Performance Artist Anna Homler Examines Language’s Effects in ‘The Hands and the Lips’

Anna Homler says she performs free-lance magic.

A wooden board outside her Venice apartment reads: “Psychic Reading/Crystal Ball/Cards.” A black leather couch sits by the door, along with wooden snakes, a large letter R and a bottle full of plastic angels. There’s a line of salt across Homler’s threshold, for magic protection against intruders.

Homler calls it “generalized ooga-booga.” Others call it performance art.

Tonight at the Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon, Homler, 39, will perform in a 7 p.m. benefit called “Holiday on Mud.” Homler’s piece, called “The Hands and the Lips,” is part of her larger multimedia work, “Pharmacia Poetica,” that has been shown in more than 20 galleries since 1981.

“She crosses boundaries a lot of artists don’t,” says Marylea Williams Ross of the OveReact Gallery in Long Beach, which will show Pharmacia next October. “She paints, does constructions and music. All of your senses are involved when you’re involved in one of her pieces.”

In her performances, Homler speaks in English and sings in a language she invented called “bread language.”

“I tell stories about ordinary things, and then I use poetry as a bridge to get into bread language,” Homler says. “The stories are true-life adventures about things that happen to me.”

Homler, who studied anthropology, says she discovered bread language one day about six years ago while driving through Topanga Canyon. “I started singing in this strange language, which felt very comfortable,” she says. Bread language is a “primal language, a root language,” she says. “It’s a feeling language, it’s an intuitive language. My songs are improvised, but the melody is always the same.”

She also uses pieces of her art on stage. Tonight her props will be a pair of enormous red lips and a pair of enormous red hands. The performance evolved out of Homler’s interest in “how language shapes our world. There’s a kind of textural language that can’t be spoken. There’s something that moves under the skin of language, and I’m trying to get to it. I’m trying to go underneath known language,” she says.

Homler does most of her writing, rehearsing and art-making at home, but she also has a basement studio near the beach. The studio overflows with objects that compose Pharmacia--artwork that Homler creates from what she finds in second-hand stores and the “small, mysterious things” people give her. Human teeth, kitchen utensils, odd buttons, baby cribs, music stands, mirrors, baskets, masks and teapots jostle for room on tables and the floor, and a multitude of glass jars contain objects implanted in sand or “embalmed” in baby oil.

During the show at OveReact Gallery, Homler will often be present in a white lab coat to offer visitors “poeticures,” usually in exchange for the objects they bring her.

At past installations, “I’d give a pink, plastic baby to somebody who was wanting a new beginning or wanting to start a new project,” she says. “Or to women who wanted boyfriends, I’d give this little plastic man in a tuxedo. Just fun. Because sometimes if you have an object to focus on, it just reminds you” of goals to pursue.

Homler began doing performance art seven years ago after she earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a master’s degree in education.

“I think the most normal thing I did was to go to graduate school, and that was the end of my normal life,” she says.

Nowadays she supports herself by giving performances, selling the art objects she creates--assemblages and “Tibetan valentines”--and taking odd jobs.

Homler’s family lives in the Los Angeles area, where she was born and raised. Her mother is “very supportive” of her art, and her father “tolerates it,” Homler says.

Yet, “I’m sure they’d love to see me married and settled, with some kind of orderly life,” Homler says, “and I just keep getting stranger and stranger.”