When performance artist par excellence, former notorious Warhol actress, East Village anti-gentrification activist, downtown art archivist, and libidinal hurricane Penny Arcade came across my manifesto Toward the New Degeneracy, which deals with bohemia and the artistic avant-garde, she knew we were destined to meet.
Wish I’d shared the same intuition.
For more than two years, on the advice of certain (ex-)friends, I assiduously evaded the Exterminating Angel known as Penny, out of fear that my narcissism wasn’t strong enough to vanquish hers. I mean, who knew more about bohemia, the cultural history of New York, or the disastrous gentrification of the East Village than she? Meeting her might force me to take my 20-year-old gold-braided chip off my shoulder, despite my fondness for epaulettes (they were big in the '70s). Maybe I’d have to turn in my crown of thorns and relinquish to her my prickly throne as the Royal Crank of Anti-Establishment Rants.
Well, never, Mary.
But actually, I had a lot to worry about. Nobody can harangue, disturb, delight, and mesmerize a crowd by relentless complaint and irresistible humor like the divine Penny. After going to one of her shows, which pulls in everybody under 40 still living in the East Village and those now populating Brooklyn, I realized she had accomplished the impossible: making moralizing delightfully entertaining.
Penny’s keen critical mind never tires in its efforts to forge a social and artistic utopia in which women will be treated equally, artists will be recognized for their contributions, and critics will magically have good judgment as well as refrain from ass-kissing the powers that be.
Lots of luck, girl.
It was only when I decided to take the chance of meeting Penny that I realized I’d only seen one-half of the picture. Whether her politics leave me fuming or her social insights leave me cold isn’t really the issue. The issue - at least from my superficial faggy point of view - is that Penny is delightful company. No one, in fact, is quite so spunky, so quick on the draw, so generous, and so community-minded as this kinky graduate of New York’s grimy streets. She also has nice skin, decent tits and cheekbones, which is more than I can say - on all counts. And no one I’ve ever met has given faggotdom so much credit for the development of her vivid personality and artistic skills.
Having abandoned a conventional working-class Italian home and a conventional working class Italian name (Susan Ventura) to rub shoulders with drag queens the likes of Jackie Curtis and Margo Howard Howard, or underground-filmmaking homo madmen like Jack Smith, Penny Arcade has been on the New York scene since she was jailbait. During her early period of life on the streets, sarcastic, campy and sometimes downright mean faggots were her playful father surrogates. Can you imagine? From them she learned to value art, spit at the establishment, field irony and survive as an outsider.
Wherever there is a sexual deviant of note, Penny is not far behind. She was the mainstay of Quentin Crisp right until his death, sat at the wealthy bedside of Charles Henri Ford in the Dakota to the bitter end, is currently involved in a struggle to preserve the legacy of Jack Smith and has interviewed a host of artists, performers, and writers for her video archives, known as the Lower East Side Biography Project. If none of these names seems familiar, you’re probably under thirty and most definitely a ditz-ball. You need Penny (and me) to clue you in about the history of the ground upon which you walk. I probably wouldn’t bother, but Penny would.
So continue on to see what Penny had to say from Vienna when I skyped her from New York.
Portraits of Penny Arcade by Jasmine Hirst
Bruce Benderson: Well, darling, can you hear this? Is it being broadcast through a speaker?
Penny Arcade: No. Only we can hear it.
Bruce: Then let me just noisily wolf down the rest of this pizza. As usual, I'm a big pig when it comes to you.
Penny: OK, then let me get a cigarette and I’ll be very happy, so hold on - nosh in peace.
[several moments later]
Bruce: I'm very interested in something you talked about in an essay you sent me, which was about snobbery and the class prejudice against you. I'd actually like to start there with our discussion, cause you know how interested and titillated I am by class issues.
Penny: Well, I think that because the 60s downtown art scene was so diverse, I never had any experience of class issues at first, because one of the things that happened in the mid to late 60s was a complete class collapse in certain circles.
Bruce: Yeah. At first it had a really positive effect because it allowed people from other classes to sneak into the scene.
Penny: Yes, absolutely, and mingle.
Bruce: Studio 54 was an excellent example. Although it was celebrity-minded, all sorts of lower class people were let in just for their bodies.
Penny:: That's right, that’s also when I started going to gay bars at the age of 14, and everybody was there.
Bruce: Yes, they used to be so eclectic.
Penny: Yes, used to be. So of course someone like me, who was a little working-class reform school girl, got snuck into gay bars in the early 60s in Hartford, Connecticut, and overheard conversations between, say, a mechanic who was into opera and the president of a bank who was into it, too.
Bruce: Did you have sex or love interests with any of these gabby homo culture vultures?
Penny: Yes.
Bruce: Was it frustrating or rewarding?
Penny: You have to remember that, classically, there’s a tremendous amount of sexual energy in a fag-hag relationship, it’s usually not just about wanting sex. There is a very strong erotic energy.
Bruce: I couldn't agree more, doll. Look at you and me.
Penny: [sighs] Yes, darling, and throughout my life I think it had less to do with people being gay or straight or bisexual than with the intensity of individual personalities bonding. At times they were able to surmount the big sexual difference of my not being a male.
Bruce: But you were never in a lovelorn position, or what one might describe as a masochistic situation?
Penny: No, because I figured it out quick. You may remember that I say in my show Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! that by the time I was 18, I’d stopped trying to fuck gay men. I’d caught on.
Bruce: OK, but let’s get back to class. When I think about that subject and you, I immediately think of two older gay men who you were very close to and for whom class was a big issue: Quentin Crisp and Charles Henri Ford. Crisp, especially, made strong class judgments, and although he liked to think of himself as culturally upper class, I think his judgments about the subject were typically petit bourgeois, if you'll allow me to make a class judgment. I wonder how you dealt with this or what your attitude about it was, because it always turned me off something terrible. I couldn’t stand Crisp.
Penny: Well, first of all, I accepted the fact that Quentin was very elderly, and that he was invariably tied to his upbringing. In a way, I think all of us tend to be, as we get older. We may have rebelled against certain things in our 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, but we go a little bit in the other direction in our 60s, 70 and 80s.
Bruce: Crisp was petit bourgeois by background, I think.
Penny: One of the things I noticed in the last ten years of his life was that he was far more middle class than he thought he was.
Bruce:Uh huh. I gave him my first book, Pretending to Say No, and he was scandalized by what he called the “obscenity” in it. He associated libido with obscenity, and with a lower class mentality, and he was against it.
Penny: This issue is a very sensitive one because Quentin is somebody who was very, very damaged by his early sexual life. He was very, very romantic as a young person, and I think that the coarseness of the situations he found himself in... Well, that’s probably why he identified with women so strongly, because he had this kind of romantic idea and would find some guy and then it would be just about sex and the romantic part of him was never addressed.
Bruce: So his revenge was to judge these people in a negative way as lower-class types?
Penny: I think that sex was just a horror for him
Bruce: How come?
Penny: Well, I'm sure it was because he was being paid for sex, and he was the bottom and had to accept whatever the person wanted. Mentally he was in rebellion against it, but emotionally I think he was quite masochistic and felt that was all he deserved. He was very conflicted. He was someone who never had great sex.
Bruce: And you really feel this led to all his harsh judgments about class?
Penny: Well, not about class but anything connected with sex. At the end of his life he would continuously say, “Penny Arcade is only interested in sex,” and I thought that was such a weird take on me, because clearly that's not true. But that was his interpretation of everything that he saw in me at that time. He was really all about propriety and politeness and, unfortunately, to a certain degree, his regard for people operated on a real surface level, it was about being polite. At the end of his life, I was one of the few people who actually knew how much money he had. Two months before he died, I said, “Listen, don’t you want to make some kind of provision for elderly gay people over 75 or something like that? Because this was at a time when the East Village was really changing and people were being pushed out of their homes, and there was no money for lawyers. He was absolutely against it, and his response was, “If we all got what we deserved we would starve to death!.”
Bruce: OK, despite what Quentin thought about your sexuality, it’s certainly an important aspect of you. Because I know you’re interested in Reich and his theories.
Penny: I started doing Reichian therapy in 1983 and had the opportunity to work with Dr. Jorge Stolkiner, a Reichian doctor from Argentina, a country where the work is very close to what Reich himself practiced. The first time I went to see him he said only a couple of things, and one of the things he said just by looking at me, and it was, “You probably work in the sex industry.” I was completely shocked, because at that time I did. I was flabbergasted that he could see that in character analysis, just by looking at my face.
Bruce: Well, darling, what were you wearing?
Penny: No, it wasn't the way I was dressed, I was always dressed, you know, casually. But the point was that I was very intrigued by this. Reich understood that armoring takes place in the body because of fear, and I've always been very sexual, from the time I was a child. I've been knowingly bisexual since I was five. My fantasies were always about girls and boys, and I had a very active sexual imagination, and many of these things I’d imagined actually existed, I was later to find out. In Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! there’s a little girl section where she talks about tying up other little girls and spanking them in the basement. And all the little boys would come in and pee and we would cook with it, and all that sort of thing.
Bruce: They’d pee and you’d cook. I'm sure you didn't use one material for the other activity?
Penny: Yes, we did, absolutely. They wouldn't let us run the garden hose, and you can't cook without water. The boys would run in and out all day saying, “Need any pee?” and we'd say yes.
Bruce: And did you eat what you’d cooked?
Penny: No.
Bruce: I want to talk with you about Warhol, as I've been thinking a great deal - negatively - about him. I've even been thinking about writing about him, and I’m very interested in your take. Not only about what his aesthetic really was, but about what his motives really were, his modus operandi... and that really relates to everything we've already talked about so far. Not only sex, but class. Because what a few others and I have noticed is that, at least during the beginning of his career, when he achieved all his notoriety, it was people from working class backgrounds who were attracting all the attention for him. In fact, he himself was from a lower class immigrant background, and yet he seems to have abandoned it even though it was at the foundation of his success. So could you talk about that?
Penny: Well, in fact, I just went to this symposium in Columbus, Ohio, connected to this big exhibition at the Wexler Center.
Bruce: Oh, was Bibbe Hanson there? I simply adore her! She has that je ne sais quoi, don’t you think?
Penny: [mocking Bruce’s fake tone] Yes, I do, dahling. But, no, she was in Germany for some reason. I was really disappointed because I was looking forward to spending time with her, she's very fabulous. Anyway, it was one of the most interesting Warhol shows I've ever seen. The way it was mounted put very little distance between the viewer and the work. It was just unbelievably well-designed, but unfortunately it’s only going to be shown at the Wexler - and somewhere in England. Anyhow, I looked at the exhibit with John Giorno and Taylor Mead. You couldn't have two better people to see that exhibit with.
Bruce: I'm glad Taylor is still mobile.
Penny: Yes, he was, we were wheeling him around.
Bruce: Oh.
Penny: Yes, he's had a bit of a stroke and it’s affected his balance. But you know, he is 84 and he has a marvelous mind, and of course both he and John knew Warhol from very early on. They knew him starting in 1961 or something.
Bruce: But you knew him, too, didn't you?
Penny: Yes, but I met him after he was shot, which was a whole other thing. But what I wanted to say was that when I first came to New York, the first scene I was involved in was this very heavy-duty downtown drug scene of amphetamine addicts, and most of them were the people who populated The Factory.
Bruce: And most of them were from lower class backgrounds, I’d like to add.
Penny: They were all from lower class backgrounds, and Andy actually created The Factory for Ondine. Andy was a voyeur, and he was extremely drawn to this kind of criminal underground scene. Years ago, about 1997, I went with Victor Bockris to an exhibit about Warhol. It was about at the same time as the big retrospective on Jack Smith at PS1. They were kind of dueling exhibits at one point, and they had these vitrines with Andy's clothes in them, his leather jacket and his Marseilles sailor jersey and black boots. And I looked at it with Victor, who wrote the best biography of Warhol, and I said, "Oh my God, Andy was so into Jean Genet! All those gay guys from the 50s and 60s, you know, Jean Genet was their hero, his rough trade, criminal thing; and Victor's eyes popped open wide. 'You've just hit the nail on the head,” he said, “I never thought of that before. In fact, when I first approached Andy and wanted to do the biography of him, his first response was, "Why do you want to do a biography of me, why don't you do one on somebody interesting, somebody like Jean Genet?'"
Bruce: Let me add a thought. Really, his entire formula is very typical of exploitation, he’s somebody from the lower classes - who of course absorbed what he saw, some relative or certain working class social or cultural situations that were either sordid or energetic or ill-intentioned. And I think he repressed his connection to all of it. But because you can never get rid of these things, he then chose people on the outside world to act out these conflicts, to act out his closeness and connection to working class mentalities. But because he himself wasn’t admitting a connection to it, it became a kind of exploitation.
Penny: Well, yes, Andy was from an immigrant background, and I'm from an immigrant background, too. When you grow up in 1940s America like him, or 1950s America like me, you really are The Other, if you know what I mean. So Andy was upwardly mobile, he was the first person in his family to go to college, he came to New York, he kind of patterned himself on Truman Capote, a kind of dandy, who was somewhat intellectual and very faggy. He was ultra-dandy-faggy... with his bowties...
Bruce: If you compare what you did as an artist with your immigrant background to what Andy did with his immigrant background, the difference is that you owned it, expressed it, and analyzed it. Andy Warhol never got up there and said, “I'm from a working class Czech background, my relatives worked in factories.” It had to be found out about him.
Penny: I absolutely agree, but I mean, look, the guy was a super-hard worker, and by 1960 he was wealthy. Once he achieved this kind of financial success and acceptance, he then started to get voyeuristic… Whenever Ondine would see Andy, he’d say, “Get that guy out of here, he gives me the creeps.”
Bruce:But he had a need for his voyeurism because it represented what he had rejected in himself.
Penny: Yes. In my early conversations with Andy, probably one of the reasons why my relationship with him didn't develop more depth was that my immediate thing was to talk about us both being from working class and immigrant backgrounds. The town that I come from is all Eastern European Catholics: Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian. And Andy reminded me of all the people I knew in my hometown, some of whom lived there with their mothers because they were gay, and went to mass on Sundays, etc. Bringing this stuff up to Andy made him really nervous.
Bruce: But don’t you resent his exploitation attitude, not owning himself what he used voyeuristically, using others to act it out and profiting from it?
Penny: No.
Bruce: Well, I do.
Penny: Well, I don't resent him for it. Here's a funny story, did you ever know Herndon Ely? She was in the Playhouse of the Ridiculous at the end of the 60s. I knew her there. She was an East Village figure, an amazing artist, a speed freak, you know. She had a long relationship with Dorothy Podber, and Dorothy was the sidekick of Ray Johnson, a big speed freak, big meth amphetamine person. And all the speed freaks of the 60s of that circle were massively creative, they were all amazing artists. Dorothy was ill for a long time. She was 75 when she died. Within a very, very short time Herndon died, and I don't know under what circumstances, but I had seen Herndon July 15th, when I had left for Europe on my birthday. At any rate, I was greatly saddened to hear about Herndon’s death. It was a big shock to me and I decided to google Dorothy Podber. This is like some really obscure East Village figure. Well low and behold, there is this obituary in the New York Times... and it talks about her relationship with Ray Johnson, and the happenings and how they used to go about terrorizing people as an art form. But there's also an interesting little story about how she had gone up to The Factory in 1963, and there were a bunch of 'Marilyn's' sitting around and she said to Andy, “Oh, can I shoot them?” and Andy said, “Sure, go ahead.” So she took out a gun and shot a stack of four of them between the eyes. Andy flipped out and said to Billy Name, “Get Dorothy out of here and please don't bring her here again, she really scares me.”
Bruce: Did he think she was going to shoot them with a camera?
Penny: Yes! But what I thought about was the first foreshadowing of somebody shooting a Warhol and of somebody shooting Andy. And as for the original Factory, I heard about it when I was on the Lower East Side in all those shooting galleries, because a lot of those people who were coming through these dark, dank shooting galleries that I was crashing in as a 16- or 17-year-old were also hanging out at The Factory. You know, Andy used lots of speed, and he surrounded himself with these quite dangerous people. But I never experienced Andy as exploiting anybody. I think people were exploiting him while Andy was exploiting them; it was a two-way street.
Bruce: It was one big happy exploitation party!
Penny: Yes.
Bruce: This is my last question: I feel that a lot about your performance and your value as an artist has to do with the cult of personality. Your art, in a large way, has to do with your personality in a very unmediated way, and that’s the first thing I'd like you to tell me about. Then as a corollary I'd like to know why you think you are important, why you think your cultural voice is important.
Penny: Well, first and foremost, I never thought I was going to be an artist, even all the time I was making art. My goal was to live an artistic life, I thought I could do that. I've always been a great performer, ever since I started performing. I’m charismatic, I have a lot of energy, I have timing - all the things that are important when you perform. When I was in my twenties, I really felt like there was something I wanted to express. But I didn’t know what it was, and I ended up taking lots of time living in other cultures. The thing is, I've always been a storyteller. I’ve always been a person with lots of experiences and I've wanted to talk about them. So, fundamentally, when I started making my own work, it happened totally accidentally, out of telling stories about what had just happened to me or what someone had just said to me. And one day I was on Avenue A telling somebody a story about Dame Margot Howard Howard, you know, the famous junkie drag queen, and as I was telling the story I suddenly had the sense, “Wow, I could do this on stage. Being Southern Italian, I come from a storytelling tradition, and all through my childhood the stories being told around the kitchen table were definitely more interesting than Bonanza or anything else on television, so I come from that background. I also come from the bad blood of the family, you know. I turned 14 in juvenile detention, then got put into a soft-core reform school.
Bruce: Hot. Did you have a nice party?
Penny: No. It was me getting my period on an iron bed in the Hartford House of Detention. That was my birthday. Here's the point: I’ve always had a peculiar point of view, and I think artists report from the edge of society. Only outsiders can speak to the whole because they are outside it. That’s how far it goes with my unmediated voice. Around 1976-77, I was living in Maine, and there was this odd-job store in the middle of nowhere, and once I found a whole bunch of discounted copies of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music there. It was a completely instrumental screeching thing. Of course, I knew that Lou Reed had been involved with all these speed freaks I had known, so I bought one for a dollar and brought it home and said to myself, “This album is for the people who have no music, and I’m a voice for people who have no voice.”
Bruce: So this is political for you, this is almost like a crusade to give these voiceless people a voice.
Penny: Kenneth Bernard, the theater playwright and academic, wrote an introduction to the new book about and by me to be published by Semiotext(e), and he made a very interesting point by saying, “Arcade is a reformer,”....and I am.
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