I Just Ain’t That Good
By Frank Moore, 1997.
Commissioned by and published in Art Journal, Vol 56, No. 4, Winter 1997.
Reader’s Digest once asked me what was the symbolic/social significance of wrapping nude dancers in cellophane...and got pissed when I answered, “I like seeing skin under plastic.”
After one of my all-nighters at Franklin Furnace, a “scout” from another gallery said, “but it was a ritual, not a performance.”
Both of these encounters reveal a basic ignorance of what performance is, thinking the performance is the creation of the artist for some linear purpose such as entertainment.
I can’t claim to be the creator...except of different catchy titles for the “same” performance to trick people who think that the same form means the same experience, that you are in a rut if you repeat a performance more than one tour.
A performance is a living being, an ever changing, ever evolving creature reacting with different audiences, casts, environments. This creature is made up of modules, and is giving birth to new modules which can either become a part of the performance and/or become different performances. My job is to take care of, protect, respect these creatures.
One of the “simplest” modules in my care is Wrapping/Rocking. Wrapping/Rocking uses the simple, but magical gesture of rocking to provoke images of comfort and suffering, of childhood and old age, of sex and war, of insanity and play. A nude woman sits on my lap, rocking out all of these primal events, moaning singing these events, rocking under a strobe light to body music. Nude, body-painted dancers create a structure on these rocking figures out of household materials such as toilet paper, ribbon, cellophane, and tinfoil. Unexpected visual and sound effects are created by this structure. A poem is read over and over. The audience is linked to the surreal moving wrapped being by material strands looped around them by the dancers. They are slowly transported into the distant past...back into the magic of childhood, back into unlimited dreams, back into the primal cave where the shaman rocks. Everyone rocks in the hot ocean of foil and cellophane, connected within the trance created by the two nude bodies rocking, rubbing beyond sex.
I am not that good to be the creator. Where did it come from? Looking back, I can see the roots...the private ritual when a woman got out of a suicidal depression by rocking with me....having guys in audiences sit on my lap and rock...the time when, to use the spools of ribbon a store had donated, I had a mummy slowly unwind revealing a nude dancer...the performance when I spent a long time convincing an audience woman to be the nude rocker with me while a video played...the end of that video turned out to be that woman rocking with me.
I can see the elements popping up in these older creatures. But I don’t know how they came together in Wrapping/Rocking in 1986 for the Babel group show. And even now I don’t really understand why or how Wrapping/Rocking works. I just ain’t that good!
Also published by Inter-Relations in the book, Frankly Speaking: A Collection of Essays, Writings and Rants https://www.eroplay.com/franklyspeaking/