What happens when a notorious performance artist turns forty? He stays home, gets dressed, and writes a book.
"I'm getting too old to be taking off my clothes in public all the time," laughs Tim Miller, wisecracking on the telephone from his Venice Beach home before he flies to San Francisco for a weekend appearance. "I'm a respected author now."
But the nakedly autobiographical Miller, who has made a 15-year career of performing his life in works like "My Queer Body" and "Fruit Cocktail", isn't ready to cover up yet. He'll bare his heart, history, sense of humor -- and yes, that body, the one Jesse Helms didn't want you to see -- once again at Cleveland Public Theatre, beginning this Thursday with a new performance, "Shirts & Skin".
The phrase, which is also the title of his new book-length memoir, is an apt metaphor for Miller's work, which has persistently addressed the questions of identity, vulnerability, and the push-pull of intimacy in the life of a gay man in the late 20th century. "It's about taking chances, falling in love, moving to NY, trying to raise your voice, finding complex relationships -- all that juicy, sexy, funny stuff", he says.
As Miller delved into memoir, he discovered that there were shirts at the center of his memory-photos. From the ragged Patti Smith T-shirt he wore all through his senior year, to ones emblazoned with ACT UP slogans, they seemed to be billboards for that time of his life -- what he was showing, and what he was covering up.
"'Shirts & Skin' is a retrospective," says Miller, "where I try to embody the feelings I've explored and experienced so far -- all the joys, hurts, sexuality, and adventures of this particular life's journey." Like many artists approaching mid-life, Miller is taking stock. "This is my way of checking in, a way of clearing the table," he says. "I mean, I can't see myself telling any more stories about my adolescence!"
But what stories those have been. Some of Miller's most delightful material is reprised in this show: the funny, self-deprecating reminiscences of a California boy getting queerer by the minute in suburban Whittier, home of Richard Milhous Nixon. He has a comic, magic-realist sensibility -- one that can conjure up the ecstatic bellow of trapped mastodons to accompany his suffering swoons of teenage lust-agony over a high school buddy as they walk around the La Brea Tar Pits.
Working on a longer memoir instead of a life measured out in performance-sized bites has given Miller a fresh look at his past, and a recognition of different turning points. In the new show, he returns to one of those rites of passage that seem so California-surreal they have to be true: a gay white boy learning high school German by translating passages of "Death in Venice" under the tutelage of a Chicana lesbian named Fraulein Rodriguez.
Of course, Tim Miller didn't become one of the notoriously defunded NEA Four by writing literary reminicences of queer teen nostalgia. It was always flesh: those naked, in-your-face performances, where sex was written not just in the secret heart of the work but all over its skin. Miller has always had a flair for breaking taboos, whether it's pasting labels to his body parts or writhing in audience laps. But it's the accompanying motormouth histrionics, the comic stream-of-consciousness riffs, that consistently put him so over-the-top, that are so transgressive.
"In this performance, I think the funniest, scariest, most memorable part is this long inner monologue of all the things that go through my head while I'm having sex. Meanwhile, I'm covering my naked body with clothespins." Ouch! "Yeah," Miller laughs, "no matter how the evening's gone so far, that always gets my attention."
Miller's influence on contemporary performance has been far-reaching -- not just through his own work, but through his sponsorship of other artists. He has been a producer/curator at two of the U.S.'s most important experimental spaces: PS 122 in New York City and Highways Performance Space in Los Angeles. He also teaches at UCLA and California State University L.A. Miller sees his work there as congruent with his long career as an artist-activist.
Speaking of murdered University of Wyoming student Mathew Sheppard, he says: "That kid, performing himself at 21-22? That could have been me," he says. "Two out of my four major lovers were almost killed in gay bashings. It's why I commit to working at colleges, being the 'fag-on-view' in weeks of workshops. Gay and lesbian youth are at risk."
In his memoir, Miller recalls the high school athletic ritual of "Shirts vs. Skins", where boys choose up teams and then scrimmage, either covered or exposed. "I was always going to be on the team where the boys took their clothes off and got close to each other...I was on the Skins team for life. I could cover up and slip into different shirts and disguises, but underneath it all I would always be there with the other boys who were stripped bare."
"We would always be recognizable as a different team."
[Cleveland Public Theatre presents ""Shirts & Skin". October 29-31 at 8 p.m., 6415 Detroit Ave., Cleveland. Call 631-2727 for reservations and tickets.]
Originally published in the Plain Dealer, October 1998.
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