Paris Letter: (In the Form of an Interview)

PARIS LETTER (in the form of an interview) p. A Ralston Farina T T So you spent five months in Paris. Tell me about it. The American Center for Students and Artists, Boulevard Raspail, which is run by a new administrator very interested in performance art -- Don Foresta-is beginning a new direction. They asked me to teach there and to be the specter of that new direction. And the idea of the new direction? To erase the old image, whatever that might have been, and to create a new image of an international avant-garde university. What happened? We were depending a great deal on the French press. We gave a press conference and I did a performance for it which was very well received. But weeks and weeks went by and I never saw anything in the press. So they were obviously content for the American Center to keep its old image. So what did you try to do besides win over the press for the American Center? I was negotiating with the Beaubourg Museum. That was still in the works when I left. I did receive a letter from a dance school, CID, something like Cultural International Dance, which asked me to do two lectures. After the lectures there was such a positive response they booked me for ten weeks beginning in September. This school is in Paris? Yes. It's an all-around dance school, modern and ballet. There I was teaching timing. The class I taught at the American Center was called the Aesthetics of Time, "Esthetique du Temps," because the French don't have a word for timing. After having six translators work on it, we still couldn't find a word for timing. The course started out being called Serial Pattern Design, then it became the Aesthetics of Time, then we decided to call it the Anatomy of Spectacle. Each time we did a publicity campaign we changed it, because we weren't communicating . The dancers and choreographers absolutely appreciated the need for timing, but the artists didn't understand what "performance" was. There's no word for that in French either. So we had a hard time with that, explaining what performance was to young artists who didn't have the slightest idea except for a few things 24 they've read in magazines. And when people only do performances from magazines instead of seeing performance, it will be very onedimensional . Which is why, in fact, so much performance around the world is one-dimensional. Did the dancers associate you or what you were teaching with John Cage's ideas? Yes and no. In my press release, there was a quote from Cage talking about my work, so they knew he admired what I do. The man from Humanit4 said my notation system reminded him of Douglas Dunn's. He was quite surprised when I said I'd never ever seen it. I don't think it occurred to him that Douglas had danced with Merce Cunningham and that Merce and John work together, and that I'm a former student of John's, so the connection had nothing to do with Douglas Dunn. What kind of artist performance did you find Paris? Beaubourg had a resident performer who was teaching there, and she was cutting herself with razor blades. Gina Pane? Yeah. I never saw it. I heard she was teaching rudiments of first aid. Someone said her first class was telling students that before the performance you should put alcohol on your arms to prevent infection. Do you have any idea why Europeans find body art so fascinating? There was an international show called Art Corporeal at Beaubourg organized by a South American man and it was a joke from what I saw. I thought I was back in 1969. Vito Acconci was there, and when I came on the Soho scene, he was doing all that. Did he present a live piece at Beaubourg? He showed a videotape. And then they had this big debate about whether body art was art, and what was performance, which was hard because they don't have a word for it. But do...