The author wishes to express her gratitude for the continual support Professor Branda Miller gave during the thesis process. Additional thanks to Maureen Kinsella and Pam McAllister for their guidance and time. Comments and advice were warmly given, helping the author to achieve not only a thesis, but a happier, more aware life.

Special thanks are extended to Blue Lunden and Jun-san Yasuda for being peaceful, and inspiring me. Warm thanks to all who participated in this experimental art.

ABSTRACT

This thesis paper is an exploration of the beginning of the artistic process, the journey I took, and continue to take toward a simple, mindful, peaceful life. In this process of writing I continue my life as a "perpetual artist," my life as a woman who seeks out connections and communication, as a human concerned about the present world in which we live. I have come newly, through the writing of this thesis, to discover that the "perpetual" performance allows me to question some of the distinctions I form between art, activism, simplicity, and spirituality. In this continuing performance I have come to believe very much in the idea of be-ing, rather than doing. In getting rid of certain material things that prevented me from being free, I continue to see that our individual and collective memory is shared not through objects, but through experiences and communication. This process was also a journey away from technology, and toward my own core.

PART ONE
INTRODUCTION

While walking the Barbara Deming Memorial Peace Walk for five weeks during the summer of 1996, Blue Lunden said to me "listen to your inner voice, and trust yourself." Blue was one of the participants of the Walk who came from an intentional community in the Florida Keys to walk in remembrance of her mentor Barbara Deming. When Blue said this to me, ten days into a thirty-nine day performance, I was just beginning to understand what she meant.

After the first day of walking, Marian Wagner, who had been arrested for civil disobedience with Barbara Deming in 1983 came to me and thanked me for bringing together an amazing group of women, and for my honoring of her friend. I remember only thanking her for coming from Vermont to be a part of The Walk. Marian stopped walking and asked me to accept her thanks, to really hear what she was saying. We both began to cry, seeing ourselves very clearly in the other. I learned something about acceptance.

The seventy-two year old Quaker from Schenectady, Liz Pearson, arrived quite early in the town of Amsterdam and began walking for what she thought would be a week. Liz told me quite clearly that "peace was not some goal, peace was a way of life." I hadn't seen it lived so clearly as Liz, her open and happy lifestyle brought us friends everywhere we walked together. I started to realize what this walk, no longer calling it my walk, could bring about. It was bringing out the very best in all the walkers, not only in myself.

Gale McGovern was driving to her home in New Paltz when she saw me walking alone on the side of the road. She pulled over and asked me if I wanted a ride somewhere. I remember telling her quite contentedly, with a large smile on my face, that no, in fact I was walking, but thank you for her consideration. I told her I was walking to New York City in memory of Barbara Deming, and that I had already walked about 300 miles from the Women's Encampment and the Seneca Army Depot in western New York. She asked me if she could help, invited me for a rest in her car, and ended up spending the next three days with me. Gale organized speaking engagements in New Paltz and three newspaper interviews. She said something very important to me which helped me become humble. "We're not walking for you, or for Barbara. We are walking and supporting you for the concept of peace. This isn't about you, it's about a way of life." By being peace, as Liz was trying to tell me, we make peace.

The Walk was no longer about any of the things that I could have imagined it to be about when I started organizing this performance. Indeed, The Walk became something much different than I could have ever planned, and no amount of planning would have prepared me for the changes that were to occur. Through the process of simplifying my art project and simplifying my life I was able to get in touch with my core. The road was a place where my habits were broken, where through the process of simplification I was able to tap into a new sense of creativity. It was a place where, as Blue said, I could "listen to my inner voice, and trust myself."

What it took for me to listen in new ways was to simplify, and listen and look closely, and with new senses. We have thousands of things that distract us from our true selves. For me, art itself became one of those distractions that formed not connection itself, but the metaphor of connection. I continued my experimentation with process art that I had begun with earlier works and took up the idea of a pilgrimage, where the walking was something that allowed me to connect and communicate with people, rather than communicate to people. There were no spectators of The Walk, we were all participants, working cooperatively and living peacefully and simply. Through this artistic process we were able to rid ourselves of material clutter, complexity, and time demands to search. There was a balance, where there was little distinction between our outer and inner selves. The Walk gave participants the time to be centered. In our learning to simply be, we were learning to be creative, dispelling the myths of the "creative genius" who must be born with "natural" talents.

PART TWO
MY EVOLUTION AS AN ARTIST

The Walled City Trilogy

In 1991 at Mills College, while working towards a Masters of Fine Arts in Electronic Music, I began writing music compositions about the prison system. This process started with my experiences working as a private investigator for the defense. I left this job to attend Mills. I then went to writing stories, then began translating those stories into compositions. The first of these prison works was a piece called Letters from Prison, completed in 1991. The piece is for computer generated tape and piano. It began as a work for tape only, a type of music I had become adept at while an undergraduate at Clark University.

It was not until I had completed the tape part that I discovered what I really wanted to do with the piece; learned what was missing. I inserted myself as a performer into a composition for the first time. It was an interesting transition piece because I was so connected with the prison situation at that time. It was easy to write about my personal, my political life and make it into a performance. It was the first time that it was really joyful for me to be composing. It was the first time I was able to call myself a composer.

At that time I struggled to connect my actions as a performer of a musical instrument to the overall prison concept. I decided to play the piano, only trilling, playing over and over the notes of a single range. My repetitive actions causing trance-like sound, mimicking the prisoner's ritual that was being described in the tape. The performance became a grueling experience, something that was difficult to perform, and difficult to both listen to and watch as an audience member. My physical laboring became as much a part of the piece as the composed tape piece. This was surely a sign of things to come in my evolution.

When I performed my thesis concert, The Walled City Trilogy, at Mills College in 1993, I included Letters from Prison and two other prison related works. These pieces were performed one after another, with no break and no applause in-between. I attempted to turn the performance hall into a ritualized environment. I was interested in designing more than sound, but designing, manipulating, even coercively persuading an audience into a prescribed series of reactions.

In my 1993 Mills College thesis, Music, the Necessary Organ, Shaping the Course of Humanity, I attempted to relate the concert experience to the religious experience. The "surround-sound" environment of both the concert hall and the church adds to our ability to suspend our disbelief. We are susceptible to our world when in such a controlled environment. Change seems possible.

The Trilogy was designed to place people metaphorically in a prison, to live temporarily in that environment, and make decisions which would affect them permanently. Art has the distinct ability, indeed responsibility to reach the human will: the power of the mind to choose and control its own actions. This is what shapes the future. If art is to function as anything other than entertainment, the artists responsibility, perhaps obligation, is to both communicate (i.e. educate) and inspire. "In reflecting reality, the composer reflects herself and, in the process, her time and class as well. We reveal certain truths about reality that cannot, or have not, been recorded in words." (Mills College Thesis, 1993 p. 5.) Perhaps now, after learning something about be-ing, I would try not to separate my self from my time and class. Perhaps now I would try very hard to not separate my self from my life.

With a work like The Trilogy, I was trying to decipher what type of piece I needed to perform in order that a person was affected, intellectually, emotionally, and aesthetically. I was trying to simulate a concert experience where the act of having "gone through" the common experience with others, joined people together. There has been a great deal of research on communities in disaster, where people are able to bind together to get through an earthquake, a fire. Could I as an artist, achieve the same personal connections, compulsion to help another, through art practice? My goal was to create a "beloved community" as Barbara Deming had done, though at the time I would did not see it as such. In creating performances I was attempting to bring community to me. I thought that my perceived privileged position as an artist would help me form community. Although now I am attempting to break down the privileged perception of the artist and viewer by attempting to connect art and life, in 1993 I was attempting to use it both for my own personal gain as an artist, and also for what I conceived as a common good of humanity.

When I arrived at iEAR I was interested in continuing my work designing environments. I didn't have the language then to call what I was doing installation or even performance art. I was very busy being a composer, and simply trying to expand the definition of concerts. I began working on a piece I called Quiet Tensions. This phrase "quiet tension" Barbara used to describe her hidden anger, transformed into deep resolve and bold actions. It was to be a performance piece about Barbara Deming. I started thinking about Barbara Deming constantly. Although Barbara was dead before I came to discover her writings, I fell in love with her and all she stood for. Barbara Deming was able to communicate, educate, and inspire me though her art; writing. Barbara Deming's writings helped me to see a connection not only between my self and my life, but also between my self and others. Through her writing she created community in that she allowed me entrance to her now dead self through the connections she had made. She had done the same circular path that I will demonstrate below in my own performances, representing and being represented at one and the same time.

When I discovered my connections with Barbara, which existed somehow out of time, I allowed myself to be changed and inspired by her communicating her life to me. I dared to let Barbara Deming enter my life in a way that I had been asking others to risk allowing me into their lives. I began writing about this, trying to honor and remember Barbara through a performance. I quickly realized that I was not ready to do this piece. On one hand I was seduced by new technologies now available to me through iEAR. I had, essentially, completely cluttered my minimal aesthetic and became quite distracted with all that might be possible. On the other hand, I was quite intimidated because Quiet Tension seemed the most important piece I could imagine writing, and I didn't want to make any mistakes with it. I am quite thankful that I went through this entire process, where I shed the smoke-screen that technology often creates, and ventured toward my self. Barbara Deming's memory was at stake, and I couldn't bear the thought of not doing it justice. I laid this piece aside to gain some additional skills and to further understand what it was about Barbara Deming that made me compelled to write the piece anyhow.

Amoskeag 1994

I was in need of a piece that would be a good training ground for my entry into video, performance, and installation. I wanted to do a piece about something that I was interested in, but something that I was not so vested in as Barbara Deming. I chose the women at Amoskeag, a closed-down textile mill in Manchester, NH. I wanted to do a performance piece that included the elements that I felt worked in my earlier Trilogy, with the added element of video.

The endurance or stamina element of Letters from Prison really intrigued me, and the unease it caused, both with my own body, and with the audiences' psyches. I wanted to work with this further. I also was committed to using video, trying to find a way that video would not be the main element of the performance, not become the main focus. I didn't want my music to be simply something that went with my video. I became really frustrated with video. My experience visually was as a photographer, shooting black and white film roll after roll as an undergraduate. I was trained in finding the right shot, catching the peak of action, and then taking the picture. Video seemed like getting all the bad shots up to the snapshot you really wanted, and then some more bad shots. I didn't know how to include motion.

My solution was to turn still photography into video by doing a time-lapse video shoot at the Amoskeag factory. When I had decided upon this, the video, and visuals then became the governing form for the piece. Amoskeag was entirely driven in form by the video, yet the video remained as a backdrop, never interfering with the performance, never overpowering the sound. The time-lapse was to begin at 6:00 a.m. and would take one second of video every minute until 10:00 p.m. This would result in an 18 minute duration for the piece. The time-lapse would show the day described by Maria Lacasse, as told to Tamara Haraven in her book Amoskeag.

When I attempted to complete this video shoot I ran into one technical difficulty after another, trying to shoot outdoors for 18 hours in a location I was not familiar with. In fact it took two trips to the factory in order to get the shot I wanted. Each time I needed to arrive the day before in order to get the shot, find my focus, and secure the camera before it got dark. This 18 hours of taping really required close to two days to procure. It was clear to me that this process was very much a part of the piece. It was an action, like the earlier trilling, that people who knew anything about video would know was an ordeal when they watched the performance. This was somehow important to me, and the process of obtaining the footage helped me make decisions about what the rest of the piece would be like.

Through this acquisition process and the extended endurance nature involved with that, I gathered footage with my partner's help. It was the first time I had ever let someone else be so closely involved in my process. We became closer joined having gone through the experience together. This was my beginning of allowing myself to "crack my own single self." Barbara Deming saw our sexuality as a way to connect, to break through our individualism and join us one to the other. Through art practice I was attempting to discover my self through discovering my connections to others. It is through this process that art can become less an elite commodity, and more a part of our daily lives. Art was to become something that everyone could participate in, something all had a responsibility to participate in.

My work as a videographer was to be compared to my work as a performer. I was a woman working to portray women working in the factory I was showing. I very much enjoyed the circular motion, the repetitive work, the struggling required by the process I'd defined. I wanted artists to be awed, in a sense, at the work it took to take the time-lapse. I wanted the so-called "non-artists" to labor in my perpetual work as a garment worker. I hoped through communicating to both self-defined "artists" and self-defined "non-artists" that I would be able to help form a bridge between the two through common experience; that of experiencing repetitive time.

The piece manifested itself as this video, projected behind myself sitting at a treadle sewing machine, sewing yards and yards of white cloth. I learned an important lesson making this piece. The process of making the piece was as important as the piece itself. Where I anticipated my audience to experience the toil of work, I found joy in doing the work. Here I began to learn further how to connect the audience one to the other, but still struggled with my privilege as an artist. I was perhaps educating, perhaps inspiring, but I was experiencing joy when I wanted my audience to experience toil. My next attempt artistically would be to not only connect the so-called audience together, but to do away entirely with the notion of audience. As composer John Cage said "to narrow the distinction between composer and performer," but also artists, performer, and audience.

Inmates 1995

In my previous Mills College pieces I became somewhat obsessed with the prison situation. Combined with new insights about the processes involved in my art, I decided to try to do an installation. Installation proper was less interesting to me than an extended performance space. I was still trying to create an environment around myself in which I could perform for long periods of time. Inmates became about me and my performance as much as it was about prisoners.

Every day for one year I had a friend gathering the courthouse records from the newspaper. I had a complete listing of every person arrested in my home town of Worcester County for the year 1994. Through this labor of love, my relation with my friend, our personal connections were profoundly enhanced in the process. As a performer in the process, again I allowed a person who would not identify himself as an artist to be an participant in my work.

Infatuated by this archiving information I quite willingly tried to do an extend performance. I set out to design an environment where I could read all the crimes. I was careful to separate the names from the crimes, implicating no one personally, but allowing their personal experiences to collectively join together to represent the larger political crisis. Using surveillance cameras, audio, computers, and a stark cement room, I created a performance that was as much about the performance as it was about prisoners. Making myself a prisoner of my own performance, the audience became a visitor to the inmate. Again, there was a circular representation of myself as inmate, describing inmates.

Through the process of receiving the clipped records every day, the information became so much clearer. It was easy to see connections that were not possible without having gone through the entire process. The self-imposed ritual was visible in the performance as I placed each record, day by day, on the wall next to my performance space. Again, I wanted to make extended time references available to all, so that even someone who casually entered the room and perhaps disagreed with my political statement, could at least appreciate my diligence. I hoped this would allow them to feel some connection to me as an a human, an artist, indeed, an inmate. If they could feel this I hoped they could feel connection even to those who they did not agree with. It allowed them some space to feel compassion and empathy for the other, even an other they disagreed with. Was it possible to communicate empathy by performing empathy? Was it possible for me to connect myself with my "audience" in this way?

I spent nine continuous hours performing in the installation. I had no food or water in the corner which I was performing, symbolically enclosed by barbed wire. I relied on my audience to, in a sense, commit aesthetic disobedience and "interrupt" my performance by giving me food and drink. Nowhere did I indicate that I was looking for this activity to occur. I was trying to break the line between performer and audience, as well as discover what it might take for someone to do that which is right, despite the fact that it may, proverbially, be against the law. I was asking my audience to risk becoming an inmate themselves if they were compelled to help me. This performance was "interrupted" by several people who realized that I had been trapped there for numerous hours, and brought me food and drink. I thanked them, as they became performers in my piece, not the interruptions they could have been seen to be.

Using endurance, process, and created environments, I was able to make connections between my life as an activist and my life as an artist. I felt the Inmates performance was successful to the degree that I took it. It would have been interesting to take this performative installation further, but I didn't want to simply refine this piece. Perhaps now I would read all the names for the year, rather than simply set up a performance time of nine hours. I only read the first eleven weeks of arrests in those nine hours.

I felt through Amoskeag and the Inmates performance that I had learned this transition from composer to artist that I wanted to learn before continuing my piece about Barbara Deming. I had learned a certain amount about risk and "heartfelt and pluckish things" as poet Nikky Finney spoke about at my Mills College commencement. "Pluck is to have courage, to keep spirit, to know fortitude. Pluck implies a strong heart in the face of any danger or any adversity." (Finney, Pluck, p. 2) These words very much sounded like something I would say about Barbara Deming. Now I could begin to dare to say them about myself. I wanted to begin my work of remembering Barbara, and discover myself as a perpetual performer.

A Look Back

Looking back on these stamina pieces, I became uncomfortable with what I had done. I had been doing art about people I wanted to honor, but was I mocking them in the process? I was about to start trying to honor Barbara Deming, how could I do this without idealizing her, without objectifying her? I remember thinking this through the day before I started walking, when I was waiting for walkers to arrive. What if no one showed up? Would my walking in Barbara's memory be mocking her if I walked alone? What would I do if I was to walk alone?

I look back to Amoskeag with slight distaste, partially because it seemed like laughing at, rather than laughing with. I was using a family who suffered incredible hardship as the subject/object of my own art. It was an art that I was not really connected with. No matter how hard I had worked to make the piece a reality, my work could not be compared, in a literal sense, to the work that those women had conducted in the factory. I struggle with the distinctions I set up between artist and audience, a hierarchy I no longer wish to perpetrate. Barbara Deming had used a distinctly feminist, and deeply respectful medium of letter writing and personal essay as a way to discover her self and form personal connections. I was searching for my medium, and the searching demonstrated an awareness of, and respect for Barbara Deming. It was the process of working on the piece that awakened my senses. Through the process I was allowing my self to change.

In the course of five years of socially conscious music and performance, I discovered that what my art meant to do was to bring about shared experience and blur the self-imposed distinctions between art and life. Art was about forming these human connections between our individual selves and our society if it was about anything at all. I had learned that, for myself, those connections were best formed in the process of doing the work of art. "The entire spectrum of activity directed toward the production of art - the conceptual process, the physical labor, the collaborative efforts - in the most literal sense, is the work of art. Emphasizing the substantive value of work as equal rather than subordinate to art." (Felshin, But is it Art?, p. 90) In placing value with the conceptual ideas of art, we place significance not on the object, but rather on the opportunity it allows us for growth, discovery, and change. The process becomes not a metaphor, but an invitation through doing. Through this artistic process, our lives become examples as they inspire. As we live aesthetically, we discover, indeed allow ourselves access to our creativity which so often we deny. Our bodies and actions become avenues of exploration and possibility. In the walking we communicated simplicity, trust, and peace, and participants in The Walk were then allowed to explore these possibilities for themselves. The Walk lives on in memory of each who participated not by any trinket or "wedding favor," but rather in a shared experience. My work as an artist was about the work of life, the work of activism, the work of making life art.

The Start of a Walk

After I had thousands of ideas about what kind of a performance piece I wanted to do about Barbara Deming I realized that all my ideas had one inherent flaw. I had Barbara Deming as a solo voice, a solo walker, an individual struggling for a more just world. Barbara was a profound voice for the radical Left, and later the radical feminist movement, but she was not alone. Barbara surrounded herself within a community of others, who collectively, and individually, made our world more just. I had been placing Barbara alone, when she may have never been able to act so powerfully as she did in community. This community inspired Barbara. My work as an artist was to help form community. My earlier pieces of Amoskeag and Inmates helped me to connect "artists" and "non-artists" together, into powerful working relationships. It was now my desire to use art not as my individual effort to bring about a more just world, but to join myself into a community that would work organically; where the whole was much greater than the sum of its parts. In order to do this, I needed to give up a certain amount of control, and a certain amount of perceived artistic privilege. I needed to begin to see art as an essential balance, where there was no distinction between the individual and the world in which they live.

The piece ranged from a performance situation, to a evolving sound piece that would be driven from Quebec to Florida. I have documented these ideas in Appendix A (Preproduction Journal Entries). I think a good part of how I came to the physicality of walking was simply because the location of iEAR Studios. Believing that art and life could be connected, working in the basement of a building, with bright lights and no windows, the world seemed so very distant. I felt trapped, in the basement, in my life. The Walk would serve to connect me to the world again, get me out of the basement, out of the art world, and onto the streets. After many years using technology, becoming quite skillful in my craft, I decided that to discover the core of the process we call art I needed to shed away all those layers of complexity. Technology was integrated into the planning of what I thought The Walk would be. Ultimately, I abandoned all things electronic while walking.

I decided that to best honor Barbara Deming was to honor all those who were part of her extended community, who made it possible for Barbara to be an activist. I went for a walk, something Barbara had done so very much of, and decided upon a peace walk in her memory. I wanted to know those women who knew Barbara. By doing a walk, the process would be the art, and would help forge those connections that I desired, on an individual and aesthetic level. It seemed walking was a way of communicating an idea which words were incapable of. In an appropriate typo by the Syracuse New Times newspaper in describing what I was doing, "The process is really the peace." She couldn't have said it any better.

The piece was then to be about the process. The process of durational walking would be not only the piece, but also the process of transformation that so helped Barbara to change. The piece would unfold as I was performing it, as I allowed others to join with me in making it life.

PART THREE
ABOUT BARBARA DEMING

Introduction

Barbara Deming was a poet, essayist, feminist, lesbian and peace activist. She was a woman able to act in ways larger than herself. She saw society as a whole, not a fragmented, atomized group of individuals, but something much more united. Barbara Deming wrote herself, and her causes into a history that too easily overlooked her and them. As an active member of almost every major political struggle from 1960 through to her death in 1984, Barbara Deming's voice has been consistent in her empathy, and her ability to act. With that said, she is rarely ever taught in academia, neither in political science nor women's studies. If you ask any woman at a political action if they knew Barbara Deming they will probably say yes. The Walk could help serve as a means of bridging a gap between words (academia) and actions (activism). One of the goals of The Walk is to move Barbara from being known only through an oral history, to being taught every day. We can do this through our actions that occur in sympathy with the beliefs she held so strongly. Our living activist, artistic lives, our living as perpetual performers is a constant testimony to Barbara Deming. We can teach peace through living peacefully.

Barbara Deming's ideologies grew throughout her life. She was not politically active until her forties. From nonviolent resistance, moving through the women's movement, Barbara writes about her changing awareness of the world. Words and actions were the root of Barbara's life. An intellectual and moralist, Barbara's words and actions resound in harmony with today's feminist theories. She was a visionary, yet practical. She spoke against violence and oppression as a continuing unfolding of her life.

When I found Barbara I found a hidden treasure, a woman who thought clearly, who wrote boldly, who acted courageously. I learned of Barbara Deming in 1990, six years after her death from cancer.

I was working as a private investigator and watching young men get sent to prison, some young men who were no guiltier than I. I found myself going to Walpole State Prison, the maximum security prison in MA. My connections with these people, now inmates, led me to do my homework - I needed to know more about the prison system. Among the books I found in my library search was Barbara's book Prison Notes.

The Sixties

In Prison Notes Barbara wrote her experiences, wrote her life, wrote herself. She wrote of her civil disobedience in Albany, Georgia during a 1963 peace walk. A peace walk that took a year and a day, that traveled from Quebec to Washington, D.C. to Guantanamo Bay. They were walking for peace, speaking for nuclear disarmament, exposing the US's role in Cuba. They were not arrested in Georgia for any of these reasons. They were arrested for walking through town as an integrated group. They were stopped from walking because they were walking with Ray Robinson, a black man. They were arrested and sent to jail, where they refused to cooperate with their oppressor. They did not post bail. They spent 20 days in jail for walking through the town. When they had served their time, they attempted to continue their walk, walking through the town again. Again they were arrested. Again they did not post bail. This time they refused food. They were jailed for another 17 days. The third time they walked through town without incident.

Barbara's tactic while protesting was that of resistance. Barbara made it difficult for the prison authorities to ignore her humanity, or rather their shared humanity. She did this through non-cooperation. Barbara did not let prison guards simply will her away. "Nobody has to print in a manual for guards that the prisoner must be wished out of existence for society's sake; this magic principle is grasped as if by instinct." (Deming, Prison Notes, p. 3)

In order that Barbara could act she necessarily joined with others. Rather than creating an "other," an "us" and "them," Barbara recognized that the "revolution" could not be fought on traditional terms. Just as nonviolent resistance became an opposite of war, Barbara saw that her struggle would be lost to the more powerful authority if waged on "their" terms. During the racially integrated peace walk in 1963, Barbara spoke of her commitment: "I was protesting that there is any such classification as second-class citizen - and protesting it in my own name. I didn't do it out of altruism; I did it because I knew in my soul something of what it was to be a nigger." (Deming, We Are All Part, p. 216)

As a political activist in the 1960's, Barbara could have found it easy to slip into the "us against them" cold war mentality so prevalent at that time. When we look to fight an enemy, to blame them for our troubles, we necessarily use difference as a foundation. Barbara Deming saw that, in creating an Other, we distance ourselves from our very selves. In We Are All Part of One Another, Barbara recognizes "we do not belong to an other, but our lives are linked; we belong in a circle of others." (Deming, We Are All Part, p. 285) She saw that there was power in individuals grouping together emphasizing the commonalties. Where Barbara succeeded in creating community, she succeeded in creating a sense of belonging and bonding.

In her "Letter to WISP" (Women Strike for Peace) published in Liberation, April 1963, Barbara believes that women's truths lie in the here-and-now of our culturally trivialized daily lives. Barbara's first-found truth: that we must not allow ourselves to look away from the radical implication of each truth we find. Her challenge: dig deep for the truth; when you have found it, and the courage to acknowledge it, then act truthfully upon it. (Deming, We Are All Part, p. 208) The function of history is to record these truths. Barbara wrote to insure that her dreams became the truth. This is our responsibility as feminists, and as activists, as "Others."

During the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, a committee in the federal House of Representatives which conducted a "witch hunt" for Communists in peace, leftist and entertainment organizations, Barbara recognized the truth of her experiences. She began trusting herself, as Blue Lunden impelled me to do before she stopped walking to return to Florida. In hearings against WISP members, the chairman's opening statement reflects the male status quo that Barbara was beginning to challenge. "The struggle between the women and the committeemen was an unequal one because the women spoke out of their own direct experience - their concentration upon their children - and the committeemen spoke out of long acquaintance with certain portentous words and phrases - 'excessive desire for peace' impending 'adequate defense preparations,' sapping 'national strength,' serving the 'aggressive plans of world Communism.' The Committee spoke these phrases as if they themselves had immutable reality. It has not dawned on them that the rapidly altering nature of the world about us has drained certain words of all former meaning." (Deming, We Are All Part, p. 105) This questioning of language helped Barbara see the world more clearly. Her use of language now became an important prelude to action.

In "On Revolution and Equilibrium," published in Liberation, 1968 Barbara begins to take us past a traditional definition of pacifism, to powerful nonviolent revolution. Many would state that the word "power" is a word inconsistent with a faith of nonviolence. Barbara is looking for a new, nonviolent vocabulary which would make their struggle more comprehensible to others. Barbara had been reading, and learning from Gandhi since the 1950's. These activists needed to show a clear vision of the revolutionized, nonviolent, just society. Describing that utopia required a new vocabulary.

The Seventies

In her 1971 essay "On Anger," Barbara recognizes that the dualism's themselves were what created oppression. "Black people have done better in this regard perhaps than women - they did jointly acknowledge their oppression, which was more obvious, and jointly acknowledge that they had other selves than the selves presented to them by their master. Women have had, for the most part, to try to keep alive their pride in isolation from one another. And they have all too often hidden their anger even from themselves." (Deming, We Are All Part, p. 214) The civil rights issue, at least on the surface, united blacks of all genders, all classes. Feminism has had a much harder time with this.

Barbara struggled to join people together, to be able to hear and understand difference to reach the commonality we share. When Barbara publicly came out as a lesbian in 1971, the Left responded with fear. Barbara was a voice of reason within the Left. Even Ray Robinson, the black man they walked with to Cuba, chastised Barbara for leaving the revolution. Of course, the Left saw its own revolution, Barbara saw very much another one.

Barbara had realized that being a woman was being a second-class citizen. She later learned that being a lesbian would create a further separation. Again, in her essay "On Anger" quoting Shulamith Firestone The Dialectic of Sex, Barbara sees that all oppression stems from the "sexual class system" which is the "model for all other systems of oppression, and that until we resist this, until we eliminate this, we will never succeed in truly eliminating any of the others." (Deming, We Are All Part, p. 216) She recognized that it was more effective for her to appeal to the root of the problem, rather than the vine. The root was not her suffering, was not black suffering, but human suffering. For we are all part of one another. We risk much when we embrace our differences.

Joined in a community of nonviolent activists who trusted the truth to be stronger than pragmatic compromises, Barbara began to develop her ideology of nonviolent struggle as a powerful strategy for change. This community helped Barbara into feminist discourse, as Barbara helped them.

In 1971 Barbara was seriously injured in an automobile accident. Barred by her physical condition from travel and physical activism, Barbara turned to new forms of written activism: the letters and open letters of the seventies in which she brought her personal and political analyses together in a sharper focus than ever before. Their synthesis is the philosophy of feminist nonviolence. These writings break through the barriers of socialization, training, and habit so that the feminist attitudes and assumptions we glimpsed in her earlier writing now shine forth openly.

Barbara had for years been struggling to trust her own feelings, "to quiet herself and listen with a deep respect" as Blue Lunden said to me. Through feminism we can all begin to dare to presume to trust our own eyes. In her letter "On Anger" it becomes clear how much of her own experience and emotion - as a woman, as a lesbian - had been set aside from consideration, or had been recognized and expressed only by analogy in the struggle against racism. Barbara began to challenge her anti-war comrades to reject the traditional trivialization both of women and of personal experience.

For Barbara, the task for all of us is to erase the so-called differences between the sexes, bring out the women in all men, the man in all women. By doing so, we are able to act not as atomized individuals, but as parts of a larger community. We join gender back into a singular noun. Barbara saw this leap as possible when discussing gender in a way she was not able to understand during her lifetime of activism. "I would say myself that our sexuality is given us so that we can commune with one another. It cracks our single selves. Without sexuality we would be impossibly isolated within our individualities. We could not experience community, could not experience in our flesh the truth that we are, all of us, members one of another." (Deming, We Are All Part, p. 244) Our sexuality is very damaged. Damaged by the attempt to split it into the so-called male and so-called female. This lie is what has weakened any possibilities of communion. "If society did not try to make us all heterosexuals - and if patriarchy were dispelled and, with it, the power inequities that make most heterosexual relationships so distorting - my guess is that we would find ourselves quite naturally attracted to either sex." (Deming, We Are All Part, p. 246) Barbara recognized the base opposition that created all others to be gender. A separation of our very be-ing.

Barbara was aware of the very real difference between us. "It is very necessary to learn from one another under what varying conditions we live our slave lives. The longer we listen to one another - with real attention, sharing more than opinion but life experiences - the more commonalty we will find in all our lives." (Deming, We Are All Part, p. 291) She was able to discover and learn by surrounding herself in women-only communities. Knowing the ultimate goal was not a separatist society, Barbara did believe that women would only be able to come to find their voices if they separated off from men for a time.

"If the fundamental contradiction that has to be resolved is, as I think it is, the contradiction between the lie that men and women are of different natures and the truth that we are of one nature, the truth that no human being should be thought of as The Other, then the appropriate form of struggle is surely that form still largely to be invented: nonviolent struggle. One can't prove a common nature with the other by doing violence to them." (Deming, We Are All Part, p. 289)

She and her partner Jane were struggling for custody of Jane's children. The personal became very political for Barbara. Her struggle was a political struggle, and the patriarchially run Left couldn't accept her any longer. Barbara struggled for the rest of her life to join together feminism and nonviolence. She recognized that oppressors were often oppressed themselves, that the only way to wage that battle without killing one's peers was to do so nonviolently. And for Barbara, this meant listening with a deep respect. This was perhaps why Barbara Deming's nonviolent actions were so effective. Nonviolence was not "willing the other away;" nonviolence was listening.

The Eighties

Barbara Deming's last political action was in 1983 at the Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice. This experimental, women-only community was formed on the land adjacent to the Seneca Army Depot. They suspected that the Depot was shipping cruise missiles to England, and therefore planned a summer of action. They were begun in sympathy with the women who had been protesting at the Main Gate of the Army Depot at Greenham Commons in England. Barbara was quite ill by this action in 1983. She was to die less than a year later of ovarian cancer.

Barbara writes about her experiences in Seneca in her book Prisons That Could Not Hold, recently republished by the University of Georgia. In this book are her writings demonstrating twenty years of political action and growth; from the 1963 Canada to Cuba walk and the actions in Seneca Falls. This book does well to demonstrate Barbara's continually evolving commitment to peace and justice. Through her art we watch her change. Even in her other compilation books, Barbara never went back and edited out her thoughts that she no longer believed, "correcting" her ideas. I learned a great deal from studying Barbara's consciousness developing over time. She realized, as I had come to discover, that the process was vitally important.

Women wanted to live near Barbara Deming, to learn from her. She began a "beloved community," a community of women committed to change in Sugarloaf Key, Florida. This term was borrowed from the civil rights movement which Barbara was an active in. It was here that Barbara was most at home. Writing every morning for four hours regardless of who was visiting the community. This community became home for me in searching out information on Barbara.

"The only way to build the 'beloved community' is to seek again and again not how to cast out but how to gather." (Deming, Prison Notes, p. 24) Barbara actions during this time gave her extraordinary spontaneity - the sense that an individual can act, and has weight. "The only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision without being scared into wanting to retreat is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive, naming abuse of power, that is held unfairly and must be destroyed, but naming no person one whom we are willing to destroy" (Deming, We Are All Part, p. 271)

Barbara's life was a process, in constant development, constantly moving. Her brother, Chip Deming, said at the recent book release for a collection of Barbara's poems that "you needed to be quick of foot to catch up with Bobbie, or willing to be in jail." I was able to catch up to her through the connections she created, through the lives she changed, through the closeness that she so passionately worked to bring about.

I finally got the courage to start writing to some of Barbara's friends. Often they were people who were living in harmony with their beliefs. They were living a life I wanted to know more about, a life academia never saw fit to teach. What these women were to tell me was powerful, rational, intelligent. Their words helped me renegotiate my academic understandings of history. These women were living with integrity and passion. They consistently took the "action which is right to take." I wanted to trust my own self. I wanted to believe my actions, not my creations, were doing right to Barbara's memory, and to my own life.

I began by searching out all her writings, now out of print. I read and researched diligently. The more I learned, the more love I felt for Barbara, and those who acted with her. I wanted to know these people. Through my process, the art became possible. In fact, the art was already begun. The connections were being discovered, bonds were being formed, and honoring Barbara was not objectifying her.

PART FOUR
THE BARBARA DEMING
MEMORIAL PEACE WALK

How it All Started

I saw The Walk as a way of bringing together Barbara's friends, a way of learning about a history that I knew only through writings. It was about uncertainty and change through personal connection with others. At points The Walk may have been political, may have been spiritual, may have even produced art objects, but The Walk was always an evolving and fluid process. I wanted to know what change was possible, how Barbara became who she was. I didn't know how I would change, even what change I was looking for, but trusted in the process that seemed to work so well for Barbara. The process of The Walk ultimately became quite fluid. Many things I had originally planned to do were given up as unnecessary, actually harmful to the process. Often I had too many "things" planned that interfered with personal connections. Often technology failed me, making it impossible to update my web site remotely, sometimes difficult to receive answering machine messages. My individual intentions became enmeshed with the desires and dreams of others. Our connections did, in the end, create the art work I now began referring to simply as The Walk.

I recorded my thoughts on The Walk in a journal. The journal entries and letters I wrote, starting as early as 1994 in reference to this piece are quite telling of my process. Through these writings it becomes clear to see how I moved from a technologically savvy piece, to a piece about nothing external to itself. Just as Barbara learned herself through her writings, I too became aware of my own transformation. I have included these journals as Appendix A to this paper. I have not "corrected" them so my journey to consciousness is visible. The original thoughts always revolved around a performance piece, taking place in a controlled concert-like environment. My ideas about what kind of performance changed as I worked on Amoskeag and Inmates.

I wanted to do a piece where I would be walking on a treadmill center stage of a performance hall. I would be hidden behind a large screen, so that I could be seen only in profile. I would be playing my violin, for no other reason that it seemed appropriate that I be performing something which had some baggage associated with. In my mind I struggle with the memory of the fat, ugly kid that played the violin in sixth grade. I wanted to play the violin while walking on the treadmill, my violin triggering Barbara's words. Essentially, I was trying to make a piece very much like Letters from Prison. I wanted it to be repetitive, and I wanted there to be meaningful text. The visuals I would use would be the constant walking. At some point I decided that I would have MIDI triggered lighting, MIDI controlled sounds, and try to link all the elements of the performance together. I was intricately interested in the form the work would take. I wanted to try to bring out the connectedness of all the elements, comparing it to the connections that Barbara Deming sought.

I then decided that what was missing from a performance of that type was actual mobility. I wanted to walk, but was unable to see any formal solution to how I would do that in the context of a performance. Using the 1963 Canada to Cuba Walk as an inspiration, I thought about renting a sound truck and driving the entire route of the walk with my piece playing in the streets. I thought about making a piece about driving the route, where each day I would add onto the piece, so that over the course of the route to Cuba the piece would evolve and grow. I never limited myself to thinking about the actual sounds I might trigger in the performance piece, nor did I question what sounds I would compose living in a sound truck. I spent all my time thinking about form. What form would a piece about Barbara Deming take?

I was excited about the mobility of doing a piece on a sound truck. I was also excited about getting out of the concert hall and into the streets. Ultimately this piece was quashed by a letter from Yvonne Klein, who walked the 1963 walk and was somewhat dismissive in her response to me. In hindsight, neither of these pieces included anything about myself, nor did they allow any possibility for change or much hope for connections with others.

Luckily at this point I was doing extensive research on the route of the 1963 walk and also continually searching out more of Barbara's writing. I contacted the War Resisters League in New York City, a place where Barbara had many allegiances. This led to contact with the editor of the 1996 WRL Peace Calendar, Andy Mager. Andy sent me email telling me that Barbara was included in the calendar. After several email correspondences Andy told me about the 1983 action at the Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice. He encouraged me to not give up on a piece about Barbara simply because of my correspondence with Yvonne Klein.

My efforts were then turned to doing research on the Women's Encampment in Seneca Falls, NY. The thing that got me most excited about Seneca Falls was its proximity to where I live. I could see in my very preliminary efforts to take a sound truck from Canada to Cuba that it would be very difficult to schedule performances and do all the logistics that I figured necessary to undertake such a concert tour. I figured it especially difficult when the locations were, relatively speaking, so far away from where I was. I could go to Seneca Falls and plan a beautiful performance. This is what I did.

After going to Seneca Falls I became infatuated with the idea of a performance and installation at the chapel and site of the 1848 Women's Rights Convention. I went through thousands of ideas, from a performance there, to a concert in the theatre inside, to an installation outside in the falling down remains of the chapel. I wanted to have audio only outside, that would permanently play just as the water continually fell in the fountain. I couldn't get the National Park to agree to anything I suggested.

I decided to go to find the Women's Encampment to see if they were still around. I was warmly greeted and inspired by the two women who remain a permanent residents on the land in Romulus, fifteen miles south of Seneca Falls. They gave me some literature, some information on Barbara and the Encampment, and sent me on my way. I committed to walking at this point.

I wanted to walk formally. I wanted the form of The Walk to be significant. It was my formal training as an artist, as a composer, that allowed me to make aesthetic choices of how The Walk would be. Everything about the walking process became important in my considerations. I tried to take nothing for granted and made decisions about how it would look and sound. I found that Barbara's first arrest for civil disobedience was in New York City, and knew that her last was at the Encampment in Romulus, NY. I could walk from one to the other. The formal structure was in place.

I spent the better part of a year determining what I would do on The Walk. I began to walk as often as I could find time. I thought about performing every day, leaving things behind marking our route, recording sounds every day for later use, installations at each of the three corners of the route.

I even thought of making an electronic device that would make sound only while I was walking. In this way I was coming to the place where only people who walked with me would hear the piece. I always thought I would have an opening installation in Seneca Falls, and middle installation at the Women's Building in Albany, and a closing celebratory installation somewhere in the New York City artworld. I wanted to take video for later documentation of The Walk, and most of all I wanted to do daily updates and journal entries from the road to the extensive web site I had developed on Barbara Deming and The Walk. I was unable to carry the laptop computer, and unable to ensure an available phone line to upload the information. It became an incredible burden to use technology, and was keeping me away from actually experiencing connections with people. The virtual community I had formed by the internet would have to wait to receive these stories.

Most of the ideas of the original Quiet Tensions were lost. Some of those things I gave up were quite difficult to let go of. Others were quite easy. The Walk became a process of simplification that led to profound connections. I displayed a representation of the simplification process I made after I finished walking at the Women's Building. These lists I created showed the process of determining what was essential, and are included as Appendix C at the end of this paper.

The overall form, determined by the route of the actual walk was the structure, the core that I did not alter. I had intended on three key locations marking the path of the route. In Seneca Falls at the Encampment and the Elizabeth Cady Stanton House, in the Albany area at the Women's Building and the Peace Pagoda, and in New York City a gathering at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center, all had extra effort placed into the organizing for special events. No other "performances" were planned.

What We Did

The Walk was about community as much as it was about myself, as much as it was about Barbara. In the writing about The Walk now, after I completed the predetermined route, I have been unable to separate myself from any of the other walkers. The contribution that each walker, each host, indeed each participant in The Walk made a community who's sum could not be separated into parts. In the next section I frequently refer to "we" rather than "I." This is in reference to all Walk participants.

We set out on a 400 mile peace walk from Seneca Falls, NY on July 19th, the anniversary of the 1848 Women Right's Convention, held in Seneca Falls. We walked about 12 miles a day, a group which ranged from 25 to one. We stayed at churches or with families along the way. We were taken in by strangers, housed and fed dinner, breakfast in the morning, and packed a lunch for the next day's walk. We were never homeless. We walked without fear and with great joy. When we needed something, either tangible or not, people came and provided it. Indeed, a community did form through The Walk.

We walked east from Seneca Falls to Albany. There were formal speaking engagements along the way, and many less formal ones. We spoke at many churches, the Women's Building in Albany and at the Hiroshima Day memorial at the Grafton Peace Pagoda. We prayed and walked with the Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhists as we headed south to New York City. We arrived in New York City on August 23 at the former Atomic Energy Commission Building on Hudson St. This was the site of Barbara's first arrest for civil disobedience. The date marks the passage of the 19th Amendment. The seventy-two years that passed from July 19th Convention, to granting women the right to vote, was a successful completion of women's nonviolent resistance. Our performance made that time visible.

We walked from her last action to her first, remembering Barbara's life through her writings and through the stories of her friends. We donated copies of her writing to every public library of the towns we slept in. We planted wildflower seeds along our way, and gave seeds to our hosts so that they may remember Barbara Deming, and our Walk year after year. We planted a tree at the home of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Seneca Falls, as a permanent, ever growing reminder of Barbara's patience and ability to change. A Native American belief is that "each person has a tree as a companion, for life. The tree's spirit entwines with the spirit of the person, so that what happens to the tree happens to the person, and what the person does affects the tree." (Ashes and Light, p. 47) We must continue our Walk indefinitely. Our physical act of walking is a powerful and assertive gesture in the tradition of active nonviolent resistance which Barbara so passionately lived.

Every walker was asked to "register" with The Walk by signing the guest book. This guest book consists of the sneaker or shoe prints of every walker, signed and dated when they entered the performance. Each footprint shows us as strong individuals, each one unique, the unified form of the collection of all these prints together demonstrates our connection to the larger whole. As a feminist song we frequently sang says "walking, walking for our lives." These are included as Appendix D to this thesis paper.

Most of what we did was talk to people. We told them about ourselves as they shared their experiences. Sometimes we talked about Barbara, always we openly expressed our dreams, desires, hopes. We shared our experiences, not only our opinions, which helped assure a balanced, non-hierarchical relationship between all participants. We tried to listen as respectfully to a person passing us on the street as we did to people who walked along with us. Barbara Deming recognized that in telling our stories we help ensure ourselves a place in history. The function of history is to record these significant events that shape the world in which we live. In a larger sense, history is written in people's dreams and aspirations. The dreams are the truth. Our oral histories meshed into a collage of multiple voices to construct a complex narrative. The Walk personalizes our history, moves it beyond the personal narrative to a public text. It is our common remembrances, our private histories made audible. The Walk became the common language we call art.

The Walk is courage and trust made visible. We dared to do that which people deemed impossible. We dared to trust ourselves and to trust others at a time when so much around us tells us we should be fearful. Through our courageous actions, and vulnerable living, we inspired people to trust. Marina Abramovic, a performance artist, speaks of her walking the Great Wall as a way of "surrounding yourself with the unfamiliar in order to find the unimaginable." Each person we touched became a participant, a performer in an artistic life, and each found, and continues to find their own "unimaginable." Through a looking inward, we became able to design the truths of looking outward. For me, the unimaginable was to be able to perform without anger, to live in joy. This performance gives us time to contemplate, time to be mindful of all we do. Indeed, a sacred performance environment where we separate from our daily lives in order to connect with each other.

In my 1993 Mills College thesis paper I examined the connection between performance environments and other ritualized spaces; namely the Catholic Church. Each of these spaces aims to and often does create community. Each offers space for growth and personal development, as well as the potential for activism. It was an interesting development when, after a criticism in 1993 of coerced persuasion in the Church, walkers frequently were invited to speak at congregations of many denominations, and often slept in Church basements. Though congregations and performance environments might both be considered "intentional communities," I think there is a fundamental difference. The concept of insider and outsider is quite marked in most every religion, indeed in many communities like the one Barbara formed. Religion, even the most liberal religions, have "members," and typically operate on a somewhat evangelical basis. A primary aim is in obtaining and retaining members. Additionally, most religions are not based in nonviolence. Although many would profess not to be, each would claim their beliefs are correct, all others wrong, further emphasizing the "us" and "them" mentality. This makes it easy to do violence to the other, and many organized religions are extremely violent, indeed militant.

An intentional community, such as the community Barbara Deming began, and a performance art space live in similar domains. Many intentional communities are indeed replications of "insider" and "outsider," but ideally intentional communities are accessible to all, and no "membership" is needed. As community becomes essential, so to does art, each accessible to all. As community develops, artistic practice develops "not to cast out, but to gather," as Barbara had said. The individual identity of the artist, the signature, the object of value becomes enmeshed so deeply within the community, that the art work is the work of the community. Religion divides away; one a Buddhist, the other a Quaker, yet another Muslim. Art gathers together, forms community. Poet Audre Lorde said "it is not difference which immobilizes us most but silence." As artists we can begin to dare to speak. "Beauty and tranquillity and tradition always needs some pluckish thoughtful noise," said poet Nikky Finney not about art, but activism. As performance artists, as concerned members of the world community, we dare to speak for "that which is right" as we remembered Barbara Deming.

The initial planning process of The Walk, indeed the beginning of the piece, the start of profound changes could not have envisioned what ultimately occurs in the piece; what continues to occur in the performance. The Walk remained primarily a woman-only space. I had not designed that into the piece, it simply came about. Having a space for only women allowed new levels of conversation, allowed us as performers to design an experimental community, bound together not by disaster, not by religion, but rather by intention. Barbara recognized the need for a women only community. I didn't trust her, couldn't have understood what that space could have achieved. When The Walk turned out to be almost exclusively women, I began to hear Barbara anew. I have come to trust this women only space as sacred, hope to live in that community to discover the possibilities.

The stories gathered over the course of The Walk are becoming part of an ongoing web site project. Each story leads people down a different path and allows users to form new connections between each of us. This is not a representation of The Walk, not documentation, but rather a separate experience, where our own stories and Barbara's stories become part of our collective conscience. Each of these stories reside in our memories, timeless, often formless, one not necessarily preceding the other. Doing a project like this on the web allows me to perpetually continue The Walk project by continuing to form diverse communities. The beauty of a web site is that it can be continually changing and growing, where we can see development of stories over time. It will never be completed, but continually evolving. The web allows me, in the process of making a virtual object, to continually thwart the pressure to "complete" the work. This web site hopes to form a different type of community than Barbara could have envisioned. This virtual community is not designed to replace the community that Barbara formed. It aims to help create, record, and preserve the stories from those "beloved communities" we create as artists.

PART FIVE
OTHER WALKERS

WALKING AS ART
Robert Long

Robert Long is a conceptual artist from England. He does walks all over the countryside and calls them art. His walking is not about peace, but about art. For Robert Long, walking itself is art. As a conceptual artist, Long has become known for completing extraordinary walks, oftentimes alone. The journey represents a structured time in which a fleeting performance occurs. His walks appear to be inward, rather than outward looking.

Long now documents his experience walking with an object which he the sells as art. Under pressure from his friends in the art community, Long has begun taking things back with him from his walks and selling them as art objects, rocks or sticks found along the way. This minimal documentation is sometimes just a footprint preserved in mud, or a line the length of his stride.

Long's original conceptual idea of walking as itself a work of art is what prompted interest in his work. I have seen only sparring documentation of his walks, and seen only one object which he produced as a result of walking. His extremely minimal representations of his walks interest me only in that they communicate something very different, very removed in some sense from the actual walk itself. Seeing the length of his stride as a black line on white paper is something minimal and yet essentially linked to his performative walking. He creates an object of simple beauty which is powerful on an aesthetic level, in doing so, he does not communicate his experience. His object is no more, or no less beautiful to me because of the walk he took. I don't know how much he separates his art from his life, or the art object from his walk. His minimal objects possibly inspire thought on the part of a viewer about the physical act of walking, and to this end are successful. In his producing of objects, he now takes his inward, solo journeys to a place of communication of experience. By doing so, Long separates art from life, and performer from audience. If, as I assert, art is about communication and connections, I'm not sure how much of either of those Long can accomplish by walking alone.

WALKING AS RITUAL

Buddhism

The Buddhists have a ritual, spiritual practice of walking. The Nipponzan Myohoji order, based locally at the Grafton Peace Pagoda, walk, drum and chant for peace. The order was founded by the Most Venerable Nichidatsu Fujii on the principles "civilization is not to have electricity, nor airplanes, nor produce nuclear bombs. Civilization is not to kill humans, nor to destroy things nor to make war. Civilization is to hold one another in mutual affection and respect." It is clear to see how Jun-san, the Buddhist nun in Grafton, was friends with Barbara Deming.

As Barbara lie dying in her beloved community of women in Sugarloaf Key, FL, Jun-san played her prayer drum along with Barbara over the telephone. When I visited the Pagoda, they were eager to help me prepare for The Walk. Jun-san would later walk with me at each corner of the route. "Walking connects people like nothing else" Jun-san told me before I started walking. "Walk and pray for peace."

Jun-san walked with us the last day of The Walk, crossing the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan. We took a route the allowed us to pass by the French Consulate building, across from Central Park. Jun-san had spent a week sitting outside the building, praying, drumming, when France resumed nuclear testing in 1995. When she told me this story, it reminded me of my Inmates installation.

We walked and chanted na-mu-myo-ho-ren-ge-kho every minute we walked with the Buddhists, drumming three short, four long beats. Jun-san has walked thousands of miles, participated in peace walks for years and called it spirituality. Each step plants a seed of peace, forms a partnership with the earth. This practice, which I continue to participate in, of drumming and chanting necessarily creates "insider" and "outsider" positions. When we walked down 5th Ave. in Manhattan who knew what we were doing? The Buddhists are simply being peace, but their message is only understandable to those who know something about this particular order of Buddhists. This we call faith. Just as in the modern art world, it is a demonstration of insiders speaking to insiders. In their heroic efforts, often walking month after month, in good weather and bad, their aim is to bring about world peace. They do this by being peaceful, by remaining nonviolent in the face of any situation. They do this by walking, drumming, and chanting. They build Peace Pagodas around the world that serve as a sacred space for people, Buddhists and non-Buddhist alike, to come and practice spirituality and be peaceful. Though I don't disagree with their goals or their means, I think this might emphasize division. As I would like to have no division between art and life, so to would I desire to have no division between Buddhism and non-Buddhism. If The Walk and spirituality are to be compared, engaged Buddhism is a model we used for living intentionally, living in the present, and speaking for that which is right.

I believe Nikky Finney has much in common with Barbara Deming. Barbara knew that we needed to share our stories, not simply our opinions if we were to ever see our common nature. Finney spoke eloquently in the 1993 Mills College commencement address about connection. "The future will require that we turn and actually talk to each other. It won't matter how many degrees we have or how much money we make or where we live. When we do finally turn to each other, in a real way, we will argue, we will raise our voices, we will disagree and lose our tempers, we will listen, we will cry, but we won't get up from the work table. What a day that will be." (Finney, Pluck, p. 5) These are the communities we as artists strive to create. Not sterile environments, but places of challenge, where our community thoughtfully questions actions, adds dimension to our lives, and insists on growth and transformation.

I think The Walk in remembrance of Barbara Deming helped to blur the artificial boundaries between art and spirituality. Just as Barbara was able to help bring about a more just world by joining disparate people together, so to did The Walk bring Buddhists together with so many other religions. I learned from my earlier political actions, and my earlier compositions, that you get nowhere in this life alone. By our vulnerability we became bridges between community, spirituality, art and performance. We risked discovering ourselves as we discovered each other. We gave people the opportunity to be generous, to be helpful, to support us. We gave people the opportunity to find peace within themselves.

The entire Walk I had a small cloth on my backpack that simply said "Barbara Deming Memorial Peace Walk." I was uneasy with this, but asked time and time again to carry a sign. What bothered me about it was it seemed a little evangelical, as I had often seen the Buddhist drumming. Yet I not only wanted people to know what I was doing, but to join me. I spent a tremendous amount of time and energy getting publicity for walkers before we began. This was quite successful in both bringing me community, and also informing those who could not walk, or did not want to walk, about Barbara Deming. It was more important to me that people be reminded of Barbara Deming, that I infect people with the idea of peace, than I have walkers. The sign on my back allowed outsiders access to the performance, and I therefore wore it the entire time, no matter how uncomfortable it sometimes made me feel. The same could be said about the Buddhist drumming. Perhaps evangelism is needed to achieve anything other than an inward journey, such as those that Robert Long takes.

WALKING AS PEACE
"There is no way to peace. Peace is the way." - A. J. Muste

Peace Pilgrim

When I visited with the women at the Women's Encampment in Romulus, NY they gave me several books about nonviolence. One of the books they gave me was about Peace Pilgrim, a woman who walked over 25,000 miles for peace. Going by only the name Peace Pilgrim, she walked every day as living sign of peace and simplicity. She carried nothing but a comb, a toothbrush, and some letters she was answering. "I realized in 1952 that it was the proper time for a pilgrim to step forth. A pilgrim's job is to rouse people from apathy and make them think." (Peace Pilgrim, p. 24) I would say this is also the work of an artist, the work of art. Peace Pilgrim did not consider herself an artist however. She walked with intention, but not the intention of the walking as art. Her life was art, if she had chosen to call it such.

When Peace Pilgrim started walking she was diligent about counting the miles. With a sewn tunic bearing her name and "10,000 miles on foot for peace," she quickly needed to change her tunic. She stopped counting the miles after 25,000. I think this is significant because Peace Pilgrim's walking was not about travel, not about making it to her next destination, not about overcoming some record. Peace Pilgrim walked to form connection. Her walking, as the Buddhist walking, is a prayer.

Peace Pilgrim said her walking was "praying without ceasing." She was quite principled, always walked every mile. I think this distinguishes her from many political peace walks, where frequently walkers "cheat" to make up for lost time, to keep with a schedule. Although I had a set and rigorous schedule, I walked every mile. This intentionality was necessary for me because without it I could not have considered The Walk an artistic performance. Just as with my previous Inmates performance I continually read the arrests without ceasing, even if no one was in the room. In Inmates I had to trick myself to stay principled, placing a surveillance camera on me, with this image showing on a monitor in a hallway. In this way I had no idea if someone was in the hall watching or not. It kept me honest. On The Walk, it was easy to walk every mile because every mile added to the process of "discovering the unimaginable."

"A few really dedicated people can offset the ill effects of masses of out-of-harmony people, so we who work for peace must not falter. We must continue to pray for peace and to act for peace in whatever way we can, we must continue to speak for peace and to live the way of peace; to inspire others, we must continue to think of peace and to know that peace is possible." (Peace Pilgrim, p. 99) Every home I went to, every church I spoke with, told me they were inspired by our living memorial, our living peacefully. Art can be a profound way of inspiring others to greatness.

"I think one way we can dramatize peace could be through the use of a mobile theatre. For a long time I have thought that the arts should be used for the cause of peace. Only a limited number of people will listen to a lecture. More will read all or part of a simple and interesting pamphlet if it is handed to them. Many will listen to the peace people if they can get on radio or television with their peace message. However, just about everybody will look at a drama or puppet show if it comes right where they are." (Peace Pilgrim, p. 160) To some degree, we were there drama and puppet show. Our walkers were living peacefully, living simply, living as a work of art.

Blue Lunden

Blue Lunden, who lived in community with Barbara in Florida walked from New York City to Seneca Falls to be part of the 1983 Women's Encampment. She was one of the 54 women arrested along with Barbara that fateful day. Barbara wrote about this event in her Writings from Seneca Falls. Blue came up from Florida to walk as part of the Barbara Deming Memorial Peace Walk. This time it was not only a political statement for her, it was also love. "I'd never thought of this as art, but now that you say it, it makes perfect sense that it's art."

The Great Peace March

In 1986 The Great Peace March crossed the United States, from Los Angeles to New York City. There were 300 people who walked the entire route. They were walking to help raise awareness of nuclear weapons. They created community with their walking. It became known as "Peace City" which even elected a Mayor. They had their own newspaper and mobile school. This was a community that came together around a big idea, and remains somewhat connected today; they celebrated their ten year reunion during The Walk. One Marcher joined The Walk for several days. None of those walkers considered what they did to be art.

Ashes and Light Walk

In 1995 there was a peace walk that traveled over 4,000 miles on foot from Auschwitz to Hiroshima. They were remembering the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb and the end of the war.

"A pilgrimage starts out as a walk and ends up as a journey deep into the soul - of oneself, of other peoples, of lands walked through. To hold in your heart that you are walking the long, arduous miles as a pilgrim is to surround yourself from the beginning with the possibility of profound transformation. This is a spiritual experience. We of the Interfaith Pilgrimage for Peace and Life, 1995 also discovered another aspect of the Pilgrimage: It stays with you. It doesn't end with the last mile walked. You say good-bye to the people who have become close through the miles covered, but you don't say good-bye to the pilgrimage experience. It whispers a profound, new insight: you are a spiritual being on a human journey. This is what all the great faiths have always taught." (Ashes and Light, p. 53)

PART SIX
PERFORMANCE ART

It's a Woman's World

This is not to imply that only women are performance artists, but there is a powerful presence of women in the field. As a woman who is a composer, it has been difficult to break into what has traditionally been a male dominated field. In 1985 when I began to use computers to make music, the choice eliminated even more women. Since this time I have found myself frequently the only woman on concerts of electronic music. How could I have trusted Barbara about a women only space?

Performance art is a relatively new form, taking root in the seventies in a counter-culture of the art world. Performances didn't necessarily take place inside the art community, and communities often became active participants in the performances. There has been a division, somewhat artificial, between performance art and activist art.

One possible reason for so many powerful women involved in performance art is due to it's birth during the height of the feminist movement in the 1970's. Women were learning to use their voices, and express their anger at a world that excluded them. Performance art and feminism co-exist, strengthen each other, then and today.

Many of these performances are rooted in expressing something exclusively female, though certainly not always feminine as I discuss in the next section of this paper. Women have been able to use the realm of performance art to express their creativity, their vision for a more just future. From Linda Montano's ritualized performances to Annie Sprinkle's Public Cervix Announcements, we will consider just a few examples of women's experimental expression on stage, and on the streets.

I think self-expression is a prerequisite for self-empowerment, meaning one needs to move from object or subject of an art work, to working as an artist. Performance is a process through which people can change their lives, where women are not victims, or gaining token equality. Performance art is a designed environment, an invented reality where our voices matter. Indeed, performance art could exist as the "revolution", the society we strive for where there is cooperation, not competition. A society where war does not exist, and difference is respected. A performance art society where the world is just because we have created a just world. A society Barbara Deming and so many others have dared to envision.

Joining activist art and performance art, The Walk invited women from every background to participate. And women from such diverse backgrounds came together to perform in a peaceful world for the duration of their walk experience. For some that might have been the day, for others it might have started the day they decided they were going to come and walk, for even others it may, and hopefully is still continuing.

Montano and Hsieh
Roped

Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh lived every moment as art when they remained tied to each other for the year. From July 4, 1983 through 1984 the two were tied together by an eight foot rope in Art/Life One Year Performance. It was a piece that no one watched but in pieces, except for the artists who lived it each day. In fact, they often hid from their audience, "since they never set out to be spectacles of themselves." (Carr, On Edge, p. 3)

Each artist had a different view of what it meant to be part of the piece, Linda's more personal, Tehching's more universal. This distinction, of course, the stereotyped difference between male and female; women talking in specifics, men talking in general. "Linda said the piece was more than just a visible work of Art. It was a chance for the mind to practice paying attention, a way to stay in the moment." (Carr, On Edge, p. 5) The Buddhists call this staying in the moment "mindfulness." Here it seems mindfulness and performance are becoming intermingled. Enmeshed in the web of spirituality and art.

The artists made audio tapes of every minute of the performance. Conceptual art tapes, intended for no one to ever hear, but enhancing the intentionality of the performance. These tapes serve as their documentation of the performance, a documentation that essentially does not exist. The piece was about the process that they both went though, not necessarily about communicating that experience to others. Their performance has been recorded by the art world through reporters words about the event, and the artists own speaking. The performance demonstrates their capacity for self-discipline and integrity, two qualities I later describe as essential to a perpetual performer. Montano is a nun turned artist. She joins religion and ritual, and creates art.

Montano believes that what she does is "to surrender to the chosen and call it Art." (Carr, On Edge, p. 7) I think she means not just any "chosen" but a specified chosen, a mindful choice of what actions she performs and when. A scripted moment of her life, calling it art. Theirs were not arbitrary moments, those chose to tie themselves together for one year starting on July 4th, Independence Day. To most, this day represents freedom, to them the beginning of a year tied together.

A spectator asked, "I must ask you why I always see you attached." Linda answered, "It's an experiment." That's become their standard response to the question, Linda said, because to call it Art "plays with that definition too much for a lot of people and then they get angry." It may also play with their definition of Life. (Carr, On Edge, p. 8)

I don't think that Montano would have simply designated any year of her life as a performance, and gone about her daily activities. For Montano there was still a separation of art and life; that to perform necessitated doing something that you would not normally do; it needed to be more than just be-ing. When art cannot be separated from life, art is what you normally do. Art creates your life as much as you create the art. Montano and Hsieh chose to tie themselves together, their intentionality enhancing their lives. As others would view art to enhance their lives, the two artists used the art itself as a way of enhancing their experience of life.

The endurance and ritual aspects involved in Roped were influential in my thinking about structured time. In their performance, Montano and Hsieh demonstrate that their intentionality makes life art. When I hear Montano refer to the piece as an "experiment," I think she, too, is beginning to discover the continuum between art and science, science and history, history and dreams. In this way life becomes a series of "variations." In art and music this refers to the exploration of all angles of the same thing. As artists, as scientists, this is our duty. "Revolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of reality." (Shlain, Art and Physics, p. 16)

Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Maintenance Art

As a woman and mother, Ukeles found a lot of her life consumed by "women's work." The other work she did was as an artist. In an extraordinary effort to join the two, art and life, Ukeles created a series of Maintenance Art pieces. Unlike Montano and Hsieh, Ukeles, in one piece "distributed a letter inviting every maintenance worker to help create a living Maintenance Art work. She asked them to designate one hour each day of their normal tasks as art." (Felshin, But is it Art?, p. 174)

Ukeles "documented" this activity by taking photographs. She asked the employees as they punched out at the end of the workday to fill out a form identifying when and how they performed art. Often one person performed "work" while the person next to them, performing the same activity, designated it as "art." Ukeles challenged the truth of language. For Ukeles, it is the declaration of work as a work of art that becomes liberating for not only herself, but for the participants in the performances.

"The project enhanced the value of work while making art more accessible." (Felshin, But is it Art?, p. 174) I take issue with this statement from art critic Patricia Phillips. Ultimately, these forms and the photographs were exhibited at the Whitney Museum, not a space that I would say makes art available to just anyone. Time and time again, activist art, done with all the best intentions, gets brought back into the very gallery that represses any belief in activism as art. It seems inherent in our present, consumer driver society, that art becomes commodity. When we make art a commodity, it loses some of its ability to be activist.

In a performance piece, Ukeles moves away from any art object and literally onto the streets. Working on her hands and knees with rags and a bucket of soap and water, Ukeles scrubbed the sidewalks in front of the A.I.R. Gallery in New York City. "All kinds of people walked through her performance site, inadvertently participating in the work." (Felshin, But is it Art?, p. 177) Passers-by left their footprints on Ukeles' newly scrubbed sidewalk. This performance impelling the public to participate in a performance which occurred in Ukeles' name.

The very nature of Ukeles' work allowed me to think in new ways about including the everyday world into a work. By allowing the maintenance workers into her pieces, she allows herself to trust the aesthetic judgment of the workers. These workers would be considered non-artists by themselves and the art world. Ukeles empowers them through her trust. This was a model I wanted to work with in The Walk. It was important to me that the walkers left feeling a renewed connection with art.

Abramovic and Ulay
The Lovers

Marina Abramovic and Ulay walked the Great Wall of China, beginning at opposite ends some 3,700 miles apart. Before they began, they expected the walk to change their lives. It certainly did when the lovers parted after years of extended performance together as a couple. They parted as lovers before they walked, but walked just the same. It took them over eight years from the dream to the first step.

Using art to sculpt their very selves, they took an inward journey "facing not just the unknown, but the unknowable."(Carr, On Edge, p. 26) The piece had "elements of ritual and ordeal, that have no counterpart in China outside religion or politics" (Carr, On Edge, p.29) What Marina and Ulay saw as art, the Chinese government saw as religion or politics.

In a series begun in 1980 called Nightsea Crossing the artists/lovers sat motionless for seven hours at either end of a long table, trying not even to blink. They performed this work ninety times, completing the series in 1986. Marina saw this type of work the new art of the 21st Century where there was to be "no object between the artist and observer. Just direct transmission of the energy. When you develop yourself strongly inside, you can transmit your idea directly." (Carr, On Edge, p. 27) Pieces like Nightsea Crossing had their inner life as content, their body was mind. They exercised it every performance.

Both artists were interested in Eastern philosophy, certainly visible in Nightsea Crossing. But as they walked the Great Wall, they speculated that this piece could become a walking meditation. The Buddhists, recognizing the mind/body connection, saw walking meditation as a way of living in the present moment. Both artists said this never happened; that the walking was too difficult to not pay constant attention to.

The pure concept of The Lovers was for "two tiny humans moving toward each other over this broken but monumental path." This became impossible as the Chinese government wouldn't allow them to walk without guides. They had planned to sleep directly on The Wall, but this too was impossible. The present moment had the same effect on the Barbara Deming Memorial Peace Walk. Walkers allowed things to change so that our Walk was possible. As Marina and Ulay simplified before they even began walking, the core of their idea remained constant. Their walking helped them not only find the core of the work of art, but the core of themselves as humans.

Just as Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh had very differing ideas about what their Roped piece was about, so did Marina and Ulay. "Ulay was looking for more by looking for less. Paring things away - technology, comfort, habit, even language." Ulay came to the point where he wanted to walk in complete silence. He used the Wall walk as a way to study China. He absorbed everything he could from the outside.

Marina had made the walk an inward journey. "Art should be done, she believed, from that extraordinary state of mind one could only get to physically, through exhaustion or pain or repetition." Performance was a space where "all my habits don't exist." (Carr, On Edge, p.45) The performance space is a place where change is possible.

By chance, they had traveled for exactly ninety days, the same amount of time they'd spent doing Nightsea Crossing. Chance set their meeting site as well as their performance. Nothing was planned. Marina had started to cry, which Ulay thought inappropriate. Ulay said something about her shoes, which Marina thought inappropriate. Marina couldn't wait to leave China. Ulay said he could have walked on forever. "For the first time in twelve years, we had separate experiences," reported Ulay. "There will be no way to fuse it." (Carr, On Edge, p. 47)

The artists documented their experience; Ulay had satellite photos taken at intervals of his walk, Marina did rubbings on the wall itself. The installation they created does not interest me as much as the walk itself. The Lovers allowed more communication though action than through words or traditional art objects. Knowing about the walk inspires me, the documentation or so-called "art" does not even interest me. What Marina and Ulay's piece allows me to think about makes it one of my personal favorites. The Lovers says more about the artists than the artist's would probably ever dare to say. As a piece of conceptual art, it is the concept that entices. This piece was will made visible. I feel their transformation by the idea of the journey. The Lovers was form played out in real-time.

PART SEVEN
ART AS ACTIVISM

Art and Nonviolence

We have watched, over the course of history, the role of art, and the artist change. Although I will not get into any in-depth history of art, I would like to briefly look at the role art has played, and the role I hope it will someday play.

Art was a vital part of daily existence, a human activity that was as essential as food or water. There was a time when art and music were part life, when we were a culture that encouraged rituals. Often in these societies there was no distinction between medicine and music, or artist and cook. When art is essential, the object is not a commodity but rather a precious item that brings about public awareness. The "signature" has no meaning, the artist's identity unimportant. Yet there was also a time when the only way an "artist" could paint, or composer could write music was in service of the church. What is the role that art plays today? How have we learned from our history of art?

If art is to have renewed relevance in daily life I believe we must shift the site of aesthetic meaning from the privileged expression of the artist to the common experiences of the participants. I have called this activist art, combined with performance art earlier on in this paper. When art can empower people, art is essential. It becomes a means for community building, inspiring us to grow and change. Art becomes a powerful tool to bring about a paradigm shift, to create the "revolution," where we live peacefully and simply. I strive for an art that is accessible to all and that infects all. In a perpetual performance the work of the piece, the work of my life, inspires me as it inspires others. Ideally, we strive for a world where everyone lives with intention, that is to say, all are artists. Being an artist, living artistically, indeed art itself is intentionality and mindfulness.

In art we make ourselves vulnerable to our world. We dare to speak those things which are right and just, we dare to act. Without art, nonviolent activism would be far less effective. The women at the Women's Encampment at the Seneca Army Depot used slow, ritualized dance to dramatize their beliefs. Bread and Puppets Theatre have continued to be an aesthetic alternative to violence. Peace Pilgrim saw that people are infected when they experience and event, more so than when they told about one. Art and nonviolence are intimately joined.

Robbie McCauley

Our stories arise from our past. Telling our stories we shape our future. Robbie McCauley's work is about intense conversation. "Dialogue isn't just the heart of her work but her life." (Carr, On Edge p. 200) Through her stories we envision ourselves, give ourselves permission to feel the way we feel, acknowledge our histories. She calls her works "performance dialogues" where she tells stories, the details of which have not always been related to her, because it was "shameful." McCauley tells these stories that we have been craving to hear, allowing us to leave the performance with permission to engage in a different level of "shameful" conversation. We cherish the invitation to be moved from the silence we have upheld.

McCauley strives for the deep listening, the respect of the other in the conversational process that Barbara Deming described. To McCauley, listening and speaking together is a way to understand racial and cultural "others" without the familiar pitfalls - "like who's right and who's wrong, and self-censorship around charged issues, and having rules like don't blame anyone when we have to, and like we're all equal when we're not." (Felshin, But is it Art?, p. 126)

In discussing her charged performance Sally's Rape, McCauley expresses her role as artist. "The use of art in this dialogue is so valuable because artists make things beautiful. I'm talking about beauty as a function: if I want to tell you something I want to seduce you so you listen. Theater is different from a political forum but the subject matter can be essentially the same." McCauley's work creates an opening for ongoing dialogue.

The Walk, too, has continued to grow and change. It created a space where enhanced dialogue was possible. Those dialogues are on-going. I speak publicly every month about The Walk, continuing the conversations rather than just reiterating them. Each time I speak with someone we continue off in yet another direction of life, of living peacefully, of living artistically, of life as performance.

Guerrilla Girls

Perhaps most known for their posters which "inform and incite pedestrians," (Felshin, But is it Art?, p. 315) the Guerrilla Girls critique the art world. They are media savvy and provocative in their means. Just as there was a revolution in the Women's Movement, so too was there a Women's Art Movement. Artists were demonstrating in the streets for women's rights and picketing museums for equal time. The Guerrilla Girls helped make the later much more public.

With slick, glossy, black and white posters, the Guerrilla Girls plastered the streets with their now infamous signs. "How Many Women Had One-Person Exhibitions at NYC Museums Last Year?" and "The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist" are perhaps the best known. Armed with the facts, some alarming statistics, and clear and simple graphic design, the Girls offered a critique of the art world that was not available anywhere else.

"Guerrilla Girl posters were activist statements that conformed to a distinct aesthetic format. It was obvious at a glance that the Girls were artists, yet these texts were pure propaganda." (Felshin, But is it Art?, p. 309) They were not polite in their message, nor in their means, plastering SoHo in the middle of the night.

The Guerrilla Girls have become famous as a collective of women artists, though no one knows their identity individually to judge their individual success. The Girls struggled for the inclusion of more women in the traditional art world by using non-traditional means. Whether successful or not, which I don't believe should be a criteria for any art, the Girls continue to provoke and inform with their research.

The Girls do, however, argue for women to be recognized within the traditional art world that they critique, still holding that tradition to a higher level than the subversive realms that they work within. Ultimately, they aim to make their livings as artists. It was the Girls who said "feminist art was disruptive to the commercial economy of art" in 1985. Though I shouldn't fault them for wanting that, I don't believe that selling objects of art makes one a great artist. Their subversion has, to some degree, sold them into the artworld proper as outsiders. The Girls hide behind the masks that have made them popular, and show their status quo bodies to the art world that they claim has exploited them for having those bodies. I can't say that I disagree with anything they have done, rather I question the overall coherentness of the work they do and the ends they seek.

Diamanda Galas

Though I don't think Diamanda Galas would call it such, her Plague Mass is a form of what I would call perpetual art. In 1984 Galas began work on Masque of the Red Death, a work she has committed to write for the rest of her life, or until there is a cure for AIDS. Galas, in addition to her powerful music, has actively been working to end bureaucratic apathy towards the AIDS crisis.

In the Galas madwoman tradition, her solo voice with processing fills an entire hall. I heard Galas live in 1993. One particular nicety was hearing an unedited performance. We hear her struggling, the music physically tiring the singer. Frequent gasps for air made hearing Galas live a rare treat. Galas appears on stage naked except for a loin cloth; her body covered in "blood." A figure writhing in pain, Galas' is passionately involved in the performance. Hearing Galas live brought out the performance artist aspect of the work that is completely lost in the recording.

Upon hitting her high coloratura, her high, shrill, operatic training bellowing through, we begin hearing the Diamanda Galas that we have come to know. Her screams of pain, coupled with her apparent physical human limitations were an interesting juxtaposition. As a listener, I become very physically aware of the amount of energy Galas is capable of expending. To watch and hear her struggle, yet her coloratura reeking her commitment towards actions rather than words, she tackles the AIDS issue. In a day where many composers are focusing on a tiny microcosmic world, one where perhaps they sonically describe the biological deterioration process which occurs in the immune system, Galas takes on the problem as an entirety. Her work is pain made audible. Dealing with the macro-level of AIDS and it's physical embodiments, Galas is able to engage a large group of people. Ideally, she is able to coerce an audience into actions rather than empty words of support.

Diamanda Galas performs this constantly growing work tirelessly. Hers is a powerful voice of courage among all the political actions around the AIDS issue. She will perform this work, and will continue to write this work until there is no more need for it. I would assert that she performs this work every day, whether she is performing on stage or not. In her every interaction with other humans, Galas shouts "action" every time she speaks. Hers is the aesthetic life, a life of intentionality that communicates.

PART EIGHT
ART AS FEMINISM

Feminism and Nonviolence

Barbara Deming pieced together through experience the connections between feminism and nonviolence. Both are the language of our collective dreams as women. Insisting there is something different than that which we currently live, Barbara was able to "open the minds of others to radical insights about our present condition, and to the courage to trust this new vision and to act upon it themselves." (Deming, We are All Part, p. 203) In using persuasion rather than violence, women "insist there is another way to be. By combining our rage with compassion, we live the revolution every day." (McAllister, Reweaving the Web, p. iv)

With The Walk, we begin to connect those women who have already learned of those powerful connections between feminism and nonviolence with the artistic life. Feminists, pacifists, artists - each act out every day with courage and passion. Each day we reaffirm our connections with the earth, and life by confronting our fears, dreaming our dreams. We dare to see, and to speak the truth as we see it.

Karen Finley

On-stage, Karen Finley "represents a frightening and rare presence - an unsocialized woman." (Carr, On Edge, p. 121) Finley, too, tells the worst truths in front of an audience, truths that have too long remain untold.

I saw Finley live in 1995. She did something amazing on-stage. She got out of her persona and performed, her personality as dynamic as the "performance." The performance started twenty minutes late, yet there were still people entering the hall when Finley was performing. She stopped, and started a dialogue about how distracting that was. "I'm told that if I'm a good performer I would ignore that. If I'm a good performer I'd ignore my audience."

We left after an emotionally draining performance and I couldn't stop thinking about those stories. Not so much for what they were themselves, but about all those stories that I don't tell to others. Those stories being the most revealing of my own self, too frightening to even consider. My planning for The Walk served as a forum for change, both external and internal.

Annie Sprinkle

"Feminist porn activist" Annie Sprinkle performs in the places where "exotics" and "show girls" are, but Sprinkle labels herself "artist." Spreading her legs, inserting the speculum, Sprinkle invites her audience to view her cervix. "Take pictures. All kinds of exploitation are welcome," Sprinkle's assistant announced. "But can you be exploited if you want to be exploited? Does and act change when you redefine the context - when you call it 'performance art' instead of 'striptease,' for example." (Carr, On Edge, p.174) Or when you define artist as intention?

Sprinkle is perhaps the best nonviolent activist of them all, placing herself in the most vulnerable position, but ultimately commanding power over all her viewers. As a porn star, Sprinkle has been the object of the degrading male gaze for most of her life. Her ability to transform the degradation into empowerment is a rare work of art.

Annie Sprinkle, along with Diamanda Galas are included in a REsearch publication Angry Women. These women have more in common than their anger. Both work diligently to break taboos, both allow themselves the privilege of speaking honestly. Both have demystified the female body, daring to speak their lives.

PART NINE
ART AS SPIRITUALITY TIME AS FORM

John Cage

"The highest purpose of all is to have no purpose." - John Cage

Cage spent his life joining art and spirituality. Through his understanding of Zen Buddhism, John Cage tried to remove all traces of personal control and self-expression from his work. He did this in a belief that the artist's own emotions, memories, and prejudices were barriers that obscured the work. Cage's attention turned outward on the world around him, not inward to his own reaction to it.

For Cage this meant letting sounds be themselves. He was able to get personality and ego out of composition by using chance procedures. Cage tried to redefine the very notion of music to include everything that happened. "If the listener could put aside everything entitled 'music', all the sounds of life would become music. This music is new music, which requires a new listening. Attention should be given to the sounds themselves." This statement has been a motivating factor in my own artistic development for over ten years. I have read this statement perhaps 200 times; never has it been more clear than after The Walk. Cage's life and his work were inseparable. When the "sounds of life become music," life becomes a work of art. When we consider these new sounds "music," we gain a certain awareness about the world we live in. The music requires a new listening. When art can bring about changes in our very being, requiring us to act differently, art is activism.

"Music is an affirmation of life - not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord." John Cage saw composing as a way of freeing sounds, and Zen as a way of freeing his spirituality and life. Both processes were a simplification to the core of his life as a work of art. This gave Cage the extraordinary ability to make eating art (macrobiotic), use new forms of writing (mesostic), and create a revolution in the art world by positing that music might just be any time period we declare to be such. Cage is a role model for living in a perpetual performance.

Art as Spirituality
Process and Simplicity
Thich Nhat Hanh

In Thich Nhat Hanh's book Being Peace he talks about mindfulness in daily life. Hanh is a Buddhist monk who teaches about the connections between Western psychotherapy and Buddhist principles. I became aware of Hanh's writing through someone I met on The Walk, a minister of a church I stayed at. This minister told me that my own mindfulness came through art, and he was excited to hear I knew very little about Buddhism.

In the following quote, Hanh writes about our life as a work of art.

After a retreat in southern California, an artist asked me, "What is the way to look at a flower so that I can make the most of it for my art?" I said, "If you look in that way, you cannot be in touch with the flower. Abandon all your projects so you can be with the flower with no intention of exploiting it or getting something from it.

It has become a kind of habit to look at things with the intention of getting something. We call it 'pragmatism,' and we say that the truth is something that pays. If we meditate in order to get to the truth, it seems we will be well paid. In meditation, we stop, and we look deeply. We stop just to be there, to be with ourselves and with the world. When we are capable of stopping, we can begin to see and, if we can see, we understand. Peace and happiness are the fruit of this process. We should master the art of stopping in order to really be with our friend and with the flower.

Everything we do is an act of poetry or a painting if we do it with mindfulness. Growing lettuce is poetry. Walking to the supermarket can be a painting.

When we do not trouble ourselves about whether or not something is a work of art, if we just act in each moment with composure and mindfulness, each minute of our life is a work of art. Even when we are not painting or writing, we are still creating. We are pregnant with beauty, joy, and peace, and we are making life more beautiful for many people. Sometimes it is better not to talk about art by using the word 'art.' If we just act with awareness and integrity, our art will flower, and we don't have to talk about it at all. When we know how to be peace, we find that art is a wonderful way to share our peacefulness. Artistic expression will take place in one way or another, but the being is essential. So we must go back to ourselves, and when we have joy and peace in ourselves, our creations of art will be quite natural, and they will serve the world in a positive way.

This Buddhist's thoughts on art resound well with Barbara Deming's thoughts on political actions. "When we do not trouble ourselves about whether or not something is a work of art, if we just act in each moment with composure and mindfulness, each minute of our life is a work of art." In her "Letter to WISP," Barbara tells of a letter she received, imploring them as activists, "Do not spend much time wondering how effective you are...You are not a political party, you are our conscience....Do not ask whether you can. You have no choice." Both spirituality and nonviolence join here with art, compelling us to a life of integrity, compassion, and communication.

Thich Nhat Hanh and John Cage would have had wonderful conversations. It is these conversations that I think I must have been hearing while walking. I strive every day to continue their imaginary dialogues, connecting art, spirituality, and living peacefully.

Grafton Peace Pagoda

While walking I was part of the Hiroshima Day Memorial at the Grafton Peace Pagoda. On the night of August 6th we walked from Grafton Center to the Pagoda. Our walking meditation bring peace to walkers and views alike. After a series of speakers, of which I was one, we performed a beautiful piece, or as the Syracuse paper had mis-quoted me as saying "the process is the peace." Everybody lit a candle lantern, walked once around the stupa, and placed their lantern on the Pagoda. They perform this ritual every year on the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb. We were learning how to be peace, and our art was quite natural.

PART TEN
MINIMALISM IN ART AND LIFE

Role Models

Blue Lunden lives in Barbara's beloved community in Sugarloaf Key, FL. She walked with me for a week on The Walk. She lives in harmony with her values, strives every day for a more peaceful world by living simply. Many of the women who walked were living with minimal impact on the earth. The women at the Peace Encampment live with only a wood stove for heat, and with outhouses. There was a woman who lived out of her van by choice, having given up a home to have mobility. One woman hitchhiked in to The Walk. She travels from political action to political action with only her backpack. There were remarkable stories of women with minimal possessions, who lived richer, fuller lives than many women I interact with daily. They, as did the minimal artists, looked inward and found the core of their life as a work of art. They determined what was essential and got rid of all the rest of the clutter.

Voluntary Simplicity

The important thing to remember when we consider these remarkable women is that theirs is a voluntary simplicity. Barbara Deming also lived a simple life, choosing her own path even at the expense of loosing the financial support of her wealthy father. These women live simply, leaving a small footprint on the earth. They are not homeless, and do not wish to have indoor plumbing. Theirs is a choice. Living simply is living mindfully. Part of my work as an ongoing, perpetual artist is to continually reinterpret the day to day activities of my life to discover what is necessary. I strive in this piece to come to that core of my very being. It is not until I reach that point, which I may never do, that I would consider calling my life anything other than a perpetual performance.

The process of determining what is essential was never easier than during the actual walking. When we lost our support vehicle, or I was walking alone, it was necessary for me to carry everything on my back. When every ounce mattered, it was easy to think about if something was worth carrying around. Literally, it was baggage to cart around. See Appendix C for the list of beginning and ending items.

I spoke with a voluntary simplicity group about The Walk as part of the perpetual piece. Living simply is not living easily, it is questioning, and deciding the right actions to take. It helps keep us mindful as we watch the world around us throw us into unneeded complexity. Through our simple living we are able to concentrate on those things that bring about a peaceful world, as we live in the present in peace.

PART ELEVEN

PERPETUAL ART

Art without Object
Narrowing the Distance Between Art and Life

Before I arrived at iEAR I called myself a composer. As I make this transition to perpetual artist, making art without object, I recognize music as such. Music exists in time only, there is no object, only our memory of a performance. I may have sometimes recorded my music, but the recording is much different than the performance, two different pieces really. The documentation is not what interests me in my own pieces, it is the making that excites me. Experimental composer Alvin Lucier said to me "I'm really happiest when I'm composing. Not when I'm performing, not when I'm recording, but when I'm working on the piece."

My desire for a "universal" work of art is part of my often called "idealistic" desire for human unity with the world, and with oneself. As Barbara Deming saw our sexuality as our way of "breaking our single selves," I see art as a way of overcoming our individual isolation. Art can provide bridges to our selves and to the world. It is not the production of pleasing objects or sounds, and it is often hard work and not 'pleasure,' but art is a means of union between people. Art is a condition of human life. Art is the means by which life is produced.

"It is not the function of art to break down open doors, but rather to open locked ones. But when the artist discovers new realities, [she] does so for [herself] alone; [she] does it also for others, for all those who want to know what sort of a world they live in, where they come from, and where they are going. [She] produces for a community." (Fisher, Necessity of Art, p. 210) I would add here that she produces community.

Our production of "art objects" adds to a capitalist vision of the world. When our art speaks to and of the same "beloved community" that Barbara Deming helped create, it can not, indeed must not, create monetary value. The value of the work is in the community it creates, in the values it shares, not in the cash it brings back to the people. Art does not just passively reflect society; it serves as a public forum for ideas. When we produce art without object, we act as a subversive force, critiquing both capitalism and the patriarchy that support it. We strive with this new art to live the "revolution" every day. When we speak, and speak again the truth that "we are all of us of one nature" as Barbara Deming knew, we impel our culture to follow our lead. The new art, perpetual art, is not an opiate, but a living symbol of peace. Art must show the world as changeable, and then help to change it. We must not exploit each other, or the world.

Exploitation was my biggest fear when faced with the need to write a piece about Barbara Deming. I would not, certainly could not do harm to her. In performing The Walk we honored Barbara because we trusted each other, we shared with each other, we formed community rather than audience. For myself, this will be an ongoing homage to a woman who so passionately thought "first about the action that is right to take, [thought] later about coping with one's fears." This is very much the role of an artist. Artists can be the visionaries of our society.

Living peacefully means a more peaceful world. AndrÚ Breton has written " a work of art has value only if tremors from the future run through it." (Fisher, Necessity of Art, p. 205) As with my earlier works of Letters from Prison, Inmates, and with The Walk, the form and content are caught in a web with each other in so many ways that they can hardly be separated. The web is spun at first by the artist, then along with the community. Because of this, we are no longer able to separate art from life.

Documentation of Process

I can't say that I've not made objects about this walk, for I have. I probably will make even more objects about it, but these objects are very much different than The Walk as a perpetual work. Indeed, it was through the very creation of these objects that I came to making The Walk itself art.

I have included a handbook I made to be given to walkers during the performance. In this simple, but beautiful work, I explain what my intentions were for organizing and creating The Walk. In it I write about Barbara Deming, and how this walk serves to honor her. I used the book as a way of keeping people mindful, focusing the attention of the walkers on the issues of peace, feminism, and nonviolent change. The handbook also serves as a small object, something we could all carry in our pockets as we walked, which gave people a way of connecting further with Barbara's ideas. Intermixed with my writings are Barbara's words. These words have renewed relevance in our society.

There is an ongoing website that I have developed that will keep the performance intentional, keep the process evolving, and connect people one to another. The stories which we told on The Walk were a performance of memories, both the individual and collective memories of women. Each person's story individually is moving, all together, these stories create a new, circular history, where we can find connections that are not possible in a linear presentation of the text. Often these stories will be written by someone other than me, by the person who's life was affected by it. This web site gives those who choose to participate the opportunity to further explore their own creativity, through writing, through graphics, or though a connection discovered. Participants will travel through the stories by finding pennies along the way. Each penny will be a different path that could be chosen. These pennies are the pennies that I found and saved along The Walk. Each time a participant discovers a stray feather, it will lead them to some of Barbara Deming's writing.

I requested that each walker leave me their footprint with their signature and the date they entered The Walk. I hope to join these prints together into an artist's book. I will also use these footprints in the ongoing web site. In the spirit of nonviolence and civil disobedience, these footprints brought a degrading and invasive practice, fingerprinting, to an artistic and empowering representation. Each individual footprint is an original, signed by the artist. The process of foot printing turned each participant into an artist. My role is simply as curator.

I have a list of beginning and ending items documenting my process of simplifying during the walking proper. Since this describes a personal transformation, and since I was the only person who walked the entire route, this is the only piece that I claim personal "ownership" of. The lists have been included as Appendix C to this thesis paper. These were displayed in an installation at the Women's Building in Albany, with the route of the walk between the beginning three frames of items, and the ending one frame. This installation was aimed to demonstrate the simplification process that occurred while walking.

PART TWELVE
DISCUSSIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

Life as a Perpetual Performer

Living artistically in a perpetual performance means living with integrity. It means living mindfully, an idea consistent with the Buddhist philosophy. We see the flower in the garbage, the garbage in the flower. It is an understanding that all things are connected, that all life is sacred.

As a continuing part of this ongoing Walk I have been speaking at schools, churches, women's groups, and other meeting places. These discussion, along with my everyday conversations with people, are my way of continuing my work as an artist. Every conversation increases my connections to others, fosters my love for Barbara Deming. When art is in my every conversation, communication is enhanced, relationships fostered. This is the ultimate activity of my art. It teaches me empathy and compassion. It teaches me to listen with respect, and speak with intention. It allows me access to the realm of the "unimaginable;" allows me a playground to discover and challenge myself. I have been called an "inspiration" to others because of this perpetual performance. That had never happened when I produced objects, nor when I separated my life from my work as an artist. When art inspires it is inclusive.

Perpetual art exists not only at a certain defined performance times, but permanently. My dialogues with Kady VanDeurs, Blue Lunden, Branda Miller, Aidan Reynolds, and Pam McAllister, through letters and personal contact, helped keep focus and intentionality in the performance. Through our impermanent connections, through producing no object, we help keep Barbara Deming a permanent part of our collective conscience. We do this through will.

Ironically, three years ago I was concerned about how a piece of music could live on long after its performance. Through The Walk performance I discovered that objects do not contain memories, but act as metaphors to memory. It was this type of metaphor I tried, and perhaps will continue to try to make with my art. For the time being, I am interested in exploring the idea that these objects may, in fact, inhibit people from living peacefully, simply, artistically. When the making of objects serves to educate, to stimulate, and yet not clutter my own or another person's life, then by all means I will make an object. I believe very much, however, that the object is not nearly as important as the process, and that any art object I create should make clear the process involved. I think in this way we connect with our selves, and connect others with their own creative selves. The journey becomes as important as the product. If the journey, or the product, serve to inspire others, then art can communicate. As long as art is seen as entertainment, or prestige in our society, art can not function as anything other than an opiate: art will continue to be a form of escape from our true selves.

With The Walk I chose to give up those desires I had to make objects, to create memories, to obtain documentation, to make art, so that I was able to live art. It was a very difficult choice that I had to make, and I remained convinced that it was a well thought-out and intentional decision, and the right decision. When we spend less time worrying about how we will remember an experience, how we will communicate an experience, and simply be, the moment becomes essential; all else is clutter.

For this piece, The Walk, technology became part of the clutter that kept my self divorced from my art. iEAR Studios is a place where art and technology are woven together into a web that I often found confusing and depressing. If the intention of the artist is less important than the technology used to generate the art, then art, and artists occupy a privileged position in our society. In order to join the two, I stripped away the technology to discover what might be my intention. When I did this, I discovered intention in all that I did, in all I continue to do. Duchamp and his "ready-made" and "found" objects, and Cage with his "silence" performance, both found that core where intention lives, but both relied on the societal context of the gallery and the concert hall. The Walk tried to take these intentions out of their pristine environment, and discover how they could live in the world. Not only that the intention of the artist was art, but that the artist with intention was art. These intentions might not reside in the objects that we create, but in our very be-ing.

Perpetual art helps us in understanding the value of art in all our lives. Art is an activity with which humanity transcends the present, steps beyond the threshold of the given; it is a mode of human expression that provides passion and the enthusiasm to foster the transformation of the potential into the actual. Are we sure this isn't the definition of activism rather than art?

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