Willoughby Sharp:    Cough up Willoughby                                Cough up
                               Deliver the goods,                                Willoughby.
                               You don’t have to                                cough up                                Willoughby
                               You are in control;

     In 1975, barely six months out of art school, I was an assistant to Willoughby Sharp while he was an artist-in-residence at Brown University: constructing his video installations, being the videographer for his performances and managing his life for a couple of weeks. The first time I saw Willoughby Sharp was as a freshman at Rhode Island School of Design in the spring of 1971. Alan Sondheim, an English Professor, had been the main promoter of the conceptual art and performance art on our campus. That spring he brought Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, Dan Graham, and Willoughby Sharp to campus as visiting artists. The campus was very vibrant with the introduction of many new ideas and a sense of moving past the turmoil of the anti-war years, drug use, and minimalism which had become a dominant form on the campus. Other art, video, and performance groups such as Raindance Corporation, Bread and Puppet Theater, John Cage, Hans Haacke, the Wooster Group, Archigram, and the National Theater for the Deaf were all on campus that year. The conceptual artists had almost rock star status back then. The RISD Metcalf auditorium was standing-room-only for these artist’s presentations.  My image of Willoughby was of him walking down Benefit Street with Alan Sondheim. He had a long black hair and beard and wore a black band leader jacket.
     By 1975, Willoughby Sharp had stopped being an active editor for Avalanche magazine and was pursuing a career for himself as a conceptual/performance artist. These early video works by Willoughby were variations on the birthing process. Willoughby in a commercial clothes dryer (womb); Willoughby in a play pen and even in “Cough Up” the wooden closet that Willoughby kicks and bangs his way out of becomes a fiery birth canal. These pieces were about Willoughby jumping over that line from art critic to art maker. Each performance was a kin to what many artists feel when they make art and that is that they are giving birth to an object. Each time Willoughby did a performance he was giving birth to himself.
     In March of 1975, Dennis Hynsky and I worked on two pieces with Willoughby. The first piece was a video installation for a show at the List Art Gallery at Brown University. It was a two channel video installation in a twelve foot square room. A single edge razor blade was mounted on a pedestal in front of two 21-inch black and white monitors. Willoughby was either monitored live with a video camera (during the opening of the exhibition) or with a pre-recorded 10-minute loop. The other monitor showed a live image of the viewer. His tape challenged the viewer to cut themselves with the razor. His pieces had become emotional confrontations with himself and his audience. There was often an element of danger or an object that represented “out of bounds” to the norms of our culture. Here it was the razor blade, which could be used as an instrument of violence against someone else or yourself. In “Cough Up” it was fire, and the playing with it as an emotional test of one’s control. In 1976, at University of Massachusetts Art Gallery it was a bucket of urine.
     “Cough Up” was performed in the What Cheer Arts Art gallery in March of 1975. What Cheer Arts was made up of a group of artist studios. Dale Chihuly and Jamie Carpenter were on the fourth floor alongside the 5000 square foot gallery. On the 5th floor was Richard Fleischner, an earth works artist, Mary Shaffer, a glass artist, Duff Schweninger, a conceptual artist also in the List Art Gallery Show, and Electron Movers, a video coop made up of Robert Jungels, Laurie McDonald, Dennis Hynsky, and Alan Powell. What Cheer Arts was a few blocks from the RISD campus and provided the community with raw open  loft space that was used for installations and performances.
     Assisting Willoughby Sharp on the night of his performance was Duff Schweninger, Robert Jungels, Dennis Hynsky, Alan Powell, and Willoughby Sharp’s girl friend at the time Kirsten Bates who was doing photo documentation. An old closet at the southwest end of the gallery had been designated as the site where Willoughby would barricade himself in and set off a smoke bomb in a galvanized washbasin. Duff was working with the fire marshal to make sure the of ingredients of the fire, actually it was only supposed to be a large smoke bomb. Dennis Hlynsky was working a live hand held video camera which was fed to a reel to reel video deck. Robert Jungels, a professor at RISD, was at the gallery entrance lecturing audience that they should just stay at the video monitor mounted at the entrance about fifty feet away from the live performance in the closet. Bob Jungel’s lecture to them was that the future lay in electronic imaging and transmission. The importance of the live performance was meaningless because the real art existed within the frame of the video monitor and within its cultural spectacle. My job was the sound, and electronic distribution of the sound and video signals. What Cheer Arts was an iron building. The entire structure acted as an antenna and we were constantly fighting the sound of random radio stations that would bleed into our audio.
    The piece started out with a small incident. As the piece begins, Willoughby is shouting in a crying tone “don’t let them in Bob, I don’t want them to see me. I don’t want them to see me.” The light bulb in the piece blew out in the first minute or so. Willoughby calls me into the room.

Willoughby Sharp: “Alan I need you! I need you!
                                 The light blew out!
                                 The light blew out!
                                 Alan, I am going to die!
                                 I am going to die,                                  remembering you in my life.”

Alan Powell :  “ Willoughby, Do you want                            another light bulb?”

Willoughby Sharp in a calm voice: “ Yes, That                            would be nice.”       

     After I installed another light bulb, the closet door was shut and Willoughby resumes the piece. Willoughby went into a ten minute monologue about being in control and delivering “the goods” to the audience. The suspense built as Willoughby lit two matches as a tease to the audience. On the third match, Willoughby dropped the match into the galvanized wash basin filled with rags and acetone. Instead of smoke bomb effect the match caused the basin to explode into a 6-foot flame. Willoughby, who was wearing a gas mask expecting only smoke, found himself cornered with his legs wrapped around a hot burning wash basin.  I remember that the microphone and the electrical lines were hanging right above the fire. I reached in and grabbed both as I heard the microphone begin to short out from the heat. I continued to hold a flood light on Willoughby as he started to grab his crotch which was right up against the burning basin whose flames were now over four feet tall. Willoughby pulls off his gas mask and rolls out away from  the burning basin. “ Control! I can’t control it!, Officer Lazansky”, the fire marshal “where are you ? I can’t keep it under control!”.  Willoughby grabs the fire extinguisher but can’t figure out how to start the extinguisher.  Willoughby continues to chant “I can’t control it I can’t control it!” The audience is responding “pull the pin! You can do it Willoughby you’re in control.” Willoughby finally pulls the pin but manages to squirt the fire extinguisher in every direction except the burning basin whose flames are now over six feet tall. In frustration, Willoughby throws the extinguisher into the fire and kicks the basin. Duff Schweninger grabs Robert Jungels’ brand new $200 leather jacket and throws on the fire and the extinguisher. He pulls out the extinguisher and moves to the middle of the room releasing the pressure of the extinguisher. Another group of guys including the fire marshal pull the burning basin out and dumps it on a piece of loose plywood.  Willoughby jumps hysterically into the fire again, but this time you here Duff yelling “Willoughby get out of here!” Then all one hears is the stamping of feet as the last flames are stomped out by various members of the audience. Everyone is coughing now from the smoke that has filled the gallery. Willoughby then pronounces, “ That was only a rehearsal.”
     Almost ten years later I start teaching at college level to both undergraduates and graduate students in video and new media. I have probably shown the tape almost every year since then. Performance art quickly moved into the spectacle of entertainment with artists like Laurie Anderson and Robert Wilson putting out huge productions. By the 1980’s many of the performance artists retreated into the art world making installations and art objects that could be framed in the museum or public arts funding mechanisms. I spend a lot of my lecture time defining and illustrating modernism and post modernism. In 1975, neither Willoughby nor I had the language of post-modernism, but we knew that the nature of art making and culture was changing.
     I look upon Willoughby then as one of the last modernists standing at the threshold of the post modern world. I teach my students that one of the traits of modernism is this intense personal dialogue between the artist, a medium, and his subject. Willoughby’s medium was his words and the constant defining and questioning of himself. He had learned as an art critic that his words could define what is art and what is not art. His words could make or break the public perception of who was or who wasn’t an artist, especially in the un-commodified world of conceptual art. Those simple video installations and use of video in performances were really models for the communication systems that would become the internet. Yes the technology has greatly improved but the ideas back then were so new and artists such as Willoughby were searching to create an art form where the line between the real and simulated was obscure. “Cough up” worked because we got lost in the performance. We didn’t know what was real or what was scripted. I remember giving Willoughby timing cues throughout the performance. He was pretty much on script until the fire. In “Cough Up” Willoughby is delivered from the warm modernist womb of a closet, through a flaming birth canal into the cool world of simulation and spectacle. At the moment of birth, we must all begin the dying process and that fear penetrates Willoughby’s work.
     In the 1990’s I had a group of graduate students who started a video collective modeled after Electron Movers. They ask Connie Coleman, my art and life partner to do an on air critique of “Cough Up”.  Connie could have been one of those pretty blond art student coeds in the videos that all those conceptual artists put the make on. She liked Willoughby but she also felt she had to fight hard to get her artistic voice heard against the outlaw / bad boy nature of the conceptual art scene. She was among the first generation of woman artists and media makers that took their cues from Willoughby, but forged ahead using her language to define herself.
     The raw art language of Willoughby Sharp in the 1970’s either got refined into polished performance art and post-modern theater or it became politicized in the language of deconstruction and post-structural theory. Over time I use “Cough Up” in a very different way. It is an historical document now. The audience was filled with Iranian students whose voice and freedom would be crushed by their own cultural revolution. The risks that Willoughby Sharp took in 1975 would not be tolerated from a liability point of view by either educational institutions or art museums today. I also hold “Cough Up” as an illustration of the energy, personal searching, and risks we were taking in the 1970’s in our quest to define the new world we saw coming.
     Alan Powell is a video and media artist who has worked in collaboration with Connie Coleman for the last thirty years. Alan Powell is an Associate Professor of Communications at Arcadia University, in Glenside, Pennsylvania, USA. Connie Coleman is a Professor of Computer Animation at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Their recent work is about their twelve year journey working with the poor in Central America. Alan Powell works with video, digital photography, web based media and paint. His website is:

Alan Powell's art website