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I live in community, organize collectively, and always maintain one foot in a long-term collaborative project. Because of this my solo work tends to be an escape from the confines of group process. I work much faster alone. I stay up all night writing or babbling naked in the studio or video recording an inexplicable personal ritual. I change my mind drastically and invent entire performance structures in a flash. In solo work my texts are more politically sharp and my costumes more absurd because I don't have to discuss my affiliations or opinions or flights of fancy until I'm done. In group work I end up in places I couldn't expect and I treasure the deep discoveries made only in friction with family, art comrades. The solo feeds the group feeds the solo... is a key metaphor in my life and art.
I dig and dig into the context and process of my artistic choices. Noticing day dreams, paranoid or sexual fantasies, political analysis, family discussion, and contemplative practice I track the interdependence of my artistic images. I notice the reverberations in my work of a global economic context, my particular class history, my shifting age and changing body, cycles of the sun and moon, whether or not I have a lover, current
trends in political activism, aesthetics, or advertising, and so much more.
I am a political animal. My primary sense seems to be an attention to power, equality, justice, betrayal, cooperation, and consensus. After a very brief flirtation with electoral politics I chose art, specifically performance, as my primary focus and direct action. The city streets, political issues, and public consciousness remain at the forefront of my
creative exploits. I revel in art's potential to explore on multiple levels what activism often reduces to polarized positions, dismissal, or petty fighting.
Keith Hennessy in Saliva
For many years I have complemented my performance work with research and teaching in sexual healing. Beginning in my 20's I exposed myself to the superstars of gender and sexual liberation - Joe Kramer, Annie Sprinkle, Pat/rick Califia, Betty Dodson, Fakir Musafar, Kate Bornstein. A period of sexual initiation, a coming out as sexual, queerly sexual, and as a sexual healer, was integral to the evolution of my art. Everything changed when I allowed my sexuality to fully enter my dancing, lucid dreaming, writing and crafting of images. In my first major solo work,
Saliva (89), I invited the audience to spit into a hand-blown glass bowl. Receiving the bowl naked, in a cathedral-like setting under an old freeway, I added black pigment and nonoxynal-9 and then with my hand I used the communal saliva of 100 people to paint a design on my body. At the height of AIDS grief and hysteria I asked myself and everyone to remember when our body fluids could heal.
In the coming years I expect that death, in all its potential horror, mystery and grace will play a much larger role than sex. My life and work in the past decade was framed by the death of my father in 1991 and the recent death of my mother. Their deaths form a single initiation, separated only by a dream of separation that lasted nearly 10 years. This initiation which involved caring for them and finally witnessing their final breath, has inverted time, inspired unprecedented actions, and altered my ways of seeing, sensing and loving. The concept of ancestors is no longer the abstract or romantic notion I held so dearly. I am more and more aware of the tangible presence, weight, of history in my work.
My oldest brother via Buckminster Fuller taught me not to specialize. He said that there were already too many specialists and that most of us were needed to work and play between disciplines, making connections, sensing and designing systems, evolving hybrid integrity. My approach to artmaking emerges from this observation. The work that inspires me requires cross-training not just in the fields of art and performance - dance, music, literature, video, image, idea - but includes ongoing research in many areas combined with multiple forms of creative action - teaching, activism, organizing, healing, and ritual. My favorite performances end with a perfect moment in which I am whole and we are one and everything fits and nothing is impossible... and I express this with my eyes alone.
-- Keith Hennessy
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