In 1986, the New Museum in New YoRK
opened the exhibition
Choices: Making
an Art of Everyday Life
, curated by the
museum’s founder and director, the late
Marcia Tucker. This show included such
artists as Marina Abramovic and Ulay, James
Lee Byars, Spalding Gray, Tehching Hsieh,
and Linda Montano. It was at this show
that I first saw Montano’s compelling and
haunting video
Mitchell’s Death. For all its
focus on mortality, it proved to be my own
point of entry into a show that rigorously
investigated aesthetic counterpoints to a
wider art world of commercialism, media
overload, art’s co-option by entertainment
and fashion, and the art world’s seeming lack
of a moral compass.
It’s worth referencing the
Choices show
because most of Montano’s creative life as
a performance artist has been an attempt
to blur the boundaries between art and life,
and her retrospective at SITE Santa Fe—
curated by Janet Dees—loops back to her
first sustained performance, if you will, as a
would-be Catholic nun. Besides becoming
anorexic in the convent, this experience
set the tone for the artist’s inclination
toward a highly disciplined control of her
mind-body systems in order to reach a
heightened state of being, plus Montano’s
spiritual edge is part of her driving wheel.
By the time
Choices opened, Montano had
already begun, in 1984, a work with a multiyear
duration,
Seven Years of Living Art. This
piece was based on the seven energy centers,
or chakras, of the body, and each year the
artist would color-code aspects of her life—
such as her wardrobe—to match the seven
colors associated with the chakras: red for the
base of the spine, then yellow, orange, green,
blue, purple, and white at the top of the head.
In addition, the artist would stay a minimum
of three hours a day in a space matching the
color of the chakra in question, listen to one
certain pitch for a minimum of seven hours
a day, and, for one year, wear only clothes
that matched the color aligned with the
chakra under investigation. But Montano’s
art-life piece had a public component as well
and that’s where the New Museum comes
in again. Once a month, for seven years,
Montano sat in a room in the museum painted
to match the color of her clothes for that
year, and she met one-on-one with individuals
who desired to engage with her in art/life
discussions and counseling.
At SITE, the largest component of
Montano’s retrospective is devoted to
documentation from
Seven Years of Living Art.
Each year’s uniform hangs on the wall, and
on the floor, directly in front of the colorful
garment, is a bundle of clothes matched to
that year’s hue. Besides the clothes, which
poignantly carry a strong sense of the artist’s
presence as well as her absence, there is a
video that deconstructs the spiritual rationale
for this long and intricate performance. In it
we see the artist’s tattooed back marked with
circles denoting the chakras positioned up and
down her spine, but the most interesting part
is the live snakes that wind around her neck
and back and symbolically refer to the coiled
Tantric energy that is supposedly located at
the base of the spine.
Death is an eternal mystery and, on a
fundamentally deep level, the loss of someone
we love is never easily integrated into our
landscapes of memory. The power of loss
is palpable in Montano’s video
Mitchell’s
Death
, which is about the shotgun accident
that took the life of the artist’s ex-husband
Mitchell Payne, in 1977. This is the strongest
and most incantatory of Montano’s works.
In a voice-over monologue, the artist relates
the moment of learning about Payne’s
accident; traveling to Kansas where he
lived; dealing with her ex-husband’s family;
examining Payne’s body in the morgue;
and unveiling her confusion and grief. The
attempt to mirror the death and its impact
on Montano results in a decidedly profound
artwork. In the video, her face morphs from
something ambiguous and skull-like to a face
dotted with acupuncture needles and slowly
back to a soft-focus skull. The artist recites
her litany of painful loss in a one-note drone
that emphasizes the strangeness and horror
surrounding Payne’s death. If Montano were
to be remembered for only one work, this
would be it.
The late art critic and writer Thomas
McEvilley has written extensively on the
potency of artists determined to create
situations and gestures that have “dissolved
the traditional boundaries of art activity and
set new ones within the limits of the lifefield.”
Establishing fluid boundaries within the
“life-field” is at the heart of all performance
work, and what results in this mindexpanding
genre are images of a variable self
splitting open like a seed. In 1983, Montano
collaborated with well-known performance
artist Tehching Hsieh in a yearlong piece
where the artists were tied together by a tenfoot
rope but were forbidden to touch. Hsieh
commented about this piece after it was over
and said, “It’s more than art—you have to
be a human being and an artist. It’s like [the
movie]
Rashomon in that everyone’s point of
view and understanding of the same thing will
be different.” In thinking about performance
art, the work eventually comes to rest in the
mind of the viewer, which alters the distances
between what is art, what is life, and what
it means to be a witness to phenomena
that arise between the two forces.
Diane Armitage
Linda Montano,
Mitchell’s Death, video still, 1977
My technique for feeling life’s ecstasy has been negation, taking something away, discipline…. I am in a perpetual state of letting go of control.
Linda Montano: Always Creative
SITE S
anta Fe
1606 P
aseo de Peralta, Santa Fe
–Linda Montano
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