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California Performance in Mass Media 52 Suzanne Lacy NX.-N.. 15-vi - - - - - - - - -- ...... MEDIA BURN. Local news stations broadcast the performance event when Ant Farm sent a 1959 Cadillac crashing through a wall of fifty burning television sets. 53 Somewhat like a thermostat of our environment, the work of performance artists reveals a particular susceptibility to the images, the storylines, and the messages of popular culture. For years performance artists have incorporated film, slides, electronic sound systems, and video-the forms of communications technology. But to understand how the media environment itself has influenced performance language let us look at the theatre of popular culture and its multiple stages: billboards, and magazines, newspapers, movies and television programs. In this article I want to address the distinctive issues that arise when art performances are consciously designed to look enough like television's normal bill of fare to slip, as it were, into mainstream media. Enticed by sugar plum fantasies of the contemporary and the immediate, of nationwide audiences, of a form suited to the ephemerality of their work, some performance artists consciously entered this new performance stage; others stumbled into it through accidental publicity for outrageous or humorous acts. By 1973 Chris Burden had already been written up in the Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, Esquire and Newsweek and appeared on television talk shows, publicity resulting from various acts of bravado such as shooting himself and nailing a spike into his sternum. Having experienced the heady sensations of a mass audience, Burden designed a series of television "advertisements," using these ubiquitous forms to reach a larger audience while retaining complete control over the image. This last is particularly important in the art of television performances as artists continued to develop strategies for "guerilla intervention." For Burden, the obvious way to control one's information was to buy air time; in Through the Night Softly he crawled, naked, through glass, his hands tied behind his back, for ten purchased seconds every night for a month. Like advertising, narrative was collapsed into a single, dramatic image that could assault, attract or otherwise awaken presumably hypnotized viewers. The demands on performance made by the use of television are few (mostly constraints posed by brevity). Hence innovations in these performances are limited to the novelty of doing them and the shock or excitement generated by content antagonistic to the typical commercial message. Ant Farm brought a more complicated media analysis and usage to performance art. In Media Burn (1975) the figure of Artist-President Kennedy addressed an audience of fifty cameras (some of them from networks) and five hundred participants at Cow Palace in Sacramento: "Mass media monopolies control people by their control of information ... I ask you, my fellow Americans, haven't you ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?" Amid roars from the crowd, great fanfare, and the Star Spangled Banner, two brave Astronaut-Artists rammed a customized 1959 Cadillac Biarritz through a wall of fifty burning television sets! Broadcast locally on news stations, the irony of an event criticizing media while being publicized through it could not have been lost on its viewers. Ant Farm's performance was, for all its light-hearted buffoonery, a calculated mimicry of news clips, with all the newsworthiness that parody, 54 political ceremony and demolition derbies could provide. Its coverage, however, was not simply a product of its appeal, but of the artist's awareness of the workings of mass media. If Ant Farm had relied on conventions of performance art this piece might well have ended up on the cutting room floor. News demands clarity and simplicity, a straightforward narrative composed of two to four images, a message that can be explained in thirty seconds by a reporter who may only invest a few minutes of her or his time at the event. In the tradition of the sixties radical media interventionists , Ant Farm bowed to the necessities of television form language when constructing their performance in order that the ultimate consistency of form and content-the use of media to critique the media-would be achieved. In 1977 Leslie Labowitz and I introduced hard feminist issues and an alliance with political goals...

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