The materials that I use in the artwork are usually woman oriented, kitchen oriented, street
oriented…Like beans, I got beans everywhere here. Those are bean rubbers up there. I use paper of
many different types, and I like paper that… a good quality paper that can be ripped or you can put
things into it like beans, or you can roll it up and travel with it. I put really good money, you can’t just
go to the art store and grab a piece of paper, it has to be laid, it has to be good paper that you can
fool around with. Paper has always been my main material but then the beans, because they sound
in the paper and after that, physical things: hats, shoes. Because a performer from the audience that
is wearing a hat, or has some shoes that are interesting.
Leaving Pratt Institute I had various jobs, usually printing. But what do you print on? So if you make a
silkscreen and it’s to go into a restaurant and it says please eat here, there is all kinds of physical…Like
what is the paper you are printing on? What is the quality of the ink? How about the squeegee you
pull across it? So I would do the whole production of stretching the screen onto the frame, taking it
into the camera room, taking the negative, going to positive, and exposing the silkscreen. Then,
when I made the sign of course, they just throw it away. Well, I take it home and I can use fragments
of those letters in my own artwork and for instance, with Adolph Gottlieb, I could print fragments of
numbers and letters that had been part of a large sign. Cloth, I could print on cloth, but I was no
longer having a brush and paint. I was printing with inks and I was kind of obsessed with the act of
printing because you don’t have to pull the sqeegy all the way, you can do it with two colors,
partially,…Smear I mean it’s kind of, I treated printing almost like a painting. So mostly on paper,
some on cloth and some on canvas. Then I begin to perform and, we’ll say, a piece like, well „draw a
straight line and follow it“ or thats from La Monte Young, or „shoes of your choice“, just something
where I’m talking. I could have the bean turner quietly moving while I’m talking. So, anything to
confuse people or make them wonder what I’m doing up there.“ I thought she was gonna do a
theatre piece for us? Let’s get out of here, I don’t know what’s going on“. I like to puzzle. I like the
puzzling of the audience because then I can I ask them, will they like to come up and speak about
their shoes. If people are puzzled, there is always a few people who want to be aggressive about a
question and those people are very useful and they go on to do something because they are
questioning their environment or their situation. If I see someone in the third row and I see that they
have got a bright face and I say, „you there in the third row could you please come up?“, and I can
pick them out, the ones who are going to be responsive. They become human material to be in the
piece which I prefer to just being a solo performer, because it pulls the audience right in.
