Say "performance art" in mixed company and you're liable to have no company around you in no time. It's a great way to kill a party. For better or worse, performance art has this pretentious reputation. Performance art conjures up images of people standing in a gallery doing some mundane thing and charging people money to see it. It's hard to perform and even harder to convince people that your particular message is one that belongs in a gallery.
When famous people do performance art, it's laughed off a lot, too. Lady Gaga confused people with her Marina Abramovic-inspired VMA performance this year. Yoko Ono has been confusing people for decades with her performance art (though, oddly, her installations of ladders, telephones, and other every day objects tend to get a pass). James Franco is getting a lot of crap for pursuing art projects and Hollywood feature films, leading to a lot of downright homophobic jokes and comments about his non-narrative work.
Yet sometimes, it's that element of fame that can give the audience enough context to accept performance art. Last year, while fulfilling her duties as winner of RuPaul's Drag Race, Sharon Needles wrote and performed a shocking piece of performance art called "TV Will Never Love You." It's incredibly NSFW and will be discussed in great detail below the jump.
Sharon Needles' entire character is performance art. Full stop. It's a totally manufactured persona that's stupid, beautiful, and dead. It's Kelly Bundy as a corpse and the stupidity is a tool used to push buttons with offensive language and commentary. It takes a very intelligent person to create and maintain such a ridiculous character and Aaron Coady snaps in and out of his Sharon Needles persona with ease.
That's why it was so shocking for me to learn that "TV Will Never Love You" was created while Sharon Needles' was representing RuPaul's Drag Race. It's a scathing commentary on fame and TV culture. It's angry. It's nasty. It's beautifully blunt in the most disturbing ways imaginable.
Sharon walks out onstage in a red leather jacket covered in cause badges, including a choice message for police officers on her right shoulder. The emcee calls her a legend. Sharon dedicates "this one" to anyone she ever hurts, then a tube TV flicks on. Static is the only sound onstage beside her voice. It is the haunting element in the background that represents the empty obsession with just being famous that drove the Sharon Needles' character to reality TV at all.
"TV Will Never Love You" is a series of messages repeated two to three times each, like a teacher instructing her students to learn by rote. The message shifts sometimes in unexpected ways, but the point is always clear. You may love the idea of fame, but an idea can't love you back. How much will you sacrifice to get what you think you want out of life?
The performance specifically names an interview with Out magazine as the final pushing point. A quick search led me to this interview, published two weeks before Needles' performance at the Trannyshack in LA. The writer created a really sensitive portrait of an entertainer achieving fame seemingly overnight. He also suggested that Sharon Needles was an emotional wreck ill-equipped to be famous and said Aaron might be suicidal. He aired out dirty laundry about his private life and made Aaron/Sharon out as some martyr for the cause of drag.
If you know nothing else about Sharon Needles, know this: Aaron does not think she should be a role model. Aaron wants her to be a tool of rebellion and destruction, a subversive force ripping the plastic off the entertainment.
"TV Will Never Love You" is the first time I've seen Aaron onstage, not Sharon. Sharon may be physically present, but Sharon is not smart enough to do what Aaron does onstage in this performance.
Bad news kids...bad news kids...bad news kids, art is dead. Bad news kids, art is dead and money lives.
The mantras grow longer and more convoluted as the figure of Sharon figuratively unravels onstage. She mentions her prize, her TV appearance, her fame, and her aspirations.
The whole time, the TV blares in the background. Live footage of Sharon flickers on a projection screen behind the TV. The image of Sharon shifts in and out of focus as the lights flicker to distort the projection and TV.
The mic drops, the crowd screams, and then the baseball bat comes out. Pay attention to where Sharon places the rest of the action and the story becomes quite clear.
I must stress again that this video is NSFW. It's a brilliant piece of art, but it's filled with expletives and disturbing imagery. You should watch it, but you've been warned.
Not every artist has the advantage of nationally televised context for a piece of performance art. That fame is the only reason Sharon Needles can perform "TV Will Never Love You" only adds to the intensity of the performance. This is the American dream fulfilled by America's vote. Aren't you happy to be a part of that system?