rock star, a mother, 50. It would have been gorgeous. . . dangerous . . . difficult . . . anonymous. If I go on . . . I might relax . . . blow up . . . reform." The video ends with Mushkin lying on the couch under the banner, which has been transformed into an afghan.

If You Lived Here (which may be viewed on the internet) suggests how elusive the center—or any center—actually is. Even when lying under the banner on her couch in her home, Mushkin still remains one of many possible centers, a subject that exists in relationship to many other subjects all of whom live in buildings that display banners similar to that under which she sleeps. In the Los Angeles that Mushkin inhabits, perfection and thus happiness are promised and sought after but never achieved. Mushkin's LA is the LA of movie stars, big budget films, Jennie Craig, and 24 Hour Fitness. In Mushkin's city of Angels, young white women are subjected to constant surveillance, while non-white, non-young women remain unmarked and unnoticed. If You Lived Here is overtly critical of the hegemonic representation of Los Angeles as a spectacular culture in which appearance, particularly for women, matters more than anything else. Mushkin's emphasis on conditional language suggests that to live in Los Angeles is conditional—one must partake of the hegemonic culture of representation in order finally to be "home." If You Lived Here is funny and pessimistic—funny, because it exposes the ludicrous nature of the pursuit of happiness in LA; pessimistic, because those of us who like to hope that happiness is not synonymous with hegemony realize that we have been set up for a rather cruel denouement.

Or maybe not. As Meiling Cheng points out, "as mortal beings, we are born equal in our centricity into a multicentric universe." Put another way, we are all the centers of our own universe. In reality, of course, there are many Los Angeleses, many centers, and many types of subjectivities, all of which cannot exist without...