Artist
Frank Moore

June 25, 1946 – October 14, 2013
USA

Frank Moore’s remarkable output of work includes countless intimate ritualistic works for individuals and groups, an ever-changing popular cabaret show called The Outrageous Beauty Review that ran for three years in the Bay area (San Francisco), numerous videos, publication projects (including a regular ‘zine called The Cherotic [r]Evolutionary, personal manifestos such as Art of a Shaman, and his extensive website, the Web of All Possibilities) and even a web radio station (Luver). Moore acts as an initiator and a visionary. Part of his genius is in his ability to attract a tribal community of creative collaborators. He lives and works with his wife Linda Mac and colleague and former student Michael LaBash.

Additional resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Moore_(performance_artist)

Performance
Dying is Sexy by Frank Moore

“As artists, our tools are magic, our bodies, taboos, and dreams.” ~Frank Moore

FADO continues its 12-month duration performance art series, TIME TIME TIME, with a new work by acclaimed US performance artist Frank Moore. Performed with Michael LaBash and Linda Mac, featuring guest artists Philip Cairns, Harry Cee, Paul Couillard, Anna DiPede, LInda Feesey, Fred Hatt and Heidi VanderMolen.

Dying is Sexy is a 48-hour erotic, musical, ritualistic, intimate, personal climax of the magical life of the American controversial/revolutionary performance artist Frank Moore, a web of many small improvisations.

In a two-day performance that blurs the distinctions between life and art, audience members will have opportunities to engage directly with the artist and his cast in an improvisational setting. From intimate daytime rituals to performance evenings that echo the style of cabarets and “happenings,” Moore will bring to bear all of the skills he has acquired in a career of art- and ritual-making that extends back to the early ’70s. Variously called a shaman and a trickster, Moore transforms what at first glance may seem unbelievable, corny, or even tacky into an awake dream of deep transformative power.

Born with a severe form of cerebral palsy that leaves him unable to walk or speak, Frank Moore has spent a lifetime exploring and breaking taboos—from the fear and ignorance that keeps many disabled people unnecessarily institutionalized to the phobias against touch, intimacy and pleasure that pervade our culture. He writes:

“There are all kinds of art. There is art that calms, art that pacifies, art that sells, art that decorates, art that entertains. But what I am committed to is art as a battle, an underground war against fragmentation. Performance, like any avant-garde art, is the way society dreams; it is the way society expands its freedom, explores the forbidden in safety, loosens up. Society needs its dream art, just as an individual needs to dream or will go insane.”

Linda Mac recalls:

“When Paul Couillard first invited Frank to perform at his festival TIME TIME TIME he told Frank that the series was inspired by Frank’s extended time performances. Frank said he would like to do a 72-hour performance for this series. This was almost two years before the performance was scheduled to happen. During that two year period Frank performed at a week-long festival the WE FEST in Wilmington North Carolina after which he got pneumonia and was hospitalized and was very sick and had this 72 hour performance coming up in Toronto! So Frank changed it to a 48 hour performance, had Paul rent him a hospital bed and changed the name of the performance to DYING IS SEXY figuring if he died during the performance it would be on theme!”

Additional resource: https://www.eroplay.com/Cave/dyingissexy/dyinghome.html

Series
TIME TIME TIME

TIME TIME TIME was a 12-month series of durational performance art works by artists from the UK, US and Canada, presented in Toronto and curated by Paul Couillard.

TIME TIME TIME presented works ranging from 12 hours to several days. Ritual, endurance, attention span, community-building, altering states of consciousness, boundaries between public and private, narrative, linearity and transformation were explored in the series by artists presenting their compelling, urgent visions of ourselves and our world at the end of the 20th Century.

January: Linda Montano
February: Alastair MacLennan
March: Rebecca Belmore
April: Tanya Mars
June: Roddy Hunter
June: Shannon Cochrane
August: Frank Moore
September: Otiose (Ailith Roberts and John Dummett)
October: Jennifer Nelson and Glen Redpath
November: Jenny Strauss
December: Clive Robertson
December: Paul Couillard

Curatorial Statement by Paul Couillard

‘Performance art’ is a difficult beast. Not many people really know the term, and even less could say what it means. For those ‘in the know’, the definitions vary widely: some definitions are very personal, while others are tied to very precise and limited historical references.

My own approach to understanding or defining the term ‘performance art’ is ‘radical’ – in the sense of looking to the ‘roots’ of the practices grouped under the term ‘performance’. Performance has four basic formal elements: time, space, the body of the performer(s), and the relationship between performer and audience. In broad terms, performance includes the various established forms of ‘theatre’ (in all its genres from recitation to puppetry to melodrama and so forth); ‘dance’ (from ballet to tap to ballroom); and ‘music’ (classical, a cappella, rap…). I use the term ‘performance art’ to name works that engage the four elements of performance, but use one or more of them in ways that are unfamiliar, unexpected, or initially unrecognizable within the cultural context that they are presented.

For the past 15 years, I have been creating and producing works that I call performance art. In calling them performance art, I am suggesting that the ‘project’ of these works, or at least of my involvement with them, has been to explore the basic elements of performance, to experiment, to research—often, to push at what appear to be the established boundaries of form. To create new forms. To look at forms outside of my personal cultural currency. To be consciously a misfit.

The premise of TIME TIME TIME is to look at the element of time or duration through performance art.

We have very odd ways of understanding time. This is apparent in how we mark time in units that can seem relatively ‘objective’ (‘days’ and ‘years’, determined by the earth’s relationship to the sun – and useful for things like planting crops or knowing when it will be dark or light) or ‘subjective’ (e.g. ‘the millennium’), depending on what we know or imagine about how these measurements came to be. Is a second meant to be a heartbeat? Why are there 60 of them in a minute? Why 24 hours in a day? Why 12 months in a year?

Here in North America at the end of the 20th Century, the measurement of time seems to press heavily upon us. Our attention spans have been perhaps sharpened but undoubtedly shortened by technologies of our own creation, while an artificial row of zeroes may be poised to wreak havoc on the electronic infrastructures of what we call ‘civilization’ and possibly on our collective psyches as well. It seems an appropriate time to look at ‘time’, to return to our ‘roots’ in time.

TIME TIME TIME is a series of 12 works by different artists, presented in Toronto over the course of a year (1999) – approximately one a month – with each work lasting a minimum of 12 continuous hours.

Twelve continuous hours is one full sweep of the face of a clock, a commonly understood time marker that surely holds many conscious and unconscious cultural connotations. Half the length of a day, twelve hours is generally long enough to encompass at least one transition of light—from ‘day’ to ‘night’ or vice versa. It is longer than the average work period, but within the realm of many types of shift work. Twelve hours is certainly a far longer time period than that normally associated with either spectatorship or entertainment, but not an unheard-of length of time for engagement in a task, or for many forms of teaching, community activity, or spiritual practice.

Twelve hours is also a long enough period to raise several practical bodily considerations for the artist in terms of going to the bathroom, drinking, eating and sleeping. Artistry is, in many ways, a response to restrictions; it is the agency that one carves out of the confrontations and resistances one encounters in the struggle to create or express. With but a single formal restriction (that the piece must be a minimum of 12 continuous hours in length), TIME TIME TIME offers the audience a chance to look at how 12 sets of artists solve these ‘practical’ problems that time brings about. How do these artists turn 12 or more hours into a performance? How do they invite an audience to engage with this work? And what clues does this provide to us about how these artists understand what performance is, what time is, and how meaning is produced through time?

This sampling of work is in no way meant to be taken as a definitive survey of the durational performance work being produced right now. Although I attempted to bring together a range of artists and approaches, the curatorial process was limited by both financial restrictions and my own ignorance. Every day I learn of other artists and works that I would have liked to have seen included here. Nevertheless, I am extremely proud of the calibre of work in this series—by artists from several cultural backgrounds, of varying ages, and at various stages of their careers. They are teaching me a great deal about the mysteries of time. It is a rare privilege to be able to observe and participate so closely in the process of these generous, creative souls—and I am forever transformed by their work.

Series Purple

An ode to FADO's history, Series Purple is composed of a collection of purple fragrance materials dating back to the Roman Empire. Dense, intense, and meandering, this fragrance tells us non-linear stories.

Top Notes

huckleberry, violet

Middle Notes

cassis, lilac, heliotrope

Base Notes

orris root, purple sage, labdanum