Staging Life/Living on Stage

Anna Koós

quat Theatre is known for having presented provocative, avant-garde perfor- mances in a New York storefront from 1977 to 1983. The stage was situated Sinside, in front of the window. Seats on risers served as the auditorium in the back of the store. The audience watched what transpired on the stage and beyond it, through the window, in the street — an extension of the stage, or a living back- ground, if you like.

Our collective work began in in 1970. We were young artists, poets, former members of a university ensemble who formed an independent theatre company. In the Cold War, the Communist government in did not tolerate gatherings, cultural or otherwise, beyond its direct control. Our performances were banned in 1972. After four more years of skirting around prohibition (performing underground on the fringes of officialdom, mostly in private apartments) and fending off infiltrat- ing informers, the police, and even the neighbors, our theatre company was given the green light to emigrate, with four small children in tow.

The core of the group which stayed together from 1970 until 1985 included five friends, namely: (1943–2007), Peter Berg (b. 1947), Eva Buchmuller (b. 1943), Peter Halasz (1943–2006), and myself, Anna Koós (b. 1948). (Since our personalities mattered much, here I call us by our first names except Berg, to avoid mixing up the two Peters.) In the fifteen years of our collaboration, several other people joined us and sooner or later parted with us, two more children were born, and languages changed. We took the name “Squat Theatre” in 1977 when our first storefront performance — Pig, Child, Fire! — premiered in Holland. After a successful run at the festival of Nancy in France, we crossed the Atlantic and settled in New York. From October 1977 to October 1985, Squat rented a building in Chelsea, at 256 West 23rd Street. We had a storefront to perform in, and three more floors in which to live. None of this happened as happy-go-luckily as it may seem in an abbreviated history.

Performances do not usually survive their making. They may at best be remembered by everyone present. Plays we did not write; scenarios we agreed on among our- selves and kept in our heads; acting we shunned from the start; methods we did

24  PAJ 105 (2013), pp. 24–40. © 2013 Anna Koós doi:10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 not learn or teach. After describing the succession of events on stage and publishing the texts used in the performances (Eva Buchmuller and Anna Koós, Squat Theatre, New York: Artists Space, 1996), I embarked on writing a book about the ways our lives and the theatre we made enmeshed and depended on each other (Anna Koós, Szinházi történetek: szobában, kirakatban, English: Theatrical Stories: from Living Room to Storefront, Budapest: Akadémiai, 2009). Like all three Squat plays in Western emi- gration, the first in New York — ’s Last Love — was collectively created and produced. It played in New York (1978–1979), Rotterdam (1978), (The Festival of Nations, 1979), (BITEF, 1979), , Brussels, Rome, and Flor- ence (1979), Cologne (Theater der Welt, 1981), and again during The Golden Age of Squat Theatre Festival (New York, 1982).

The three-part performance took place on three “stages,” none of which were stages, strictly speacking. For Part One the performing group and the audience gathered on the second floor, in the living room of Eva and Stephan. Having listened to a radio message from Andromeda, everyone walked down to the storefront. Part Two was a black-and-white film projected onto a cotton curtain hanging in the storefront window, visible from both inside and outside. Part Three used the area inside and the sidewalk outside, and began with Andy Warhol’s arrival from the street chaperoning a short overweight woman: Kathleen, the witch. She proceeded to perform a ritual in the nude then sat down to answer Andy’s pre-recorded questions live (Warhol’s voice was Mark Amitin’s). Meanwhile, three women from Andromeda gathered on the sidewalk. One of them, ’s twelve-year-old reincarnation, entered the stage to interview Andy, eventually re-enacting Valery Solanas’s 1968 shooting attack.

The following excerpts from Chapter Seven of my book Theatrical Stories: From Liv- ing Room to Storefront are about the creation of Andy Warhol’s Last Love. It starts in 1978, seven months after Squat cleared immigration at JFK.

the year of the horse

When the Gregorian calendar registers February, Chinese around the world celebrate the New Year. In Chinatown the celebration lasts for several days. A nocturnal parade winds its way through narrow streets in lower Manhattan. We must have landed on another planet.

On my first outing to Chinatown, I was dazzled by its unfamiliar objects, the deni- zens’ habits and gestures. East of Broadway, fishmongers lined small streets in the vicinity of Canal Street, their stands slumping under the dawn’s catch. In landlocked Hungary, fish markets were rare if there were any. Fishstands in were narrow stalls lining the sidewalk in front of the first floor of the building they occupied. After hours they vanished — cashier, scales, and counter all folded up and pressed against the wall behind shutters pulled down to the ground, all in one pop-up book as it were. In Chinatown, it was the opposite. The fishstands not only jutted out over the sidewalk but they also spread across the building — no windows or doors, the store entirely open. The catch of the day was laid in trays filled with crushed ice: clams, mussels, oysters, tuna, dwarf shark, squid, cod, scallops, shellfish, fluke, mollusk,

KOÓS / Squat Theatre  25

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 hermit crab, lobster, eel, turtle, and unnameable others. Vegetables of all kinds piled up in crates on the sidewalk near the stands, vegetables I had never seen before, let alone eaten, along with smelly dried or smoked fish and seaweed.

At the foot of the rear of a downtown prison, two cobblers worked sitting on tiny stools — no shop, not even a makeshift booth. Tools wrapped in linen lay on the ground. Next to them a thin Asian man squatted at the edge of the sidewalk, sculpting and folding dried bamboo leaves into palm-size pieces of praying mantis, butterfly, and dragonfly. I bought one of each. All sorts of medicines lined the shelves at the drugstore. If one cared to rise up on tip-toe and look through the upper window of a wooden front door, a curious sight might come into view: half-gallon glass jars filled with various dry concoctions, salted and dried white sea horses, dried algae, chrysanthemum, and calendula flower, small balls of uncanny mixtures of dried herbs and minerals. The Chinese herbalist spoke no English. Once I entered a Buddhist temple next door. Candlelight, empty space, an altar, incense burning, tiny bells hanging from above. Quiet. Shambala Center was on West 22nd Street, many blocks to the North. Curiously enough, we lived on West 23rd Street but were unaware of it while there. Shambala Center had lying in repose in the spring of 1998. It so happened then that I turned on the radio one early morning while I was painting toy soldiers to supplement my income, or to have something meditative to do within my hectic schedule. WBAI 99.5 FM. Amy Goodman was on the air, I liked her reports. As I remember, she was saying: “The ceremony over, everyone has cleared the room. Only the two of us have stayed on: Allen Ginsberg’s cold body and I.”

The New Year’s parade started from the little square at the confluence of three streets where the statue of Confucius stands. Germinating bamboo shoots in glasses of water decorated Chinatown’s windows, and steam billowed onto the sidewalks from restaurant kitchens. At the head of the parade a gigantic red and gold dragon puppet danced at rods’ ends. It reminded me of the chimeras on display at the Met. Behind the dancing dragon Chinese New Yorkers banged instruments, threw confetti and ticker-tape, lit sparklers, and tossed firecrackers. The loud racket chased the evil spirits away from places and from the coming year. Nineteen seventy-eight was the Year of the Horse. Stephan’s uncle — the sculptor Joseph Jakovits, Yaki to us, who had immigrated to New York twenty years before — took him and Eva to the parade. Yaki bought a red poster with a picture of a brown horse in profile — a present for Eva. She pinned it up in their room above the table. This was the source of inspiration for filming Andy Warhol riding a horse through Chinatown.

forward with a new play!

In early 1978, we still had not come up with a new play. Not that New York necessarily expected it from us but we thought our life — as a theatre and as a group — hinged on it. Thoughts of our survival kept worrying and simultaneously driving each of us, in separate phases and different constellations. A gorge opened up and yawned behind us: there was no stepping back.

26  PAJ 105

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 Continuous talk went on among us that sometimes crashed into a dead end or mutual silence. The play was being written in our heads. Not only when we all sat around the long table but also when alone, in twos or threes we were coming and going, cooking, doing dishes, these last two left exclusively for us women. Each of us at his and her own temperament and mood decided what and when and how to work on stage. We did not accept one another’s ideas unconditionally. It benefitted no one to be thin-skinned because our common venture, the play, was at stake. Outsiders could not put their finger on the unspoken, let alone unwritten rules of how collective playmaking functioned among us. Perhaps because we did not appear absorbed, patient, or necessarily kind with one another. Peter proposed that a mylar ceiling should descend at the end of the play to close off fiction from non-fiction, stage from street, and also to mirror the audience. The others were not exactly passionate about this idea. “Cute.” “Spoonfeeding.” Peter decided to push it. He was still fiddling with it on the eve of opening night. A suggestion stood no chance unless it hit the bull’s eye — a vision described on a postcard (from Tamas to Stephan), a piece of recorded music (Eric Daillie proposing to mix a song to the film), or an idea wedded to its host (Stephan appears as Andy Warhol, his daughter Eszter as twelve-year-old Ulrike Meinhof). By that time three or even four determined foreigners sat around the table in our midst whose help we needed badly and who were pleased to take part in the chaotic process. They were Larry Solomon who worked with us on sound and video recordings in his spare time; his friend Kathleen Kendell, the witch — peace be with you — formerly working at WBAI; Eric Daillie from France, joining us in Holland all the way to New York, the father-to-be of my son born in August 1978; and Michael Mooser, an artist from Wilma Project in Philadelphia who ended up shooting the film for the play. English interpretation was mostly my job; among ourselves we still spoke Hungarian. That changed somewhat when one day the youngest among the kids — Galus, my five- year-old daughter with Peter — switched to English.

Plays may be born in many ways — “authorship” goes to the one who claims it as his or her “own.” The solitary writer sits at one end of the spectrum like Bulgakov’s autobiographical hero in A Theatrical Novel. He grows hungry and cold, he does not have enough money to pay for the oil that feeds the lamp let alone for the food that feeds “the smoky-gray, scrawny beast” — his large cat and only companion. With what little self-confidence remains flickering inside him, the author squeezes out what he calls A Dead Man’s Memoir — the working title for what became Bulgakov’s posthumously published book subtitled A Theatrical Novel. At the other end of the spectrum appears the author whose writing is fed by dialogue with others. I read the recently published book by the German literary historian Hiltrud Häntzschel in Hungarian translation — Brecht and his Women, variations on the theme of where authorship begins and where the roles of assistant, translator, wife, lover, listener, and writing-partner end. The question is especially resonant with Elisabeth Hauptmann, to whom even Brecht credited with co-authoring The Threepenny Opera.

KOÓS / Squat Theatre  27

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 Top: Peter Halasz and Stephan Balint, with Peter Berg looming in the window, in Andy Warhol’s Last Love, Part Three, Squat Theatre, 1978. Photo: © Roe DiBona. Opposite top: Stephan Balint as Andy Warhol, Kathleen Kendell as a witch, and as a returning Andromedan in the disguise of “Ulrike Meinhof” as a young girl. Photo: Theodore Shank. Opposite bottom: View from doorway toward audience. Photo: Theodore Shank.

28  PAJ 105 KOÓS / Squat Theatre  29

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 Needless to say, the ingenuity in the novels of Bulgakov or Brecht’s plays cannot be detected in our own theatrical achievements, starting from the fact that we left no script behind. An anarchistic unevenness characterized the process of creating collectively. Difficulties multiplied in New York with the spectators’ frame of cultural reference being obviously very different from ours. Expecting certain questions from the press and the audience, we put together fifteen pages about what motivated us to create Andy Warhol’s Last Love. Following our conversations, Stephan wrote it in Hungarian and I translated it into English. The photocopied booklets were a present for our spectators in the first New York run. In September 1978,TDR published it under the title “Squat’s Answers.” (All quotes without reference are from this text.) It began with the following thoughts:

(about New York and our arrival:) We did not want to create a play about New York (especially not about America); we have never wanted to create a play about something, because theatre is not about something but it is from something. It is itself; from a given place, from the social and personal forms of life. It is conceptual and existential at the same time. And it is in and from New York where one can rise to speak. Because here you may be part of the larger community without giving up your own past identity. . . .

(about the concept of street-storefront-theatre:) In Pig, Child, Fire!, which we created in Europe and also performed in New York for half a year — the storefront window opened the theatrical space onto the street — to a non- theatrical space with nontheatrical events. Theater wears the mask of life and life wears the mask of theater, leaving each to interpret the other. The real policeman who put handcuffs on the wrists of the “dueling” actors in the street, the girl who was abducted from in front of the window, all became actors; the passersby and the peeping faces became the chorus in Greek tragedy.

The girl who was “abducted” from the street deserves an aside. We performed Pig, Child, Fire! in the winter. On one icy evening I read Artaud’s letter standing on the sidewalk, facing the audience through the window. No sane person braved the freezing temperatures, the street was empty. I had no objection to it. As I was to learn after the fact, Seth Tillett schemed to stir up some excitement; not that Artaud or I needed it. He figured a girl should step near me, then he himself should join in while someone else parked a station wagon at the curb. They would “kidnap” the female onlooker and off they would go. And so it happened. No spectator inquired about the kidnapped girl’s fate, the audience got the message. Only I was put on the spot as I stopped reading and ran upstairs to call the cops!

For the record, although the audience often delighted when random, oblivious pedestrians or police got caught in moments of realization of being put “on stage,” the most intense thrill came from the plain fact that the stage was open to the per- petually moving urban environment, a public space. In an abandoned neighborhood, the same thing would not necessarily be exciting, but 23rd Street was amusing to

30  PAJ 105

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 look at even without having a stage in between. Back at the time I could not put this into words, nor could I make the others accept it, although I made an effort. Our collective thought attributed different meanings to the street because on more than one occasion we concocted tricks to induce the street to perform “stunts.” In other words, pedestrians were prompted to behave as they usually did not but might have. At the time, this was easy to elicit from Manhattan’s genial and colorful street life. To start with, the film could be watched by anyone who happened to walk by Squat during the show. Several pedestrians naturally stopped and formed a small group of onlookers. Soon Warhol’s personified self arrived in Kathleen’s company for a short Polaroid photo-op before they opened the door to the storefront and disappeared from the outside while appearing inside. Interestingly, onlookers would not attempt to enter the stage similarly from the street, except on one occasion. A man in a hat holding a bag stepped in and stayed on standing during the interview part until we all left and he realized he was left alone. Then he ran for the door. Berg’s loud dance attracted people, curious about what was going on, as if spectating took on a new form, hanging out and talking to one another.

Early on in the planning stages, we realized that the short time we had spent in the city was not enough to generate sufficient experience and correlative material for a new play. We had to reach further back and remain satisfied with the obvious patterns.

A virtual meeting between Andy Warhol and Ulrike Meinhof, two emblematic figures on two continents, North America and West Europe, offered us an easy-to-treat, digestable, and tongue-in-cheek scenario: science fiction. Stephan felt inspired by reading Space Odyssey, a raggedy paperback about the making of Kubrick’s film. Science fiction was also Berg’s fodder; he gulped down Asimov’s novels in Hun- garian. Neither Kubrick’s nor Asimov’s aura led us anywhere. The stage required a — a concrete image. At least in the kind of theatre we were about to do. A postcard arrived, addressed to Stephan from Tamas Szentjoby, our “godfather.” He had come up with the name Squat during the short Parisian leg of our emigration. Himself a Fluxus artist and part of the Hungarian underground diaspora, Tamas then lived in Switzerland. The short greeting told us about the extensive network of broadband radios in America, amateur short-wave radio broadcasting. Tamas thought we ought to join the network.

Snatching on the idea, the new play started with Eva placing earphones around her head while fiddling with the buttons of a transmitter-receiver. Her partner Stephan was lying on a mattress. In the middle of the twenty-minute-or-so scene, a radio message arrived from outer space. Eva immediately called Berg and Peter to join them listening. “Two locations were born: a tangible one — the room of two members of the company (Eva and Stephan) — as a theatre space — and a science fiction world from where the message was transmitted.” In New York we operated on alien ground. Whatever we did seemed to be framed by quotation marks. Part One of Andy Warhol’s Last Love was entitled Aliens on the Second Floor. Aliens with an intent to settle in the United States may come from space or from other coun- tries. We fell into the latter category. Aliens did not differ from citizens, both were

KOÓS / Squat Theatre  31

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 human beings, but did aliens from space differ from earthlings? Wouldn’t such a distinction be a figment of citizen-earthlings’ imaginations? It went without saying that we needed no special costume or make-up to look like strangers, or aliens for that matter. Except for pregnant me. I wore a silver plastic gown reaching to the floor. Epaulet on the shoulders, a UFO-RAF emblem painted red on my back, and a dildo on my protruding belly. In time, this unpleasant accessory promoted itself to “tiara.” We enlisted Oriental and Hopi Indian symbols in vain, the thing itself proved to be a needless provocation, raising hell, way out of proportion. I disliked it yet did not decline to wear it.

We figured the message should come from a scientific fictional afterworld called Andromeda. Stephan wrote the final version. Travel time to Andromeda would exceed a human being’s life expectancy, so a traveler could only arrive dead and only a dead person’s message could reach Earth. The spokesperson for Intergalaxy 21 Revolutionary Committee on Andromeda was Ulrike Meinhof, who had been astrally reincarnated as a young girl while traveling through space. In October 1976 we happened to be in Dusseldorf to prepare a performance at the Art Fair. Members of the radical leftist group Baader-Meinhof were hunted down and imprisoned. One morning the police broke down the doors in the apartment building where our hosts, a sculptor-couple and their children lived. Uninterested in the group’s ideol- ogy, we were taken aback by the gossip and graphic details circulated in the press. The obscure circumstances of Meinhof’s death in high-security solitary confinement served as pretext, or at least a starting point, for the play’s message. She was found hanging in her cell with semen stains marring her clothes. In the science-fiction version Ulrike spoke: “In the moment of my death an alien made love to me.” The alien took her to Andromeda from where she sent a message to the inhabitants of Earth: “Make your death public.” (So an alien might be dispatched to pick you up.) The audience heard it as the three men on stage listened to the transmission before carrying out its instructions — indulging in symbolic acts.

The scene in the room upstairs recycled and fictionalized the events of Berg’s 1972 solo for two players, the first living-room performance at the headquarters of our underground existence in Peter’s and my Budapest apartment, with an essential shift in tone. What had appeared as everyday gestures and slowly evolving motifs in Berg’s version would turn into a series of readymade actions in Manhattan five years later, as if we had come from another planet. In its original locale, the comi- cal, frail couple reeled about needless objects and wobbled in a queasy, rank, smoky apartment, heavy with the smell of wine. Transplanted onto 23rd Street, their mime lost authenticity, intensity, and raison d’être. The actual environment was Eva and Stephan’s second-floor“suite.” The atmosphere and arrangement of the room could not possibly remind anyone of either a theatre or a living room. It occupied half the floor. With its longish shape, larger-than-necessary size, the color of the walls a strong mid-blue, two large windows with wired glass faced the entrance and three small windows perched on the wall where an almost two-foot-high riser ran the long edge of the space — as the previous tenant, a club called Galaxy 21, had fashioned it years before, making us feel like aliens ourselves until we settled in the house, more or less.

32  PAJ 105

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 The audience seemed to suspect some sort of mythology lurking behind the cryptic events taking place in the room. To a certain extent we exaggerated the atmosphere. Berg moved under the table to wind up the phonograph behind an overflowing paper tablecloth. Eva and Stephan began to dance slowly to the music. Or the story of the two little girls. Galus was often bored sitting “on stage” where she had nothing to do. She felt better seated among the spectators, with Rebecca, Eva’s seven-year-old daughter. We preferred the girls to be nearby, not running around the house some- where. Especially after Rebecca broke an arm. So we allowed them into the crowd together, where they knew that at some point Peter would pick one of them up and take her with him, stepping out of a window behind the others, higher up the wall. It was understood that such windows opened onto a fire escape, yet a child-snatcher escaping through a window gave everyone the creeps.

In the summer of 1978, the audience felt the most authentic among all of us: anony- mous ticket buyers in Manhattan. Should these spectators have gone elsewhere but to a group of aliens’ storefront theatre, they could have appeared eas- ily out of place. If I study photographs of this part of the performance, it is all too obvious. The scene appears no different from how we lived our lives during the day leading up to the performance. Aliens. Beasts of burden. Could it be that this was the way we did away with “the past” once and for all?

Stephan came up with the title. “Andy Warhol” was also his “personal discovery” for the play. Before I move on with the tale, and to avoid any misunderstanding I would like to make a point: I have not been a fan of Andy Warhol’s art. Quite simply because if Paul Klee’s oeuvre is art, and it indeed is, then Warhol’s work should be defined as that of a clever graphic designer and successful businessman’s enterprise, sold as overpriced “art.” Warhol, I have come to realize, was to fill the vacuum that opened up behind Pollock with flagrant and undisguised theatricality in the French Situationist thinker ’s “society of spectacle” from which the arts have disappeared, where the artist has remained only as a role. Playful irony deflected Warhol’s popularized double, in our treatment of the title of the performance and the visualized figure himself. We were under the impression that had he come to our place, he would have had a good laugh at our jokes. We were wrong. We forgot about the camel’s difficulty in going through the eye of a needle.

Warhol invented how to worship the present — bereft of a past and a future — via simplification and multiplication. His silk-screen prints and acrylic images glamorized products sporting a calculated blend and an equally calculated price, also known as consumer items — such were Coca-Cola, the “odorless” dollar bill, and the thirty-two kinds of Campbell’s condensed soup — one reason being (if we are to believe the note posted by MoMA) Warhol consumed a can a day for many years. Warhol thought it was great that the American president, Liz Taylor, and a bum on the street all drank the same Coca-Cola, paying the same amount of money for it, and enjoying it the same way because better Coca-Cola could not be bought, even if one were willing to pay more. After all, what is good is good.

KOÓS / Squat Theatre  33

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 A scene in Yasujiro Ozu’s filmEarly Spring gives Coca-Cola an edge. We are in the 1950s. Tokyo. Four young office workers go on an afternoon outing. Some in European dress, some in traditional kimonos. It is a sunny day. The girls are sitting around a European-style square table in the upstairs room of a diner. They giggle at their own temerity when they order a round of Coca-Colas. In Fassbinder’s 1973 movie Ali, or Fear Eats the Soul we are introduced to an aging cleaning lady, the widower Emmi Kurowski. She walks home from work in a provincial West German period town. A storm gathers. She comes upon a bar and steps inside for shelter from the driving rain. Emmi pulls a chair over to an empty table close to the door, far from the bar and its regulars. The tall, blonde, and foxy waitress sweeps to her, tray in hand, and snidely asks: “Would you like to order something, Ma’am?” “Eine Kola, bitte,” sounds Emmi’s reply.

The lesson from Coca-Cola’s globetrotting trip is that in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Coca-Cola became one of the unavoidable and unconscious symbols of American values entering into the traditional Japanese ways of life. Emmi Kurowski does not order “eine Kola, bitte” because she wants it but because, I presume, it is the only “harmless” drink in the bar that has pulled itself up from once being a pub before World War II.

Meanwhile pop art also got a name for itself to help it parade around the world, not that it could ever catch up with Coca-Cola. While racism and civil rights activism paralleled accelerating consumerism, the war in Vietnam provoked burning of draft cards and demonstrating for peace. ’s levitating , drugs becoming a habit à la mode. Vignettes, masks, or silk-screen prints flashed instantly recognizable, popular consumer cult images that were impressed upon viewers in the early sixties. Next to Pollock’s figuratively hard-to-identify saxophone-solo drip paintings, Warhol’s synthetic colors looked “new” and were easy to digest.

In 1978, two years after we had left Budapest behind, Warhol turned into a semi- retired star, an elite figure in the upper echelons. Well-known yet not so popular, at least not any more. His appearance — the wig that looked and moved like straw, his non-existent facial features — followed the style of his own silk-screen prints — not in terms of popularity, but in missing a personal look. As if his street presence had been the shadow of his own protruding self, or, perhaps it is better to say, as if he had strolled within his own quotation marks. Theatrical. Multipliable, though one of him sufficed on stage. Warhol clamored for an artist’s uniqueness yet the key to glorifying the popular in his “art” was further multiplication. Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase — the medium is the message — had taken flight in 1964. We were on the right track. (A note: McLuhan’s adage is the paradigm of what Ortega y Gasset said in his 1947 lecture “Introduction to Velázquez:” “Art is not the way a given thing looks outside the image but the style as it appears on the image.”)

I could not make up my mind if irony, naïveté, or calculation prompted Warhol to rely on the banal meaning of words while constructing his pop philosophy. Stephan saw Warhol announce on television, for the first or umpteenth time:“In the future

34  PAJ 105

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” John Audubon wrote in a letter to his wife during his 1828 voyage to England: “I daresay like everything else in London it will live but one week.” So, time has accelerated but fame is still fickle. Warhol’s fifteen-minute fame began to fade after the aggressive feminist author of the S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) manifesto, Valerie Solanas shot him in the groin. The location: Warhol’s studio called the Factory. The year: 1968. The reason: Solanas, a self-avowed filmmaker, hovering on the fringes of the Factory’s social circles, asked Warhol to return a script. Alas, the script was nowhere to be found. Warhol survived the attack. The studio on Union Square closed down and reopened as the editorial offices ofInterview magazine. Valerie Solanas and Ulrike Meinhof reached us as news items, their acts and fates posing questions about their ways of interfering with degrees and forms of injustice. The memory of seeing WANTED flyers around Dus- seldorf in 1976 inspired Stephan to use her figure as the revolutionary counterpart of her complete opposite, a rich artist thriving on pop art.

Judging from published photographs and descriptions, Warhol’s no-comment behav- ior functioned as a plate of armor. The following occurred in November 1982. Andy Warhol’s Last Love played in a retrospective of our three storefront plays. We read somewhere that Andy Warhol was going to sign copies of his Interview magazine. After the show, Eva and Stephan as Andy in mask and wig rushed to catch the artist. A lot of people were standing in line, a slight hum in the air. How many eccentric characters were running around Manhattan! Just look how many were lobbying for another’s signature! When Eva and the alter ego’s turn came, Andy Warhol scribbled his name on a magazine bought on the spot — without bothering to look up. He must have been afraid of his wig coming loose. Unless this was yet another alter ego.

We could not start shooting the film before the end of April because of a stray snowstorm that made life come to a halt in the city. I did not mind because Eric and I were still working on the French translation of Mark Amitin’s doctoral dis- sertation about the Living Theatre. It took time and energy to turn two hundred typed pages from English into French while it was cold inside and out. The snow kept coming. The bouquet of red roses and the twelve hundred dollars I received in exchange were great. Gabor Dobos, close friend and photographer, came to visit us all the way from Budapest. He was taken aback by the “squalor” we lived in. He may have expected us to live already a better life than the one we had left behind. After a five-show gig in Pittsburgh, once back in New York we may have gone on with the almost forgotten showings of Pig, Child, Fire! for another month — we had to put food on the table. Peter scraped walls; that was how we described the prepara- tory stage of house-painting. Eva painted small-size kitsch; that is what she called her odd jobs. She also took on layout work for newspaper ads. When I entered her room on Thursday mornings, I often found her bending over the table and looking for lost pieces of Letraset, upset about the glue drying too fast. She usually worked through the night before her deadline. The job paid ridiculously little. When we ran out of acquaintances from whom we could borrow money for our daily food, we lifted a piece of cheese from the store. Twenty dollars a day were allocated for food and cigarettes for eleven of us.

KOÓS / Squat Theatre  35

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 The 1977 fall curriculum of New York University listed a course with Squat, what- ever the assistant to Professor Ron Argelander called our classes. Every week, half a dozen students whose parents paid hard cash for an education at an expensive college came to spend a few hours at our outpost on 23rd Street — and it was cold. In the beginning we all just talked with them, but later Peter asked them to present improvisations — in the rear end of the third floor, in his room. Escaping to 23rd Street for a peek into our “romantic” collective life may have appealed to the students, I imagine. The semester of “classes” paid the same amount as I was honored with for my translation of the dissertation. To shoot a short film for the next play was not going to be cheap. Ritsaert ten Cate, the director of the Mickery in Amsterdam called us from out of the blue only to ask how life was treating us. He wired us two thousand dollars, an advance. That paid for buying raw stock and processing fees at the lab, plus the cost of renting a horse. On the film Andy Warhol mounts a horse to trot in the canyons formed by the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan. Upon reaching Chinatown he gets entangled in adventures. The topic and the title of the film was: An Imperial Message, based on Franz Kafka’s parable of the same name.

One day the idea of asking the original Warhol to play himself on horseback came up. Stephan kept nagging me to call the offices ofInterview magazine. My own voice sounded alien to my ears when the others listened to me asking if I could please talk to Mr. Warhol. Ridiculous, could somebody be Andy Warhol or was that only a name? Sure thing, no one by that name came to the phone. I duly went on telling about our plans to shoot a film for our next play — with him or about him as the messenger with whom the emperor was to endow a message, and if he were to be so kind as to play the role, or if he knew how to ride a horse, that’d be great. Oh sure, could I please call back the next day. Bzzz bzzz — hello? My accent immediately gave me away. The answer was ready: Mr. Warhol was not interested in the role. Stephan did not know how to ride a horse, so we enlisted Stephan’s cousin, Yaki’s son, to be the stuntman in the film. Warhol would never come see our show, despite the fame it gained — for fifteen minutes, sure, we knew the rules. If he walked in the door incognito sometime, mixing in with the other spectators, he must have worn the disguise of the unrecognizably evanescent newt — the of true multiplication was written in 1936 by the Czech author Karel Cˇ apek, who went to War With the Newts.

Pop (art) Warhol was personified by Stephan, young-astral Ulrike by his daughter Eszter. Casting could not have been better or more fitting for each role. Whether it was a coincidence or a conscious choice that Stephan Balint, an artist’s son, appeared as a multiplied image of a “popular” New York artist, I cannot tell and would not guess but suspect — a son’s gesture toward his less popular father, at least in New York, who in my opinion was ultimately a better and a greater artist than the one the son portrayed. To appear as Warhol, Stephan wore a mask (made by Eva Buchmuller), a wig, and a suit and was equipped with sunglasses and a Polaroid camera. Ulrike wore a light purple dress from our treasure chest, the same one that the girl who acted hysterically wore in our 1971 play Skanzen. With the passing of time as Andy Warhol’s Last Love made its European festival rounds, Ulrike’s dress and role changed host: Eva’s elder daughter, Boris Major, her sister Rebecca, and eventually her best

36  PAJ 105

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 friend — Warhol superstar Viva’s elder daughter, Alexandra Auder — alternated on stage. (Viva, Alex, and her young sister happened to live next door, in the Chelsea Hotel.)

The period’s most notorious television commercial making everyone laugh at its protagonist publicized Crazy Eddie’s clever deals. A jovial man in his forties stood behind a desk amidst a pile of TV sets. Heavily gesticulating, he claimed he sold tele- visions for the lowest possible price. Any TV bought for any price might be brought to his store and he would sell it even cheaper. He told all that in one breath because Crazy Eddie’s prices are insa-a-a-a-a-ne! The diphthong ending the word “insaaaane” rang in its listeners’ ears. Even in my ears. I did not watch television, but it was on in the room where we ate, where the kitchen opened. The TV was on everywhere I had to go: in the laundromat, stores, the lobby of a high-rise. Even the streets were loud with Crazy Eddie and his insane prices! We asked Larry to set up his camera in front of our TV and film it with no sound. Straight on. With our bare eyes we did not notice that there was a delay, a difference in refreshing time between a televised moving image and its recapture projected. When televised “footage” was filmed, the projected moving picture was interrupted by a dark horizontal bar pushing the frame up or down every six or seven frames of the film. The original image rhapsodically crawled upward, then became steady before beginning to roll down.

It perfectly fit the TV dealer’s desperate gesticulation. When we put it on the editing table we realized that this rhythm shift in the unsteady image further supported what we had intended to achieve by omitting the original sound and replacing it with a Kafka parable. It was recorded on audiotape in Larry Solomon’s intense and precisely articulated recital. We meant to have two worlds and the liminal area between them overlap: the commercial — typically turning everything into small change — and belles lettres. Meanwhile Kafka’s messenger struggled to reach the unattainable. The truth of the matter is that the only spectators who could understand this subtle “message” were those whose ears still rang with Crazy Eddie’s intonement (in other words, lived in New York at the time) and who were also familiar with Kafka, even if not fond of his work. All in all, Crazy Eddie did not resonate with European audiences’ mind and memory, and Kafka did not with New Yorkers’.

Therefore Crazy Eddie is supposed to be the emperor, the TV being the message, and no choice is more obvious than the messenger being a multiplied pop-Andy Warhol — with Kafka’s words — “a powerful, an indefatigable man” who strives vainly to pass through all the gates of the palace “into the center of the world, crammed to bursting with its own refuse.” Clearly unaware and carefree, he gallops through New York to Kraftwerk’s purely electronic music — “We Are the Robots.” He rambles in the labyrinthine, depopulated financial district where tall buildings create canyonlike narrow corridors around Wall Street. He rests for a while. We see him peeling an apple. A young girl (Eszter Balint) approaches; lifting up her ruffled skirt (repeating a gesture in Skanzen) she steps up to him. She is a returning Andromedan in the disguise of “Ulrike Meinhof” as a young girl. Her mission is to kidnap Andy as the audience heard in her radio message in Part One. Now she is seen and not heard.

KOÓS / Squat Theatre  37

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 In Part Three, she will appear, speak, and act “in person.” The entire story could not necessarily be put together like pieces of a puzzle until the performance was over. As unfolding events they may have carried unrelated, therefore confusing meanings, yet none failed the surrealist tone of the overall scene. Almost like in life.

On the film the confused rider guides his horse toward Chinatown. The aliens are hard on his heels, aliens who the audience had met upstairs, in Part One. They are adamant on passing the “message” onto Warhol on his horse. A young man (played by Eric Daillie) who has been following him by car corners the rider. The horse stops in his tracks. The driver gets out of his car carrying a violin case in one hand and the rolled-up message in the other. Remember, the film is projected on a white cotton sheet hanging in the storefront window. On the film, facing the rider, the driver makes a step toward the horse, his back to us, extending his arm with the message — at which point on the storefront stage from a door on the right enters Eva, the radio-operator alien from upstairs. She aims a starting pistol at the screen, shoots, and the gun releases smoke. At that moment, the young man on the screen collapses. “Warhol,” still unaware of the mission in store for him, rides on. He parks his horse and enters a diner, but his pursuers will not let it go at that. They catch up with him and press a mousse cake into his face, stealing his horse. He hails a cab. He is late for his date at the Chelsea Hotel with Kathleen, the witch. The two of them walk from the hotel to the storefront theatre.

“Warhol” and Kathleen appear in two “copies.” What is taking place in the film — ­Warhol gestures toward Kathleen to pose in front of the storefront window, lifts his Polaroid to his eyes, and the flash goes off — is the same as what is taking place for real on the sidewalk in front of the storefront window, discernible through the screen: Warhol gestures toward Kathleen to pose in front of the storefront window, then lifts his Polaroid to his eyes, and the flash goes off. The film runs out of the projector. A bright rectangle is projected onto the screen. By the street-door on the left, War- hol “himself” enters the stage with Kathleen. He takes a seat on his favorite couch. Here, as in the Factory on West 47th Street, silver mylar is stretched over six-foot frames to decorate the walls. At the Factory, a certain circle of friends used to visit Warhol’s studio, exchanging ideas with him and one another. Later, two “Andy War- hol Superstars,” — peace unto your ashes — and Viva would cross our path. The aliens from upstairs are here reminiscent of the Factory people — not literally but in a Squat edition. Andy’s guest Kathleen takes off her coat cut as a cape and ministers her witch ceremony — naked, looking like the statue of Venus of Willendorf — bless- ing the four corners of the world, the sky and the earth. For an altar, she uses the only other piece of furniture on stage, a black-and-white TV monitor without sound. While Kathleen performs her ceremony in the dark storefront, the bright rectangle remains beamed on the curtain-screen from the filmless projector by the risers.

Peter, yet another alien, picks up his acoustic guitar next to the purring film projector, and goes upstage. The bay window behind him consists of one-foot-square panes with a dark wooden grid holding them all together. Peter sits on the top of the radia- tor under the window. To entertain his alien-friend, now “Andy Warhol,” he begins to

38  PAJ 105

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 play and whistle the melody of Chaplin’s “Two Little Ballet Shoes” (from Limelight). Yet another alien, Berg is now dressed in a white jacket. Donning a pair of dark glasses and a burned facial preparation on one side of his face (remember the table exploded upstairs), he walk-dances on the sidewalk, staying near the window — atop the loudly reverberating metal trapdoor. He keeps dancing throughout Part Three. Exhausting. He must be thirsty. At one point Peter, inside, opens a bottle of beer and hands it to Berg behind him, outside — by first breaking through a window pane.

Aside from Kathleen often coming to 23rd Street with her friend Larry as he worked his camera to broadcast live video in Pig, Child, Fire!, the idea of the scene with Kathleen and Andy originated in a black-and-white photograph we had seen in a French paperback on Andy Warhol I once had. The photo shows Warhol dining with a conspicuously overweight woman in a Chinatown eatery.

Acting and talking on stage have always been pivotal issues in our performances. Perhaps the varieties of non-acting and non-talking we used in Andy Warhol’s Last Love created the best amalgam: All Stephan needed to do was move naturally wear- ing mask, wig, and dark glasses, after all Andrzej Warhola and we shared an Eastern European background. Warhol’s notoriety and depersonalized self qualified him to appear as his own proper “multiple,” as a “mythical” or “imagined” character. The case of Eszter and Ulrike is to the contrary. “The world of the child is at an equally impossible distance from the historical personality of Ulrike Meinhof.” Creating a sci-fi background to the scene served the purpose of establishing a sort of narrative. This way we did not need to strive to play roles or portray anything realistic. Eva, Peter, Berg, and I did what we had planned, our personalities shaping our actions in the playing field of unmasked science fiction. Only Kathleen the witch kept her own identity. “The performer does not differ from what she performs, and there is a live tension in the identity of the everyday and stage role. But because, in this case, the private life is exotic, it gives the impression of fiction on the stage.”

NOTES

1. This selection is an excerpt based on the Hungarian edition, Színházi történetek — szobában, kirakatban [Theatrical Stories from Living Room to Storefront], published by Akadémiai Kiadó in 2009 (Budapest). The author wishes to extend her special thanks to Stephen Peabody for his editorial assistance.

ANNA KOÓS is the author of two books recently published in Budapest (in Hungarian) — A Legacy Unasked For and Theatrical Stories: From Living Room to Storefront — and coauthor (with Eva Buchmuller) of Squat Theatre, published in New York. She has made two independent films:Tongue in a Bottle and Three Degrees of Knowledge. She was the co-founder and mainstay of the independent theatre collective eventually called Squat Theatre, from its inception in Hungary in 1970, until its dissolution in New York in 1985. Since 2002, she has been dividing her time between New York and Budapest.

KOÓS / Squat Theatre  39

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 [Several months before the first issue ofPAJ was published, its editors Bonnie Mar- ranca and Gautam Dasgupta were traveling in Europe and had occasion in August 1975 to see a secret performance in the private Budapest apartment of some of the actors of the theatre company soon to be known as Squat Theatre. Dasgupta was later to write about it in PAJ 19, Volume VII/Number 1 (1983). — Eds.]

Postcard announcing The Golden Age of Squat Theatre 1977–’82, a retrospective. Courtesy PAJ Publications.

40  PAJ 105

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021