RE: Students' questions

Hey Frank,

For some kids, they really can think :P They deserve answers ! :)

I was just saying, about the nude thing, you shouldn't stop with it entirelly, BUT: le contenant ne doit pas se transformer en contenu ( your message should not stand in yourself being nude, your nudity is just what surrounds the content of your message; In others words, when your buying an excellent chocolat candy piece, would you rather enjoy the chocolat or the foil ? Both if ever, but your in it to taste the chocolat piece, not to eat the foil ).

Anyways, who the fuck am I to give you lessons about anything, I still got so much to learn...

And maybe I understood it all wrong, I just wanted to help giving my opinion,

C'est la tienne qui compte en bout de ligne de toute façon,

Salut O Grand chaman !

Et à la prochaine,

Rafael

* * * * *

I find most people can think if you don't sell them short or out. They will rise to your expectations most of the time.

Mmmmm, I have been getting and ignoring such dreadful if well meaning advice for over forty years... Since high school! The job of being an artist is not to limit the art, but to push back the limits... At least that is what I am about.

In this case there was no nudity, eroticism, whatever. None! What triggered the freaked out state of the teacher was going outside of the normal boxes to where all is possible. In reality that is usually the case even when they can blame their freak out on nudity, eroticism, whatever.

In my art of a shaman writing about my show of the seventies, the outrageous beauty revue, I wrote:

There was tremendous pressure on me to polish the show up to make it more sellable, more entertaining. This pressure did not come from the critics, but from friends and cast members. "Add rimshots, tighten it up. Then the show will be a commercial success." "We should rehearse more,then we could be good theatre, good music." But the vision was not about commercial success, nor reaching a lot of people, nor about good entertainment, nor art. The vision is to create trances and realities which will bring change. This is my vision. The vision has me. I am its tool. If I had not stayed within the vision, I would have been lost within artistic pressures. Art should be a vision quest.

Other kinds of pressures were to change the content, the tools, and the focus of the work. People always say they like the work because it is strong, but I should get over my obsession with sex and nudity, and get on to more important issues; I should not get "stuck" in one vision. What they do not realize is what they like about the work, the strength, comes from being committed to a single vision, no matter what the current trends and fashions are. I cannot imagine more important issues than sex and freedom symbolized by nudity. But, as this paper shows, these are not my ultimate focus. Sex and nudity are powerful digging tools to reach the intimate community. By limiting the tools of art, art itself is limited.

When the artist is rooted in private rituals, it becomes clear that she is not an agent for society, or some political movement, or the art galleries and art "experts", or even for her own individualistic imagination. Instead, she is an agent of gods, of dreams, of visions and myths. This causes reactions in society, especially when the piece is public. Karen Finley is criticized for limiting her audience because she offends them by her words, anger, nudity. An artist who is rooted in the private channels is not affected by this attempt to curb the power of the art by strapping it to audience acceptance and agreement. The power of a Karen Finley is TO the taboo-breaking energy she releases into society. This societal pressure to tame art down, which usually sounds very reasonable and comes even from liberal sources, is very hard for the artist to resist who is not familiar with the hidden channels of change.

Another example of society's attempt to rechannel the change coming from Shamanistic Art is what an "art expert" told me: "Your work is...not art...(because) it doesn't address the concerns...(which are a) part of the current art dialogue, whether it be mainstream or 'alternative'...curators and presenters are (not) obliged to show it". She went on to say that I should stay "in (my) own sphere", and that I don't need the public channels that galleries represent. Which is true. But galleries and the people who think what is in galleries is the full range of art need the artists, not the reverse. The magic of private performance is needed to expand the narrow, shallow river of "the current art dialogue", controlled both in content and depth by the art experts. Fortunately, there are galleries which are willing to go into the magical unknown represented by private performances.

I have debated with myself about stopping resisting the label SEXUAL. By insisting what I am doing is not sexual, I am opening myself up to people questioning my honesty and integrity. If I accept the sexual label, people would just have to decide whether or not they like sex in art -- decide whether it is art or not. That would be the depth of the questioning. They may feel uncomfortable seeing sex as art -- but that uncomfortableness would be just from breaking the taboo of sex -- which would not be that big of a deal. What I am doing is taking nudity and acts that are usually considered sexual and giving them a new, nonsexual context. That creates a tension, a conflict, an examining, a leap into something new. That is what I am after. This leap into newness is why people who are normally comfortable with casual nudity and casual sex sometimes get very uncomfortable with the nudity and erotic play in my work. By taking "sexual" acts and sincerely putting them into a different context, it creates another reality, another way of relating. It also creates conflict with the normal reality -- and that conflict may change, in an underground sort of way, the normal reality. I think art -- or at least this kind of art -- should create conflict and change. And I like relating with people in the "unnormal" way in this different reality. This is why I do performance.

Rawness in itself is threatening because it opens the way for everyone to express their feelings directly. Rawness inspires. It breaks the chains of the rules.

The show was in bad taste, was called "exploitive". What made it thus was not just what was done, but who was doing it...crips, women and other "untalented" unfortunates. The first assumption of the people who were offended was that these were able-bodied actors making fun of crips; then, when it became clear we were real crips, the leap into dumbness was that someone was exploiting us. When they got it into their heads that we had created our own acts, the new way to deny our power was to say we were exploiting our own bodies. Forget nudity. Forget being sexual. Just by getting up onto the stage we were exploiting our own bodies. Women share this hidden yoke of suppression. By breaking this yoke, by offending a lot of people, the show released, inspired, and liberated a lot more. Artists and musicians come up to me today and say they saw the O.B.R. when they were kids and thought if we could do that, they could do what they dreamt.

and in my Numbers Game I wrote:

Most people think to be the most effective, you have to reach as many people as possible. And to do that, they think you have to do it through the mass media. And to do that, they think you have to fit (water down) the content, style, and form to the mass media, to play by the rules of the game. This is based on the faulty formula of Effectiveness = Number Directly Reached (or how big the audience is). It always seemed to me this formula is extremely simplistic and inaccurate. A more accurate formula is Effectiveness = Purity-of-the-Art x (Number Directly Reached x 10). Purity-of-the Art is a measurement of how close the delivered art is to the original intent, content, message, power, etc. Obviously the higher the P.A. Count, the more effective the art is. It is simple science! And you can just imagine what happens if the P.A. Count happens to be in the negative! By the way, the 10 represents Number Indirectly Reached, which in reality is always an unknown number.
I have never focused on how many people have come in contact with the work. I focus on doing the work. So I have never been sucked into the numbers addiction, have never been tempted to shape the work to get "an audience".

BUT I WENT ON TO SHOW PLAYFULLY HOW I HAVE REACHED MANY MORE PEOPLE THAN MOST ARTISTS WHO FOCUS ON REACHING THE MASSES!

In Freedom,
Frank Moore