I have a dim memory of a 1980s street protest. It was part of a larger demonstration that had shut down several blocks of downtown. Four or five college students (they seemed older than I was) stood shoulder to shoulder in thrift store suits and ties. A carnival barker told the crowd what we were about to witness. Each one of our performers, he explained, had consumed mash potatoes colored with food dye and they would soon puke red, white, and blue. We stood in the rain as the suits jumped up and down and gagged themselves. It didn’t go as planned. Everything came up grey, but even that proved a good metaphor.
Their act has stayed with me in part because it felt like a form of social grace born from rot; a kind of fermented democracy.
I’m interested in what its long form might look like. Something infinitely better than speaking truth to power.
The puke protest coincided with Oliver North, Anita Hill, the birth of gentrification and Roger Ailes’ television. A cynical entertainer had ascended to the White House. Our current uncanny moment is punctuated with zombies from that administration.
A few other things happened in the 80s like the feminist classic 9 to 5 and the phrase SILENCE=DEATH, which today, in the age of political chatter, sounds almost blessed. In 1985, the year that the Philadelphia police bombed MOVE, the activist-artist collective Group Material participated in the Whitney Biennial to the detriment of their outsider image. To redeem themselves, they launched a project on democracy that culminated in a town hall on the AIDS crisis. Critic David Deitcher said of the event that it had “a sense of participating in something token, in something staged and recorded, of partaking in a process that…played little or no part in the [participants'] daily lives” and that foregrounded the “nostalgic and mythic aspect of the ‘town hall’ currency.” He went on to say that it proved “how intractable are the obstacles in this society to widening the range of political debate, to opening lines of communication between constituencies with divergent interests” and “to effecting a sense of urgency in the midst of a culture that militates in so many sophisticated ways against change.”
I think the puking street performers had a good sense of those intractable obstacles. They responded from the gut. We’re all hosts to dirty politics and it takes some resolve not to flinch when that mishmash of speech doesn’t look at all what you expected once it hits the pavement.
In hindsight, part of the appeal of their performance was its nod toward big tent politics, the grimy rejoinder to the clean, composed town hall. The big tent—cramped, muggy, interminable; impossibly more vast inside than it appears and staked on the faith that layers of sticky social habits make worlds—a hot house for discursive germs.
We didn’t yet know in the 80s about the wonders of gut flora but the decade’s analog signals resembled a political practice built in its image. Time for a revival.
Wallis, Brian, Ed., Democracy: A Project by Group Material (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1990).