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Doris "Boris" Berman
Fotoaktion!
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The Story of Fotoaktion
By Perry Vasquez
Around
1969 a story began circulating in the Austrian art scene about
a man who had interrupted a university lecture by pulling down
his pants and defecating on stage in front of the astonished
students and professor. The professor’s response was not
recorded but he was said to have been a hold over from the Nazi
era and so this provocative act was understood to be unmistakably
political in nature. The man’s name was Otto Mühl
and from 1960 to 1971 he was part of a loose group of Viennese
artist who came to be known as the Viennese Aktionists. Aktionism
was a violent, iconoclastic response to the atrophy of life in
all its aspects in post-war Europe. Each of the significant artists
of the Aktionist movement, Otto Mühl, Rudolph Schwartzkogler,
and Günter Brus, spent time in jail for their art.
Doris Berman
was an 18-year-old singer-songwriter known as Isabel Domin
living in Salzburg, Austria in 1969. Her brother told her the
infamous story of Mühl’s performance
that day in the lecture hall. “In German there is a saying, ‘Pissing
and shitting is also an art.’ For me it was the first time
I truly understood what modern art was all about,” she
said. Her producers had tight control over her image as the girl-next-door.
But Doris began to chage and soon afterwards, she abandoned her
pop career, departed for America and became a punk rocker. Settling
in Palo Alto in 1979 with her husband, Russell Berman, she invented
a new persona, Doris “Boris” Berman, fronted a noise-art
band and enrolled in photography classes at San Francisco City
College. Her photo teacher had a reputation for shooting people
from the hip, literally holding his camera by his side and clicking
the shutter randomly. That cavalier approach offended Doris’s
understanding of what the relationship between photographer and
subject matter should be. Why not let people take their own portraits
she thought? So one evening at an art gallery she set up a camera
on a tripod with a cable release and invited people to squeeze
the black rubber ball and take their self-portraits. She called
her event a “fotoaktion” in the spirit of the original
Viennese Aktionist art movement.
Doris and I became
friends in 1980 while I was a student at Stanford University
where her husband lectured on Nietzsche wearing black leather
pants and an intimidating look able to reduce coeds to tears.
His class inspired me to publish an art magazine so I placed
an ad in the personals looking for contributors, and by coincidence,
Doris answered it. Over the phone we agreed to meet in a nearby
café. When I asked
her how I would know her, she said in her clipped Austrian accent, “I’ll
be wearing puss print and smoking a cigraette, darling…” My
spirit quaked. When a tall woman with big orange hair walked
through the door wearing a hot pink leopard skin mini-skirt,
fishnets, go-go boots and a black leather jacket I just about
fell over. It was friendship at first sight.
One day Doris
invited me to a fotoaktion event as her assistant, to manage
her props and make sure everything ran smoothly. I assisted
at several fotoaktions and the people who participated ranged
from members of the San Francisco gay underground to the inhabitants
of a bombed out Bronx neighborhood. Years later after moving
to San Diego, I told a friend about Doris’s fotoaktions and how fun they were. He suggested
we do one for our house party. After some hesitation I decided
to continue the practice of fotoaktion as homage to Doris and
those early groundbreaking events. Since then I’ve staged
10 different fotoaktions in San Diego in bedrooms, garages, art
galleries and museums.
Fotoaktion is
rock and roll. It’s
appeal lies in the levels of risk and caution involved when crossing
the boundary between spectator and performer. Fotoaktion participants
also use props to turn the experience into theater. I provide
masks so they can hide and give cover to a side of their personalities
they might otherwise not feel comfortable with in public. A fotoaktion
is a trap that you willfully fall into. You have to give yourself
to it. Fotoaktion is part improv comedy and part psychotherapy.
Within its logic, symbols of power may come tumbling down, secret
truths may be revealed and lunar beauty may surface and grow.
Each fotoaktion
has it’s own unique
timing. A fotoaktion typically starts out slow but once it catches
fire it can burn hot very quickly. Like a bubble economy at its
peak, no one can wait to buy in. Is there no such a thing as
order at a fotoaktion then? That’s good question. There
may come a moment during a fotoaktion when the sum of the crowd’s
collective border-crossings, existential transformations and
risk unawareness reaches critical mass. Then the audience can
sense an immediate shift in the magnetic fields of creative possibility.
Time, space and motion become realigned into an orderly, unified
field, like a painting, and a greater truth is revealed. The
event itself becomes an organic feedback loop as image follows
upon image, produced by living, breathing human enigma machines.
For me that moment
came half way through the evening at a fotoaktion I recently
staged in downtown San Diego for MCASD Live!When two young
dudes dressed in hip-hop gear put on Fidel Castro and George
Bush masks, things got weird. Moving through a series of images,
they aped a satirical showdown between good and evil with hyperbolic,
self-aggrandizing moves straight out of the hip-hop playbook.
It was like watching someone tag the Museum wall with a living
political cartoon. Afterwards you could tell the level of risk
and caution had changed for everyone and the following performances
became edgier and more pointed. The moment was pure Aktionism;
spontaneous, political, funny, revolutionary and self-aware.
At that moment I felt both the spirits of Otto Mühl and Doris “Boris” Berman
moving in the house. They were there to deliver a postcard. “To
San Diego from Vienna, with love.”
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