ART IS LOCKED OUT
By Frank Moore, copyrighted 1988
In 1988, Frank was booked to perform two nights at The Lab in San Francisco. But when The Lab’s director Alan Millar learned of this, he freaked out and called Frank and told him that the performance was cancelled. Frank asked him why he was being cancelled and Millar told him, in a particularly rude and insulting way, that it was because Frank’s work was “old-fashioned.” There were a series of phone calls where Frank pointed out that because Frank had been approved by the booking committee there and had been “inked in” to perform at the space, that the space could not legally book another performer for those two nights. Millar threatened to push Frank in front of a moving car if he saw him out on the street. Millar also said he was going to ruin Frank’s career and reputation. (He did do that…Frank was unable to get booked for years in the Bay Area.***) The Lab did not book another performance for those two nights and Frank, his cast and a group of poets and musicians, performed on the sidewalk outside The Lab both nights. This is a piece Frank wrote that was read as a part of the street performance.
Art is locked out of the gallery. This is why we are on the street. We are locked out. There is something wrong when art is locked out of the gallery. There is something wrong when the gallery threatens to blacklist art, to blackball art. There is something wrong when the gallery does not treat artists as human beings, when it breaks its word. This is why we are locked out of this gallery.
We are here to take art back from the business, from entertainment, from politics of art, from the fashion of art. If this were a personal battle between this gallery and me, it would not be important. But it is not. It is a battle in the war over what art should be like. Art should be the exploration of all possibilities. It should not just be focused on or limited to what is in fashion, in, hip … it should not be limited by what is deemed appropriate at a certain time. The old and the new should clash and mix to create a crack in the normal world to reach the universal humanness which is beyond the fashion of time.
Art was here before galleries and it will be here after galleries. This is not about saving art. Art can exist in the street, in where ever humans dream and love and wonder and fear, and cry. What this is about is trying to transform the art political system back to the point where art can exist. There are galleries that know that their art is to be a channel through which a flood of visions can flow uncorrupted to the people. But these galleries are the exceptions.
What we are taking aim at is the art machine that chews artists up and spits them out, that tries to control what kind of art exists and for how long, that tries to make people think it is the art itself, that tries to make artists feel blessed when the art machine picks them. The art machine sees artists as powerless children to whom it grants showings. This gallery even has admitted that it is tired of artists, wishing it could do without artists. It cannot.
I am here to say I as an artist have the right to be treated like a human. I am here to show that the art machine is not art. I am here to show artists as humans do have power.
Tonight, art is alive on the street.
Art is locked out of the gallery … and the gallery is closed!!
Photos from the performance outside The Lab.
*** We just ran into this as we are going through the GEnie Files:
Category 9, Topic 35
Message 4 Sat Jan 18, 1992
F.M00RE7 [SHAMAN] at 04:25 ESTI’m pretty much blacklisted from the bay area galleries and clubs...this goes back before helms got into the act. the nudity, audience participation, the physical eroplaying...and especially the 5—48 hours...and the trance states..., all freak galleries out. they can’t package it. but what locked the blacklist was when i did not let a gallery (the lab) worm its way out of its contract with me...i ended up performing almost nude outside the locked gallery for two nights...since then, no bookings from the bay area art establishment [but i have performed outside their power kingdom...such as at poetry events...i’m doing a performance in march in oakland at the studio of an artist who saw my flyer about being blacklisted.] helms got the names of karen finley, annie sprinkle, johanna went, cheri gaulke, and me from reporters of n.y.c. moonie newspaper who, under false pretenses, went through the files of the nyc gallery that booked us. the gallery, franklin furnace, is now closed down for “fire code.” i think the shamanistic elements of our work is more offensive to the helms mind than the sexual elements.
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