Tim Miller
The 'NEA 4' artist on gay marriage, the bed as metaphor, and the Bush Death Star
Performance artist and political activist Tim Miller has never taken things lying down. Well, maybe some things.
Born and raised in Whittier, Miller was one of the "NEA 4" who, along with fellow avant-garde performers Karen Finley, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes, won funding in 1990 from the National Endowment for the Arts, only to have it stripped months later when Congress passed a "decency clause" insisting the federal organization consider "general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs of the American public" before awarding grants. What followed were eight years of First Amendment lawsuits. In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that the clause was merely advisory, thus leaving uncertainty to affect other applicants down the line.
Today, Miller - cofounder of the cutting-edge Santa Monica arts venue Highways, where he'll be performing this weekend - is obstreperous as ever, using his work to call out what he believes are entirely 'in'decent laws: in particular, ones that continue to deny marriage rights to him and his partner of 12 years, Alistair McCartney, a foreign citizen. His new solo show, 1001 Beds (see review by Don Shirley, page 28), is culled from essays in his recently published book of the same name. "In 1997, when Alistair got a three-year student visa, I thought, 'Oh, by 2000, President Gore will have signed immigration reform, and we won't have to worry about this,'" says Miller. "One thing I've learned is time goes really, really fast and America's progress goes really, really slow."
-Rebecca Epstein
CityBeat: So much of your work has been informed by your quest for spousal rights in same-sex unions. How do you view the progress of this debate?
Tim Miller: My previous shows, Us and Glory Box, were really hugely around marriage equality and immigration stuff - Broadway musicals as a way of getting at a civil rights question. Certainly, in the eight or nine years since I've been doing work around this issue, so much has happened. Ten years ago, marriage equality and immigration stuff wasn't on anybody's radar screen. Now, we have full equality in one state, Massachusetts, comparable state domestic partnership parity or civil unions in Vermont and California. California passed a full marriage equality law in Sacramento that our Nazi governor proceeded to veto. It's a very, very fraught time.
If you have to move when Alistair's second (and final) work visa runs out, where would you go?
If we have to leave, we would immigrate to England on Alistair's British passport. This gesture toward a full place at the table for gay people in this country is going much more slowly than I ever imagined as a little Southern California queer boy who was "out" in high school in the late '70s. This new piece, 1001 Beds, has a longer view. I'm really trying [to ask], What is a "life work"? In some ways, this piece is much more personal - where we do our lives, where are they organized, and what's the most personal and private place?
What is the connection between your books and your theatrical performances?
1001 Beds is my third book. As someone who is very verbal and writerly, negotiating the space between my words on the page and my body on the stage is just this endlessly poignant and challenging and frustrating and thrilling event. It's not like you're performing the book - if I were performing this new book, it would take a week. Instead, [the audience] gets 22 double-spaced pages of some really interesting new material [that] gets at what lives inside that book.
Do you see the NEA experience as a blessing, a curse, or both? It's always going to be a part of how you're known.
To me, it starts seeming remote - the Bush-the-Daddy era of history. At the time it seemed liked the darkest moment of the night, which in comparison to the current Bush, seems very appealing. Don't quote me on that. Unless you do. [Laughs] The truth is, the NEA stuff was in response to my most charged, politicized, sex-positive work that I've so far done. And that court case is in history books and talked about.
In addition to the performance-art venue P.S. 122 in New York, you cofounded Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica. How did the creations at that venue connect with all that was going on around the NEA decision?
We founded Highways in 1989 because I felt L.A. was where the action was. Artists here were in dialogue with politics and community and sexuality, in a way I found much stronger than what was going on in New York. My colleagues were here - Rachel Rosenthal, John Malpede, Guillermo Gomez-Peña - the strongest performance artwork being done in the U.S.A., I thought, was being done in Los Angeles. But Highways ended up becoming the most regularly hassled arts organization in the United States, losing grant after grant after grant. I was the only artist who came under the gun of the NEA culture wars who also was the director of an arts organization, so, of course, I brought the scrutiny.
Do you feel there have been any palpable changes in subject matter or performance style taking place there?
When we opened Highways, the hunger for just almost any kind of lesbian or gay culture representation was so strong. There was nothing on TV. There were hardly any movies. There was an enormous energy and eagerness for it ... the first year, '89-'90 - which also paralleled a moment when the gay community in this country felt under attack by 12 years of Reagan/Bush and the lack of action during the worst of the HIV/AIDS crisis - was a very, very motivated, charged community. And that comes and goes and changes. We all know the lull of the Clinton years, which for me was a huge relief.
When you say "the lull," you mean ... ?
Not waking up every morning feeling like your country's trying to destroy your life. Clinton was always kind of a mixed bag of failed possibilities. But there was not this Death Star energy that exists in Washington, D.C. now. I don't perceive Bush as having any well wishes for my life or liberty and pursuit of happiness. His power is built on trying to hurt 30 million gay people.
The fine arts scene in L.A. is really exploding right now, but there is also something happening in performance art, that it's becoming more of a hybrid of forms.
L.A. was [once] a kind of center for solo, community-based, highly theatrical, funny, politically fierce solo monologues. Right now there seems an interest in durational performance and re-exploration, plus explorations of new kinds of media that didn't exist two years ago. On the other hand, I meet all over the country a whole bunch of amazing, really interesting 22-year-old performers who are interested in a stripped-down, lean and mean, writerly kind of high-energy solo performance.
Is 1001 Beds a monologue?
Yeah, it's just me. I titled the book 1001 Beds partly because I saw in so much of my work what a common thread the bed has been. These politics, our lives, our love, our spiritual selves, are forged between the sheets, in a way. So, this piece gets to jump forward from that metaphor by inviting the audience into four different stories about very specific beds where my truest self, my political self, resilient self, my partnered, married self, came forward. Not surprisingly, I think that is partly why this piece ends up having so much sex in it.
It seems that people really respond to the joy and optimism in your work.
And the humor! Those are the magic wands, in a way, that invite people to walk around in another person's experience and see what can happen. A month ago in Winston-Salem, a sort of surly, frat-boy athlete came up to me after the show and said, "Well, I don't know how I feel about gay marriage, but I really think you and Alistair shouldn't have to leave the country." We can encourage people to imagine that change can happen. It's definitely my agenda, and in the piece. At the end, an orgy overthrows the Bush administration.
Published: 05/18/2006
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