Henry & Marina
The endurance art of Henry Rollins and Marina Abramović
I downloaded the audio book for Marina Abramović’s memoir Walk Through Walls on the recommendation of Ben Loory, a friend, writer, and reader whose taste in literature syncs up with my own more often than not. When he strongly recommends a book, I pay attention.
I was somewhat familiar with Abramović’s work as a performance artist. I had a vague recollection of a piece she did a decade ago that involved a lot of celebrities. I’ve met a handful of performance artists and her name always seems to come up.
I tend to listen to audio books when I’m walking or in the car. One day last month as I set out for a stroll around Paradise Hills, I began listening to her memoir Walk Through Walls. I was immediately captivated by the sound of Abramović’s voice. Her thick accent, slow delivery, and charming style quickly won me over.
Her stories of growing up in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) are like fairy tales from a world that no longer exists. Her parents were partisans, freedom fighters who met on the battlefield during the fight for independence from the Soviets. Although it is an incredibly romantic story, it was not a happy marriage. Each of her parents possessed an indomitable spirit that made them incompatible as partners but informed Abramović’s ethos as an artist.
I won’t summarize her entire career, because it is long and fascinating and has many ups and downs that make Walk Through Walls a fascinating read. But the stories from when she was a young performance artist in the 1960s and ‘70s are extraordinary.
When I think of Abramović, I think of her as an older woman, stately and serene, with a monkish ability to sit for long periods of time. Her work has always been physical, and she is without question one of the greatest endurance artists the world has ever seen, but I wasn’t prepared for how bloody and violent her work was at the beginning of her career. Her performances included self-mutilation, cutting (both intentional and unintentional) and lots and lots of blood.
Marina Abramović performing Thomas Lipps
In Walk Through Walls she writes, somewhat disdainfully, “In theater, blood is ketchup; in performance, everything is real.”
When she and her partner Ulay began to gain some notoriety, they bought a van and traveled all over Europe to take advantage of the opportunities they were given to perform. They had little money, no fixed address, and lived out of the van. They’d call friends in Amsterdam where they kept a mailbox to see where they’d been invited next and hit the road again.
Walk Through Walls wasn’t the only book I read last month. Because of the way I listen to audio books, it took a while to get through Abramović’s memoir and it overlapped with my reading of Get in the Van by Henry Rollins, the fourth and longest-tenured vocalist for Southern California hardcore legends Black Flag.
I got to know Rollins’ work through his books. When I splash-landed in Los Angeles in 1992, I worked at Eagles Coffee Pub in North Hollywood and after a few months, my co-workers and I convinced the owners to let us host an open mic for poets and spoken word artists. We called it Skinny Leonard’s Free Verse.
“Spoken word artist” strikes me as a strange and dated concept now, but in 1992 it, along with slam poetry, was at or near its peak. The point I’m trying to make is if you hosted an open mic for spoken word artists in the early ‘90s you heard a lot of Henry Rollins imitators, which wasn’t nearly as bad as reading Raymond Carver imitators in fiction writing workshops, but I digress.
So last month I found myself reading Get in the Van, which tells the story, through diary entries, of Rollin’s tumultuous career in Black Flag. It’s a remarkable document. Not long after he took over the vocal duties for the band, Rollins started to keep a diary. The story of how he joined Black Flag and his first tour with the band are framed as recollections, but then he moves on to journal entries, which are meticulously precise in terms of where the band played, who they played with, and how they performed.
Stories about how Black Flag would pack its gear in vans and go on long tours across the country, play in shitty venues to hostile crowds, and sleep on floors in crowded houses—all for little or no money—are as common as they are legendary. For many bands they represent the ur-text of DIY punk rock. They blazed the trail, paved the way, made it cool, etc. But unlike most myths and legends, these stories are true. In fact, thanks to Get in the Van we know the reality was extremely harsh.
Rollins’ entries reflect a very narrow focus. In other words, Rollins writes about Rollins. Get in the Van is a catalog of confrontations, fights, skirmishes, injuries, insults, on-stage collisions, exhaustion, sleepless nights, and weather that is either brutally hot or bone-numbingly cold. A typical night for Rollins might involve sustaining a mild concussion and then riding all night to the next show in the back of the trailer the band used to tow its equipment in total darkness. Hardships like these weren’t usual or extraordinary, but a way of life, a life in which everything was real. It was the price the members of Black Flag paid to perform, which Rollins sometimes described as a release, a release he came to depend on like a drug. Rollins needed it so badly he would sometimes cut himself with glass as he took the stage to ensure he had an outlet for all the anger and pain he kept bottled up inside.
Henry Rollins photo by Edward Colver
During the rare moments when Rollins editorializes in Get in the Van, he psyches himself up for the challenges ahead. He seems to view the tour as a test, and each show as an opportunity to push what his mind and body could take to the limit. It’s easy to read this, as so many male spoken word artists of the ‘90s did, as bravado. But after the fifth or sixth tour under more or less the same unforgiving and uncompromising conditions, the similarities between Henry Rollins and Marina Abramović started to reveal themselves. Both are performers who took risks with their work and repeatedly put themselves in danger, but what links them is the way they embraced the hardships their art demanded. Without being willing and able to expand the boundaries of what they were capable of enduring, the art would have failed. Marina Abramović would have failed. Black Flag would have failed.
For The Artist is Present, the performance piece I spoke so flippantly about earlier, Abramović sat in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art for eight hours a day, every day, for almost three months. She didn’t move. She didn’t speak. She sat completely still. Think about watching a movie without moving a muscle. Imagine doing that four times in a row. Then doing it again the next day and the day after that. Imagine doing that for 350 movies. Then take away the movies.
If you consider a Black Flag tour, and add up all the shows, you’d probably end up with fewer than 100 hours of performance. That’s a liberal guess, but in those days Black Flag would often play two sets a night: an all-ages show for the kids, and another for the adults when the bar opened. But if you add up all the hours of travel, all the hours of being hot or cold, all the hours of being tired and hungry and thirsty and miserable, I’d wager you’d end up with a number that defies comprehension. What if enduring all those hardships was the real performance? What if this was the real art, the endurance art, that truly made a difference—not so much for the fans, but for Rollins, and for every punk rock band that followed in Black Flag’s proverbial footsteps?
As for Get in the Van, something remarkable happens about mid-way through the book. After Rollins is invited to perform at what he calls a “talking show” his journals change. He starts to reflect more deeply. Other people begin to creep into his world. His circle expands to include writers and artists he respects and admires. We don’t quite see it in the pages of Get in the Van, but you can feel the transformation coming. Rollins is no longer a person satisfied to document the things that happen to him, but is on the verge of becoming something new, something special, something beautiful: an artist.
Inside the Outsider: Episode 5
If you’re looking for my weekly discussion of HBO’s The Outsider with horror enthusiast Ryan Bradford, mosey on over to his newsletter AwkwardSD. I’m fond of this installment because Ryan is wrong about everything. I’m not saying I enjoy pointing out other people’s mistakes, but I’m not not saying it either.
Exclusive Giveaway: My Damage
Last week I went up to Los Angeles and sat down with Keith Morris for an interview that will run in Razorcake in the near future. In fact, shortly after I send this email I’ll be heading back to L.A. to watch Keith perform at a super secret performance, which I’ll tell you about next.
In any case, I asked Keith to sign a few hardcover copies of My Damage, the book we wrote together about his career in Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, Midget Handjob, and OFF!
I’m going to give away a signed copy to a randomly selected paid subscriber of Message from the Underworld. Not a paid subscriber? Upgrade your subscription by Monday February 10, 2020, for your chance to win. I’ll announce the winner in next week’s newsletter. If you’ve been thinking of upgrading, now would be a great time.
Lit Picks for February 6-12
Here are my recommendations for literary events in Southern California this week. That said, this is one of those weeks you could just camp out at Skylight Books in Los Feliz and see more talented writers in a week than you would during the course of an entire MFA.
Thursday February 6 at 6:30pm (SD)
I’ll have the pleasure of speaking with J. Malcolm Garcia about his new book from Seven Stories Press The Fruit of All My Grief: Lives in the Shadows of the American Dreamat The Book Catapult. Garcia is a journalist who writes about people who have been, for lack of a better word, screwed by the system: fishermen who lost their livelihoods during the BP oil spill, a truck driver sent to life in prison for transporting drugs, an Iraqi interpreter who was promised a hero’s welcome but was abandoned by the United States government. It’s an outstanding collection and if you’re in San Diego on Thursday I hope you will consider coming.
Friday February 7 at 7pm (LA)
Louis J. Rodriguez will be in conversation with Daniel Olivas at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena to discuss From Our Land to Our Land: Essays Journeys & Imaginings from a Native Xicanix Writer.
Saturday February 8 at 10:30am (SD)
Mysterious Galaxy will be celebrating its grand opening party at its new location at 3555 Rosecrans Street. There will be refreshments, giveaways, and authors on hand all day beginning at 10:30am. At 12pm Lisa Brackmann, Matt Coyle, Greg van Eekhout, Ben Loory (!), and many others are slated to appear. Check the listing for the complete schedule.
Sunday February 9 at 5pm (LA)
Lidia Yuknavitch will read from her new collection of short stories Verge at Skylight Books. A word from the hyperbole machine: “A fiercely empathetic group portrait of the marginalized and outcast in moments of crisis, from one of the most galvanizing voices in American fiction.”
Monday February 10 at 7pm (SD)
Eoin Colfer, author of the New York Times bestselling Artemis Fowl series, will sign and discuss Highfire, his new novel of adult fantasy about a vodka-drinking, Flashdance-loving dragon. This is a ticketed event; do what thou wilt.
Tuesday February 11 at 8pm (LA)
Erin Eileen Almond (Witches’ Dance) and Liska Jacobs (The Worst Kind of Want) will discuss their new books at Stories Books & Café. This reading comes with a warning: “Not for the faint of heart! Expect to hear about female desire, fraught family bonds, mad geniuses, and inappropriate love.” Caveat emptor.
Wednesday February 12 at 7:30pm (LA)
Emma Copley Eisenberg will discuss her new work of nonfiction The Third Rainbow Girl with crime novelist Steph Cha at Skylight Books. Very intrigued by this book about the aftermath of a pair of brutal murders in Pocahontas County, West Virginia in 1980.
