Insulting Injury

L.A.’s emergency unit of black comedy, performance art and softcore puppetry, Art of Bleeding, hits the big time — laughing all the way.
by Lucinda Michele Knapp
photos by Allan Amato, styling by Raquel

Everything ends.

It’s the Big Dumb Truth of life, the one we struggle with the most. People don’t like change: We want our romances to last forever, our jobs to stay interesting, our friends to stay close and our youth to stick around. Of course, without fail and without exception, none of this happens. I’ve got a pretty torrid affair with change-love it, hate it, love it, hate it: like most everyone, I think. If, as the Buddha said, “Life is suffering,” I vacillate a weird line between daring the universe to bring it on and cowering under the covers.

Our very DNA makes it an essential theme of the human condition: Once we’ve fulfilled our biological destiny, Darwin has no further use for us (all notions of progress and humanism and going-back-to-college-when-you’re-60 kinda things aside). Therefore, death directly follows sex in the collective unconscious-the blight on the rose, the sweet ephemeral nature of beauty, lust, youth. This pairing of death and sex is the driver behind our fascination with horror flicks, car crashes, true crime stories-maybe we think that if we can see clearly to the heart of suffering, we can figure out a way to subvert it, to grab the tasty goodness in life for ourselves, and run off with the prize without having to pay the price.

“Death is one of the suckier things about life,” says Al Ridenour, founder of the Art of Bleeding performance troupe and medical-fascination cult. “But I do happen to think the topic is uproariously funny. Sex and death both get laughs, but sex is just titters compared to death. Think about sex humor: for little kids just the body parts themselves…are funny because they’re so mysterious. You get older, figure stuff out, and sex is only funny in its taboo aspects, things less likely to be experienced or explored-kinky sex, homosexuality, etc. Death continues to be funny because there’s something at the core no one can ever grasp.”

By combining these two essential sides of life’s coin-beauty with decay, desire with loss-Art of Bleeding stirs up a gory gumbo that aims to make audiences uncomfortable.

“I would like people to feel stimulated in unfamiliar ways,” says Ridenour with a slightly off grin as we sit on overstuffed antique furniture in the large 1928 mansion-esque home he shares with his wife, comedian and bellydancer Margaret Cho. The couple’s dogs race around us, and the little Chihuahua-mix, Gudrun, is torn between climbing on me like I’m some sort of doggie jungle gym and fighting with the other dogs over the primo spot in the sunlight. Outside the huge casement windows, the canyon’s pine trees barely move as the wind rushes through them.

“There was a lot of tumult in my family; my older brothers became born-again Christians, while my other brother and I were so much the opposite,” explains Ridenour. And it’s not hard to see his irreverence when it comes to the trappings of piety: The whole gorgeous home is filled with objects ranging from the creepy (a portrait of the Mona Lisa transforming into some sort of exoskeleton-molting ghoul) to the cool (Indian Tantric sculptural friezes); from the merely kitschy (animatronic figurines dressed in blatantly racist costumes) to the outright occult: An extraordinarily convincing skeleton rests in a glass coffin in the study, “flesh” rotting away in its chest. A rear tower room at the back of the home is accessible only via a spiral staircase and contains a flawless assemblage of voodoo materials-so much that I wonder where the chickens are.

I was sick a lot as a kid,” Ridenour continues. “I spent a year and a half in the hospital. My mom was a nurse in a state mental hospital and I worked in one for a long time too-all this medical stuff was in my family. I was always interested in disease.”

This interest in probing the more sensitive parts of our comfort zone has burst into life as the Art of Bleeding shows, which incorporate collaged safety and first-aid filmstrips from the ’70s, music composed from sound culled from those filmstrips, a good dose of T&A in the shapely forms of scantily clad nurses, dance numbers choreographed using imagery from first aid manuals, and vaudeville-flavored comedy sketches. The Art of Bleeding’s principal characters weave chatty stories that are equal parts The Muppet Show, softcore porn and Laurel and Hardy, combining pratfalls and guffaws with eroticism and aggressive, playful confrontation. Nearly naked nurses cavort with puppets-”Abram the Safety Ape” and “RT the Robot Teacher” attempt to lecture on achieving True Safety Consciousness-and in this fall’s shows, the ante is upped considerably. Theremin performers will wheedle their tooth-rattling treble alongside super-sexy performances by Cho (whose bellydancing is sublime, I can attest), Venus DeMille of the Velvet Hammer, and Harla Quinn. There will be car crashes, massive multimedia projections and installations, and plenty of danger for Ridenour and his troupe to play around, which is where they shine: It’s the proximity to that which makes us uncomfortable, that stokes their creative fire the most. And while previous shows have been stellar, these upcoming performances-both staged in large venues-represent Art of Bleeding at a grander, more disturbing scale.

“I feel more excited…” and his voice is drowned out by the dogs as they tumble past us in a growling, snarling heap. “Speaking of combative! Look at the dogs, look how they’re playing-they’re playing by fighting. That’s what comedy is. I’ll take a stance I know will offend and upset people, but I’m not attacking them-it’s kind of like a play battle. People don’t all have the same views, so play-fighting is a really valid, liberating process. I find it invigorating when I see someone go just beyond what I think they should say.”

This difficult balance, this playful aggression, predates Art of Bleeding. As Reverend Al, Ridenour was instrumental in founding the L.A. Cacophony Society-the second chapter in the United States after San Francisco’s. During the ’90s, die-hard Cacophonists in Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles gave collective wet willies to the status quo. The most concise way to describe the Cacophony Society is as a national network of provocateurs serving as the prototype for Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.

“Chuck attended quite a number of Cacophony events in our Portland lodge and hooked up with Cacophony in 1996 when he came along as a journalist writing an article about our annual Santacon event, where an unruly mob of more than 100 anti-Santas faced off with cops in riot gear on the streets of Portland,” explains Ridenour. “Of course, we never blew up any buildings, but aggressive public pranking, guerilla theater and culture-jamming-a term which has now been all but copyrighted by Adbusters-was in the air.”

Think Michael Moore without the liberal axe-grinding or Jackass with art-historical awareness. One iconic 1990s L.A. Cacophony event involved ragged, drunken clowns somehow making their way into the boardrooms of a Century City office building, claiming they’d been invited for a birthday party for ‘John.’

However, as numbers grew, the original spirit of aggressive play seemed to experience a die-off. With Burning Man siphoning creative energy and newbies loudly declaring themselves Cacophonists but unwilling to do anything more than an occasional costumed pub crawl, Reverend Al decided to do something that would shatter the complacency: the ultimate prank.

“The burners (were) slumping more toward happy hedonism and the rest of us, though getting older and embarrassingly less reckless, were still feeling uncomfortable about Cacophony losing what was once an angry, subversive quality. By 1999, things looked bad, and we were repeating a lot of events. I was consumed by the fear that Cacophony was on its way to becoming a sort of vaguely ‘wacky’ social club. So, I used the Internet against itself, creating a final prank. Basically, I explained the disappearance of a core Cacophony member, Peter Geiberger-who’d moved to New Orleans-by reporting that Peter had died…driving drunk (after leaving a Cacophony event). Core members more or less knew it to be untrue-but there were many, many exceptions. The idea was to prank the hangers-on and lay the groundwork for stage two of the prank, which involved guilt-ridden organizers (myself and unspecified others) turning, in their grief, to an acceptably anarchistic yet genuinely Christian form of religion-being born again, and attempting to take (Cacophony) in a new direction.” Naturally that ruffled feathers, and there ensued several weeks of flamewar that spread out through all the lodges in the nation, with no one really knowing what was true or who was in on the prank. Many Cacophonists were mad as hell and left the group forever, with a strong distaste for Ridenour’s particular brand of play, which had suddenly become, to them, too aggressive or too over-the-line. “(It was) quite a wonderful hall of mirrors actually, and honestly, the best prank I ever pulled. A month or two after…the several dozen people who’d actually been involved in Cacophony organized a sort of desert send-off for me, in which I was burned in highly realistic effigy.”

Everything ends. New lives begin.

So when, in 2004, Cho bought an ambulance in an eBay auction, Ridenour was struck by anarchic inspiration yet again. “I started talking to my old friends and incorporating them…so it became more of a performance thing-street guerilla theatre, pranking kinda stuff, but crossing that line over to performance.”

“People ask us, ‘Why are you doing this?’ and we say, ‘Well, doesn’t it seem obvious?’ And usually they stop and think and it does seem obvious.”

The troupe has also been collecting audio archives of people’s medical horror stories-most recently they’ve stalked art openings and busy areas like Vermont Avenue near Skylight Books, to ask people on the street to share in their experiences; there’s also a hotline where people can record their own emergency-related stories. Ridenour calls it the Gory Details Project, and many can now be heard online at their website, www.artofbleeding.com.

“I think it’s the most natural, basic thing to hear somebody’s horror stories-I mean, isn’t that what all art and literature is about? The climax of any kind of plight and play or novel or film is always the extreme, grotesque, violent and terrible experience-some sort of drama or trauma. It seems like an inborn thing that we have to do.

“Everyone has some sort of trauma story: awful and funny and beautiful and disturbing. That sort of weird frontier between things that are funny and things that are awful-I want to find more terrain there.” Because it occupies this liminal realm, Art of Bleeding is hard to pigeonhole, and Ridenour doesn’t mind. “I don’t want it to get called a comedy thing. I don’t want it to become performance art. I like that it’s not easy to categorize: You keep people off balance, and they’re easier to push and tip over in that state-it’s easier to get a reaction because they don’t know what they’re supposed to do. I’ve done things my whole life that have fallen into those in-between categories-is this theatre? but it’s at a rock club? but it’s like a one act play? and it’s comic but also kind of dark? …Which makes it exciting for people,” he says, and wryly pushes back his unruly proto-Elvis ‘do, “but it also makes it hard to advertise.”

On a recent Saturday as the first chill of autumn began to work its way up from the ground into the shadows beneath the trees, Art of Bleeding’s ambulance is surrounded by a spectacle of nurses in corsets cantering dangerously on 6-inch platforms. Ridenour and a photographer direct the nurses and Abram the Safety Ape as they pose for the shot that will appear on the cover of this paper.

“I tend to think that all art is tombstones,” says Ridenour. Behind him the nurses totter about, trying to avoid the late-summer yellowjackets that seem to be everywhere. One screeches in terror as an insect flies down into her red leather corset. “All work, creative or otherwise, everything we do and make-relationships built, children raised-all of it is just another way to carve a tombstone, to make a lasting impression, leave something that endures. People work best under deadlines, you know. We’ve all got one, even if we don’t know what it is. I think mortality keeps us motivated.”

Art of Bleeding grabs us by the collective chin and focuses our unwilling gaze on our mortality, using the “True Safety Consciousness” they speak of-which is shrouded in mystery like some sort of Freemasonry secret-to short-circuit the flesh wounds and arrow straight in to the heart of things, beating arrhythmically, our broken and fearful spirits. It’s a directive to laugh in the face of the inevitable. “That’s the only way to look at injury: through humor. I’ve had lots of terrible things happen in my life,” explains Ridenour. “I’ve had people die I was really close to, medical emergencies myself, ambulances in the driveway, and I can talk about it, I can laugh about it-this is how I deal with it. Some people think that to embrace this stuff, even in a frivolous way, would diminish its importance; I think it’s a natural way for us to get in touch with the topic, which is scary to us: we’re all gonna die. We’re all going to experience pain. This is a way to approach it. Beginning to joke about it is a start, like a funny ‘campfire story’ modality.”

Later that day, after the giggling nurses have left, Ridenour finds out that the friend whose death he joked about back in the Cacophony days-the prank death that effectively ended the L.A. chapter-has actually passed away in real life. He tells me via e-mail a few days later:

“I am feeling particularly reflective this morning, as that hoaxed death has just come true. Sunday, I attended a memorial service for Peter Geiberger, the kid who at one point I’d hoped would take over Cacophony. He was truly remarkable, brilliant…we’ll be organizing a memorial storm drain outing to help remember him. He loved storm drains. I’m sure there will be lots of tasteless jokes, and I’m sure that would’ve pleased him. We enjoyed our gallows humor yesterday, but I still woke up and couldn’t sleep last night.”

When I write to Ridenour to say that I am sorry for his loss, I remark how sad it seems that just before he got the news, we were joking and laughing about death.

“We’re ALWAYS joking about death,” he replies. LAA

Laughter is the cure for grief. Love is stronger than death. -Robert Fulghum

Face the blood, guts, and boobs yourself when Art of Bleeding performs September 27th at Safari Sam’s and October 26th at the Steve Allen Theatre. Visit www.artofbleeding.com for more info.