LITAL DOTAN INTERVIEWS LINDA MARY MONTANO
IN FALL 2022 I WAS INTERVIEWING SEMINAL PERFORMANCE ARTIST/LIFIST LINDA MONTANO IN HER LIVING ROOM IN UPSTATE NY. SHE WAS LYING ON HER BACK, HER EYES SHUT, VERY STILL SHE CHRONICLED THE DETAILED STORY OF HER LIFELONG ESCAPE FROM ART INTO LIFE, REVISITING HER WORK THROUGH STORYTELLING, CHANTING AND REPETITION. IN HER KITCHEN, WHILE WE SPEAK, MONTANO SET A POPCORN MACHINE TO TAKE TREAT BAGS HOME FOR MY TODDLER GIRLS. THIS ACT OF MUNDANE GENEROSITY WAS PROVIDING THE RHYTHMIC PULSE AND CINEMATIC SMELL TO THE ARTIST’S LIFE AND ART STORY, BUNDLING OUR DOCUMENTED CONVERSATION, OUR PRESENCE AND EMBODIED ABSENTS AS AN ARCHIVE SET INTO MOTION.
Linda Mary Montano: I begin anything with prayer and I pray that the holy spirits surround us and talk through us and that this becomes beneficial to not only us but others, and benefits performance art and artist angels, Amen.
Lital Dotan: Amen. We are here, at your home in Saugerties, where you grew up. And you came back here after you've had such a journey
LMM: I came back to the Hudson Valley in 1980. I lived in California for 10 years, and then I had been to schools and Europe and a convent
LD: A lot of your work since coming back to the Hudson Valley was combining art and life. Your studio was named The Art Life Institute, how did your life become an art institution?
LMM: My work was always about life, and always about looking at my life, fixing life, celebrating my life, and therapy; my work was always about life therapy as a celebration. The institute was born when I lived in Kingston, before that I was living at a Zen center. So I was in that center and I thought I would live there forever and ever but then I met Tehching Hsieh and he was looking for someone to be roped to, tied to, for a year (for what would become ‘Art / Life: One Year Performance 1983–1984’ or 'Rope Piece'- LD), so I was on my way to being a Zen practitioner forever and I broke out in order to be with Tehching, in his rope. And after the rope is when the institute was born, in 1984.
LD: Yes that all makes a lot of sense now, putting these events on a timeline. In California you have been doing long durational work, being handcuffed to collaborators for days at a time. How did it feel meeting Tehching and becoming a collaborator in such an iconic work that explored similar ideas or experiences to yours, how did it feel being in another artist’s work for a whole year?
LMM: Well, it was exciting, it felt daring, because I was so wanting to be a big time Roshi in a Zen sense, I think deep down I wanted to be one of those priests with the robes, and the bells and walking around and I was retired from art, I said in 1980 I was retiring. So I came out of retirement because he was so adorable, I couldn't help myself. He was smart, intelligent and the king of endurance. So I bowed to Tehching- I came out of retirement basically. And he is very very strong, very very very very very very strong, and so we danced intensely, and politically it was a very interesting time because America felt there was only one performance artist world and that was in New York, not even California, so he was really struggling, when it was finished, lets say, because it was a feminist, women time, it was a "there are no other artists but American artists" time basically and it was very very hard on him, especially during the end of the piece. During the actual piece I felt honored to be with him, I felt honored to learn from him, I felt honored to collaborate with him, and again, he is very strong minded. I don't know if he felt honored to be with me, let’s put it that way. I was his collaborator and I didn't show him my previous work, I didn't sell myself to him strongly enough to stand up to his power, you know what I mean? Anyway I'm glad I did it, I'm glad I came out of retirement, it led to more and more work, you know, eventually the Fourteen Year Chakra piece, and its almost like now I’m doing the kind of meditation work, it took from 1983 to 2022 to finish up, I’m really retired now, really retired, I'm just doing preparation for death now. And I thought that in a sense I was always preparing for death but now I'm really really really preparing, I promise! I promise! I’m ready!
LD: Well you had a few retirements… the first one already in the 60's when you were a student and you left to join a convent
LMM: That’s right, but I wasn’t specifically an artist then, I was interested in art through my parents who were very artistic but I had not been saved by art yet when I went in the convent. I had not been embraced by art, I had not given my life to art, before the convent. When I left the convent I was saved by art. There were no therapists, I was an anorexic, 80 pounds, I was dying, and I went to a catholic college, and the nun was a beautiful artist and she opened the door to the sculpture room and pushed me in and that was the beginning of using art as a vehicle to heal from life, heal with life.
LD: I read this beautiful interview with you recently, in High Performance magazine from 1978, in which the title was “Matters of Life and Death" and here we are almost 50 years later, still discussing this as the core of what you do. Healing as art, healing yourself from life while healing others, it is so beautiful. I wanted to ask you about your perception of the body in performance, coming out of anorexia and that deletion of the body and then embracing performance which celebrates the existence of the body, channeling art and healing through the physicality of the body.
LMM: I make a separation between artist and lifist. An artist does certain things with life as material for their art, a lifist is brave, in the same way an artist is brave, just with life. And I was always very weak as a lifist. I used my body for my art and it didn’t matter how careful I was because it was for art. For example putting acupuncture pins in my face and a catheter up my nose through my mouth. I also did certain kinds of time abuse. I did a lot of blindfold pieces, because I was practicing self healing. I was not dealing with depression in therapy, I wasn't dealing with it in relationships, or in conversations, or communication or working things out, so I just incorporated all that trauma into my art. And that was my way, that was my path. After years of tragedy and my therapy from trauma, I've come down off the horse of art, onto the horse of life. And it’s like I have to hold on tightly, because now I am an elder so I have to grab quickly onto the skills that I've never learned in life… how to communicate, how to love, how to give, how to feel, how to share, how to discern, how to have boundaries, how to deal with my work, how to have the right relationship with the work, how to be an adult, how to be all grown up, and I felt like art allowed me not to be a grown up, and so I just stayed a creative wild child. The wild child is now an old woman, an elder in her eighties. And I feel its so important for artists, this is the speech part now- I feel it is so important that we are balanced, that we try not to bypass. There's a thing called spiritual bypassing, where people push away reality and it’s very important not to bypass all aspects of life. So I'm at that place of preparing to die with more skill. With more skills of life. The body was always to be used and it was a very good partner, it was always a wonderful partner, always did what I wanted it to do, you know. It was wonderful. And now I am preparing to leave it. And I think a lot of elderly artists and a lot of people after Covid are doing the same work, we are all dying. Life is a mess, we all have death on our minds now. I think it's not just me because I’m old.
LD: Death was also part of your Dorsky Museum show in 2019, ‘The Art/Life Hospital’, then you were again lying down for an extended time. Was that part of the same process of letting go of the body?
LMM: It’s more an imitation. There’s a Hindi, Ramana Maharshi, who as a teenager, laid down and died to the world, and then went into a cave and meditated for years, to understand what life is. So it's a way for me to practice meditation publicly, and to talk about death. So I'm meditating publicly, I'm talking about death, I'm abusing my body because I'm laying still, I'm practicing but the teaching aspect is there. Oh I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die but guess what- you're gonna die too.
LD: How does it feel to practice that preparation for death within an institution, with an audience, is it different than your practice at home?
LMM: I've forgotten what year it was I started involving the audience, incorporating the audience in my work and playing with the audience, I guess that's the difference. When I was laying in the coffin (during a durational live performance that was part of that show- LD), Carolee Schneemann, who was still alive, came over to me, and said out loud- in public situations, you would always know Carolee was there- she said "I'm next!” and two weeks later she died. I also live a few houses down from a funeral home and when I grew up, bodies were layed out in our houses. I find death such a good teacher of fear, of attachment, of love, of loss, and regret. There are so many aspects that are teaching tools around the concept of death and around facing it.
LD: I'm curious to know if you ever thought about how your performance work about death could be archived or collected? I’m just thinking out loud of how live performance has modalities that are collectable now, and whether it would make sense at all for you to have that type of work have an after life
LMM: I say that my work doesn't really matter or I say that I am detached and that I don't want to run towards fame but I made sure that the work went to the archive at NYU so there is a double edge there, of attachment and detachment. But I feel that we are all performance artists now, everyone, and we’re all facing the same questions. We're all performing from that same impetus to make sense of the universe right now. And just because I'm 80 and death has been my theme, I repeat that we're all singing the same song. (Montano sings-) I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, one day, one day- it's a song-
Earth is gonna hold me, earth is gonna eat me, dirt is gonna cover me up one day;
I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, some day
Fire is gonna burn, fire is gonna singe me, fire is gonna light me up some day,
I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, some day
Water is gonna wash me, water is gonna clean me, water is gonna float me somewhere
I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, some day
Air is gonna leave me air is gonna breathe me air is gonna fly me away someday,
I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, some day
I'm gonna leave, I'm gonna burn, I'm gonna blow away some day
I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, some day
hohohoho hahahaha hihihihi one day one day
I’m gonna die I'm gonna die, we're all gonna die, one day
LD: When I met you at Glasshouse earlier this year, you were laying down inside a boat in our flooded basement, being chicken, embodying chicken for two hours. Your first performance work, as I recall was also inspired by chicken. Could you talk a little about what the chicken means in your work?
LMM: There are many levels, I think to that image, it's like it became my signature, a place I could always go back to and is mine, and that's selfish, that idea that I’m the only one that could do the chicken, owning that image in a way where I don't want anyone to be the chicken, “I'm the chicken, you can be a horse, you can be a dog, but I'm the chicken” (Montano shouts) “is somebody being a chicken here? I'm the only chicken!” — laughs, so that happened… what other artist is trying to be a chicken? tell them I'm the first chicken… The way that chicken image actually happened is that I was in graduate school, during a time in sculpture that everything was very hard edge and large, large large large, and men with big muscles making big works, bigger than this room, bigger than this house, and this is what was happening. But at graduate school, there were three of us, three women, and there was an agricultural school at the University of Wisconsin and so I found myself spending time with chicken, and I remember thinking to myself this is ridiculous, and instead of going to classes I would just go be with the chickens. And my professors were big cowboys, and were all wearing these big cowboy boots, and big pants, and they came up to my studio one day and said hey Montano, what are you gonna do for your MFA show? I said CHICKENS!!! I’m doing CHICKENS. So that’s how that happened. I talked the language at the time and put three huge cages up on the roof of the new art building, and I put the chickens in there, and I gave the chickens to one of the workers at the end of the show. At one point there was a tour of donors coming to the school, and they took my chickens away, they didn't want it to upset the donors, so instead they just wanted them to see the big wire cage sculptures that I made for the chickens.
So the chicken has become my signature, it has my response to high art, and provides a way for me to transform to an angel. The chicken is spiritual flight and child's play.
LD: My last question is about the Hudson Valley, about a potential archive dedicated to the artists and art that happened here in the 70’s and 80's
LMM: I moved here to retire and it became a hot spot! I moved here because there was nothing for me here in culture, so I always had retirement in my mind but now how do I retire in a hotspot? Too much going on!
LD: Who were the artists you were collaborating with? who are still around?
LMM: They’ll feel bad if I don’t mention the right names, we'll do that privately, I'll write it on a note (Linda then wrote that note, and I still carry it with me in the pocket of my green leather jacket- LD).
Lital, Thank you for that generous meeting of our performance hearts. To conclude, let's give honor, let's give respect to all peasants who live life in sacredness, in concern for each other, who give life to their children, to their animals, their relationships, we give love to those with no applause, we thank them. Amen
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