Come laugh your ass off at the Comedy Store Saturday April 9 at 8PM! I’ll be doing a new bit about plastic bags and Quentin Tarantino, and I still have a few discounted tickets left…. And check back here in May, when I should have dates up for the Laugh Factory, where I was just passed into their regular rotation of comics. If you stick around after the show, who knows, you might even get to touch Kevin Nealon (see below…).

I’m also prepping for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in the fall, where I’ll be performing the week of August 25 (date and venue TBD) with L.A. burlesque hottie Ridley Barlow as The Roughhausers in a madcap Victorian era sideshow with bizarre magic, vanishing clothes, Dada stunts, comedy, and more. It turns out Ridley is a direct descendant of King Robert I, so maybe they’ll let us stay in a castle while we’re there…or not…so far this week I’ve been told to fuck off three times by Scots…I’m starting to think it’s their way of saying hello…. To drum up an audience, we’ll be doing a street act during the week that includes performance art (a brand new piece I’m calling “Songs with a Brick”), stunts, sleight of hand, and maybe a little pickpocketing. If you’re coming to the Fringe, let me know!

Last year I traveled to watch an evening of Performance Art in Los Angeles. A man climbed onto the stage and sang Glenn Fry’s The Heat is On from the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack. It was pitch-perfect. And I was pissed. This was the man’s idea of Performance Art? I was so disappointed.

But I wasn’t surprised. The Performance Art moniker has been endlessly appropriated by mainstream American artists who either aren’t aware that Performance Art has its own history that’s distinct from the histories of other arts, or else they just don’t give a damn and are looking for a cheap way to make bland poetry, music, dance, circus acts, and other “performing arts” sound more sexy.

Take this example—a flatulent work entitled ‘Performance Art Dance Piece’ in which three “dancers” attempt tired choreography that employs the same uninspired modern and contemporary dance vocabulary we’ve seen again and again. The men have little dance training, judging from their rickety turns, sloppy footing, poor spotting, lack of centers, Oompa Loompa groundwork, and newborn balance. But here’s the thing: if these unfortunate negatives had been taken to their extremes—if the dancers’ bad technique had been pushed to the forefront until the trio became abstract drunks trying to find their footing, or mentally challenged monks doing bizarre kung fu, or gods making an obvious attempt at reordering the dirt universe that the artists were mindlessly kicking up—this piece could’ve been transformed from bad dance into a unique Performance Art piece with its own internal structure and logic that demanded the audience “figure out” the spatial-movement-narrative language of the artists. But the movement, being so clearly Dance with a capital D, and choreographed with so many of the dance clichés we’ve all seen before, has left the “figuring out” pre-figured for us; we see the recognizable, codified movements and know instantly that this is Dance—which means the only mystery remaining for us is why anyone bothered to film the piece at all. There’s a fine line between bad art and good Performance Art, but this piece is simply proof again that the lazy fix for shitty art has become to label it Performance Art, then wait for someone to show up and clap.

Given its Dadaist, Anarchist, and anti-consumerist roots, I am all for Performance Art defying/defiling its own definitions and conventions, as it should—which is why the dilution of its name by arts that appear to be dying slow, painful deaths thanks to predictable, self-referential, and uninspired works makes me queasy.

I view definitions of Performance Art with suspicion—which is why it’s with a little self-loathing that I give you the Scotch Wichmann Performance Art manifesto, previously unpublished—and maybe it should’ve stayed that way.

I just couldn’t wait to show you these links:

Columbia University valedictorian admits stealing jokes from Patton Oswalt for his commencement speech. LOSER.

Official recipe for making brownies from the Pentagon. Section 3.2.8: “Dextrose shall be anhydrous or dextrose hydrate.” YES SIR!

And I just can’t get enough of Justice Yeldham playing the edge of a sheet of glass. Holy shit this one’s amazing.

Performance Art is alive and well in Southern California, thanks to my old performance art mentor John White—the performance artist’s performance artist—who is hosting a new performance series called 5x5x5 in Ventura. If you like Performance Art, Surrealism, Dada, sideshows, my-tongue-in-your-cheek hi/lo counter-counter-counterculture, or just “What the f*ck did I just witness?” moments, don’t miss this show this Friday, May 7 at 8PM when 4 performers and I will unveil brand new works.

In past pieces I’ve eaten trash, cut off my index finger, given birth to a chair, been slapped repeatedly by a 6’4 red head, and spit bullets while bouncing up and down on a piece of air heating duct (that was a noisy one). Don’t miss it!

5x5x5 Performance Art Series Hosted by John White — FREE! Friday May 7 @ 8pm at The Sylvia White Gallery, 1783 E. Main Street, Ventura, CA, Tel. 805-643-8300