The Man Who Wore Tails was an early but focused attempt to extend my feeling for alter ego into the specific metaphor of formal clothes.  I was 23.  I had been influenced by John Cage’s notion about theatre and art happening all the time.  Dressing up for performance was natural to me.  This notion would distill into what I called the 3 R’s of art: Ritual, Remnants and Reminiscing.

The notion of theatrical performance had its first impact on me when my brother and I, as adolescents, would read and mime the witches’ scene from the first act of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.”  This is also where I came across the term “dramatis personae” with which I instinctively identified.

I had been awarded the Zoller Award at Penn State essentially for my painting and drawings that often expressed male escape into utopian landscapes showcasing an imagined woman.  My most promising art student status was challenged when I proceeded directly into the heady and competitive environment of Carnegie-Mellon’s graduate program.

Wholesale changes were occurring in all phases of American life during the turbulent years between the late 60’s and early 70’s.  The advent of the term minimal was foreign to me... geometric abstraction and music overemphasizing repetition seemed to suffer from either low expectation or an intentional demotion of individual worth.

Lyric painting seemed to hold no symbolic significance then.  Super-realism, as I recall, was getting some marketplace exposure, but that was far away from my developing aspirations.  Performance seemed to bridge some gap between my need for recognition at Carnegie-Mellon (definitely an achievement-driven institution) and a way of flaunting “maximal” ways without losing face or diminishing my conviction that art and idealism need not be separated from the American cultural occasion.  And so, I left Mudge Graduate House, where they asked you how you liked your eggs for breakfast, moved into my studio, and got dressed up.

I had the privilege of studying with two brilliant teachers – Robert Lepper (teacher of Andy Warhol) and Bruce Breland (personal friend of Roy Lichtenstein).  Lepper’s course “Individual and Social Analysis” would compel me to pursue my personal direction with courage.  Breland introduced me to Fluxus thinking and the infant days of mail art (later this would address issues of telecommunication technology).  Lepper would defend my graduate show against angry design students, while I was helping Breland collect air for his personal invention: “The Museum of Modern Air” or water for his “American River Watercolor Society.”  My work would suffer opposition and turbulence from my peer group and some members of the higher ups, but the general population in and around the school seemed to appreciate what I was doing without explanation.

The choice of white tie and tails came from my love of pianos and the idea of a “recital.”  Having some talent at the keyboard for improvising, I proved to have no ability to read music.  In transferring a sound producing expression into a visual and concept-related format, I believed I had created a license, so to speak, for “performance without technique.”