Michael Meyers Works On a Palette of Slipping and Sliding Moments

Michael K. Meyers looks more like a maturing preppy than a maturing hippie, but appearances can be deceiving. A performance artist long before it was fashionable, Meyers has fused an art background with societal ruminations, dramatic experimentation and personal quirks--and come up with his own brand of theater.

“Reconstructing (the Temple) From Memory,” which the artist describes as “an autobiographical dream piece,” opens Friday for three nights at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE).

“It pretends to be a lot of things,” he began. “There are layers of pretenses that I, as the storyteller in the piece, can invent for the audience. I walk on stage eventually and say what’s going on: who these characters are. And I claim it’s all happening inside another character’s head. It becomes about moments from his life, my life--and they kind of flow together.

“There are characters who stand in for me at different stages of life: a little boy, a young man, an old dreamer, a young girl, a woman. So there’s this idea of family--and a series of moments that slip and slide in and out of each other.”

So slippery are these moments, in fact, that some of them are made up as Meyers goes along.

“This is my fourth staging of the piece,” he said. “Each time, I’m rearranging and dovetailing, taking it apart, adding new elements to it. Yet there are some key moments and stories that always happen. It starts off with an explanation: ‘This is going to be a meditation with illusions on the notion of remembering and forgetting, not only individual life, but everything else.’ One of the themes is shifting back and forth in time; moving into the past and into the future--the future as imagined by people in the past. Then there are four spots where I say, ‘We’ll invent this spot here. I know I want to end up there; let’s see how we get there.’ Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.”

Still, he says, audiences won’t have any trouble “getting it”: “The piece turns out be disjointed and very strange, but at the same time, since it’s rooted in our experience, it’s not strange. It touches enough human experience that if anyone can relax with the fact that it’s not a linear story, they can feel it, understand it. They might not be able to say exactly what they understand; the difference between what you’re perceiving and an ability to convert that to language is a gap. What I’d hope is that it would be interesting enough that they wouldn’t try to bridge that gap during the performance.”

Meyers, 48, who was born in Chicago and returned there five years ago, added that none of this is to be taken too seriously. “There’s a lot of humor in the piece,” he noted. “It doesn’t read, ‘This is my skin: Look at all the pores.’ Yeah, I promise. Life’s serious and stupid; you find a way to express that simultaneously if you can. We’re comical and we’re wonderful--all these things at the same time.”

The artist comes to his conclusions via several years of artistic and societal observation, beginning with his 1961 graduation from Drake University with a degree in economics. Noticing that he had a talent for drawing, his guidance counselor suggested medical illustration. “So I went to medical school for two years, studied cadavers, got a degree. Then I went to (the University of Iowa) to be a staff illustrator, and I took a painting course. . . .”

Before long, medical illustration was a thing of the past: “When I began to make paintings, I never worked from subject matter. I’d have my big chunk of canvas, and I began to make marks. Then you’d respond to yourself and the painting would take shape from itself. That process is the same one I follow now. I develop chunks of material, rather than lines, then conceptually--on paper or in rehearsal--I rearrange, restructure, find necessities for other things to be developed in other ways.

“I’d always been interested in lateral things, peripheral things, the things just over there,” he emphasized. “I found that by making things that existed in time--live art--I could find a way of putting things in there that were more interesting to me than a picture. So it became performance. Lots of props, visual moments happening one after the other--with no language, some music. Then I began to write, and the language became imagistic as well. The performances managed to combine things paintings couldn’t hold. Making a painting is believing in the magic of it. I get that feeling now from the work I do on stage.”

Meyers’ first performance came with a group of fellow artists--in an anti-censorship project inspired by Scottish inmates--during a 1974 trip to the Edinburgh Festival.

“It made me sit up and take notice what was possible from art, what art could do,” he recalled. “Of course, I didn’t know what to call it then: It was somewhere between live sculpture and an environmental thing--lots of stuff with our bodies, videos. It doesn’t feel like what I’m doing now. ‘Reconstructing the Temple’ is a play. But I knew that the process of making it and actually presenting it was strong stuff for me.”

Lately, Meyers (who taught at the Kansas Art Institute from 1972-82 and since ’82 has served as chairman at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) has begun playing with the idea of physically absenting himself from the work.

“I’m on my way to something else,” he said happily. “I just finished a piece about a month ago in Chicago, which I’ve been working on at the Organic Theatre. It’s called ‘Verbatim’ and is made up of two short pieces, ‘A Man Is Sitting in a Room Looking at a Piece of Paper’ (“how we perceive ourselves through others’ perceptions”) and ‘Fictions’ (“about coupling and uncoupling--with video projection”). They don’t even pretend to be autobiographical; having me offstage is really crucial. And they’re cooler than my other pieces. They create the world differently.”