I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST

I have a problem with the name “performance.” That’s what Vito Acconci called the things he did, which came out of Erving Goffman’s theories, and I suppose historically we are stuck with it. But my own work has so little to do with “performance” and “self-presentation” that I may soon stop performing and write and direct my pieces exclusively.

        If pressed to describe what I do, I’d say that I am writing in space. I guess that comes from being trained as a writer (I went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, etc.). But I was never able to accommodate to the linearity of writing. Perhaps I’m too conscious of the stages I’ve lived through and the multiple personalities I contain. I think I’m also too aware of the interstices between consciousness and the unconscious: I have a dream journal that goes with my day journal, and it now has 175 totally recalled dreams with elaborate responses to them. The fact is, except for the lyric poem, writing is the art form most closely bound to time; but to layer information the way I perceived it, I needed the simultaneity I could only obtain in space.