DTAOT: COMBINE
(DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER THIRTY, ALL OVER AGAIN)

ESSAYS AND PRESS

DTAOT: COMBINE

Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty: A Conversation
April 29, 2005
Dan Graham, Tony Oursler and Rodney Graham,
Sandra Antelo-Suarez, Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne


Rodney I'm on my mobile. Is everybody there?
All Yes.
R Are you guys all in the same room?
Philippe Yes, we are all in the same room.
Dan Okay, let's get going.
P Let's ask Dan where the Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty project really originated and when.
D It originated in, I think it was 1988, in Brussels. Chris Dercon was very involved with doing a production for Flemish television along with Jeff Cornelis. He had this idea for a collaboration with the Brussels La Monnaie Opera, which would be a small opera piece on stage, which would be broadcast, live on television.
He picked, as Chris would do, architecture and art stars like James Coleman and Aldo Rossi. It was a spectacular idea, but it was very short, everybody had about eight minutes. So James Coleman gave his eight minutes to me, so I could do sixteen minutes. I don't know anything about opera, but I sure know rock opera. I was a little bit appalled by Tommy, I liked Arthur by The Kinks, but actually it was a mini-opera that The Who did called A Quick One While He's Away. It was about a lorry driver whose wife had a quick affair when he was away. I was into this idea of using popular material. There was also a film called Wild in the Streets, which as a teenage film starring Shelley Winters and Richard Pryor, and the theme of the film was something that teenagers liked at the time because it was about a twenty-four year old rock singer who was approached by a congressman running for senator, kind of a Kennedy-style politician, and he was advocating that you
only had to be eighteen to vote. The rock star agreed and eventually put into action, fourteen for voting and fourteen to be old enough to be President.
P When you first developed the project you also had a woman involved, Margaret?
D No, Marie-Paule Macdonald who I've collaborated with before on a Matta-Clark Museum. She is an architect, writer, involved in rock and roll and designed a nightclub for the Rolling Stones. So I thought she could do the set design for that project which was called Wild in the Streets. Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty, the title of this new version, is saying all these things about hippie culture and the fact that they thought you might be dead when you are thirty. And of course Americans really don't like people getting old. It's a paradox. I was very interested in what happened after Sky became president. In the film, he puts everybody over thirty-five in rehabilitation camps and they're getting LSD in their drinking supply in the morning. I was particularly interested in hippie culture when hippies moved to the country. This was the time of Neil Young's first album and Nashville Skyline by Bob Dylan, and I wanted to costume the rock opera with late sixties, country hippie, in other words, peasant dresses. Actually, President Neil Sky's character is based on Neil Young and Sky Saxon of the group The Seeds. President Sky does this press conference at Camp David in a rustic hut, which is also a go-go cage from TV programs like Hullaballu or the English Top of the Pops.
P Why do you think America doesn't like people getting old?
D Because we came to America to be young. Donald Rumsfeld hit the nail on the head when he said 'Old Europe'. [Laughter] But the thing is, it's a contradiction because everybody gets old. The original opera was never produced but I did a small pop-up book on it with Marie-Paule for a publisher in Ghent. And then it occurred to me, maybe because I've seen-I can't remember seeing these things-I may have seen Mike Smith's puppet show, which was very early apparently, but the thing it occurred to me to do something like the puppet show called The Fantastics. I had the idea that people who were hippies now have kids, and maybe they can take their kids to learn about the sixties and see a puppet show. But of course, as it has been worked out by Sandra, we do this in art fairs and what I find happening is people who really love the puppet show are usually Jewish women in their late sixties who told me they smoked marijuana when they were younger, so it's nostalgic for older people. [Laughter]
T America has always been responsible for youth culture in relation to the rest of the world. This is tied into the economic export of pop culture so there is a fear of death, which involves a fanatical equation. In the time period when this work takes place, ideals were still in place above money, and the theme loosely traces this decline: from utopia to market. Timothy Leary said something like the best of all the old worlds moved west until they hit California and the there was no place left to go but space.
P It was not produced in Belgium?
D No. It wasn't produced in Belgium.
T Then there was a reiteration, it must have been ten years ago, when we first got involved together on it, which was when Marian Goodman got involved_
D Well, she had us in this meeting_
T Well, there was at least one meeting and plans were drawn up for an earlier version with you, me and the amazing Glenn Branca.
D Yes, it's because Tony is doing these things, and what I love about Tony's work is that he does a downscaled video.
I didn't like spectacle, but I liked the downscale thing. I also liked the puppets, he was using and of course Glenn and I collaborated on many things before, but it was a time when everybody was upscaling. In fact, Mr. Oursler was working with large things for David Bowie!
T That was shortly after that. I have always been interested in collaboration and crossover, and of course in love with rock and the possibilities it seemed to suggest, in terms of reaching out into a new public.
D That was just after. Whereas Glenn was very into the opera thing, I thought it was too upscaled. Also Tony always wanted to collaborate with me, so we gave him a goldenopportunity to do a real collaboration on this project. He's been involved for a long time, he liked the concept. In terms of Rodney, he also wanted to collaborate with me, to do a tapestry for the original rock opera. Of course we all loved rock opera. I don't know if you love Kim Gordon, but Tony and I are very close to Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth.
T Absolutely.
C So Rodney, when did your involvement start?
R I guess it was about maybe_I don't know_ Dan, I can't remember what year it was, but we talked about it quite a bit. You described the project to me. I was always excited about it and we had this fantasy of doing the tapestry at a certain point. But in terms of actually doing the music it was only recently that Dan proposed that I do the title song and the other song Fourteen or Fight, that was last summer. But we talked about it vaguely for years. I always was excited about the project, you know, but in terms of being directly involved, I guess it started last summer.
D I have to say one thing now because, when we talked about it with Marie-Paule Macdonald, when I redid the
script, I co-wrote it with Teresa Seeman, who was an assistant of mine and who loves rock music. And also we should mention in terms of collaboration the soon-to-be superstar Japanther from Brooklyn. Actually, what I wanted for the original Brussels Opera was a group like the Beastie Boys or an amateur group just beginning, kids who could improvise. Now Japanther has written five new songs. It's very important that we have young energy.
T That ended up being one of your main focuses in the production, working with Japanther. You were working with them on the music right up to the end. I didn't have any connections with them at all except loving what they did. I worked on the visuals, which started back when we first began with Glenn and it began as an enormous machine that had animatronics on it because we thought we could never really afford to have puppeteers, so we were going to make animated puppets with video projections and actual kind of motion like Disneyland that would move so you'd sort of move around the room but it would also move in different ways. In this show, I was thinking how would the video and the puppets interact? Laurent and I designed
the idea of a simple series of boxes within boxes. In other words, focusing the energy of the live band in a box on one side, and the puppets in a rectangle on the other side. This is all connected by one big video screen that can change scale when needed.
D I never heard that because I was so dedicated to this idea of downscaling. My big attraction to Tony's work is that it was so intimate and downscaled and at the same time, it would scare both children and parents. [Laughter]
P So the history of the project_You get involved, and Sandra, you enter the conversation_
Sandra Actually it was maybe about two years ago, no_when did Bush win the first time? A year after Bush won the first time, I started asking Dan about it, and he kept saying hippies are not ready yet, they are not ready to come back and I kept insisting. At that time we were doing a project with Dan, Revisiting: Homes for America; actually the filmmaker ran away with the film and we only have the VHS. So, at one point Dan said to me "Okay" and we started getting together. At the beginning, Dan was a bit skeptical, and rightly so, of having live music and the multiple overlayers. He did not want anything spectacular. However,
I thought it was very important the idea of making it to be a bit schizophrenic, of really pushing that moment of
frictions, extensions and overlays between the different elements. Also it was important that this be a collaboration of friends, the celebration of communal friendship. Earlier on, this piece was going to be called Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty: Entertainment by Dan Graham and Friends. In a phone conversation Dan came up with the "Entertainment" because he said he was not a professional director. The fact is, none of us have done theater per se, so there's no professional theater director, so, there are moments in which thepiece is taken over by one element, then another element,elements that were done by the different collaborators,
including musicians and sound designer. For me it was very essential, the coexistence of the three elements: video,marionettes and live band, the difference of scale between the puppets and the band. The two different windows in the proscenium: a landscape-like, horizontal, tight window for the puppets and the portrait/go-go cage for the band. Dan commissioned Rodney to do the theme songs Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty and Fourteen or Fight. I thank Dan for agreeing for the band to be live, at one point we had a screaming conversation in which I said "It's important to have it." The other day, with Rodney we were talking about the possibility of his band playing live in the London version. In this sense, I see this work as a work in progress.
P What do you mean at some point you weren't ready?
D What Sandra did, she got first-rate professional people, which of course means we're bankrupt. [Laughter] It also has to be small scale because the puppet stage has to be a small stage, and although I proposed for older people with more money to buy opera glasses and then we'd charge them for the glasses, that hasn't happened yet. But actually Sandra got the most incredible professional people, including the best puppeteers.
S Phillip Huber from Huber Marionettes.
D Apparently the man in charge, we had some ego problems with him and we had to work through this. We also got
an amazing stage designer from France_
S Laurent P. Berger.
D Who actually understands American culture the way only a German normally can understand American culture; he was brilliant. Also the sound person, Bruce (Odland), is brilliant. We had brilliant people and it all came together. Finally Sandra asked me to be the director which I was very happy to be because I thought I was out of the picture for a while and I made some suggestions. There were some compromises, and actually Japanther was very instrumental in picking up my ideas. And Tony put in a lot of sex because we actually have older people who are very nostalgic about sexual things rather than young people, we don't have enough kids actually in the audience.
S Well, we dedicated it to the kids and to the spirit of rock and roll_
D It's a first rate theatrical production.
P Did you think that from the moment it was written in 1988?
D Well, I didn't really write it then, I just did some of the scenario, but I did a lot of writing with Teresa Seeman's helpfor this version.
T I wrote some short scenes, which are interior monologues-sort of daydreams, which the puppets have in their wooden heads!
P Looking at the sixties from 1988 or looking at the sixties from 2004, the context is very different.
S Yes, very.
T Also Dan and I are two different ages, which has always been a great dynamic between us. I first met Dan when I was a student and I saw him lecture and I had started to make my first videotape; I really loved the way he did installation. It was so much more complicated than anything anyone else was doing at the time and it was super important for my development. About five years later, I started a small editing company in New York with a bunch of other artists that was like a collective almost and I worked on Rock My Religion_
D Actually, the hippie section.
T The hippie section, and that's when Dan and I really became friends. This is before Sonic Youth was really even Sonic Youth, and at that time I was also producing a videotape with Kim Gordon, about architecture, the interior architecture of clubs in New York City, which was very influenced by your work. I liked it because I was becoming very interested in the theory behind rock, trying to understand how it functioned as a social force. I had just sort of broken up my band, The Poetics with Mike Kelley and John Miller by moving to New York, I was questioning the relationship between the audience and the performer, the whole system. I was doing more soundtrack music. Dan and I had a lot to talk about, so that's when we got together and we liked a lot of the same bands, so we shared a lot of the same interests but from slightly_How old are you Dan?
D Eighty-nine. [Laughter]
D No, sixty-three.
T I'm forty-eight.
D Actually Tony took all the drugs except LSD.
T Well_no, see_you didn't like drugs, neither of one of us liked drugs but we liked to talk about it as part of our artwork. People think I was a big drug guy but I was interested in the culture around it. How could you not be? It formed all the social codes, pop culture and psychedelic imagery. I never took LSD, I was very spooked by LSD.
Salvador Dalí said he didn't need it because he was it! I agreed that art should operate on the same level.
D But your question to Philippe about the difference_See, in the late eighties I thought the sixties would come back and, actually, for the DIA Foundation project I want to have inflatable chairs which would have two-way mirror mylar, on top of inflatable vinyl. Actually, there's a small script for Erika Beckman, which was set in Poussin's painting about Arcadian innocence and was written about Apollonian hippies. So I was very fascinated that the hippie culture would come back at a certain point. But also, I'm a rock and roll historian. I wrote something, actually, it's a published article in a catalogue for The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven called Country Trip. It's about Neil Young's first album and Nashville Skyline by Bob Dylan. It's about that
Period, so I was always fascinated by that period in terms of costuming. The first costuming was done by Marie-Paule, it's more a kind of British 'mod,' whereas the costumes for this production are more country-hippie American.
T You basically did them with Sandra. We sat there and worked on them together, the three of us. Then you invited me to make comments on them together, the three of us, which was very strange because it dredged up memories of people and places from that time period. I forgot what a wild mix of times and materials the hippies were fusing-very wonderful.
D Yes. So I think costuming is very important and I guess that's about theater also.
P Looking at the piece when it premiered in Miami, there is a very strange flavor because we look at the sixties as this kind of golden era, almost like a utopian dream_
D Also you had Altamont, and in Rock My Religion I show the
Decay of that period, but I think this distance you're talking
about is my Jewish tradition, dealing with Jewish satire like the films of Billy Wilder. It's about American culture seen from an ironic, humorous Jewish point of view.
C Rodney, how does your approach relate to what Dan just said because you, also, have been very involved in rock music, drugs and LSD, and making work about that; about that experience and rock. You're Canadian like Neil Young. What's your take on what Dan just said and also on the relationship between your approach and your work and that of Dan's and Tony's?
R Sorry_between my work and Dan's work?
C Well, I was interested in what Dan said, then thinking about your approach because you're Canadian so you have this similarity of background and conceptual thinking, plus an interest in music and bands, drugs, LSD_
R Like Tony, I was very influenced by Dan. Dan came to Vancouver quite a bit. You have the art school there and both universities and that's when I met him. I was a student. Dan's own pop music really encouraged me to pursue that. After that, it was just developing. I was always interested in it anyway. I was always in bands. I never thought of it as my work you know. In terms of influence, but I are you asking
about the attitude towards the sixties?
C Both, I guess: the attitude towards the sixties and American culture. You're the non-American in this. I know
it's similar culture but_
R If you ask me about the culture of music, especially pop music, it is actually dominated by American music of course, but so is Canadian I guess. I was thinking specifically following Dan's briefing on writing the songs for Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty. I was really thinking of something in the spirit of Neil Young. Dan's writing is about incorporating that kind of Neil Young-type character or a combination of Neil Young and Sky Saxon. You've heard of Sky Saxon? So I've got to put myself in a Neil Young sort of position vis-à-vis the subject.
P Did Dan bring Jewish irony to the picture? Do you bring Canadian irony to your relationship with the sixties?
R There's an irony_yeah.
T Now I bring the ex-catholic paranoia. [Laughter]
D In other words 'guilty pleasures.'
T Exactly, yeah.
P When we were talking about younger artists, or younger than Dan, what do you think of this urge of people involved with visual art to embrace popular music, or rock music? It started when Dan_you started to write a lot about that, you did Rock My Religion. It was difficult to find an artist who was not involved in a band. Why do you think there is this connection between the visual and pop music?
T Well, I think that for me, and I have done a lot of interviews, I did a ten-hour interview series called Synesthesia, distributed by EAI, for which I interviewed a lot of artists and musicians about the connection between art and music,
mostly with David West helping me. I did this with The Poetics Projects, a collaboration with Mike Kelley, so I think that artists look to, as Dan said, this idea of popular culture, and the easiest way to get to it is to kind of work in the vernacular. I think that kind of conceptualism led to really interesting uses of the vernacular. This is one of the reasons I wanted to use television; it was because when I grew up people were watching TV. It was the vernacular, and rock music, you know, the idea that anybody could just pick up a guitar, especially with punk. It became do-it-yourself and people, the whole idea of conceptualism, destroying the idea of craft. Before that, you had people in the institutions trying to learn, you know like, "I am going to learn how to
use stone for fifteen years before I can become a master" or something like that. Then conceptualism comes along, and says you have the idea which is more important than the craft, and if your idea is good enough then you can jump over this hurdle of craft. It changed the way we make art and also music. People were seeking ways of finding a new audience, a new system all together: punk rock is just one happy result in a lot of ways. And that I think really opened up punk rock in a lot of ways, people who were really disturbed by the white room of the art world, the ivory tower, ought to move out into like stand-up comedy like Mike Smith.
D I think the abstract expressionists loved jazz, and I think art was gradually getting away from play and was turning into business. I think what we like in the art world is a kind of communalism; I think in the seventies many artists like Richard Prince or Robert Longo for example, were in rock bands, and also of course Tony Oursler and Mike Kelley. The idea was a kind of communalism, a recreation in the community of the art world. And also there is the idea of the group rather than the artist as individual, who is an isolated businessman. Tony is right about the vernacular, but I also think it had a lot to do with the interest in performance in the seventies as well as punk rock, and I think what happened was there was a revival recently. People
are fantasizing about the sixties and seventies which they call neo-psychedelic-I think it's the same period-, and they want to have music inside museums and galleries, which I think is a big mistake because I think the most important place for music is in a cave-like structure, in other words, a derelict cellar-type situation, but I think Rodney Graham is taking advantage of this period, to actually go with it.
T Which is also where the first movie theater started, which was in caves. The first moving image was thrown on the back wall of a cave, because you had the perfect situation for a camera obscura, to say nothing of the first cave painting.
R Let's not forget that the acoustics of galleries are notoriously bad because the walls are all parallel. Do you know what I mean? They're the worst places for music.
P There's a name that comes back over and over again: Mike Kelley. Is he, was he, is he going to be involved with the project?
D No, he never was. But we had a fantasy, Sandra particularly, that Paul McCarthy could work with us, but he's sort of overbooked at the moment so he couldn't do this. And I think, I don't want to overdo it, I'm interested in people who are very good at their particular areas. I think Mike would have been great, he would have done something, but he's overbooked. Tony actually gave up some of his bookings just to work on this. Also, Paul and Tony and Rodney always wanted to collaborate with me, so we're giving them this chance.
S Mike Kelley was involved. He wrote the preface for the Wild in the Streets pop-up book done by Dan and Marie-Paule. I have approached him to write the preface for the upcoming book of Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty as well. He is such a punk, it would be interesting to read his revisiting to the hippie culture.
T The funny thing about this project is its immersion into the experience rather than analyzing it, or deconstructing it, which I thought was really like a breakthrough for the situation because, you know, like Rock My Religion is all about, you know, sort of stepping back. Well, you never had a rock band, did you?
D No, it's an essay. It's an essay.
T You never had a rock band. I know it's an essay.
D I made possible many things as a producer.
T Believe me, I know that. But I think in this one, it's very immersive, and that's why I think it's a great step for you, it's no longer Dan completely analyzing, if you look at the whole structure of the piece itself, there's a lot of referencing of course to history and so forth, but still it's a very pleasurable experience. There is a generosity in that position, which of course you have set up in situations in your pavilions and have facilitated in other situations but here we dive into the pool together!
D In other words I was responding to the situation of opera, which I never understood.
C But the difference between the seventies rock opera structure and this one, is this one is small, and intimate, which I like. There's something about the puppet show that's very intimate because you have to be close to puppets to see them and to see how they behave, as opposed to rock opera where everything is about distance and spectacle, lights_
D Oh, I think rock opera was a huge mistake, although I liked Arthur. So I was going back to the origins with The Who, A Quick One While He's Away but actually what I like is when things get very stupid they become very interesting.
T The thing about this particular puppet show, what happens, is that there's a mixture of, it's interesting that you brought up scale and the pomposity of the rock opera. We took television scale-something I have always been really fascinated with-this tiny screen, it has more to do with psychological space than actual physical space and brought it into a live format, _so you had this inversion happen: the actual play between, taking place in the widescreen of the puppets, then you have the live, the moment is happening with the band, and then you have the intermediary video playing between, it shifts scale between them, so you have this very interesting shifting of scale and time, you know_
D I think what Tony is saying is very important because my experience of television was being in a studio audience as part of a children's audience during a cartoon show which actually had a puppet, a live puppet. Also, Howdy Doody, that was very important. And what I was thinking for the Brussels Opera was that it'd be like a studio audience for one of these popular music TV shows, we would have the groups appear in a go-go cage: think Howdy Doody studio audience of kids with puppets. I don't know if you ever went to a TV show as a child. That was a big experience for me.
R _about you_ on the Howdy Doody show?
D I was influenced by the Howdy Doody show on TV. Isn't this is where Paul McCarthy would have come in because he deals with this kind of period of terror through puppets when you're a child?
P Also during the launch in Miami, I couldn't take my eyes of it, the structure of the stage with the band on the side. At some points, maybe it was on one of the drawings done by the set designer, there was a mirror. For me there was a contagion, between the way you structure this piece and, Dan, your early performances in front of mirrors with the audience in the back of the reflection of the audience and the way to involve the audience in front of you. It's also still working within your pavilion, was it a decision?
D No, I was not part of that, but the thing is when I first did the performance audience-mirror, one of the first time was at Riverside studios and I had Static, which was Glenn Branca's first group and a performance with me using this mirror, so I always wanted to integrate that kind of performance, simple performance in front of the audience with the kind of rock narrative. But that wasn't my idea, this guy is quite brilliant, the French set designer, Laurent.
C Do you think Laurent was looking at your work?
D I don't know but he was looking at everything. He was quite brilliant.
T He looked at everything.
C There are structures with architecture and TV, and TV within architecture_
T We worked down the actual overall layout because Dan had come up with the idea of, okay, the puppets, the live band, the video_
D Sandra had the live band_[Laughter]
T Sandra had the live band, so Laurent and I came up with the structure that was the stage itself, which was the box, the wide screen format, kind of a1950-60s little puppet stage which related to TV but also sort of had this wide screen format, and then the fact that the video would then cover the whole thing and then change scale as a kind of mediator between it, but my point is Laurent was a really incredible sponge, because he was looking at everything and totally open-minded. I met him only a short time before_
S Oh, I worked in this project for about 9 months, 24/7, but the crew worked less than 40 days_, it was very much of a communal energy then. The energy and tightness of the production is mirrored in the energy between the performance and the audience, another collaboration, I would say. The formal structure was set up by Dan, Tony and I which created this overlapping of textures, counterpoints, Dan's slogans and clichés and of course the script! This situation allowed us to be playful, exploring our kid side inside us. The result is this overlay of opera, puppet theater, video, live and recorded music, Dan's favorite and specific songs from the era, and so forth, how can you describe it? On the other hand, working with live performing marionettes gave us a structure what it needed to be done previously in videos. Culturally, the funny part is, the artists are United States or North American citizens, but the crew is a compilation of Bolivians, French, Turkish, Brazilian, generations, all of us above 30 except the band, plus they are neo-punk! The artists were so great to work with, everyone got completely immersed in the project. You really need to see it in that tight space to experience it, just as we were all sleeping in my studio_it was incredible_
D I think this became a theatrical experience, but actually there's a big conflict in this production, Japanther's parents were hippies, and Japanther are neo-punk and very antihippie and I think there is a real distrust of Japanther and the Neil Young-influenced Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty but somehow we have to reconcile these things, songs, we have to bring everything together_
P That was also what was in the performance, the tension between what was happening on the stage and their music, that is so much not hippie. I don't know if you need to reconcile them because this tension is actually wonderful.
S Exactly_
T That makes the piece.
S That is what I call the joyful schizophrenic moments, pushing to create frictions_
T Everything is time-shifted in a science fiction way and I know Dan and I both really like science fiction, especially Philip K. Dick. So also in a way there's a time shift, there's a scale shift, the puppets are very small, so you can barely see them, and then they are bigger than anything, so they take over the human scale. At certain points, and I think that's really the strength of the piece, there's always these kind of conflicts. It also continues in the narrative, it's stripped down and written in a dumb way like a Neil Young song, yet there is a lot of truth to it. You can follow it as a silly story yet what is really interesting is that it has all these reflections to more complex issues happening now in politics. The dated elements show us how we are living in a loop on any number of levels_
C Also the live element of Japanther playing_but also you're aware that the puppeteers are making the puppets move behind the screen, so you've got this proscenium arch, but you know like in Punch and Judy where it's almost like the first TV, and it's very violent too. There are people behind, the puppeteers are behind and then the puppets who seem to mimic the live action of the theater traditionally creating something much more low-brow, and popular culture. Then you have the band who're actually live, live when the young people and the puppets are kind of_
T Then at one point the puppets sing with the band. Which I love so much.
P There is for me something very strange about the piece, when people ask me what it is. Is that a theater piece? Is that a concert? Is that a video projection? I actually cannot find words to describe it. Like when people ask me what is Dan Graham's works. Is that architecture, is that sculpture, you fall into aesthetic language, semiotic. You fall between aesthetic categories, and what for me that is very strange with this piece, actually it doesn't match anything we know. There's not a word in the language we're using in aesthetic, there's a band, there's a puppet and nobody in art was interested, or is interested in puppets, it was really the enemy, [we say "stands as a sculpture".] and we don't know that. I'm very curious with this piece and about its legacy. Is the piece going to be able to change the way we perceive what a cultural project is? In institutions and museums we always talk about multi-disciplinarity and then we don't really know what we're talking about when we say that and here you have a moment when everything comes together and then we don't know what to do about it.
D It's a hybrid. All my work is on the boundary of different things, but actually I want to call it the influence by Philippe Vergne and Entertainment.
P What would be your take on that?
T My take is that_ Later, I'm hoping to develop another version of the piece, which becomes a three- imensional storyboard to experience the piece but in your own time in one way or another, and then we'll use animatronics. It'll use some of the actual puppets that would move, synchronize with sound. I'm hoping to take a lot of the designs, imagery or some elements out of the videos and sets to accentuate them into a kind of musical, linguistic, sculptural installation storyboard that you would get the different facets as you move around in the space. It will give you more than what you will get in the show but less at the same time because it will be important, that it's two different experiences-otherwise they negate each other.
C That relationship between live performance and installation has a very long tradition back to the sixties and seventies. I Like America and America Likes Me, by Joseph Beuys, was a performance and then became an installation later. Likewise Joan Jonas' Mirage was a performance and then became an installation, Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy, a performance and an installation. So that relationship between the live performance and then an installation, which is both its own piece, but also has a relationship back to a live performance. What is it? Again that is another form of hybridity, that's another kind of questioning of the relationship between something that happens in real time and then is over, and something that exists over time.
T Yeah, I'm fascinated by it and I think that it's something I have been working on with performers quite a bit, time shifting (in) projected faces. Dan mentioned my work with David Bowie where I did some of the sets for his 50 birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden, then it became a TV show. So, it kept shifting from one thing to the next, I worked with Sonic Youth. I shot Kim doing certain songs for the camera trying to capture her performance into a kind of dummy. Some place between music and live performance as experiments and then rock videos with them. This cycling back and forth between what television or what film can take and give back to the live performance and what it can give back to the physical performance, I'm hoping that it will succeed somehow, that Dan and I can work together, because he has his own take on what can be done with performers using time delay and mirrors. I would love to take some of his, also elements of his performance and installation and try to evolve it in the storyboard, on a small scale we haven't really talked about it yet, but it would be great to bring some of that in as well.
P Rodney? Allo? Rodney Graham did we lose you?
C Rodney?
T He heard the word David Bowie and he hung up.
P He got bored with us. [Laughter]
D Well, the thing is, Rodney's never actually seen the performance. [They dial Rodney's number. Voice operator saying the number cannot be completed as dialed. Rodney connected again.]
P We want to ask you a question. We're talking about what is going to develop out of the piece. We started with this idea that the piece brings together so many different aesthetic categories and the question was where do you go with that in terms of_not discipline_but, are we facing an aesthetic category we don't really know or to name, And as artists and people who do exhibition[s] we deal with that, and I was curious to know, within your own practice how do you negotiate these different disciplines, from photography, films, music, do you consider them as something different or is it just the same body, a constellation of activities?
R I have an ambivalent relationship to this kind of interdisciplinary activity in terms of music anyway because, as we were talking, because the ideal venues for those things are quite different, like the idea of the cave some kind of acoustical environment for music that's appropriate, its something you don't find in a museum or gallery context, and I find negotiating the different registers sometimes quite difficult, I don't really know if what I'm doing in music is really part of what I'm doing in visual art_ I think they're really quite different stuff I think what Dan and Tony are doing with this. I think is recalling right away that I certainly couldn't get to be able to do myself.
T Not really to take issue with you, but I've seen many pieces of yours that involve music in museums and things that have worked quite well. One where you're playing piano as a prisoner that was in that sound show at the Pompidou, that sound and light show_
D THE LSD bicycle piece.
R [INAUDIBLE] That was very avant-garde music_I think that in terms of pop music there's something about the environment, where you need to a certain kind of immersion and the volume_
T Oh, I see what you mean. The difference between rock _
C _so it does make a difference because in the live puppet show, Japanther play live, so we're suddenly watching them live. You're in a theatrical situation where you're in your seats watching a puppet show and suddenly there's live band element which is different from an installation-people are moving in and out of the room, the sound is part of that, they walk in or they walk out, it's part of something different, like with your bicycle piece, the LSD piece, you're looking at the record, you're looking at the projection, so it's part of something that's almost ambient. With the puppet show live performance you are in a situation where you're gathered together in a specific place, for a specific time, so the live element works very well in that situation.
S Yes, it does. On the other hand, it's also very much a white cube box rather than a black box. It became more of an installation kind of situation but again is a concert.
T It's funny because Laurent comes from (the) theater world, yet another world that's not really represented by
anybody sitting in this room. It's the slickest performance thing that I have ever seen, I think, in the art world because of his professional ability to transform what you call the white box, so I think that it's amazing_
C But at the same time it's amazing because if you thing of the Punch and Judy show, it usually or often takes lace on the beach, people gather around, and it's very small, in
England anyway, people gather around in a small group and they watch it together sitting on the sand, and it's small like a TV, and it's kind of a canvas covered, sort of oblong kind of object almost, which is different from being in a theater where you're surrounded by the architecture of the theater where the proscenium arch takes over, and this is not about proscenium arch, this is about an intimacy, the scale of the whole thing is small, isn't it? Even when it's a theatrical situation rather an installation, in both cases the scale of it is small, you must be fairly up close to the puppets because you do, you can't sit hundreds of feet away, have 500-seat theater and you're in the back, you won't see the puppets.
T Although I have to say I saw the Wooster Group recently and their scale is not much different from our puppet show, I think it is small in terms of Cats_
D I have to say this is anti-Wagner.
T In that sense of course it's tiny, but in terms of avant-garde theater it's certainly acceptable.
D What I thought of, I never saw it, but I thought of the Fantastics which was a kind of puppet show for children, I have never seen it but_
T _I didn't see it either.
D _I have never seen it either but that was where I had my mind. They were off-Broadway, they were in Greenwich Village, and much my life has been against, I can say it now, bringing artists into a kind of Wagnerian grandeur, and I think what happened in the video was, I won't mention names, but I'll mention one name Bill Viola, we got into the spectacle thing, also Douglas Gordon, and I want to downscale, and my attraction to Tony's work in the beginning was that he downscaling.
T I have always been interested in the idea of taking minimalist aesthetics and applying that to pop culture
so another words can you take_you know_what is the smallest reductivist entity that will become a performer per se, so in my tapes you have worms, and all sorts of strange body parts acting as performer.
D I think the downscaling thing is pretty important given the issues of things in museums today and I think all artists are very attracted to this alternative version through the vernacular of rock music. I first got interested in rock music because my friend Robert Smithson was very enamored of Andy Warhol and Andy Warhol used to do his work by listening to rock music and when I did my first conceptual pieces I was listening to the Yard Birds, and the Kinks pop songs and I wanted to work a short form which was like pop/rock hit songs.
T I think working on a smaller scale has always been underrated because my belief in scale is that is not where things happen, it's psychological, it always happens in the mind and during the experience, it's an interior event, when you internalize the image then you really give it scale. But puppets, I always had a little bit of problems with puppets, because they were so complete. I want my audience to dream to make u p there own world. I never liked the complete form so I was always resistant to Dan's attraction to the puppets themselves but I have since come around because there's something that happens with the audience that they work though these stereotypes in a very interesting way, because I think that the designs where you have these echoes of John Kennedy, echoes of Neil Young and other kind of rock stars and then you have the old guy who looks like that horrible Southern senator, what's his name? You know the guy who was against the arts_
S _Jesse Helms
T Jesse Helms_ and then you have this Hendrix, sort of very sympathetic character and then there's the boy who becomes almost like a transvestite, because he looks like a middle-aged woman. So I think the choices of puppets opened me up to a new way of seeing you have time travel again types that trigger current and past pop cultural figures. I've always been into having art works be read on a number of levels and this adds a complexity to it.
D _a shop that had railroad models, and I would also go to get small dolls, Mike Kelley said he began as a feminist with his dolls, and as I started shopping around for these little dolls to put in my models I became very attracted to the doll culture that girls had that I missed out on.
T You have to because it's the yin yang, it's the opposite, it's your alter ego, all the feminist dolls, the female dolls that I produce they become this alter ego, it's the thing that boys don't get to play with dolls, it's fascinating, you become another person by doing it.
C I remember seeing that in your studio, the model for the pavilion, with the teenage girls with the mirrors, things that young girls have. I'm thinking that was very_
D _You mean the model from the Day Care Center Computer, Cdrom, Cartoon library, which wound up in another version when we did this structure for the Hayward Gallery in London.
C But it had girls, it was girls, because I remember thinking that was very unusual, but also not only spitting image_
D The Spitting Image.
C The Spitting Image. I remember watching a TV program in England, it was American in the 60s, it was puppets, it was a space_it wasn't Star Trek_what was that_? It was all puppets.
C The Thunderbirds!
T _It was so great!
C _In the spaceship
T Something about the lack of ability of these characters, because they are images but they are bound in a way, you think that they are able to do things but they really are not. I noticed this when shooting for two weeks with the master puppeteer. I kept thinking I was going to get more emotions, movements or articulation of the puppets, and I noticed that they really can't do that much so that they're this kind of stuck image. So the beauty of that is that they rely on the audience to create_
P to project_
T _to project onto them. That's exactly it: you project onto them.
C That goes right back to what you were saying about the cinema starting in the cave with shadow because that's like the projection of the shadow, because the shadow puppets and the idea of these shapes that are archetypes, so you're going back to these kind of very powerful archetypal figures rather than_it's all anti-realism.
T Which has to do with the group producing an event, themselves, in themselves, which is really lost in pop culture now, with pop culture you're put in the position of the, you know I've said a million times, you're put in this kind of drug state, you're kind of in a trance, it's about escapism. What's wonderful about something like this, you become a participant as you watch it, as you have said that there are these three levels that kind of wash back and forth, and the audience has to put it together, and make up the story "it's about the 60s, but wait that's a punk band"! There's these little puppets and there's this happening, this projection, you know so you have to just weave it together.
D When I was just beginning as an artist I was very attracted to Bertolt Brecht and so I thought of using the idea of alienation effect.
T What is "alienation effect" (just for the record)?
D Alienation effect was making things strange because they don't live up to our normal expectations. I wrote this article about Dean Martin and his use of idiot cards, but what I wonder about this production, and I am a little suspicious about this, is how is it going to read in non-American cultures, because I think when you have Americans they look back at their own history and their own memories.
C But I think that American culture, and the history of American culture, is so well-known now in Europe that
although there would be a different reading I think everybody was brought up on that, to a certain extent.
D Certainly the Brits! [Laughter]
P There's also something pathetic also, (grotesque). They are great things, you cannot take them seriously because there are little, strange, disgusting. If it were actors, you'd be like "Oh my god, Dan Graham has turned preachy" but because it's puppets you bring back this absolute 'uncomfort' with the narration.
D 'Discomfort', that would be like alienation of fact, a little bit.
S For me it was a political action as well, Bush had won the elections, and The Botanical Garden was a voting place, and it was also in the state of Florida. How do we reconcile our political disillusionment, everything we have been working, I mean, people that were active in the 60s, 70s, and my generation in the 80s and 90s, to get to where we have gotten, to go back to, I don't know, 70 years, or something, so for me it was a little bit of a trigger at that moment justbecause I knew also it was a voting place.
P Have to move to Canada.
D And of course Florida belongs to South Americans, or part of Florida anyway.
S We were going to do it there, remember?
T There's also a funny thing that I want to bring up, which is about the fact that the art world is fascinated with the idea of crossover, and it's been kind of my dream to be able to make art work that crossed out of the ivory tower and worked for people who have no knowledge of art, except that when you actually do it, then the art world is kind of scared by it, they can't really accept it.
P You become a populist!
T Yeah, in a way, if you do work with a bigger band, I have done something now with U2, in their current tour I did a collaboration with them where I projected into smoke, Bono is obsessed with human rights, So he has the UN human rights read in between in the two halves of the concert, but I don't even really talk about it to the people in the art world, because you just see people's faces go blank, you know, like what does that mean_
D What it means is you're dealing with U2 the way you're dealing with Starbucks; it's the same when you go to Starbucks. Starbucks is too middle of the road. So I think it's not only that, it's the middle-of-the-road-ness but I think_
T _but again I work also with Sonic Youth, maybe you think they're middle of the road too_ [Laughter]
T I recently did their video for a short tour that was about a week ago, where I did 2 hours of video for the entire set, but my point is what do you think about the idea of crossover, where things really actually get out of the art world?
P For me, if you look at the way the art world developed a little bit over the last 20 years. If your brand goes out of where it is supposed to go, then you have a lost product, and if you start to work with U2, the structure that support you economically is at loss because you're doing something where's there is nothing to sell, it's like highly democratic, Even within the utopia of the art world being avant-garde, the minute you reach this moment where it is actually democratic/populist, it's not about crossover anymore, it's about economy.
C That's why cinema has always had such a hard time within the art world, or film because it's democratic_
D I see being an artist a little like being an architect, you have certain things coming into the office and I think that's what Tony is thinking and you respond to them. But I also think public art was so dumb, including late Henry Moore was somewhat dumb, but when everything became public art, it became a challenge to try to work in that area. But the hardest thing of all is corporate art. We have a many artists doing corporate art but I think Tony is speaking about the public domain, another words, the larger public and I think artists after a certain point have to deal with that.
T _which this piece, I think, succeeds in doing. And I'm very curious about why, it seems, that the art world loves it. Like they said in Miami: "The art world loves puppets? what was it? "Puppet_"? "Art loves puppets"?
S "Art Loves Puppets" yeah, Sam came up with the Art Loves special events section few years ago; well it was a special event of Art Basel Miami Beach, boy they were courageous to give us the platform.
C I think it's partly because it has that structure, where it takes place within the white cube, but it has this very strong visual element. I think people are beginning to accept video projections so they'll understand that within that, and then it's very cool, live music now, so it's also entertaining all of a sudden, it operates on these different levels and the fact that it's in a white cube rather than in a black box, theater, it's an event that's almost within a gallery, so when you project your film in a gallery, everyone sees it, when you project it in a theater nobody sees it, and I think this is that kind of hybridity that brings it to the art audience, they would not go and see a more classic piece of puppetry or other things. It wouldn't even get into their head to do that probably. Yeah, and how can you go wrong?
T _about a dream that existed at one time in this country, and anyone who remembers that, in any way, shape or form is fascinated by it. That's what I love about this piece, is it that it kind of brings that dream back to life in such an interesting way, PEACE and LOVE, which is really why I wanted to work on it because I was a teenager during that time period and I have a very personal memories of it, I wasn't really in any way_ you know I was just beginning thinking about art and so forth, but there was so much happening and then it's just evaporated_ But you know what, I have a child now and I want him to feel peace and love to as a social unifying factor. In fact I want it too now. One of the scenes that I made for when sky is traveling around and gaining power comes from a real image that happened to me and my older sister in Vermont. We would hitch hike and collect bottles and cash then in for money to get a buzz (back then Vermont had a very hippie status and eco laws like getting a nickel for a bottle) and we were camping and we went to this strange camping ground which was near the high tension electrical wires and a river. We met up with this strange group of people who we spent the night with who clamed to have been living with Charlie Manson in California and when things got hot they came to Vermont. So we cooked and camped out with them and I ask if they thought Manson had done it (as he was on trial then) and they defended him to the end. We all went nude swimming in the river the next day-this was the first naked girl I saw ever-and I was glade the water was freezing! But the image of how close they were camping to the road and the power line somehow bothered me.
D So maybe it's another neo-60s project. In other words, everybody hates the 80s and 90s because it was so business oriented and we all have different nostalgia for that earlier period_but you were a square teenager. Is that what you're saying?
T No, no. No I wasn't, I was a hippie. I had long hair and I smoked pot once in a while. But that's just what everybody did. I loved to have people tell me stories of acid trips they took-it was like a fairy tale for me.
C We have to, Philippe and I, have to go to the train station, so we should probably end. But it was a fantastic discussion and I'm looking forward to getting together again_
P And the food was great. [Laughter]
C Yeah we can't tell you what the LSD was like yet, because we're still going up, you know_
T The only person I think we left out was Brecht. He is my man in terms of performance and theater; he had a theory about letting the audience know the mechanics of everything that was happening_
D _It's part of the alienation effect
T _and then that making them participants in it, making the experience richer, and making them part of it. I think that Sandra's idea of this combination, and Dan's idea of the combination of the three different things constantly shifting back and forth, this is the Brecht effect_
C _that's a great phrase: the Brecht effect.
T Well he had a name for it, the X-effect or something, the Estrangement effect.
All Thank you. Bye.


A 60'S PSYCHEDELIC TALE OF YOUTH CONQUERING ALL
(THE REVOLUTIONARIES ARE PUPPETS)
By Steven Henry Madoff
Madoff, Steven, The New York Times, Theater Section, Dec. 1 2004.

In a small theater on the grounds of the Miami Beach Botanical Garden, across the street from the hundreds of art dealers offering works this week at Art Basel Miami Beach's international fair, a very different kind of art event is selling out. For seven performances starting today, packed audiences will watch 10 marionettes strut, scheme and rock out to the music of Sonic Youth, among others, as they send viewers back to the 1960's in a bitingly funny and psychedelic piece of puppet theater, "Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty."

When the veteran conceptual artist Dan Graham first thought of creating the piece, he had no idea that marionettes would have stolen their way back into pop consciousness.

The makers of "South Park" hadn't launched their apocalyptic movie satire "Team America: World Police," now in theaters, with its marionette supercops conquering a toy-size Kim Jong II. Even Spike Jonze's screw-loose hit film from 1999, "Being John Malkovich," with John Cusack as an existential puppeteer who mysteriously enters Mr. Malkovich's brain, was still to come.

"Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty" is a funky, funny adaptation of Barry Shear's 1968 movie "Wild in the Streets," an astonishingly cheesy slice of paranoia in which Max Frost, a 24-year-old rock star turned politician with a simpering look halfway between a Beach Boy and a Rolling Stone, takes over

America. Rallying the youth to shut down the country while his band of merry pranksters drugs Congress with LSD, he manages to get the voting age changed to 14 and has himself elected president. Then he does what any normal 20-something president would do. He locks everyone over 30 in internment camps, keeping them perpetually stoned.

"I've had this piece on my mind for more than 15 years," said Mr. Graham, 62, rumpled and amused, during a recent rehearsal in New York, "but the timing certainly seemed right to do it now."

Two years ago, Sandra Antelo-Suarez, the director of the New York-based arts organization Trans, having heard the idea to restage the movie years before from Mr. Graham, convinced him that with the presidential elections on the horizon this would be a perfect moment to realize the project.

Bringing together a dazzling gang of Mr. Graham's friends - including the video artist Tony Oursler; the artist and musician Rodney Graham; the rock groups Sonic Youth and Japanther; and the master puppeteer Phillip Huber, whose marionettes were featured in "Being John Malkovich" - Ms. Antelo-Suarez and Mr. Graham envisioned a layered, multimedia reinvention of puppet theater and, for that matter, of rock opera. Punch and Judy meets the Who.

In true seat-of-the pants, nonprofit fashion, they pressed the team into intense, almost nonstop labor as the months crept up to the premiere's deadline, and Ms. Antelo-Suarez scrambled to find backers for what rapidly became a $300,000 project, with stops over the next two years in Miami, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and art festivals in Dijon, France, and Vienna.

Each of the 10 marionettes took Mr. Huber more than 100 hours to make. Their period-perfect looks match their hippie stoner swagger - with the single exception of the president's dog, appropriately named Eisenhower, who stretches, wags his tail and curls up with idyllic canine ease.

Mr. Oursler worked closely with the puppet master to create the short bursts of video that loop like druggy dreams through the live marionette scenes. Neon-green and pink backgrounds, backdrops of "Leave It to Beaver" suburban settings and Kennedyesque television speeches flow into real-life film clips from the Kent State demonstration and woozy images of puppets floating on acid trips through the Senate chamber.

Meanwhile, Japanther's and Sonic Youth's pounding music and the more hummable, Neil Young-style title anthem by Rodney Graham (no relation to Dan) punctuate the action, which compresses the story of "Wild in the Streets" into an hour's time.

The results are what Mr. Ouster describes as "a small spectacle that's both cinematic and theatrical, the videos zooming in and out on a screen above, while these amazingly cool-looking 24-inch puppets with strings are on this little stage below."

Mr. Ouster continues: "It was really kind of stunning to be sitting there, editing these scenes about a spooky presidential election when the real election was going on. And I'm watching these little wooden stick figures on my monitor become politicians with agendas as they move in this slightly surreal, artificial way and, well, you know it's obvious what I'm thinking."

To which Ms. Antelo-Suarez added, "We wanted the characters to be funny and nostalgic, but with the bittersweet tension of reflecting the present, because everything that 1968 stood for, fighting the old ways, fighting the conservative right, has been crushed now. So in a way the piece is saying, "If you think these puppets are freaked out, what about us?'"

That sense of dual reality is typical of Mr. Graham's other artworks, which often employ two-way mirrors to make people standing in front of them feel as if they're there and not there, looking at themselves and through themselves into the landscape or at people on the other side of the glass. His marionettes serve a similar purpose. Their cool, New Age whimsy, twisted into the exaggerations of "Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty," is a funhouse mirror "of our totally youth obsessed culture," Mr. Graham said.

The artist shoots his dart straight at the heart of Peter Pan-ism, of what he calls "our culture's crazy wish to never grow old; that age, like films, can be fixed with special effects." So it comes as no surprise that his puppet president makes an easy career transition from the image-driven spectacle of rock to the spectacle of politics and that he announces: "Man, you don't want to even live to be 30. Thirty's death, baby. Pure death."

When Mr. Graham first thought of retelling 'Wild in the Streets" or even when Ms. Antelo-Suarez approached him about reviving the idea, none of the events that mark the current political landscape had unfolded.

Asked about the timing now, and particularly about the ending of his hypnotic, weird and eminently contemporary theater experiment, he repeated that it couldn't have worked out better. In the final scene, as music blares, the hippie president and his old regime are pushed aside. A band of stick-wielding, power-mad I 0-year-olds takes over.


PUPPET PREVIEW - SEEN AND HEARD
By Scott Rothkopf
Rothkopf, Scott, ARTFORUM, Dec. 2, 2004
www.artforum.com/diary/id=8021

The real action, it seemed, was elsewhere-which is where the action at this fair always seems to be. For unlike Basel proper, which comes with fewer private parties and (as might be expected) poolside cabanas, the overabundance of simultaneous events in Miami induces a near-manic paranoia in clued-in visitors endlessly worried that they're in the wrong place at the right time; While many were off at the frenzied opening of the younger NADA fair across town, a select group gathered just across the street from the Convention Center at the gates of the botanical garden for the world premiere of Dan Graham's puppet musical Don't Trust Anyone over 30, the culmination of a more than decade-long project adapted from Wild in the Streets, a 1968 film starring, among others, Richard Pryor.

A little after eight, the confused throng pushed into the modest garden, artificially enhanced with the glow of both theatrical lighting and the free-flowing "Smirnoff Orange Crushes" provided, like nearly everything else at this fair, by corporate sponsors set on intoxicating an art-collecting elite. If art fairs were once simply about selling art, they now seem equally about selling liquor, cars, hotels, cigars, and diamonds. And what could be a more appropriate backdrop for a puppet theatrical both lampooning and wistfully lamenting the squandered countercultural ideals of the '60s? Graham himself may have put it best in his introduction to the first performance, remarking, '1 thought why not do a puppet show, where people who used to be hippies can now come with their children... But in fact, we don't have that audience at all."

The audience we did have was a group of art-world insiders, presided over by the show's effervescent producer, Sandra Antelo-Suarez of Trans. Packed cheek-by-jowl in the small theater were P.S.l's Alanna Heiss and Klaus Biesenbach (the latter now also of M0MA), Phaidon publisher and collector Richard Schiagman, Walker curator (and producing partner) Richard Flood, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Chrissie lies, and the Art Production Fund's ever-glamorous Yvonne Force, set soon to release her own musical production in the form of a CD by her duo (with friend Sandra Hamburg), Mother Inc. "The album includes my song 'The Real Skinny,' which is about my weight obsession since basically third grade," Force confided before the show. "My real goal is to do it on Oprah and then give the CDs away for free to everyone in the audience." The crowd also contained a number of dealers linked to artists linked to the project, like the Metro Pictures crew and Marian Goodman. Goodman was improbably poised to see the second puppet show by a member of her stable in just two weeks' time, the first having been staged by Pierre Huyghe at Harvard. With Team America still in theaters, there's talk of an incipient puppet zeitgeist, which Obrist commented is also being explored by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Philippe Parreno, but may have been kicked off by Christian Jankowski with last year's Puppet Conference, which brought together Lamb Chop, Grover and their ilk at the Carnegie Museum of Art. A dissertation topic for art historians, circa 2015.

After the lights dimmed, audience members took in a lengthy spectacle, with marionettes compliments of Being John Malkovich's Phillip Huber, video projections by Tony Oursier and Mike Kelley, and original music by Rodney Graham and Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore. The narrative centers around Neil Sky, a twenty-four-year-old, suede-befringed, pot-. smoking rocker who's elected president on a platform of teen enfranchisement. In between stops at campaign rallies and a modernist suburban drug den by way of New Canaan, we witness video footage of intergalactic puppet love and rousing musical sets provided live by the duo Japanther, which was shoehorned-drum set and alt-into a tiny aperture adjacent to the puppet stage. But just like money, youth is something that somebody's always got more of than you do-a moral tha our hero has to learn the hard way. Without knowing the '68 movie, it's hard for me to say precisely what Graham's puppet show adds to the equation, except, of course, dazzling visuals and appropriately avant-garde credentials, as well as-perhaps most importantly-the frisson of a presumably liberal audience watching the show unfold a quarter-century after the fact, a month after an appalling election, and an hour after a shopping spree across the street.


DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER THIRTY
By Melissa Dunn
Dunn, Melissa, Flash Art, January-February, 2005, p.111

Tourist buses that descended on San Francisco's Halght-Ashbary during 1967's "Summer of Love" were often greeted by hippies who turned mirrors on their spectators. Dan Graham's new puppet rock opera, Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty-which premiered at Art Basel Miami Beach in December-operates as a mirror of sorts. Introducing the first performance, Graham suggested that the audience he had in mind- one not necessarily represented by the art world elite who had assembled for the occasion-was the Woodstock generation. The theme song, composed by Rodney Graham, taunts the hippies of yesteryear with a riff on one of their own slogans: "don't trust anyone over thirty 'cause they're fucking old and they're fucking mean."
Based on the 1968 cult film Wild in the Streets, Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty tells the demented story of a charismatic 24-year-old rock star named Neil Sky who is elected President of the United States after "turning on" Congress and changing the voting age to14. President Sky promptly orders the "oldsters" over 30 into forced retirement at "conditioning" camps where therapy includes lots of LSD. With a little help from his friends, including collaborators Tony Oursler, Rodney Graham, Brooklyn-based band Japanther, and master puppeteer Phillip Huber (who also designed the marionettes featured in the film Being .lohn Malkovich), Graham stages a raucous multimedia extravaganza that layers puppet theater, video projections, and live music to psychedelic effect.
Graham says the project has been on his mind for more than 15 years-and the long gestation period has produced a cache of drawings, ephemera, and a pop-up book published in 1995. Its realization as a puppet rock opera was made possible through a commission from the New York-based arts organization TRANS>. Delay, a strategy often employed by Graham in his video-based works, creates the distance that allows the audience a vantage on the past. While Graham has often used mirrors in his performances and sculptures, here time functions as a mirror that reflects an image of the hippie generation back at its now well-over-thirty, geezerly self. But this image must also be recognized as a projection or distortion filtered through the screen of mass media that has also replaced history with nostalgia and farce. Somewhere in the distance the ghost of Nico rasps: "1'1l be your mirror, reflect who you are, in case you don't know." And if you don't recognize yourself yet, take caution from the tragic irony of Neil Sky's demise at the hands of his youngest protégé: this story, like Graham's early video installations, is an infinite loop.


DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER THIRTY AT THE MIAMI BEACH BOTANICAL GARDENS
By James Trainor
Trainor, James, FRIEZE, March 2005, pg. 78-79.

Mention marionette theatre in polite company and people will often visibly wince and start uncomfortably eyeing the exits. But 2004 was payback time for puppetry, after a long season in a purgatory reserved for well-intentioned folkioric morality plays or Saturday morning children's TV. This new-found legitimacy may owe something to the mass appeal of the wire-working marionettes-as-gum-chewing-superheroes of
Team America: World Police (2004) or to Pierre Huyghe's Harvard Project (2004), a high-concept puppet drama performed in the university's architecture school. Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty, premiered at Art Basel Miami Beach in December, benefited from sharing equally in the Pop and frequently raunchy social satire of the former and the high-art credibility of the latter.

Billed as a puppet rock opera written and conceived by Dan Graham and produced by the non-profit Trans>, the pint-sized spoof of 1960s-era revolutionary posturing run amok ended up more as a collaborative mini-Gesamtkunstwerk, with songs and lyrics written by Rodney Graham and Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore (performed live by the excellent bass and drum duo Japanther), video projections by Tony Oursler and Paul McCarthy, and marionettes designed by the puppeteer who worked on Being John Malkovich (1999).

It's saying a lot when people scrambling from venue to venue at a sprawling international art fair turn with evident relief to puppets for a serious art experience, but the audience packing the snug theatre at the local botanical gardens seemed nothing if not charmed by Graham and company's musings on ageism, smiley-face fascism and the reductivist hypocrisies of his own generation's youthful revolutions. Based on the little-known cult film Wild in the Streets (1969), the action follows the rise and fall of the 24-year-old Neil Sky - charismatic rock star, suave hippie-on-the-make and political candidate - who wins an unlikely bid for White House by lobbying to lower the voting age to 14. (We also see him enjoying psychedelics and ample string-tangling tantric sex with other hip puppets in a crash pad that looks more like a clean-cut Modernist casestudy house than a commune, as if the counterculture lifestyle were simply an interminable slumber party at somebody's parents' suburban home; their pet dog, appropriately enough, is named Eisenhower.) The triumph of the new 20-something political class (under the flower-power junta 'oldsters' are corralled into LSD 're-education' camps) is short-lived, however, as President Sky is toppled in a coup by a guerrilla band of precocious eight-year-olds marshalled under the slogan 'don't trust anyone over ten'.

While the arrogant naivety of many 196os radical movements may seem easy pickings, the real target here - coming from a man who devoted much of his career to interpreting forms of creative Pop rebellion - is a national culture that still conflates youth and sex with virtue. As Graham remarked in his introduction, Americans 'don't know how to get old'. After seeing the hopes of his generation frittered away, in the late 1970s Abbie Hoffman flipped the hippie slogan on its back when he advised, 'don't trust anyone under thirty'. One suspects that Graham and his contemporary cohorts, amid an art fair glorying in youth culture and wellheeled, corporate-sponsored hedonism, and where the hottest-selling items were those produced by artists fresh out of art school, might agree.


THE SHREWD DAN GRAHAM
by Vivianne Lora, Translated by Laura Farha
Lora, Vivianne, (Trans.:Farha, Laura), Lapiz, issue 209, pg. 26-31.

Presented as a grandiose "world premier," Dan Graham's show Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty was staged last December 1st, in the framework of the third edition of Art Base! Miami Beach. The press release for the event described this complex artistic piece as a satire on the hippy generation and the psychedelic era, when slogans like the title of the work were taken up by the youth of the time as part of a countercultural political discourse that blamed adult conformism for all repression, injustice and social conflict. A discourse which, as they all do, contains the seeds of radicalisation and which, therefore, also runs the risk of becoming a fascistoid doctrine. Graham focuses on this aspect, devising an operetta that is as nostalgic as it is critical, partly harking back to the failure of the utopian project of the countercultural movements of the sixties, and partly yearning for the activism of the youth of that decade, much-overrated in the West.

Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty, a work that I find it hard to classify, is composed by a puppet show, an audiovisual projection and the live performance of the punk rock duo Japanther, genuine outsiders in terms of the music industry, whose tracks, to a great extent, represent the best aspect of this ephemeral work. A highdefinition version of the film shown during the premier is being produced as an independent 65-minute piece. The music and lyrics to the melodies that can be heard during the projection have been conceived by Rodney Graham, renowned for his music works and the wide range of genres he tackles, as well as by Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, members of Sonic Youth. Furthermore, artists Tony Oursler and Paul McCarthy have devised the audiovisual elements. Finally, based on Marie-Paule McDonald's drawings, Phillip Huber, who created the puppets in Spike Jonze's unconventional film Being John Malkovich (1999), designed the marionettes, and his company, Huber Marionettes and Company, was in charge of bringing them to life during the performance.

Don't Trust... takes its inspiration from Barry Shear's B-movie Wild in the Streets (1968), where a teenager who runs away from home becomes a powerful personality in the music world who, trusting his vast network of fans in a country where over half the population is under 25 years old, takes advantage of a gig his band plays at a campaign event for a candidate to the Senate to promote his own subversive political campaign and be appointed President of the USA. After achieving his goal, he represses all over-thirties population. In this film, the 1960s youth is presented as an inconsistent mass manipulated by the media, and their young leader appears as a sort of drug addict, brainless, fascist bastard. Is this the message Graham aims to get across? In his version, the satire is played down by the pleasant camouflage provided by the puppet show, but the plot is almost the same: young Neil Sky, aged 24, who time was fled his home and formed a rock group, whilst chatting to the members of his band in his luxurious rock star home, comes to the conclusion that it is time to change his country's stagnant political system. This leads him to prompt teenagers to force a change in the legislation to lower the voting age to 14. After meeting with two essential governmental characters, Senator Aibright, in his seventies, and thirty-something Congressman Young -whom he drugs by putting LSD in their water-, Sky achieves his goals and is elected President of the United States. He then orders the forced retirement of all persons over thirty and their retreat to camps where they will be treated with LSD. Yet, up comes a revolutionary youngster from his background, who is only ten years old, proclaiming "Don't trust anyone over ten," thus cornering Sky with his own discriminatory argument.

The visual organisation of the scene, which is architectural, highlights a surface akin to a large screen, disturbed only by two hollows: the rectangle on the left, a small stage the puppets move around, and the area on the right, where the duo Japanther perform, big enough for equalisers and a drum kit, to play an electric guitar and for the singer's controlled performance. The stage in this area moves forward at a certain point in the performance, whilst Japanther's music, with their haunting vocalisations stressed by the use of receivers-cum-microphones, strangely captures even the most mature audience. Whilst the dialogues and the controlled sets in which the puppet's plot is carried out are reminiscent of the sixties' iv series, the live music is absolutely contemporary, and the processing and projection of the audiovisual image echo the carefree spirit of certain music video directors.

Alongside the event, which was staged at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden -opposite one of the entrances to the Miami Beach Convention Center, that houses Art Basel Miami Beach-, several looped videos showing images from the work and 20 two-dimensional pieces with primary studies in the role of storyboards were also presented, thus adapting the piece to Art Basel Miami Beach's commercial natural. Those saleable "edition of 5" probably justify the vast production expenses that this adventure has surely involved.

A striking aspect of this work is its rudimentary multimedia character, achieved simply by combining the farce played by the puppets with the musicians' performance and the large-scale videoprojection. Yet the most surprising aspect is perhaps the live performance of the rock duo, which added a genuine radicalness to the event, an unreserved acceptance of the pop element, devoid of stylisations. If in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2 (1999) and Cremaster3 (2002), the rock sequences, complete with a surrealism typical of the best music videos, saw how the complex symbology and crazy plot that surrounded them engulfed the connotations regarding an ephemeral and superficial youth culture, in Don't Trust... the childishness of the puppet show -an activity linked to infancy-, and the general tone of the narration, which is inspired by the language used in the sit-corns from the golden age of American television, emphasise the eminence of the powerful musical performance.
Inevitably, from another perspective and given the use of puppets as an inoffensive façade for the discourse, Don't Trust.., echoes works like Christian Jankowski's Puppet Conference (2003) -where famous television puppets, from programmes like Sesame Street or The Muppet Show, attend a symposium with an audience of dolls, in a video recorded at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Furthermore, the realist character and the LSD trips and erotic fantasies of the plot for Don't Trust.., obviously bring to mind the disturbing and lustful puppets Huber created for the onanistic sequence between Abelard and Eloisa that John Cusack orchestrated in Being John Malkovich. Yet Graham has been working on this project, a surprising musical theatrical-audiovisual divertimento, for years.

On the other hand, when watching Don't Trust... Alan Parker's The Wall (1982) comes to mind. That magnificent feature film with music by Pink Floyd whose theme line -anti-war and anti family and school repression- also, back then in the early eighties, already came across as dated, and which Tim Burton possibly used previously as inspiration for The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), his musical played by puppets animated frame by frame.

Graham's show, so imbued with pop culture derived from television, so similar to the spirit of the MTV, can allow the artist to put himself back on the contemporary scenario -too accustomed to his minimalist structures that had become his trademark-, an exquisite effect which not many young artists would be capable of. There is perfect synchrony between purely artistic elements -visual quality- and the language of television and rock music. Graham's personal story, rock fan and versatile conceptual artist, intercedes in this successful mixture, which does not always produce good results among the generations of young artists that have grown up watching the MTV. Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty will be presented in Europe in June, at the Vienna Festival.


DAN GRAHAM AND COLLABORATORS AT ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH
By Barbara Pollack
Pollack, Barbara, Art in America, Nov. 2005.
www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_10_93/ai_n15860957

Puppets have a way of turning us all back into children, so it was quite savvy of conceptual artist Dan Graham to conceive of his hallucinatory meditation on youth culture, Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty, as a puppet opera. Based on the 1960s schlock film Wild in the Streets, the piece traces the rise and fall of rock star Neil Sky, who charms a generation of riotous youth to lower the voting age to 14, thereby paving the way to his election as president of the United States. Once in office, Sky interns all oldsters over 30 in LSD-delivery camps. But in the end, his power is usurped by an even more youthful coup d'etat, when an ambitious kid violently and viciously takes over the country, shouting "Don't trust anyone over 10!"

Like all good revolutions, Graham's opera is a collaborative affair, enlisting the talents of Tony Oursler and Paul McCarthy to provide video loops that were played between scenes enacted by 10 puppets, designed and performed by the renowned marionette company of Philip Huber. The multimedia production also included an original score by artist-musician Rodney Graham and rock duo Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, which was in part heard as a recording, but with some songs performed live by Brooklyn punk band Japanther, the only part of this team that had not yet seen their 30th birthdays. The 60-minute spectacle jumped from the puppets, charming in their awkward reality and cavorting inside a miniature stage built into the theater's front wall, to videos projected above the little set, to the band performing live on a mechanical platform that intermittently jutted out of the wall at the far right of the performance space. The disjunctions between the different media and scales perfectly conveyed the feelings of the audience, a mostly over-40 crowd of curators and dealers, perhaps once themselves upstarts, now power brokers attending Art Basel Miami Beach.

In fact, though this performance, produced by Sandra Antelo-Suarez of Trans>, will travel to venues around Europe and the U.S., none will match its original context, a small indoor theater in the Miami Beach Botanical Garden directly across the street from the convention center where the massive art fair is held. Because, while the production ostensibly commented on the recent re-election of George W. Bush--a president "Jr." who can easily be imagined as both puppet and puppeteer--the actual targets of this rock-opera tragedy are the artists themselves, the older generation of radical pioneers who now make up the academy yet seem to have little influence, at least politically, on the new crop of art-star wannabees. In the current atmosphere, where more and more artists are promoted solely on the basis of their youth ("fresh out of art school"), Graham and company have reason to examine the prevailing lack of rebelliousness. Indeed, while their presence in the art market grows, few artists under 30 seem eager to advance the revolutionary tactics of their more mature predecessors or seem equipped to match the complex effects achieved by this haunting and provocative event.


PUPPETS DON'T CRY
By Eileen Myles
Myles, Eileen, Index, February/March 2005, pg.100.

Basel Miami Beach art fair last weekend looked fabulous. It reminded me of a lot of neo-psychedelia, though I wondered what does it mean. Should I feel good, or should
I feel anxious? When I bumped into someone the next day on his way to interview Dan who hadn't yet seen "Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty" I decided to supply this guy with all he needed to know. It looked great. Of that I am sure. Two guys over there - I indicated an imaginary stage left - like half the stage is open and two kind of slacker Williamsburg guys are playing guitars and drums. Japanther. They're children of hippies. Yeah, they were good. And on the stage right - set into the wall was a puppet theater, a rectangle cut into the wall and in it you see a little toy rock 'n' roll house and big white puppeteer legs and white shoes. The puppets were marionettes. It was "Wild in the Streets," remember "Wild in the Streets?" Then these big washes of video would pour over everything like a movie on top of the puppets. No the live guys weren't playing then. Well actually I'm not sure. The video was Tony Oursler.

I keep reading that the music was Sonic Youth but it seemed like it was all these guys, but maybe the recorded music was Sonic Youth. It sounded great. Well it was opera because that was how they were holding it all together. Opera was the concept that held it. The room was packed. My friend Betty Sue had to fight like hell to save me a seat. Sandra, the producer from TRANS insisted she give it up. Meanwhile I was outside in a little holding pen for journalists (Me, a journalist? I'm a poet! Fools!) Finally we were released and flooded into the little room in the Botanical Garden across from the convention center. The puppet opera was the hot ticket at Miami/Basel. I mean money was the invisible hot ticket. Apparently the fair started on Wednesday and the serious collectors left by noon, having spent five billion dollars, or something like that. That was the invisible star. But otherwise everyone wanted to see the puppet opera. That's why I had come. Puppet Opera!


REVIEW: MIAMI
By Cathy Byrd
Byrd, Cathy, Art Papers, March/April 2005

The puppet rock opera Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty by Dan Graham, Tony Oursier, Rodney Graham and Paul McCarthy was the most wildly popular event staged during Art Basel Miami Beach (December 2-5, 2004). Every performance more than sold out. Eager spectators besieged a small theater in the botanical garden adjacent to the fair, sitting on pillows offered by staff, ignoring the discomfort of cement steps that posed as seating, and craning their necks to see the puppets act out their 1960s generational mani-festo behind the glass of a narrow rectangular viewing box. Looking inside, we were privy to a view of the puppeteers' legs as they articulated the Age of Aquarius vibe of a cast that includes twenty-four year old hippie rock star Neil Sky and his tribe, and Congressman Young, a JFK-style politician.

The psychedelic drama unfolds to the exuberant live accompaniment of Japanther, a young two-man rock band from Brooklyn. Puppet action sequences are intermittently blown up to wall-sized music video projection, with visuals by Tony Oursler and Paul McCarthy, and a soundtrack written and performed by Rodney Graham, and Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. Phillip Huber, master puppeteer of Being John Malkovich, created the puppets from drawings by Marie-Paule Macdonald.

In an overlapping, nonlinear narrative trippy with visual clichés, we follow the cocky political response of Sky to Young, a liberal congressman courting the youth vote by proposing to lower the legal voting age to eighteen. Sky subverts Young's agenda, publicly claiming his own right to the presidential throne by instigating teen riots that lead to the lowering of the voting age to fourteen. Once elected President of the United States, he submits the entire overthirty population to LSD therapy, a move that institutionalizes his own intolerance. Sky's adopted son Dylan leads the inevitable back-lash when he stages a coup, invok- MIAMI ing an even younger standard for rebellion.

Reducing the stage to a simile of television and adding live rock and video, Graham conflates real and mediated experience in a truly innovative iteration of opera

His kitschy puppet characters are an obvious and amusing metaphor for "the manipulated." They reinforce the satiric dimensions of the story: erstwhile hippies are not in control and society submits to the tyranny of our youth culture. Intergenerational viewers are faced with allusions to their own failed idealism; life-size versions of the puppets outside the theatre, they are subject to the machinations of a higher (political) power.


This ambitious and potent collaboration intends to make more than a fleeting impression on the world. Produced by Trans> and T-B A21, Francesca von Habsburg's Vienna-based art foundation, the opera will tour internationally and become a feature-length film broadcast on the LAB video art channel. Its auteurs have created a set of five multimedia storyboards for display. On view in an adjacent salon during Art Base), those visuals shed some light on a very complex creative process and isolated some of the opera's best vignettes-the young Sky's rebellious home experiments with explosives and the puppet sex scene are the most memorable.

It's only logical that Dan Graham should mastermind this oeuvre; his art practice began in the 1960s with rock criticism. Since then, he's become known globally for works that straddle the disciplinary borders of art, music, media and cultural theory. In introductory remarks at the performance, an optimistic Graham noted that he'd only recently discovered he was no longer a teenager. With a resonant concept and a lot of help from his friends, he has composed the ultimate tragi-comic ode to lost hope, materializing our very real disillusionment with the social and political conservatism that presently places contemporary art (and so much more) at risk. In the end, given our growing paranoia and cynicism, that "Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty" slogan of the 1960s might well be condensed to "Don't Trust Anyone."

Published in Index February/March 2005
pg.100

Basel Miami Beach art fair last weekend looked fabulous. It reminded me of a lot of neo-psychedelia, though I wondered what does it mean. Should I feel good, or should
I feel anxious? When I bumped into someone the next day on his way to interview Dan who hadn't yet seen "Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty" I decided to supply this guy with all he needed to know. It looked great. Of that I am sure. Two guys over there - I indicated an imaginary stage left - like half the stage is open and two kind of slacker Williamsburg guys are playing guitars and drums. Japanther. They're children of hippies. Yeah, they were good. And on the stage right - set into the wall was a puppet theater, a rectangle cut into the wall and in it you see a little toy rock 'n' roll house and big white puppeteer legs and white shoes. The puppets were marionettes. It was "Wild in the Streets," remember "Wild in the Streets?" Then these big washes of video would pour over everything like a movie on top of the puppets. No the live guys weren't playing then. Well actually I'm not sure. The video was Tony Oursler.

I keep reading that the music was Sonic Youth but it seemed like it was all these guys, but maybe the recorded music was Sonic Youth. It sounded great. Well it was opera because that was how they were holding it all together. Opera was the concept that held it. The room was packed. My friend Betty Sue had to fight like hell to save me a seat. Sandra, the producer from TRANS insisted she give it up. Meanwhile I was outside in a little holding pen for journalists (Me, a journalist? I'm a poet! Fools!) Finally we were released and flooded into the little room in the Botanical Garden across from the convention center. The puppet opera was the hot ticket at Miami/Basel. I mean money was the invisible hot ticket. Apparently the fair started on Wednesday and the serious collectors left by noon, having spent five billion dollars, or something like that. That was the invisible star. But otherwise everyone wanted to see the puppet opera. That's why I had come. Puppet Opera!


POLITICAL PUPPETS
by Sarah Bayliss
Bayliss, Sarah, ARTnews, December 2004, pg.36

In 17-century Italy, puppeteering was a vehicle for social change: the character Pulcinella delivered moral messages disguised as slapstick comedy. Dan Graham and collaborators Tony Oursler, Rodney Graham, and Paul McCarthy will also bring a political spin of sorts to this medium in the puppet rock opera Don't Trust Anyone Over 30, from the 1st through the 5th of this month at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Part punk-rock manifesto and "Rock the Vote" campaign, the show--with eleven two-foot-tall marionettes, a live rock band, and video projections--is directed by Graham and produced by Sandra Antelo-Suarez, editorial director of TRANS> magazine.

Adapted from the 1968 teen exploitation film Wild in the Streets, Graham's story follows the career of Neil Sky, who is elected president after initiating teen riots to change the voting age to 14. Under his administration, people over 30 face mandatory retirement. Sky's power is threatened by an even younger and more defiant generation, led by his 10-year old son and his youth gang.

Graham says that Sky "was initially inspired by Neil Young, but later he evolved and became a combination Young and Sky Saxon, the lead singer of the Seeds."


BASEL DAZZLE, HIGHLIGHT: DONT TRUST ANYONE OVER THIRTY
By Anna Truxes
Truxes, Anna, Zink Magazine, March 2005, pg. 116.

You might be surprised that Dan Graham's puppet rock opers, Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty, commissioned by Trans Magazine, was one of Miami's headliners for the in-the-know guests. But it makes sense when you consider the all-star roster of collaborators, including Marie-Paule Macdonald on puppet designs, Being John Malkovich's Philip Huber on marionettes, Tony Oursler and Mike Kelly on video projections and Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore with Rodney Graham on musical composition and performance.

Dan Graham's frenetic, overlapping, genre-mixing plot and puppet performances lead the audience through the oddly familiar trajectory of Neil Sky, a 24 year -old loadie rock star who inspires youth riots to reduce the voting age to 14 and to put LSD in Congress's dringking water. After he contains the over-thirty population in "reconditioning camps", Sky learns that his youth, his ticket to bohemia and the oval office, are as fleeting as the hippies.

Like the puppets in Avenue Q, and even Team America, these puppets tackle culturally relevant topics. And for the members of the audience who felt the bittersweet pang of watching Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty one month after the elections in which conservative values dealt a deadly blow to the hippie ideals that helped contemporary art emerge, Graham's rock opera was a reminder that bohemia will not die.


DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER THIRTY BY DAN GRAHAM
Review, artdaily.com, December 3, 2004
www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=11724&int_modo=1

"Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty," a 60-minute live puppet rock opera, makes its world premiere during the international art show Art Basel Miami Beach (December 2-5, 2004). Devised by the conceptual artist Dan Graham, «Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty» features video by artists Tony Oursler and Paul McCarthy, songs written and performed by Rodney Graham and Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, and music performed live by the «Japanther» band. Master puppeteer Philip Huber has designed and constructed the puppets adapted from puppet drawings by Marie Paule McDonald. The live concerts will take place on December 1 from 8 to 9 p.m. (by invitation only) and daily from December 2 through 5 from 5 to 6 p.m. for the general public at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden.

«Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty» charts the career of 24-year-old rock singer Neil Sky, who is elected President of the United States after instigating teenage riots to change the voting age to fourteen and putting LSD in the Congressional drinking water. But once President Sky retires the over-thirties population to LSD re-education camps, he faces his own unique demise. The opera's tragi-comic narrative is the reductio ad absurdum of the hippies «general politics» as characterized by the 1960s youth slogan: «Don't trust anyone over thirty.»

Devised by the conceptual artist Dan Graham, «Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty» features video by artists Tony Oursler and Paul McCarthy, songs written and performed by Rodney Graham and Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, and music performed live by «Japanther.» Philip Huber, the master puppeteer of the film «Being John Malkovich,» has designed and constructed the puppets adapted from puppet drawings by the artist Marie Paule McDonald.

Envisioned as a satiric history of the hippy generation and the end of the psychedelic era, «Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty» is a narrative comprising a «schizophrenic» overlapping of textures, counterpoints, slogans, and clichés. The resulting overlay of opera, puppet theater, and video media is formulated as a sequence of «extensions,» a notion that Dan Graham has utilized to great effect throughout his body of work.

Continually splicing disparate media together (opera and rock, the proscenium and the television screen, the 1960s and the 2000s, real people and puppets, the living experience and the final book), «Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty» deliberately separates the visual and dramatic elements, underlining how the narrative components overlap, while making the objects and subjects of time and culture interchangeable for both art and the audience. The effect is one of bitter reflection: we witness both our own shallow seduction by the cult of youth and the fascist tendencies that can overwhelm even the most idealistic movement if left unchecked.

«Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty» was commissioned by TRANS> and is produced by Sandra Antelo-Suarez. The co-producers are Foundation 2021, New York, and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna / Wiener Festwochen. Additional funding for this project is provided by Art Basel Miami Beach, Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, The Rubell Hotels, and Avant Garde Multimedia.

«Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty» makes its world premiere during Art Basel Miami Beach on December 1 from 8 to 9 p.m. (by invitation only) and daily from December 2 through 5 between 5 to 6 p.m. for the general public at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden, 2000 Convention Center Drive, next to the Miami Beach Convention Center. Tickets for «Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty» must be reserved, as only limited seating is available.


The Miami Herald, December 1, 2004

A new concept at a visual fair: sounds of music


BY EVELYN McDONNELL

Dan Graham has written rock criticism, made movies and fashioned books, all steps in a four-decade exploration of the connection and conflict between the worlds of art and music. His latest project: a puppet rock opera, which premieres at Art Basel Miami Beach on Thursday. Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty is a collaboration between an experimental punk duo, video artists and puppeteers.

"That's something you get in the rock world: communalism," says Graham, a whiskered music fanatic-cum-conceptual artist. ''Artists are so individualistic."

For decades, "pop artists" have craved and fed off the superstar mills of Hollywood and rock 'n' roll, while "art rockers" have sought the elitist stamp of aesthetic legitimacy. This year, there will be several official Basel events that explore the art of noise, including sound art installations at the tony Delano Hotel and a Scissor Sisters concert on the beach.

Next year, Basel officials say they intend to expand the art fair's sensory palette to taste, with a food component. In the meantime, the increasing number of sonic elements at Basel reflects trends in the art world, where sound art is a growing discipline.

"We highlight the interface between the contemporary art world and the sound world," says Brett Littman, deputy director of the pacesetting New York art center P.5.1. Littman is curating the Art Sound Lounge at the Delano, which will include audio pieces by Christian Marclay and Lou Reed and Internet radio programs.


'PERFORMATIVE FORMAT'

"Bands like Scissor Sisters and Fischerspooner are using the rock format as a performative format," Littman says. ''It's a new avenue with precedent, something artists are exploring more."

Graham and Littman point to the long history of art-school rock bands, from the Kinks to Talking Heads to Japanther, the Brooklyn group that performs in Don't Trust Anyone. Littman traces the current art-sound interface to the '60s, when artists began painting cartoon figures and making Marilyn Monroe prints. "Many artists have a deep, deep interest in pop culture," Littman says. ''That's where a lot of artists today find inspiration, or they use pop culture to get some ironic distance from the current culture we live in."


A REBELLIOUS THRILL

Littman says the evolution of sound art also got a push with the advent of video and installation art as a burgeoning medium since the '80s. I think sound plays a component in setting the stage for an environment."

Many artists crave the rebellious, populist thrill offered by music as an antidote to the stuffy confines of gallery and museum life.

"A lot of artists like that this is ephemeral and can't be institutionalized; it's not part of the canon," Littman says.

"That's why I listened to lots of records," Graham says. ''It's a disposable form of intellectuality that's popular at the same time."

Ana Matronic, front woman for New York-bred but big-in-Europe alternative music act the Scissor Sisters, cut her teeth at San Francisco and Manhattan art spaces. But she prefers being a club idol.

"I think art school ruins people; no one should ever go again," she says. ''Our drummer is the sole person who ever escaped from art school not bitter. The art world, God love it, but I don't want to have to deal with the snobbery justification of total crap by slapping a $10,000 price tag on it."

Having tasted the mass-appeal elixir of pop, Matronic is ready to leave her days as an East Village drag-cabaret performance artist behind her.

"There's more housewives than drag queens in the U.K. that own our album at the moment," she says proudly.

So she's not happy that, depending whom you ask, the Sisters' debut South Florida performance tonight may be a VIP-only event (show presenter Deitch Projects says it is; Basel's publicist say it's free for all to attend).

"Everybody should be able to go to it," Matronic says. ''Scissor Sisters are antiexciusivity and snobbery. The art world is somewhere that contains a great deal of that. We refuse to buy into it. We hope a lot of nice, interesting members of the Miami public will come check us out."


NOT JUST ART

Basel's musical forays can provide a low-art antidote to all the highbrow garden-party pretensions.

The fair is not just about art; it's about commerce. And money is the hook on which the union of art and music both hangs and is impaled.

"There's a funny paradox in making sound pieces," Littman says. * 'How do you sell them? Install them? Do you give over a room of your house to speakers? It's a little bit of a challenge."

It's precisely that kind of concern that drives Graham away from the gallery system. "Art is becoming too much of a business," he says.

Not many people can afford to devote a whole room of a house to one piece of art. But they can afford a CD. Although the Scissor Sisters are making such cutting-edge advances as bringing a slang-term for lesbians onto the record charts, their self-titled debut costs $11.99 on Amazon.com.


'NO EXCLUSIVITY'

"We're not really an art rock band," Matronic says. 'There are elements of it, and we all really love bands that can be considered 'art rock,' but there's no amount of exclusivity attached to this and we don't want there to be."

Japanther has found its art-puppet-punk foray to be a lesson in putting aside rock-star egos, and in potential artist exploitation (one thing that unites the art and music worlds).

"We've learned not to trust anyone over 30," bassist Matt Reilly jokes.

Drummer Ian Vanek says the puppet show has given Japanther a forum for "criticism and self-reflection." But the 24-year-old refuses to get all art-world pretentious about it. "We're doing this for a laugh," he says. '' We just felt good we did this for a day, instead of slaving away building pyramids."