JENNIE KLEIN: Annie and Beth have asked you to write the forward for this book because the seven years of weddings and sexecology/ecosexuality developed from their relationship with your canonical durational works Seven Years of Living Art and Fourteen Years of Living Art. You are an Art Saint and a mentor for much of their work. Can you begin by telling the readers how you met Annie and Beth. and what your relationship has been with them over the years?
LINDA MARY MONTANO: I will ask Annie and Beth directly. Annie and Beth, in very few words, please answer this question from Jennie about how we met. That way I am assured accuracy and memory reliability.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: When Veronica Vera and I saw a flyer in the bathroom at Franklin Furnace for Linda Montano’s summer saint camp we applied immediately. I had learned about Linda in my History of Performance Art class at School of Visual Arts and resonated with her work. Linda liked our application and came to meet with us at Veronica’s apartment in Manhattan and we were accepted to spend a week with Linda at her Art/Life Institute in Kingston. We explored one chakra a day for seven days. The week was absolutely life changing, life enhancing, and a pivotal experience. As I had been working for a long time in the mainstream sex industry, I was ready to move on. My dream was to be an artist, so Linda baptized me an artist, and in those moments I became one. I’m eternally grateful for all the guidance Linda has given me ever since. She is truly the lighthouse to my bobbing and rocking art/life ship.
BETH STEPHENS:
We first met in 2002 when I was performing my cross county performance called Wish You Were Here. I had just recently started going out with Annie and we’d had some really fun dates in California. She had a gig in New York, so I drove an old VW Van cross country and met up with her in Manhattan. She joined me for the Northeast part of my road trip project. On the way to Palmyra, NY to do a performance where Mormonism started, we stopped by your Art/Life Institute in Kingston. Somehow a lot of Annie’s porn-star friends were there too, maybe it was a Club 90 meeting. Whatever it was it was wonderful to meet you in your natural habitat surrounded by sexy, sexy people. Yes, That is how we first met.
JENNIE KLEIN: What has been your relationship with them over the years?
LMM: They are adopted family first of all. And sometimes LIFE becomes the relationship, a place where Annie, Beth and I exchange information about challenges and issues and feelings. As a result we have developed a wonderful transparency and ability to practice Non-Violent Communication. To me that is the higher art, LIFE that is, and thankfully we are friends enough to do that! We also exchange colleague info and gig info and how to exchange money in Europe info.
JENNIE KLEIN: Linda could you talk about the centrality of the chakras for your performance work during that time?
LMM: I has just begun 14 YEARS OF LIVING ART, a self designed Chakra experience, and so I was hot and heavy in the process/practice when Annie and I first met. I definitely remember that she came to Summer Saint Camp at THE ART/LIFE INSTITUTE in the yellow year, the year of the adrenals and courage. The "camp" was a way to share my information with others artists who came once a year for two weeks to play-work with me upstate. Besides all of the other Chakra disciplines that I did (wearing one color clothes, listening to one sound for hours a day, staying in a colored room for hours a day,) I also met with people for 7 years once a month in NYC at the New Museum for Art/Life Counseling. At the Summer Saint Camp, we processed and workshopped intensely and were in the learning stages of this chakra experience. I couldn't do it that hard now if you paid me, but then again that was 1987 when Annie and I and Veronica Vera explored art-life for two weeks. And it is now 2015, 28 years later.
In 2002, 14 YEARS OF LIVING ART was over but I had extended it by sharing it in a performance titled: ANOTHER 21 YEARS OF LIVING ART, a non-academic art-life "school," based on the 7 chakra map. Beth and I met during the first 7 years of that institute.
JENNIE KLEIN: Could the three of you talk about your subsequent collaborative work?
LMM: Annie truly initiated me into my beauty-goddess self via her photos of me which the whole world should see because I'm ready for her to share them now that I'm 73. They are persona studies with costumes, professional make-up and Annie's artistry.
I also co-taught with Annie and Barbara Carrellas for some years during their SACRED SEX workshops and have vibrant memories of breathing and chocolate and sounds emanating from an extremely small upstate NY bungalow with 25 heaving and huffing and puffing and ecstatic women, all loving together. Thank you Annie for that.
And The Green Wedding at Beth's UCSC was a Felliniesque feat of production/costume/administrative magic that this dynamic duo not only "performed " once but I think 18 times.
And The Green Wedding at Beth's UCSC was a Felliniesque feat of production/costume/administrative magic that this dynamic duo not only "performed " once but I think 18 times.
No comments:
Post a Comment