Still from "The Silo", 1988, video by Fred Hatt

In the mid-1980′s I was living in my home town of Enid, Oklahoma, working as a video producer for a local ad agency.  I had access to industrial video gear (a Sony DXC-M3 camera and portable U-matic deck), a romantic identification with stone age cave painters, and some unembarrassable friends, one of whom lived on a farm with an abandoned grain silo.  So naturally we decided to do some cave painting in the silo and make a video about it.

The young guy seen playing saxophone and recorder is my younger brother Frank, previously seen on this blog in another old video, Subway Sax.  Frank is now living in Western Massachusetts, where he still practices improvisational  music and dance.

Frank, still from "The Silo", 1988, video by Fred Hatt

The guy who’s driving the pickup truck at the beginning of the video is our friend John, one of my favorite people from my Enid days.  He was from a well-to-do family who owned local office supply and farm implement businesses.  John was a naturalist and an adventurer in the Victorian tradition, and an out gay man long before it was common in Oklahoma.  He had traveled the world, making a living writing adventure journalism about drug smugglers and the like for Hustler and other men’s magazines.  He’d been living in California with a partner who was the leading expert on the California condor.  After John’s partner died of AIDS, and John knew he was positive himself, he’d returned to Enid.

John, still from "The Silo", 1988, video by Fred Hatt

I got to know John because he was in the local writers’ club with my wife and me.  John was writing a hilarious, sexually graphic and scathingly satirical account of a gay coming of age in Oklahoma.  John lived in a little stone outbuilding on a farm outside town.  His place was a regular natural history museum, with an amazing collection of specimens and artifacts including a giant anaconda skin and a Tibetan ritual cup made from a real human skull.  Sitting on a coffee table was an elegant curved bone that everyone who entered his home felt attracted to pick up and caress.  It was a walrus’s penis bone.

Outside the stone house, John had built a large pen and coop to keep his pet exotic chickens.  I never knew chickens had been bred into as many variations as dogs!  John used to take us on nature walks, where he’d make us wade through waist-deep swamps and crawl through brambles.  He could spot all sorts of things I’d never have noticed, including dry owl vomit containing mouse skulls, ancient bison bones in the banks of creeks, and the nests of packrats and possums.

John was an inspiration to me because coming from a small, conservative city never made him think he couldn’t live large.  He gave me courage.  A year after I shot this video, I was living in New York City, working at the media arts center Film/Video Arts, where I edited the piece.  On one of my first visits back to Enid, I was devastated to see John wasting away in the hospital.  I present this video to the world in tribute to John, because, slightly silly though the video may be, it’s all I have.  And after all, isn’t it kind of fun, and doesn’t it have moments of beauty?

The Silo from Fred Hatt on Vimeo.

Some of the fragments of music in the video are what was playing on our boom box during the event.  I believe the breathy brass is from Jon Hassell’s Earthquake Island, and the polyrhythms are from Rhythm Devils Play River Music, by Mickey Hart, Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, and others.

Blacklight body art at a party at Collective Unconscious, NYC, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

I’m involved with several events over the next few days.  Click on “Calendar” for details.

Sunday the 14th:  Opening for Spring Studio 18th Anniversary Show, featuring hundreds of artists.  Spring Studio, NYC, starts 6:30.

Sunday the 14th:  Blacklight Body Painting Dance Party at St. George Healing Arts, Staten Island, 6 pm on, donation suggested.

Tuesday the 16th:  KAMI, live music by Gregory Reynolds and butoh dance by Mariko Endo with video and light by Fred Hatt, part of a multi-media program also featuring Ben Miller and Orin Buck, at the Gershwin Hotel, NYC, 8 pm, $10.

Monday the 22nd:  New choreography by Jung Woong Kim, featuring special light effects by Fred Hatt, at Movement Research at Judson Church, NYC, 8 pm, free.

Images from "Glossolalia + Katharsis", 1989, multimedia show produced by Fred Hatt

The tradition of the wild party for New Years probably has something to do with the idea of catharsis, an explosive releasing of pent-up emotion through acting out.  We want to exhaust the frustration, regrets and resentments of the ending year by burning off the lingering energy to awaken to a fresh new day.  Of course in real life it doesn’t work, and waking up to a hangover in no way feels like a clean beginning.  But perhaps an artistic experience can give a taste of liberating paroxysm.  In this spirit I present this little two minute primal scream made twenty years ago.

Excerpts from Glossolalia + Katharsis from Fred Hatt on Vimeo.

There’s a good story behind the making of this film.  One of my housemates at the time, Mike Montgomery (now known as the lounge singer Monty Banks) was planning a tour of the Fringe Theater Festivals in Canada with Buck Duke’s Wild Sex Show, a potpourri of dirty jokes, puppets, magic tricks and R&B music with audience participation.  To attract media attention, Mike planned to stage public confrontations between his character, Buck Duke, a profane cowboy mountebank, and a pompous European artiste named Lorean Dauphine, who would be portrayed in the faux showdowns by different actors hired in each Fringe Festival city.

Mike felt Lorean Dauphine needed his own show, and approached me about producing a multimedia extravaganza that could be presented in the festivals as Dauphine’s work.  I would have just two weeks to complete an hour-long show that could be shown without my having to tour with it.  I suppose I should have been offended that Mike thought of presenting my work as the oeuvre of a pretentious twit, but I thought it was an interesting production challenge and decided to take it as an opportunity to make something experimental.  Mike suggested basing the work on themes from Georges Bataille’s Erotism:  Death and Sensuality.

I put together a slide show with 280 images photographed from my own collection of art books:  depictions of heroism, death and horror, eroticism and enlightenment from many cultures.  The slides were ordered according to a classical hindu theory of Rasas, the gamut of moods or flavors in the arts.

To record a sound track we threw a party where we taped musicians improvising, under the direction of my brother Frank.  I still have his notes for the different phases of the improvisation, which read, “Mirthful glee – righteous rage – sexual ecstasy – wailing & bemoaning – military pride – all falsetto – sustained chanting – percussive noises – tribal trance – everybody improvise poetry at the same time.”  Frank and I had been doing what we called Glossolalia – freely improvised group sounding, mostly vocal – for several years by that time, and for the recording Frank led a large and, I’m afraid, unruly group in this.

We threw another party that filmmaker Eve Heller filmed in 16mm, at which “without rehearsal or preconceived structure, vocal and physical taboos were lifted and the resulting chaos became the ground on which the collective unconscious of the performers could realize itself,” as explained in a statement I wrote for a showing of the piece.  One hour of film was shot, to be presented unedited.  Around this time, I had first experienced the shamanic work of California performance artist Frank Moore, and his influence may be seen in the performance party.

That’s me in the film, juggling sheets of silver mylar and carrying a woman in a slip on my back.  Frank is the guy with a mustache making magic hands at the beginning, and Mike is seen in a wheelchair.  Party like it’s 1989!

The film, slide show, and sound track were created separately, to be exhibited simultaneously, with correspondences occurring only by chance.  The show was presented in New York and at the various Canadian Fringe Festivals.  One reviewer wrote, “Definitely in the running as the worst Fringe show of the year, this combines slides and experimental film in a way that goes beyond baffling. . . redefines self indulgence.”  I figure it’s always good when you can redefine something, and if the critic thought it was so awful I suppose it met Mike’s requirement to represent the work of fictional Lorean Dauphine.  April Panzer, director of TuCCA, the Tulsa Center for Contemporary Art, where the show was also presented, described it as “A cloud of chaos out of which periodically drop gems of insight.”

I felt there was a lot of good stuff in the piece, especially the slide show, but it was a bit long at an hour, so the following year I made this much shorter distillation of a few moments from it, and present it to you now as your cathartic New Years’ party.  All the best to you in 2010.

On my Vimeo page you can see the full credits for the film and music.

Subway Sax from Fred Hatt on Vimeo.

In honor of my brother, Frank, and in celebration of his moving back to the Northeast after a sojourn in Oklahoma, I’m posting a video we made eighteen years ago. This is Frank improvising on his alto saxophone in the West 4th Street Subway Station in Manhattan on a late evening in 1991, filmed with the new technology of the day, an 8mm video camcorder. I observed Frank as I would observe an unknown Subway musician, sometimes watching him, sometimes watching other things going on in the station as a dance to the saxophone’s wail.

This became a piece about the rhythms of crowds and loneliness, trains and people coming in and going out like waves on the shore, an urban surf that goes on ceaselessly through all the stations of the Subway.

I made new titles for it and changed it to monochrome as the original color wasn’t very pretty.  Otherwise this is the same as the original edit I made in 1991, edited on U-matic at Film/Video Arts, where I worked at that time.

Shadows from Fred Hatt on Vimeo.

In 2007, I created this performance at CRS with butoh performer Corinna Brown.  Corinna was previously seen here in the post Emergence.  The music is a live improvisation by Dan Fabricatore on upright bass.

This is a shadowplay and a painting performance.  The use of shadows on a translucent screen allows us to play with the relative scale of the performers.

In one of my artist’s statements, I said “The act of drawing, like dancing or making music, is a highly focused form of movement in time. The expressive power of drawing is all about rhythm and flow, feeling and modulation. So I have been drawn to try to capture the qualities of movement through drawing, and to explore drawing itself as a performance art.”  I’ve been doing drawing/painting performances for many years.  This is the first one to appear on this blog.

If the embedded file above doesn’t play smoothly on your computer, try this slightly lower-resolution version.

This week I’ll be leading workshops at the Sirius Rising festival at the Brushwood Folklore Center in Sherman, New York, so I won’t have the chance to do a new post until after July 19.  See you then.