M: Well, I want to talk about this moment of break in the piece, this moment where the spell is broken, where the music becomes sort of ironic --

B: Oh, the pop song?

M: Yeah, and then you hustle out of here and the two of you wheel in the plant -- I'm interested in the plant, too -- and set up the light and turn on the water in the bathroom and it's funny and people are laughing. And it’s like, you work so hard to cast this spell, and then you’re like, “Fuck the spell. Forget what was happening before, how you were feeling before.”

figure 17

photo by Norman McDonald, 2015

B: Right, it’s much more intense and dramatic before that.

M: Right. And forgive this question, but I’m going to ask it. So you start running all this water in the bathtub -- and I was horrified by it.

B: I’m glad you were horrified. I was horrified by it. I was wondering why more people weren’t horrified.

M: I was so horrified! And I thought, this is so irresponsible!

B: Coming from California…I am so sorry. I know! It was really an asshole move, but it had to happen.

M: That’s so funny. It reminded me of my experience, and this is very different, but still — it’s related, to me, to this experience of being at the Met, I guess, and you turn the corner and you see that Damien Hirst piece, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which I love, but I’m also like, “Fuck you, Damien Hirst. Fuck you for killing the shark. You can’t kill a shark for art, you son of a bitch.” And for me, this was related. I mean, you're not killing a shark but it was upsetting and it really took me out of the performance for a minute. My heart was racing and I was like, “Turn off the water! Somebody turn off the water, there are people who don’t have enough water!”

B: I know. I know. And the water crisis...I know. I was really expecting much more of those kinds of questions, and I brought it up to plenty of people in the audience afterward and they were like, “Oh, I didn’t even think of that.”

M: Interesting.

B: I know. OK, well, is that good or is that bad? I don’t know. I’m fine if you reprimand me. Let’s talk about this!

M: Well, and I was thinking about it later and thinking about the water usage in the ‘50s and ‘60s, which I guess adds another dimension to the piece — we can be thinking of these things from the position of the 21st century conservation ethos, reflecting back on the wastefulness of the 20th century consumer world or whatever, but yeah, I’m interested in this whole thing.

B: Well, yes, and the fact that, in terms of global warming, this is going to be one of the parts of the country that is going to have a great water supply and people discuss the Great Lakes region in that sort of way. So really, there are so many layers, but absolutely, as a native Californian, it's painful for me to run the water like that because I grew up with, you know -- we would have periods in the ‘80s even when you couldn’t flush the toilet unless you were taking a shit, in San Francisco, especially. Owens Valley is a desert now, and we have the Hetch Hetchy Dam, the Water Wars, Chinatown, Mono Lake. I grew up with bumper stickers: “Save Mono Lake.” That’s my childhood. That’s in my blood, water politics.

M: And so was it purely functional for you? Purely to fog up the windows?

B: It was purely functional and it was purely about the kind of juxtaposition it would create against the snow and the cold of the outside. It's also because when I just take a shower in here sometimes I don’t close the bathroom door, and when I do that, it doesn't take much -- I’d take a five minute shower, wash my hair or whatever, the hot water and the steam would fog up the windows like that when it’s really cold. So that was the thing that first sparked the interest and the knowledge of what that did and what that looks like. And how easy it actually is. It doesn’t require much water at all.

M: I wondered, because whenever we have a party in our apartment in the winter, the party starts and everybody’s like, “Oh, the view, the view!” and a few hours in, nobody can see the view anymore because the windows are so foggy. And that was one of the first things I thought about when I heard about this performance: I wonder what the relationship with the foggy windows is going to be. And I assumed the fog would just be generated by the heat from the audience.

B: Yeah, but I jump start it. Also, it was so interesting because the last performance we did was on Sunday, and then I took a week off, and then the following Monday, we did a video shoot without the audience, but all the snow had melted and everything had warmed up and we were into the 40s and the 50s. We tried to do the steam to get a shot from the outside and it wouldn’t work. It wouldn't steam up. It was too warm. It only works when it’s that cold. So it really is about the threshold of the outside temperature. What I was also interested in is that often times when it’s really cold, it fogs up and then it freezes, so you have ice on the windows, on the inside, which is something I wondered if we would get during a performance, but we didn't.

But yeah, the politics of water, the shutoffs in Detroit...I had thought about this before the shutoffs, it's something I’d already conceptualized, and then I thought, “Oh, this is going to be even more of a big deal." This elitist, bourgie apartment where you can run the water day and night. You’re dealing with class, you know, you’re dealing with a comment on class in the city, and I think that’s a really bold thing to do, especially in terms of racial politics and all of these things. I was thinking about those things, and I’m very interested in discussing them. It wasn’t the intention behind it, it wasn’t what I was trying to do, but I knew I would be intersecting and colliding and having these kinds of productive misses, so to speak, because that’s what performance is always doing. It's complicated, you’re always dealing with the possibility of failure, in terms of that interpretation of the soccer mom, or something like that. That did really add another dimension.

figure 18

photo by Marsha Music, 2015

And then the plant. I’ve written about it in the past, I have this infatuation with the flower conservatory on Belle Isle, with the cultivation of the domestic -- it becomes a very domestic, domesticating space, but also very wild, in this beautiful way that’s intoxicating and that is about sensuality and this injection of oxygen and also being left alone. In terms of that juxtaposition of that space and that image with the ruin porn images that proliferate within and without Detroit, of the homes that are broken down and the weathering from the outside, and how that is operating so differently in that environment. The plant in some ways speaks to that part of my practice and interest. I really wanted it to be large, not dwarfing me like the plants in the Music Hall on Saturday were meant to, but this plant is more anthropomorphic in the sense that it’s a body. And the relationship between the elements: ferns like the humidity, they absorb water through their leaves. In some ways it’s better to spray them than to water them directly, that’s how they flourish. It emphasizes that kind of steamy environment, and the washing environment, the exposure of the skin or of the body.