I Never Go Anywhere I Can’t Drive Myself

a live art road trip through two-lane byways and information super highways, traveling Route 66 from Chicago to LA and back again whilst creating an extensive road trip web site for virtual travelers. Supported by a travel grant from the Arts Council of England.

placelessness.com/drive

I never go anywhere I can't drive myself ::: Performance Research: On Place, Volume 3, No. 2, Summer 1998, pp. 102-108

Leslie Hill
Can you really 'perform' on the internet? Considering that futurists predict that the most profound shift to occur in the Twenty-first Century will be the shift from a place oriented to a 'placeless' society, this is something I want to know. As we conduct more and more of our communication, research and commerce on-line and as the world around us shifts from analog to digital, physical location becomes less and less of a determining factor in our ability to do our work, access information, keep in touch with friends and buy or sell. Having an email account, internet access and a computer, of course, become increasingly important to our ability to function as members of a community, to interact with our peers, to access and to make work. What does this mean for performance? It's one thing to publish text on the internet, but how can one conceptually, atmospherically and emotively make the leap from atoms to electronic bits when it comes to Annie Sprinkle's cervix? Scan the cervix, upload it and program it to blink on and off, create some roll-over text, embed an element of interactivity for the audience, forge hot-button links to other cervix-related sites? No doubt people would then say things like, 'I went to Annie Sprinkle's cervix last night', because people tend to talk about sites they have downloaded as places they have 'been'.

This is interesting because film and television provide infinitely more sophisticated audio-visual experiences of locations, but if a person watches a documentary film about the magnetic pole they don't say, 'I went to the magnetic pole last night', whereas with web sites, which are comparatively slow and clunky, people do talk in terms of places they have 'been' or 'visited' or are 'going'. These musings bring me back again and again to Walter Benjamin's observation that the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult, and that, 'even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence in the place where it happens to be.' As a performer working in real space, real time situations, I was able to maintain, at least in my own mind, a smug distance from the diluting implications of 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. Performance, more than any other art form, has retained its connection to 'the cult', existing fleetingly in the times and places of the performances, which is what gives it much of its power and also makes it notoriously difficult to document and, let's face it, nearly impossible to make a living at. Anyway, coming from the 'cultish' world of performance, I have been intrigued by the notion of the world wide web and the idea of people 'going' to all these places, and it gives me pause for thought as a maker, when I try and work out the relationship of place and authenticity on the net: is art which exists only within cyberspace an original which has transcended the need for reproduction or it is a simulation that supersedes the need for the existence of an 'authentic' original?

Helen Paris and I decided to make a web piece that would explore notions of place and placelessness in performance and so in terms of form and content the piece had to be devised around real space, real time experiences with specific individuals and virtual ones, uploaded for access by a potentially limitless, but strangely invisible audience. The genre of the road trip is at once totally specific, totally place-orientated and yet intrinsically fluid as scenery morphs gradually from city to country, from mountain to plain. We decided to locate our performance within the genre of the road trip, performing a time-based piece simultaneously on two-lane byways and the 'info-superhighway'. The venue for our performance was, then, the 'real' space of Route 66, the first American Highway to link East to West, running from Chicago to LA, and the virtual space of the road trip site: http://www.placelessness.com/drive. We, as the performers, acted as linchpins between the two venues, between place and placelessness, between real and virtual. In making a piece using new technology we wanted to ask new questions about our practice, and also to make work in a unique way. If we were treating the internet as a venue for performance we wanted to use it to do things that no other venue could do and this linking of place and placelessness, site specific and cyberspatial seemed, to us, to fit the bill.

Out on the old highway the sites are more site specific - there are no Starbucks or Cafe Dome, no chains, no nationalized advertising logos, but the epic semiotics of roadside cafes announced by giant astronauts, flashing neon rockets, spinning rooftop hamburgers and ice cream cones, the four-story hot-dog man and hand-painted barn-side announcements. The places are run by mom and pop owners, not multinationals and no two places are the same. By self-publishing stories and photographs daily during the course of our month-long trip from Chicago to LA and back again, we were able to link the placeless realm of cyberspace to such site specific venues as Dixie Lee Evans' Exotic World Museum and retired strippers' ranch , communicating a real space, real time project into a globally accessible venue with a 'live' or time-based dimension expressed in the daily evolution of the virtual journey in tandem with the physical journey. In this simultaneous negotiation of old and new highways, we felt we were expanding, rather than diminishing our practice as performers and maintaining, rather than rejecting the 'cult' status of live work.

All roads lead to Baudrillard and ours is no different. Baudrillard sites the most important event of modern history as the disappearance of 'the real', as the late twentieth century becomes a world of social and technological transparencies and simulacra. In his book, The Perfect Crime, Baudrillard investigates the murder of reality, detective fashion, using traces of evidence, marks of imperfection, to unravel the crime. In his work he poses the artist as one of the primary sources of evidence, of imperfection, of traces of reality:

‘The artist, too, is always close to committing the perfect crime: saying nothing. But he turns away from it, and his work is the trace of that criminal imperfection. The artist is, in Michaux's words, the one who, with all his might, resists the fundamental drive not to leave traces.’

As well as negotiating the performer's relationship to place and placelessness, Helen and I were interested in exploring how artists might translate 'evidence' from the real to the virtual, how they might mark their passing in either realm. How does one leave a cigarette in the ashtray in cyberspace? Before we left England we began compiling an extensive, eclectic archive including video-taped messages from site-specific English locations, such as Derek Jarman's garden or the tomb of Karl Marx; old maps of Shropshire and Skye; family photographs and recipes; seed packets of English primroses and cowslips; souvenirs from the Tower Of London; 'original' Sherlock Holmes memorabilia from Baker Street; Sainsburys digestive biscuits and red label tea; tape recorded and written narratives, and of course, the Shipping Forecast and Gardener's Question Time. Our idea was to leave a trail of evidence, of literal and metaphorical messages in bottles, in our wake as we traveled and conversely to replace our existing archive with a new archive collected en route from the people and places we encountered. Discovered randomly in isolation from each other by people along Route 66, our stories, objects and images were at once fragmentary narratives and links in the long thin chain of a much larger piece, linked by our physical presence as we traveled and simultaneously by the creation of the time-based web site which offered accounts of both evidence left behind and evidence gathered.

The only full account of the piece, of course, lives in our personal experiences, but next to that, the web site provides the most cohesive account of the project through our daily journals, our 'messages in bottles' and the photographic histories of lemon curd left on doorsteps or seeds planted by the roadside. The self-conscious fragmentation of the narrative and of the trail of evidence collected and left behind and the non-linear possibilities of the web site worked for me, at any rate, to create a mode of performance that was able to use multimedia and telecommunications within a format that was symbiotic in relation to the content of the piece. The virtual was grounded in the real. Real space, real time lead the project and we felt uncompromised, in this case, as 'live artists'. Performance sensibility and the juxtaposition between going places and 'going places' worked to create performance in a new way, for new audiences, stretching, rather than cutting loose our tether to the unique cult status of performance.

Helen Paris
Contact and communication are the mainstays of performance in my book, and as Route 66 was the first road in the USA to link people from East to West and the World Wide Web is the single greatest communication enabler the world has yet seen, together they seemed to provide an ideal 'venue' for our live art road trip as we drove the 4,456 miles from Chicago to LA and back again, both literally, via a red Pontiac Grand-Am and 'cyberspatially' via a daily updated web site. I was pretty excited about this project, because a good venue is hard to find. Always avoiding the trap of making funding led work, the logistics of the fiscal arrangements demanded by such a venture were instantly lost under a pile of fat notebooks Leslie and I sent to each other between London and Dublin, full of discussions of Marina Abramovic and Ulay's epic Great Wall of China crossing; Jack Kerouac's six month stint on Desolation Peak; Laurie Anderson's spontaneous hitchhike to the North Pole and details of how we would cook tins of beans off the car engine. For this project we distiled the elements of performance to the relationship between the performer and the audience based on the simple concepts of 'give' and 'take', determining that we would make these elements tangible by literally giving/leaving elements of the familiar from our own lives in the form of stories, photographs, letters and videotapes in exchange for stories, recipes, snapshots and artifacts collected en route. Embracing the dynamic of tourism inherent in the project, we incorporated quintessentially 'English' items into our 'give' archive, (Rough Scottish Oatcakes and whiskey, an authentically-yellowed map of Sherlock Holmes' London, the Tower of London ‘Steal the Crown Jewels’ board game, etc.) and collected Route 66 memorabilia in return (a St. Louis Arch snowball scene, gasoline pump salt and pepper shakers, tequila lollipops etc.). We packed our 'give' archive into a large suitcase then planted a gold star on the 'Begin Route 66' signpost in Adams Street, Chicago and we were off... or ‘on’....
Instantly I was filled with performance anxiety.
What if no one comes?

Initially we had no way of knowing who would attend our three week performance, either virtually or in the flesh. The chat page on the web site enabling our virtual audience to leave comments was a tabula rasa, as were the rolls of film and the audio and video tape we had for documenting the 'real' audience of Route 66; and then of course the rehearsal is never the same experience as the performance.... First off I just didn't look right. An advocate of minimalism; the sight of myself walking towards a tiny cafe in the middle of nowhere armed with a video camera, digital camera, DAT machine, microphone, 35mm camera and large suitcase did not fit into my vision of making a profound visceral or emotive, honest and meaningful contact with an audience (let alone lead me to think I was embodying the keen, honed outline of the lonesome traveller.) Marina Abramovic, however, describes the Great Wall of China crossing as her ideal journey, when nothing is fixed, because this is where she found the 'edge that makes you wake' and as I entered the Midway Cafe, Adrian, Texas, it soon became clear that the type of interaction possible in this project had a spontaneity and life of its own. The cafe, like most others on the now decommissioned route, was pretty empty. Mostly it contained a few regulars, one, a man in his mid 70s whom I heard the waitress call Bob, was sitting at the counter reading the paper, a bright green visor perched on his shock of white hair. Little did I know that only a short while later we would be two miles up the road following Bob's old red pick up truck as he led us to his farm where we were introduced to Ronnie Jackson and given the guided tour of their collection of eight crop spraying planes. 'Me and Ronnie made this here one without even a plan to follow,' stated Bob proudly, pointing to a fine yellow model, 'It took a lot of beer.' It appeared that the bigger and more complicated the plane, the larger the quantity of beer involved in production; so much so, that part of Bob's tour included a visit to the 'hangover room.'

The contact with the virtual audience had its own unique dynamism. The web site made the project about the specific and the infinite at the same time; the potential to make contact with one waitress in a diner in the middle of the Mojave Desert and simultaneously with the rest of the world. Getting lost on the road one day as it eluded us for a moment, we stopped in a quiet street to ask directions. The street was just a few houses really, in the middle of the vast expanse of Oklahoma plains. It was early morning but an old woman in a bright red dressing gown was out getting her mail from the box at the end of her garden. Despite the early hour she was perfectly made up, her lipstick matching her gown, and holding a half-eaten, fleshy avocado in her hand. As we drove off, I turned back and watched her getting smaller and smaller until she was just a tiny red dot in all that landscape and I thought about how later I would be sending that information about her housecoat out into the other vast landscape of cyberspace. As detailed and honest a performance as I might give in the flesh. Not to say the conveyance of this material was seamless; a cantankerous HTML code, a temperamental connection cable for the digital camera and an inability to get on-line any time before 2:00 am (Route 66 may have been decommissioned and deserted but the cyberspatial highway was one big traffic jam) led to a level of tension never experienced in performance nerves. Updated every few hours, our performance on the site engendered remarkably similar feelings to live performance, high pressure and high adrenalin. In live performance, however, there is always the reassuring certainty that if you make a mistake, you are likely to be the only one to be aware of it. Here in our virtual venue, one missed-out dot or a misplaced '<' could render communication with the audience impossible, and the presence of our virtual audience was a constant one, even when they were absent, so to speak. When we picnicked in the desert on an old disused part of the road in the hot Californian sun just before the end of our trip from East to West I knew I would be posting the exact details of the meal, the hot smell of the desert and the euphoria of having got thus far, on to the web that evening. Our virtual audience left evidence of their participation not only in comments on chat page of the web site but through posting actual requests, such as a one very specific entreaty for a recipe for pecan pie, to be written by a waitress in a diner onto her order pad. Our real life actions became informed by the virtual audience and thus made me wonder exactly who was the performer and who the audience.

In Truxston, Arizona, we met Mildred who had run the Frontier Cafe and Motel together with her husband for 27 years. Since he died in 1990, she hadn't known what to do as regards the business, 'I'm 69 - 70 this year - and I know I should give it up, but I always think... ‘you never know who you might meet tomorrow.' Mildred's philosophy became a sort of motto of our journey, the 'here and now dynamic' when potentially anything could happen on our performance-in-motion with its ever changing audience. I was still questioning the ownership of performer/audience roles when we met Dixie Lee Evans at Exotic World, Wild Road. Dixie led us round her museum of strip-tease, informing us that Aristophanes was the founder of burlesque and in the next moment, pointing to a large golden urn amidst the boas and diamante G-strings, crying: 'That's Sherri Champagne! Now she just wouldn't wear any costume that didn't have the picture of a champagne glass on it.' At times, framed in a doorway, Dixie would hold out her arms dramatically and state: 'We took what was real and we exaggerated it, we made it larger than life.... That was burlesque.'

What, we wondered, was our relationship to the real? We took what was real and made it digital, in stories and photographs from the unforgettable residents of Route 66, formatted for viewing on a web site that remains 'live' even after the journey is over. In return we left the evidence of our journey in hand-written messages in bottles; in audio taped stories of where we came from; in Polaroids of ourselves on location; in a trail of seeds planted from Chicago to LA; in a box of mint imperials in the Baghdad Cafe, the final oasis before entering the Mojave Desert; in video footage of Karl Marx's grave in Highgate Cemetery atop Abe Lincoln's tomb in Springfield; in a fuzzy felt raven finger puppet from the Tower of London in the belly of a giant blue whale at an Oklahoma swimming hole; and in a tiny beefeater statue left on a red and white table cloth in a diner in Illinois. These traces we left for future audiences who would pick up the trail. All of these markers, digital and atomic, are still out there in the vastness of cyberspace and the old American highway.

Following on from their on-line Route 66 road trip through two-lane byways and info. super highways, artists Leslie Hill and Helen Paris abandon their Pontiac Grand-Am for a a sucession of cafe tables in the Parisian Left Bank, home to the artist/intellectual culture made famous by figures such as Hemmingway and Stein, Picasso and Sartre. From their stationary position, watching the world go by, Hill and Paris make fresh explorations of the significance of 'place' in a world where more and more of our daily contact occurs in the 'placeless' realm of cyberspace and muse on the past, present and future of the way artists form communities and identities.