Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

But at 3 a.m. last Wednesday night I bolted up in bed, reaching for my laptop. I realized you were right.

“J’ACCUSE,” (I started typing) “Richard Schechner.”

Richard Schechner is a Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, author of Environmental Theater and several other books on anthropology and theater and editor of The Drama Review . He was once my acting teacher. And at 3 a.m. last Wednesday night it occurred to me that Richard Schechner had ruined my life.

And so I’d write this broadside rant and wheatpaste it all around Richard’s neighborhood and NYU. I’d dedicate it to the artist Hannah Wilke. Because while Hannah’s tremendous will to turn the things that bothered her into subjects for her art seemed so embarrassing in her lifetime, at 3 a.m. it dawned on me that Hannah Wilke is a model for everything I hope to do.

“J’ACCUSE RICHARD SCHECHNER who through sleep deprivation amateur GESTALT THERAPY and SEXUAL MANIPULATION attempted to exert MIND CONTROL over a group of 10 students in Washington, D.C.”

Well, it was a plan. And at that moment I believed in it as strongly as the plan Sylvère and I made one night on 7th Street when I was so depressed and he joined me in my suicide attempt. We each drank some wine and took two percosets and decided to read Chapter 73 of Julio Cortazar’s book Hopscotch out loud into your answerphone. “Yes but who will cure us of the dull fire, the colorless fire that at nightfall runs along the rue de la Huchette…” At the time it seemed so daring, apropos and brilliant but Dick, like most conceptual art, delirium can get so referential—

At Richard Schechner’s Aboriginal Dream Time Workshop in Washington, D.C., he and I were the only people in the group who got up before the crack of noon. We drank coffee, shared the Post and New York Times and talked about politics and world events. Like us, Richard had some kind of politics and in that group I was the only other person interested in the news. I was a Serious Young Woman, hunched and introspective, running to the library to check out books about the Aborigines—too dumb to realize in that situation that the Aborigines were totally beside the point.

Richard seemed to like our morning conversations about Brecht and Althusser and Andre Gorz, but later on he turned the group against me for being too cerebral and acting like a boy. And weren’t all these passionate interests and convictions just evasions of a greater truth, my cunt? I was an innocent, a de-gendered freak, ’cause unlike Liza Martin, who was such a babe she refused to take her platforms off for Kundalini Yoga, I hadn’t learned the trick of throwing sex into the mix.

And so on Perilous Journey Night, I went downtown and took my clothes off in a topless bar. Shake shake shake. That same night Marsha Peabody, an overweight suburban schizophrenic who Richard’d let into the group because schizophrenia, like Aboriginal Dream Time, breaks down the continuum between space and time, decided to go off her medication. Richard spent Perilous Journey Night on the football field behind the changing sheds getting a blowjob from Maria Calloway. Maria wasn’t in our group. She’d come all the way from NYC to study with Richard Schechner but she’d been shunted into Leah’s workshop on Body/Sound because she wasn’t a “good enough” performer. The next day Marsha disappeared and no one asked or heard from her again. Richard encouraged me and Liza Martin to work together in New York. I gave up my cheap apartment and moved into Liza’s Tribeca loft, topless dancing several nights a week to pay her rent. I was investigating the rift between thought and sex or so I thought, letting lawyers smell my pussy while I talked. This went on for several years and Dick, on Wednesday night I woke up realizing you were right. Men still do ruin women’s lives. As I turn 40 can I avenge the ghost of my young self?

To see yourself as who you were ten years ago can be very strange indeed.

On Thursday afternoon I walked over to Film/Video Arts on Broadway to make a copy of the videotape of Readings From The Diaries of Hugo Ball, a performance piece I’d staged in 1983.

Though he’s remembered as the person who “invented” Dada at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire in 1917, Ball’s art activities lasted only about two years. All the other years were fractured, restless. He was a theater student, factory worker, circus attendant, journalist for a leftist weekly and amateur theologian chronicling the “hierarchy of angels” before his death of stomach cancer at age 41. Ball and his companion Emmy Hennings, a cabaret performer, puppet maker, novelist and poet, zigzagged across Switzerland and Germany for 20 years recanting and revising their beliefs. They had no steady source of income. They moved around Europe looking for the perfect low-rent base where they could live cheap and work in peace. They broke with Tristan Tzara because they couldn’t understand his careerism—why spend your life promoting one idea?—and were it not for the publication of Ball’s diaries, Flight Out of Time , all traces of their lives probably would’ve disappeared.

Emmy Hennings wrote this poem in 1916 and Dick, it was just so thrilling to discover there were people in the past like Ball and Hennings, making art without any validation or career plans when my friends and I were living in the East Village, New York City in 1983.

Reading about them saved my life, and so to stage the diaries I invited the nine most interesting people that I knew to comb through Ball and Henning’s writings for the parts that best described themselves. There were the poets Bruce Andrews, Danny Krakauer, Steve Levine and David Rattray. There were the performers Leonora Champagne and Linda Hartinian, the actress Karen Young, the art critic Gert Schiff and me.

And since three of these nine people are dead now, and since I’d recently read Mick Tausig’s account of Ball in his book The Nervous System (who regrets the historical absence of Dadaist women, but doesn’t look too hard to find them—Dear Dick, Dear Mick, I’m just an amateur but I found three: Emmy Hennings, Hannah Hoch and Sophie Tauber), I wanted to take another look at the play.

As instigator of the piece I played the role of hostess/tour guide, giving my friends a chance to speak and filling in the expository holes. To do this I stole the character of Gabi Teisch, a German high school history teacher created by Alexandra Kluge for her brother’s film The Patriot . Because she is unhappy in the present, Gabi Teisch decides to excavate the whole of German history to find out what went wrong. I was unhappy too. And until we own our history, she thought, I thought, there can be no change.

To get into the role I found a sensible tweed skirt flecked with tiny rhinestones and a long-sleeved lacy blouse: a costume that reminded me of an arcane archetype, the Hippie Intellectual High-school Teacher, of her, of me.

So on Thursday afternoon I stood around the Film/Video Arts dub room watching myself at 28 as Gabi Teisch: a scarecrow with bad hair, bad skin, bad teeth, slouched underneath the weight of all this information, every word an effort but one worth making because there was just so much to say.