The pair are currently collaborating on The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, a play that examines her life from her childhood in postwar Yugoslavia through her performance work to a staging of her death. "When it came to do the play I said to Bob [director Robert Wilson], the only person in my life who can do the music is Antony, because it really corresponds," she says. "One of the similarities between Antony and me is that in the moment of performance you really step to your higher self. You create another type of reality for the audience to enter. That's why it's so emotional. It's so funny, everybody is crying at Antony's concerts and everybody was crying in Moma when they were sitting opposite me."
Indeed, there seems nothing at all unusual about Hegarty collaborating with a performance artist. For one thing, his roots are in experimental theatre, and for another, the relationship between rock and pop and performance art appears to be blossoming as never before. In 2011, the biggest pop star in the world is Lady Gaga, a product of the same downtown New York club scene that spawned Hegarty, where what Gaga describes as an "interesting hybrid of performance art meets singer-songwriter-meets-drag-meets-theatre-meets-rock" is the common currency.
"When I was really young, I was fascinated with performance artists," Lady Gaga says, on the phone from Taiwan. "Leigh Bowery, Klaus Nomi. And when I got older I became fascinated with Yoko Ono and Marina Abramovic. I grew up with them, and sort of naturally became the artist I am today. It wasn't until I started to play out in New York and my friends said, 'Look how much this has influenced you,' that I realised it. The one thing there wasn't on the Lower East Side was pop music. So as a pop songwriter, I thought that would be an interesting way to make a name for myself in this neighbourhood. I figured if I could play the grocery store around the corner as if it was Madison Square Gardens, maybe some day I can assimilate pop music into performance art in a more mainstream way."
Looking at her sales figures, you have to say Gaga has succeeded beyond her wildest dreams: you wonder how the record labels who she says turned her down because they felt a mainstream audience couldn't stomach the more outré aspects of her performances feel now. Equally, you can see their point: pop and performance art traditionally have a very strained relationship. One theory is that rock and pop audience's negative reaction to anything that smacked of performance art was simply a legacy of public animosity towards Yoko Ono, the first performance artist to take her work to a pop audience: even before she met John Lennon, she performed Cut Piece, during which the audience were invited to attack her clothing with scissors at 1967's 14 Hour Technicolour Dream event at Alexandra Palace in London. "I thought what we were doing was high art, and there was a big difference between high art and pop music," Ono says. "High art inspires the human culture, pop music is entertainment. The mixture of high art with entertainment, which you needed to do so that people would accept it and understand what you were trying to do, was very challenging and interesting to me."
But her association with Lennon and her move from performance work into making music – "it was easier to go into the studio and make music with John rather than say to him I was going to do a big performance piece in Paris. It was about us being together, using the situation" – was, initially at least, met with derision and outrage. "Before I started working with John, I felt I was communicating pretty well, actually. When I got together with John, I thought that I was doing the same thing, but suddenly the hostility was there. High art is never accepted by the masses," she says. "I accepted that a long time ago. I had a great time with John. There was great love between us. Those things counted more to me than being accepted by the people."
There's an argument that the public's dim, if deeply unfair view of Ono – the woman who was held to have ruined the Beatles – tainted their attitude to performance artists who dared to dabble in rock music for years to come. Others feel the reasons are less straightforward. Abramovic thinks music and performance art fit perfectly together ("they're the highest forms of art because they're the most direct and the most immaterial"), but Laurie Anderson, who found herself catapulted from the New York performance art scene to pop stardom with the release of her 1981 single O Superman, initially felt the two worlds were entirely opposed to each other: performance art was by definition ephemeral, existing only in the moment of performance, which is the antithesis of making a record, something she only did because she got a grant of $500 and a friend argued she was being elitist. "Records were part of pop culture and I was a snob," she says. "Pop culture was for 10-year-olds. Nothing against 10-year-olds, but I was part of the avant garde, and we didn't want to be part of pop culture."
She subsequently revised her opinion and entered into the world of rock wholeheartedly, but still feels performance artists are a difficult fit in the music business. "It's odd because people from record companies used to feel they could come into the studio and sit back and go: 'Think this needs more bass.' I wasn't really using bass. I was using things like a lot of birds. And I think those guys would have felt silly saying: 'I think you need more birds.'" She laughs. "I guess I was one of their vanity artists or something."
Dan Fox, senior editor of art magazine Frieze, thinks the problem may have lain with mainstream antipathy to the visual arts in general. "We're suspicious of the visual arts because it's seen as somehow pretentious or a con job: if it's about the intangible and the ineffable, the idea that art can exist as an idea as much as a physical object that shows some degree of manufacturing or technical prowess, people are suspicious, and that's also fed by the connotations of the art world: big amounts of money, exclusivity, elitism. In rock music you have all these debates about being real and authentic, you know, three chords and the truth, that kind of thing. There's an idea that having some kind of different approach to performance is somehow antithetical to rock, because it's not about paying your dues."
Whatever the reason, when three members of the confrontational performance art collective Coum Transmissions decided to form Throbbing Gristle in 1976 – "We were disgusted and disillusioned with the art world, it was too formalised and institutionalised for us, and we were excited by sound" says TG's Cosey Fanni Tutti – they seemed to succeed in upsetting everybody: not just the kind of people who were upset by punk, but the punks as well. They meticulously documented the reactions, which means you can hear the audiences howling in anger and dismay at their early shows on the live box set TG24 and the answering machine message from the music journalist baldly threatening to kill them on the 1978 album track Death Threats. In fairness, if you deal in churning grey noise topped off with lyrics about serial killers and concentration camps, you should probably expect people to get upset, but there's a sense that the objection wasn't merely to what Throbbing Gristle were doing, but to their artistic background.
Tutti says the band were unbothered by their rockist critics: "I didn't even think about them to be honest, anybody else just didn't cross my radar. Why would I be interested in what the rock world thought about me?" Besides, the animosity had a positive effect. Ignored or vilified, Throbbing Gristle were forced to carve out their own niche, with lasting effects both on music – singlehandedly inventing a genre, industrial, that endures to this day – and the music industry. "We thought it would be fun to see how their business model worked, how we could subvert it, which we did. Rough Trade kind of came off the back of our label, Industrial Records. The whole independent scene kind of fell into place after that."
Thirty-five years later, a musician spawned by performance art is adored rather than despised. Lady Gaga describes her appearance at the 2009 MTV Awards, during which she appeared to bleed to death from a gash on her stomach while singing Paparazzi as "a performance art piece that re-enacted the death of celebrity in front of all America". Cosey Fanni Tutti – not a fan – probably wouldn't thank you for pointing it out, but it doesn't seem too distant from Coum Transmissions' 70s experiments with fake blood and wounds and simulated suicides. Gaga's interest in performance art seems to have had an unexpected effect on the mainstream audience: when she mentioned Abramovic in an interview, the artist says, her Moma retrospective was suddenly flooded with "this enormous audience of kids between 12 and 18 spending hours there". Abramovic adds: "She's really a phenomenon. With the costumes, the blood, everything, she's really looking to art, and she's generous enough to say where the interest is coming from, which Madonna will never do."
It could be that Lady Gaga has lured a mainstream audience with some pretty straightforward pop music, but there's always the chance her success indicates a shift in the mainstream audience's perception of performance art. Ono thinks that could be down to the cumulative effect of her forebears: "I think what we were doing was kind of a like a stepping stone, on a subconscious level. Maybe it was the preparation. This is happening now on a very big level."
Back in Taiwan, Lady Gaga is musing on her success in balancing pop with performance art. No, she says, she never worries that the spectacle of the latter detracts from the former. "I'm both. I'm musician and pop singer and performance artist. I could conversely argue to you that sometimes the music takes away from the performance art," she laughs, and heads off, to perform a gig in front of 44,000 people.
Alex Petridis @'The Guardian'
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