New Year Eve 1999. Everyone was celebrating, trying to forget that Y2K and the millennium bug were only 12 short months away. What would happen when the last two digits of the great cosmic clock flipped from 99 to double aughts? Nobody knew for sure, all we could do was speculate. Would all the traffic signals flash red and green at the same time, or maybe one-hundred-dollar bills would squirt from the ATM machines? How about Al Gore’s internet? Would it crash in a big puff of black smoke? No matter the outcome, there wouldn’t be any lifeboats to escape this doomed planet.
As time marched on, ticking off one second after another toward the inevitability of Y2K, some of us popped pills, binged on booze or soothed fevered minds with the hard stuff, books. At the time, I’d get lost in Half Price Books. Once I’d found my way out of the store, I’d purchased another one of Patricia Cornwell’s novels. It was reading about the exploits of the cool-headed medical examiner, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, that inspired me to perform an autopsy. To quote Dr. Scarpetta, “To expose what lies hidden opens up a whole new perspective on how to view the world.”
My first stop was not the county morgue, but ATEX Computer Salvage where I purchased several computer towers and defunct monitors for five bucks each. What a bargain. Back in my tiny one-person art studio, wearing a dust mask and surgical gloves, I dissected inanimate computer corpses, exposing dozens of power cables, memory boards, expansion cards and the all-important processor. The circuit boards from inside the monitors gave up a whole array of copper coated do-dads and multi-colored cylindrical thing-a-ma-gigs, not to mention the gleaming widgets.
After the disassembly was performed, a suitable frame from a defunct monitor was painted black, green or red, it all depended on which aerosol-spray can held the most paint. You can imagine my surprise when I opened an Apple ‘designer’ monitor. The inside had been signed by employees. Even Steve Jobs’ name was etched in the plastic. Now, how to attach the computer parts and pieces onto the outside of the frame? Great Stuff Insulating Foam expands and hardens like a rock. Although it was nasty smelling and stuck like glue to everything, Great Stuff anchored all the colorful do-dads and widgets now permanently adhered to all four sides. What goes in the empty frame? A digitalized, reimaged, remixed and recolored 8x10 inch glossy photo of a famous movie star, musician, cathedral and in some instances a pierced nipple. Planet Silicon was born and the kids started calling me Doctor Frankenstein.
Nipplelodian
Some might view piercing a nipple as torture. For others it’s a form of blissful stimulation. It was while I spent time grinding out my thesis, Scarification, And It’s Role In Modern Society, I asked my advisor, “Is drilling a hole through the mammary papilla any different than poking a needle through the earlobe, nose cartilage, the lip, tongue or labia?” Since he didn’t seem to have an answer, I did my own research and found out how primitive tribes use skin scarification and body piercing as initiation ceremonies. In the process I ran across digitalized images of modern people proudly displaying pierced nipples. Purely done in the interest of furthering my scholastic requirements, and to be fair to both sexes, I downloaded both male and female images of people with nipple rings, studs, hooks, pins and needles some of which had been chained to an eyebrow or earlobe. Once the brightly colored 8 x 10 photos were hot-glued in the blown-up frames, Nipplelodian was ready to exhibit.
After watching actor Rob Nash inhabit the introspective and sometimes troubled characters in his one-man stand-up act, Holy Cross, I bumped into Bonnie C. who was the impresario at the Vortex theater. As luck would have it, I had one of my Nipplelodian pieces stashed in the car. When Bonnie saw a large, engorged nipple impaled by a thin white animal bone her eyes widened. Then, she sized-up the crazy blown-up computer frame and became so enthusiastic she gave me a wall at her eponymous theater to display Nipplelodian. Bonnie C., a pioneer of Austin’s alternate live theater scene, appreciated my artistic vision, how wonderful. The very next evening I hung several of my female-only Nipplelodian pieces at the Vortex. When I took a couple of steps back to admire the work, I heard someone say, “That all looks very interesting.”
Bonnie’s eyes were glued on one particular monitor. I chuckled. “Yeah, I’d never seen a double nipple piercing, either.”
Silently I wondered if Nipplelodian might be too risqué even for Vortex patrons who I assumed were a progressive bunch, not by their dress or looks of course, but from the theater’s sometimes provocative productions. One of Vortex’s past performances was the hyper-kenetic cyber-opera, Black Blood featuring bare-breasted female cyborgs. There was ex-porn star, avant-garde performance artist, Annie Sprinkle who performed her Public Cervix Announcement on stage at the Vortex. Ms. Sprinkle in the starring role sat in a chair, leaned way back, spread her legs, then inserted a shiny chrome speculum between the walls of her vagina. The audience was invited to stand in line to examine what the duck-billed medical device had exposed. A flashlight was used for illumination. When it was my turn, I saw the raw inside of a pink oyster, I think it even winked at me.
Then there was the matter of the yoni. I was familiar with the Greek-American musician, Yanni, but come to find out, yoni was Sanskrit for vagina. Hanging on a wall opposite Nipplelodian were dozens of plaster-of-Paris yonis. From the various shapes and sizes, I assumed all were cast from the private parts of different women. Taking into account the many different representations of the human female body, I assumed Nipplelodian was in good company at the Vortex. You can imagine my surprise when, a week after installing Nipplelodian, Bonnie called to inform me that my exhibition had to come down.
“Why?” I asked.
“People are complaining that it’s pornography. It’s not the images, but the pain.”
I suggested that the individuals portrayed in Nipplelodian were not suffering, they were using their pierced nipples to make a statement. To Bonnie’s credit she agreed with my assessment, but in the world of live theater, the customer is always right. Nipplelodian was removed from the Vortex and the offensive pieces were stacked in my tiny one-room studio. Toward the end of 1999 my next show was scheduled at the new Samsung headquarters in Northeast Austin. I was excited to learn that on opening night, Samsung’s CEO, Mister Lee with his Korean entourage, would be in attendance.
To my surprise, Mister Lee understood my vision and became visibly excited when he laid his eyes on Planet Silicon – The Samsung Era. Even more amazing, Mister Lee purchased the entire collection of digitalized photos which included the Samsung building with a fountain out front, Austin’s iconic Barton Springs, bluebonnets, longhorn steers and of course the capitol building. All the pieces were to be shipped back to Mister Lee’s home in South Korea. The third shock of the evening came when I returned home to find my art studio engulfed in flames. A pile of paint rags soaked in acetone had spontaneously combusted.
At one second after midnight 1999 everybody celebrated. Why? Because Y2K turned out to be a big woof. A new century was on the horizon and the black mound of plastic that used to be Nipplelodian was hauled to the dump. As the last warped, twisted frame was pitched over the side of the pickup, it occurred to me that just like Y2K all the hoopla over Nipplelodian was really much ado about nothing.
Onward to Censored Part Three, Starring the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin with a supporting role by Riverbend Baptist Church.