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What was it like growing up in South Dakota?

It was kind of small and... you pick up weird ideas there because you're not really exposed to the big thing. All the cities were far away. We had to drive an hour to get to a city of 100,000 to see a decent movie or do the shopping. So my exposure to art and strangeness came on TV which usually wasn't favorable. In one of the Herbie movies, I think the first one, The Love Bug - it's set in San Francisco and the lead character's friends are like weirdo artists, post-beatnik things. And at one point, one of the Beatnik guys's paintings fall in the street and one of those San Francisco street cars drives over it, backs up, drives over it again and everybody cheers. In the movie, you're supposed to know that these guys are silly and what they're doing is silly and stupid, but I still wanted to do that. There was something cool about it.

You lived in Budapest for three years - did you know the language first?

Oh God, no. And if I had known of the language, I might not have gone. It's supposed to be one of the second most difficult... I had an uncle who had an apartment there and traveled back and forth. He said I could stay for a month and so I went and found work teaching English. When things went well I had to work about twenty hours a week to pay all of my bills. It was only supposed to be for six months, but my girlfriend of three years broke up with me instead of coming to visit like we had planned and I had no reason to come back. The city is beautiful and it's old. ...Every day I'd cross the Danube and just look at these marvelous bridges and buildings.

People just don't say, "And every day I'd cross the Lackawanna..."

Which is unfortunate. I was just driving here today and there's some marvelous buildings. They're tearing down stuff, you know that old Hadden Craftsman Building. They're knocking a lot of the great old wharehouses, the factories down in Scranton. What are you going to do with them, the industry's gone. What are you going to fill them up with? Nobody has the money to fill them up with anything. So they're getting knocked down and they're putting car dealerships on top of it.

What was the most vivid performance you saw in Europe?

I saw a Polyphonics festival, a European festival of sound poetry. It was held and organized in Budapest by the gallery that I volunteered at and was it a French guy?... I can't remember the title of his piece, it was very popular among the sound poets in Europe. Basically he'd mutter the names of the fruits and vegetables and stomp on them. Which sounds absolutely ridiculous and it does look absolutely ridiculous on stage, but he's in his bare feet and he's not just jumping up and down on them, he's like approaching them and fondling them and squishing them. It was very sexual in a weird way. It would be almost pornographic except for the fact that it's so silly and it's just his feet squishing a pineapple or a tomato and he's mumbling the names and it's kind of, "Ummm.... pineapple, pineapple, pineapple, pineapple, pineapple."

How has exposure to this kind of performance affected your work?

...You've got the serious and the silly all at the same time. I like that. I've only thought about that performance since I saw it, maybe once or twice, but that may underline a lot of what I like put on down at the gallery because so often people tend to think of high art as being very serious and having nothing to do with anybody else. That can be true and there is a place for that - you can create something that most people won't understand and it's still a very important thing. But it's neat when you can create something that has some very complex high-falutin' meaning but is also appreciable on some lower level, so that a six-year-old can grasp it at the same time and you can just laugh at it and it's fun. I like to have fun.

What do you tell people when they ask, "What is performance art?"

I start mumbling because I'm not sure myself. When you look at the clinical history of performance art, it's come out of so many different venues. There's outgrowths of the performance of poetry... of traditional theatre... of dance, of the more typical plastic arts, painting and sculpture. As painting started involving things that moved and not being quite so flat anymore... And people started doing sculptures that fall apart over a small period of time. Is that sculpture or is that a performance? And probably things from other areas, who knows, physics, lectures, what not. All get combined in this weird mullaguponous stew of stuff that bubbles up and the stuff that goes on down at AFA is probably somewhere between a performance art series that you might see in New York and Los Angeles and a church or high school talent show.

So we're not going to see Karen Finely, naked and rolling in chocolate?

No. No we're not, but we've got the people who have been to New York or Los Angeles or Budapest and have seen some stuff. About two years ago, three girls approached us to audition for the series, and they came in and they had their little tape players and they put in their Madonna CD's and sang along. And those of us that were watching, our first thought was - this isn't performance art, and then we all did a mental double take. Well, who are we to say that that's not performance art. Anything can be art in the 20th Century - why can't this be? And then two, they had the courage enough to come and approach us and the desire to put something on in a very strange venue for them. And even if it isn't performance art - they're going to see some other people and maybe they'll learn something from and the other people who are the performance artists might learn something in return.

What was the reaction to their performance?

It was one of the most controversial performances we ever had. Half the audience loved them to death, thought they were really cute and lots of fun, and the other half was just very angry that we dared to put them on the program. They do not belong here. Well, yeah, they do, because nothing else irritated you this much.

Then performance art is often about breaking the rules of art...

You can set up all sorts of rules and define things and set up a grammar for whatever you're talking about, but you get something that breaks all the rules and it works anyway. A lot of the stuff that falls into performance art are the things that are outside of the rules. And maybe a lot of them fail or flop but some of them might succeed. You stretch things, you try them out as an experiment. You might sit there and have somebody do something for twenty minutes and they're completely embarrassed and the audience is completely embarassed and the piece is a flop, but the fact that it was done, like Thomas Edison said, no experiment is a failure.

Can you give me an example of a recent success?

On June 16, we did a marathon reading of James Joyce's Ulysses, on Bloomsday - the day that the whole book took place on. We figured that's 24 hours, let's try to fill it up. I did some research and of the marathons, the longest one I could find went about twelve hours, and that contained more than one-hundred readers divying it up. Well, we went for twenty-four hours and forty minutes with about twenty different readers. I can't swear for sure, but it just might be a record. There was no audience member who stayed for the whole thing, which was good because someone was joking, "What if someone comes in at the beginning and stays there until the very end, just sitting there, smiling." I'd be very, very afraid of that person.

- By Alicia Grega-Pikul

If You Go:

What: "At A Loss For Words"

Where: AFA Gallery, Scranton

When: Friday, August 17 at 8 p.m.

How Much: Donations appreciated

For more information or to audition: call Michael at 343-2882