Tom Armstrong talks Orwell and New York with the veteran performance artist.
People often say that if you want to feel comfortable talking to someone, just imagine them naked. Perfect, because the person sitting in front of me is 62 year old performance artist and legend of the New York underground, Penny Arcade, and it just so happens that last Friday night, I saw her naked.
In fact, everybody in Dalston's Arcola Tent did. The piece was part of Arcade's travelling anti-censorship, pro-liberation show Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!, a mish-mash of outspoken monologues and skits based on her experiences as the Queen of New York's alternative scene.
“I wrote it in 1990” she tells me across the table in her dressing room, dressed casually in sportswear but retaining the enthusiasm of her manic stage performance. “My motivation was that I was annoyed both by the right wing and the downtown art scene's preoccupation with sensationalistic sex and censorship. The right wing was censoring everything - it was frightening, and the art scene didn't seem to be interested, only as far as funding went, you know? They couldn't care that they were removing the Playboy and Penthouse magazines out of the cornershop, or that teenage girls couldn't read about their own periods at the library. And I found myself in between these two groups.”
Born Susannah Ventura to Italian immigrant parents in a New England factory town, Arcade fled small town life to become a rising star in New York's '60s avant garde - a Warhol superstar by the age of 19. A life as an integral cog in the city's alternative scenes followed, bearing witness to key moments from the Stonewall riots to the AIDS epidemic, which she describes with poignancy in the show.
Far from being one long angry rant, the tone of B!D!F!W! is overwhelmingly positive, with Arcade citing unity through liberation and tolerance as the force needed to overcome censorship. Whenever the show has been performed since its birth, she tells me, audiences tend to think it was written specifically for that time - a testament not only to the endurance of the material but also to the apparent permanence of the problems Arcade addresses. And that doesn't seem to be changing on either side of the Atlantic. Last year Hackney Council passed a 'nil policy' motion which banned the opening of any new strip clubs or sex shops in the borough, something which now seems to be happening in the neighbouring borough of Tower Hamlets.
“What's happened in Hackney happened in New York 15 years ago” Penny's years of experience combined with a matter-of-fact tone are difficult to disagree with as she recalls the countless sex shops and peep shows that were shut down in the ruthless sanitization of New York. “Suddently there was this protectionist mentality, like 'our children are not free to roam the streets of New York!' but its all an excuse for massive control, and people get used to control. It's scary”
She pulls no punches when discussing the hypocrisy of the liberal left and political correctness: “the whole academic identity politics where you're only allowed to use certain language to talk about race, identity, gender - it's really designed to limit conversation, and I'm very very annoyed by that. I find it counter revolutionary.”
Has she always held such strong opinions? “I was always that outsider and even though I was very opinionated I never felt I really deserved, or had a right, to say what I thought. But by the time I was 40 apparently I did!” she says, with a characteristic big smile. “I wanted to speak for people who were like me but who can't speak, who don't have the possibility, because working class people have an intellectualism that people don't understand.”
Equally ardent about the merits of George Orwell as her times working the phones in a brothel, there's a childlike innocence to Arcade's voice which I'm sure many have regrettably confused with naivety. The way she gives you her stories and opinions, all wide-eyes and blonde hair, laying it down straight, lets you know that this girl has been around. “I'm working class, I haven't been to university, but I'm a lifelong student. I guess I'm what they call autodidactic” she smiles.
Her opening line on Friday, “We had to come to London because America doesn't want us any more!” got laughs and a few self-congratulatory cheers from the crowd, but what are her opinions on the city that allowed her to become who she is? “New York has been completely suburbanized,” she tells me in a typically sweeping opening statement. “It's been completely commodified. People are moving to New York who would have been afraid to visit there fifteen years ago. People used to come to New York for freedom – to get away from their small towns and small minds, and now people come because they watch Sex and the City”.
“I just think that there's certain periods of time when certain places have become more vital.” She says when I ask her what modern day London looks like through her experienced eyes, “1899-1940 it was Paris, from 1940 to fairly recently it was New York and now it's London. That doesn't mean that just anybody can make something out of that, but there is a great deal of vitality here”.
Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! is at the Arcola Tent until 22nd July.
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