I heard Peter Kubelka talk about it at Bard College. He's standing up front, and an innocent young man asks him, 'Gosh, Peter, it must be fun to take a camera out and turn it onto the world and make art and show it to people.' Kubelka's quiet for a minute, then he says, 'Well, on ze contrary, it's
exhausting, I cannot tell you!'in that high voice of his'To take a heavy camera out in the world and carry the bloody thing under your arm for twenty years and be obliged to
everything instead of simply living itit's zo telling on your soul, zo exhausting in your bones and muscles. It's impossible to do it,
the places it takes you, into the nether world constantly. It's zo distressing to your merely human frame, I can't tell you. Don't do zis thing!'
I was once a free-wheeling artist among other artists, all of us on the move, giving everything we could, taking a lot as well. In those days Ann Arbor was one of our centers, because of the Film Festival and George Manupelli. We'd all stay at his house; and then later, Sally
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Dixon made a center for us in her house in Pittsburgh and arranged many shows. I usually stayed, by preference, in her basement, by the washer and dryer. I've always preferred small, private spaces (I still hanker for the simple life in a cardboard box). Later, Sally moved to Saint Paul. I haven't heard from her in years.
I met Robert Haller in Pittsburgh. He's now in New York City with Anthology Film Archives. And there was Gerry O'Grady in Buffalo of whom I hear nothing anymore. My last time through there, I publicly awarded him a general's star (from the collection I had as a kid) for his efforts on behalf of the art of cinema. He lived like a modern Bashobriefcase, suit, one pair of shoes, three ties, three shirts, three shorts. Don't know what's become of him or George Manupelli: sent a new work to Ann Arbor this year, but never heard from them!
In New York City I would always stay with Charles Levinehis mom made chicken soup for us, especially when I needed energy to give a show. We usually bought champagne, cheese, and crackers for those Millennium and other shows in the sixties and seventies. My wife at the time (mid seventies), Gigi Alinre, a wonderful artist, and I started doing little theater routines. I still have in my archives Danny Scheine's stills of me changing on stage into the Cardinal. The last run through New York, before the recent [February 1991] Maya Deren Award visitwhere my two-year-old daughter, Wind, and I did a few small routineswas in 1986 with my friend and filmmaker Nabuko Yomashita of Kyoto. We came up via Texas, through New York City, and up into Connecticut and Vermont. And there were Layne, Ed, Tom, Dan, Helen, and others at SWAMP [The Southwest Alternative Media Project] in Houston. Ray Foery, teacher of film history, and the Farrells of Vermont, filmmaker Tom Brener and the folks of Rokeby, Rhinecliff, New York. In Minneapolis, the Sutherlands; Bill and Sylvia Wees, Montreal; Kerryi and Kumi Yianesaka, Tokyo; Dominic Angerame and all the people of Canyon and Film-makers' Cooperative. I mention these particular places and people because they (among many others) were essential in my own life and in the creation of the various films we have discussed.
Some of it disintegrated, at least for me. Many of those who have supported us have been so unselfish that I wouldn't want to speak critically about them. All I know is that I don't know who they are anymore, or where they are. I don't hear from them. There's no more exchange. Canyon, the successful little cooperative that I fathered, lost a certain spiritual feelperhaps it's coming back. For a time it was like the Methodist church; they have voted out all the peculiaritiesthe poetic craziness. But it's the way of the age. At the same time, I am very grateful it functions so well! We received nice royalties from Canyon this yearamazing really. I don't know who rents those films or why, but they
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continue to do so. But they don't want to see the artist; they don't want him or her in their living rooms or classrooms. So I'm here with a small family, doing my little Dr. Bish radio shows, photographing Cambodian girls, writing notes, and making some video.
My gift has been imagination. It's always alive and working; it loves
. It seems to me that someone who's born to do that, should be doing that because all people benefit when creativity is alive. Just like a guy who's born to be a great pugilist should do
. He shouldn't have to go through some system where there's a bunch of application forms and say, 'Well, I would like to box, and I'm a potential champion,' and be told, 'Your application will be held on file. We appreciate your interest.' You should be able to say, 'Here's what I do, this is the time to do it!' Instead of all the nonsense of politics and 'managerial policy': the film business and the academic business are merely managers talking to managers. They're a caste who too often control the creative, which, as Joseph Campbell says, is so essential to society. It is art and myth that reflect our identity, our process, and our history. It is the path of the poet we follow: lonely tracks in the black snowy places of memory and an unknown horizon.
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Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono's relationship and partnership with John Lennon have given her access and opportunities she might never have achieved on her own, but her status as pop icon has largely obscured her own achievements as an artist. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the area of filmmaking. Between 1966 and 1971, Ono made substantial contributions to avant-garde cinema, most of which are now a vague memory, even for those generally cognizant of developments in this field. With a few exceptions, her films have been out of circulation for years, but fortunately this situation seems to be changing: in the spring of 1989 the Whitney Museum of American Art presented a film retrospective along with a small show of objectseighties versions of conceptual objects Ono had exhibited in 1966 and 1967and the American Federation of Arts re-released Ono's films in the spring of 1991.
Except as a film-goer, Ono was not involved with film until the 1960s, though by the time she began to make her own films, she was an established artist. At the end of the fifties, after studying poetry and music at Sarah Lawrence College, she became part of a circle of avant-garde musicians (including John Cage and Merce Cunningham): in fact the 'Chambers Street Series,' an influential concert series organized by LaMonte Young, was held at Ono's loft at 112 Chambers. Ono's activities in music led to her first public concert,
(at the Village Gate, 1961) and later that same year to an evening of performance events at Carnegie Hall,
