In Memoriam #3: Frank Green

by Jordan Davis

It was a sticky Friday night, long before artist-run galleries would have air conditioning, years before you had to pay to park in the Warehouse district, and still some time before the Slam Poetry craze convinced every local writer that a strident voice and off-kilter cadence could make a performer out of them.  The exhibition opening at SPACES Gallery brought forth another lively assortment of working artists and academics, wanna-bes, will-bes and shouldn’t bes, and other miscellaneous urban curiosities that formed the evolving downtown Cleveland art scene in the late 1980’s.  It was the usual, unusual mix of party and pretense, networking and nitpicking, with a little wine and cheese on the side.  I was managing the joint, and somehow I was supposed to find a way to send everybody home and lock the doors at 9:00pm.  The throng flowed noisily through the site-specific installations, variously intrigued, bewildered, or oblivious to the artwork around them.

Until a skinny kid took the open microphone and launched into a searing, trance-like excursion to a fantastical world of depravity and ecstasy, yearning and reaching.  I remember being taken to a dark, busy place where freedom wasn’t the answer, where your quest might not be rewarded, where your euphoria had to match wits with your loneliness.  His was an emphatic, twisting orbit of self-awareness and self-searching.  Yes, people stopped in their tracks. Yes, people shut their gobs in awe.  Yes, people wondered, “Who is this guy?”

Frank Green’s performance that night was a stunning injection of focussed intensity that upped the ante for local writers and performance artists.  Here was Marco Polo, freshly arrived from a distant, imagined land – another downtown, Manhattan – and he laid out his maps and jewels for all to marvel at.  He had lived with the exotic natives, learned their customs, absorbed their beliefs, shared in their treasures, and he brought these back home to enrich his own countrymen.  I knew I was seeing a kindred spirit, but someone who was far ahead in his facility, experience and depth of self-expression.  Although he wasn’t trying to, that night he broke open a peephole into new possibilities for some of us here in his newly-reclaimed artistic homeland.

Frank would spend the next decade and more blowing minds with the inventiveness of his personal expressions as a writer, visual artist and performer.  His work spoke of depravity and ecstasy, and the very human task of navigating between the two.  The pieces were autobiographical, but never egotistic.  He performed in galleries and bookstores, theaters and festivals, and occasionally on tour.  Prominent local champions of his output were the Cleveland International Performance Art Festival and Cleveland Public Theatre.  His performance pieces were confrontational, risky and shocking, but only because he himself felt confronted by the risks and shocks of life, and he sought to make sense of it all.  His emotional scenery could be intricately crafted and frighteningly intimate, yet his delivery was assured and detached, and often presented with a sophisticated formal structure.  He knew his references.  He could channel J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Phillip K. Dick and James Joyce all in a single evening, and still remain uniquely himself.  He was deeply influenced by multiple medical interventions he endured during childhood, and his themes were often medical in nature.  He would ask audience members to donate parts of their bodies, (fingernail clippings, for example), during a stage performance.  Dressed in a doctor’s smock he could say “Ahhhhhhh,” repeatedly and calmly, with exotic laboratory paraphenalia in his mouth.  He might fry insects in a hot skillet while wearing a diaper to juxtapose our own vulnerability with our deep-seated fears.

The twelve years of the Performance Art Festival roughly coincided with Frank’s own peak years.  The world came to Cleveland to push every envelope of creative performance, from body mutilation to street theater to endurance art to multi-media spectacle.  As far-reaching as these explorations were, they occurred nearly underground by today’s standards.  One wonders how the internet, flip-cams and tweets might have influenced what transpired there and then.  But they were some of the most exciting years for creative expression Cleveland has known, and Frank was working solidly at the core, striving not for success, fame or finance, but simply as a vision-driven artist seeking meaning through creative interaction.

Frank Green journeyed deep into areas of life most of us might avoid or ignore, and he spoke about their nature with authority.  He possessed a raw sensitivity that belied, or perhaps, required, a tough outer persona.  In his later years his trusting nature somehow came forward, even as his hands-on involvement with his art necessarily waned.  The scarlet letters, HIV and AIDS, were a fact of life for him for many years.  They robbed him, and us, of his many artistic gifts.  Just as unfortunately, his major works, his elaborately constructed multi-media performances, were never adequately documented, and survive only in minor technological relics and in the memories of those lucky enough to “be there.”

 

The family are planning a service, at the Unitarian Church West and an afternoon or evening memorial will be held at the Beachland – both to happen at the end of February or beginning of March, when brother Jason can get home.

There will be an exhibit of Frank Green materials at the next Tremont Art Walk Fri 2/8 at the Tremont West Development Corp where Frank once worked.

Also read the remembrance by Cindy Penter here.

Also read the remembrance by Cindy Barber here.

 

Cleveland, OH 44110

Cleveland, OH 44113

 

 

Post categories:

• Uncategorized
• News
• Commentary
• Jordan Davis