Jill Kroesen

On the occasion of this presentation of Stanley Oil and His Mother: A Systems Portrait of the Western World (1977), Jill Kroesen generously spoke with Alison Burstein, Curator, Media and Engagement about this performance and about her artistic trajectory more broadly. As part of an ongoing effort to reconsider The Kitchen’s history in anticipation of its 50th anniversary by revisiting and re-contextualizing archival materials, this conversation and the other components of the Video Viewing Room shed light on Kroesen’s sustained relationship with the organization from the mid-1970s through mid-1980s, during which time she appeared in eleven unique events as either presenting artist or performer.

Alison Burstein [AB]: To start, could you speak about your decision to move to New York in 1974 after graduating from the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland, California, where you had studied with composer Robert Ashley?

Jill Kroesen [JK]: It was always in the back of my mind to go to New York. When I graduated from Mills, I went to New York about three days later. And in New York at that time, art was everywhere. I stayed in Soho with one of my sister’s old boyfriends, the painter Peter Reginato. There was art all over the walls of the buildings! I had gone to a concert and somebody recognized me. It was Mimi Johnson [Robert Ashley’s partner]. It was just magical.

So I found a loft, went back to California, got my stuff, and moved without even a thought. Soon after, fellow students of Bob Ashley—my friends Beth Anderson and Peter Gordon—followed.

AB: You presented and performed in several pieces at The Kitchen before Stanley Oil and His Mother in 1977. First you staged your work Dear Ashley In The Kitchen in 1975, and you returned in May of that year to perform Rhys Chatham’s group composition Slow Joe’s Last Chance and then again in February 1976 to be part of Peter Gordon’s Symphony in 4 Movements. Could you elaborate on how you became involved with The Kitchen and came to collaborate with other artists in The Kitchen’s community?

JK: In 1975, Carlota Schoolman invited me to do a piece at The Kitchen, and I ended up presenting Dear Ashley In The Kitchen. I had just moved to New York, and nobody knew who I was. They gave me this opportunity to do this piece. It was amazing.

In those days, all the artists worked together and it was a mish mash of everybody. Peter Gordon created the Love of Life Orchestra, which pretty much everybody was in and out of. So I probably met many people during Peter Gordon’s performances. I also began working at The Kitchen as the video technician in 1975 after I performed Dear Ashley in The Kitchen, so I met people like Rhys Chatham, Robert Longo, and Eric Bogosian there.

At that time it was like everybody was helping everybody else. There were a lot of crossovers—the video people and the music people and the dance people all working together. Everything was very collaborative and very cooperative. I grew up in Oakland, California, which was more like that than other cities. It’s more like a cooperative society, everybody supporting each other.

AB: The Kitchen’s press release for Stanley Oil and His Mother provides a concise introduction to the performance: “Stanley Oil and His Mother: A Theatrical Systems Portrait of the Western World is a large scale work for 36 performers involving music, dance and conversation. The scope of this historical work covers the span of time from the age when plant life dominated the Earth to the near future. Social structures within the various countries of the world are exposed to our view by the presence of Kings and Queens, Beggars and Waiters and Waitresses.” What prompted you to take on a retelling of history at that moment in the mid-1970s? And as you began to develop the piece, how did you conceive of the structure for portraying this vast subject matter and collaborating with such a large group of performers?

JK: Stanley Oil started when I was trying to figure out the history of the Western World and the lust for power. I was puzzled by that and why people wanted it. That’s how the bulk of my pieces happen—trying to figure something out that’s bugging me. When I study, what my mind does is that it sees patterns. I could see a clear pattern in the history of the world. A lot of the material that I used was from H. G. Wells’s book The Outline of History. I was also very interested in psychology, and so that was also part of it. I guess I couldn’t really understand why people wanted power. I wanted to try and figure it out.

Shortly after writing Stanley Oil I joined the psychohistorical society. They were trying to answer similar questions. Why was everybody killing each other? Why was everybody invading other people’s countries? Why was everybody not cooperative and nice like they were at Mills or The Kitchen? That’s the life I was used to, and I wasn’t used to a life of competition. I’m still trying to figure that all out.

A lot of times my plays are repetitive. Most of them have structures that are more like music than theater, with aspects of musical structure like theme and variations. When I started rehearsals for Stanley Oil with the performers, the structure was in place. There were rules of behavior or different actions for the performers to follow.

Within Stanley Oil, everyone had different speeches that they had to say in each act, and there were ten acts. They would express pretty much what was going on in history at the time, and it went through the whole history from evolution onward. The speeches would have similar elements or sometimes be exactly the same. And that is what was so much like music. I didn’t give any direction to the performers about how they were supposed to say the speeches. They would just do it however they wanted to. Basically the performers had to follow the structure, do the appropriate things, and say the right speech at the right time during the right act. The variation in the performers’ speech styles added a lot of musicality to the play.

I think we had quite a bit of time to rehearse at The Kitchen. I think I even did the auditions there. The auditions were more like interviews. I didn’t choose based on skill. I based my selections on character.

The play starts with evolution, with creatures crawling around. There is a God character called Mom who was played by Michael Cooper, and I played Stanley, representing various characters in history, who always sat in God’s lap. After evolution, God finally said, “I want to start civilization. I’m bored.”

Many countries are represented in the play. Each country was on a flat in The Kitchen’s space made of boards of foam core. The boards were painted—three of them would be green if there was a lot of greenery in the country, and one of them would be brown if there was some desert, or two of them blue if there’s a lot of ocean around the country. They were all slightly different depending on the makeup of the country.

The different acts of the play were about the countries that were most influential in the history of the time. The structure of the play was that in each country, there was a beggar, a waiter, and a king. The beggars had a bin full of stuff, with screws and food in it. So the waiter who represented the middle class would come over and collect taxes or rent from the beggar (peasant class), and get some of the things out of their bin. Then eventually the king would gather taxes from the middle class. After pontificating a bit, Stanley would come over and grab all the spoils from the kings. In every act Stanley played whoever was the most powerful character in the history of the time. Some characters had songs.

After collecting the spoils, Stanley would go up to God and say, “look at all the stuff I got Mom.” God/Mom would always say, “I don’t want any stuff Stanley,” and then would say, “I asked you to go down and fix the world and you just made a new problem!” She would explain what was wrong now and tell Stanley to go fix it. So, Stanley would go down to the world and run around, trying to fix it. But he would end up making a new problem and collect all the money, and then he would go back up to God expecting praise for acquiring all the stuff. The whole conversation would start again.

Eventually Stanley became Freud and made everyone lie down. While everyone was lying down, Standard Oil took over everything, which is why the play is called “Stanley Oil.” At the end of the play, everything’s a corporation. There are no more countries.

Throughout the acts, the play shows what was going on at that time in history, but also what was always the same. The middle class is always getting rent from the lower class, and the kings were always taking that away, and then the despot would take it all. Nothing much got better. And then eventually everything was just a corporation. Which is still true in the world today.

AB: You mentioned that Stanley Oil and your other works feature repetition. Stanley Oil additionally is a durational piece, running for about two-and-a-half hours. Some of the reviews of this performance at The Kitchen make mention of these aspects. For example, in their respective pieces in the Soho Weekly News, Wendy Perron unabashedly states that she didn’t stay through the whole performance, while Robb Baker comments that he did, and over the course of the evening, began to appreciate the performance in a new way: “what seems like inattention (even conscious suspension of attention) is really just letting yourself open to another level of attention—experiencing performance on a totally different plane.” Could you speak about the extent to which you thought about the audience and the ways that they might engage with or respond to your performances?

JK: I think back and wonder why I didn’t take more care of the audience, and think about what it was going to be like for them. Stanley Oil and most of my pieces were very slow, and they are a little bit hard to sit through. I just did whatever I thought was right for the piece. But in Stanley Oil, I did the history in two and a half hours, and it actually took, you know, many thousands of years. So it wasn’t like I took many thousands of years!

But for my part, I talk slow; I’m kind of a laid-back person; I wasn’t trained in theater. And, at the time, as Bob Ashley would say, the art you made had to be new and original. It was almost like, where art was concerned, you just did whatever you felt was necessary. There were no restrictions. That was what was so magical about the time. The audience was very forgiving and open. They could come and go during performances, but a lot of people just stayed.

During that period, I also wasn’t the greatest audience member myself. I didn’t actually go to all that many performances besides music. I loved certain artists, like Simone Forti or Pooh Kaye, and one of my favorite pieces was Julia Heyward’s Shake Daddy Shake (1976).

I remember I was in this band called Gertrude Stein, and we used to play in different places. But I remember very clearly one day this woman wanted me to play the song that she wanted. And I thought, I don’t want to have anything to do with popular culture. That’s not art. Art is what I do—what I want to do—not what the audience wants me to do. That might have been why I never really considered the audience. Because how can it be art if you’re doing something for someone else? Not that I couldn’t have made the same play a little bit differently. They didn’t have to be so slow: that wasn’t really part of my art aesthetic. I could have sped them up. I look back and wish I would have.

AB: You use the term “systems portraits” to describe your works (and, in the case of Stanley Oil and His Mother, the term appears in the subtitle, A Systems Portrait of the Western World). What does this term mean to you, and how does it apply to your plays?

JK: The term systems portraits seemed to be the best description because the plays are all about systems—the way things work, and what makes the next thing happen. They’re not dramatic stories where there is a crisis and then it gets resolved. One of my plays, Who is the Real Marlon Brando (1976), was a portrait of the NYC poetry world at the time, with poetry readings, a poetry magazine, and a Good Writer and five Bad Writers.

The plays are about being able to see a whole pattern that may take place across many years or a small space of time—being able to really look at the pattern, because it’s not so easy to see the patterns when they’re happening. So systems portraits was just the best word I could come up with. I meant for the works to be an accurate description of what was going on, what I saw happening. They aren’t about specific things that took place; they are about how the whole thing works.

Bio

Artist, composer, and singer Jill Kroesen was an essential figure in the 1970s and 1980s downtown New York performance milieu, working at the intersection of experimental music and then-emerging performance art. After studying at Mills College with composer Robert Ashley, she embarked on a series of performances that defied categorization, such as Stanley Oil and His Mother (1977) and Excuse Me, I Feel Like Multiplying (1979). With these performances, she invented a space between structuralist theater, graphically-scored musical composition, and cabaret. In the words of performance critic Sally Banes, “condensing political events with soap opera plots and infantile rationalizations about the way the world works,” Kroesen’s “systems portraits” manifested socioeconomic, sexual, and gender politics through funny, ramshackle, and chaotic performances. Archival documentation of these works was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the exhibition Rituals of Rented Island in 2013. Kroesen performed her most recent show Collecting Injustices, Unnecessary Suffering in 2016 at the Whitney Museum.

Kroesen has presented work at The Kitchen on numerous occasions. After staging Stanley Oil and His Mother, Kroesen returned to perform in her work The Original Lou and Walter Story in 1978, in the festival New Music, New York in 1979, as part of an evening of solo performance in 1981 that also featured Boris Policeband, and in various in-progress showings and performances during the making of Robert Ashley’s seven-part opera for television Perfect Lives (Private Parts), which was screened in its entirety in September 1983.