Miss Legere will be appearing at.....

Phoebe Legere, photo by Susan Rakowski

Miss Legere will be appearing at:

IRIDIUM

Jan.18th

with her Quartet

The Ooh La La Coq Tail

PLUS: Legere's glorious, vividly colored paintings of nudes, children and animals in hyper real dream like settings of complete insanity splashed across 5 wide screens...

(whitehot | June 2008, Interview with Phoebe Legere)

The Demystification of Phoebe Legere: Language and Light
Kofi Forson interviews Phoebe Legere

Phoebe Legere (her real name) was a fixture in the East Village, New York counter culture of the 1980’s. Her song Marilyn Monroe was featured on the soundtrack to the movie Mondo New York, a depiction of New York underground. Her background in music and performance art has led to her role as resident composer for the Wooster Group. She received a NYSCA grant to write The Queen of New England, an experimental multimedia opera about the Massachusetts Native American Holocaust in 2001. Hello Mrs. President, a multi-character live art work about the first African American woman president of the United States was presented at Theater of New City. Her text, Waterclown, about the formative movements of fluids, music by Morgan Powell, with the Cleveland Chamber Symphony was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Music 2000. Dark Energy, her astrophysics poem, music by Eric Mandat, was performed at the University of Illinois at Carbondale in November 2004. She has made numerous appearances on television and radio and worked as Artist in Residence at the School of Visual Arts Computer Art MFA department and at the University of Victoria Graduate School of Engineering and Music, among other achievements of inventions and interventions. Collaboration with Eno and Leo Abrahams called Ultra Romantic Parallel Universe will be released on Mercury Records.

Kofi Forson: Phoebe, I look at you I think you were the creation of a whimsical Italian filmmaker…Only he hung out at the Limelight and listened to Professor Long Hair. (Laughter)
Phoebe Legere: Oh Kofi! I see why you have so many friends…you make everyone feel famous, hot and glamorous!
KF: Phoebe your works of art include many different forms of media: film, music, installation, electronics, performance… Can you talk a bit about the gathering of the conscience to fulfill such a multiplicity of thought and action within an artistic scope?

PL: I AM A TRANSMEDIA ARTIST. My hybrid artform explores the reciprocal relationships between disciplines in an interaction of location, science, music, painting, television and gender. I frame music in layers of visual art.
KF: Why the fascination with the female body?

PL: I am obsessed with human anatomy. My parents were artists. They taught life drawing classes and encouraged me to draw from live nude models when I was 6 years old. The nude is in my blood. I put many figures in my paintings, to show a multiplicity of angles, features, and aspects of the figure. Eskimo Art, African Art and cubism all do the same thing, I paint generative energy. Even the vegetal and architectonic motifs of my pictorial grammar are rooted in a feverish longing for love and sexual communion…

KF: Much of which I think is circumstantially rooted in our psyche not as sexual creatures but fundamentally given our hybridity and need to survive within the politics of a city… love and sex take on a whole new meaning.

PL: The representation of sex in my paintings is a sign of the miraculous, spiritual power of creativity…I paint skin longing for skin, for connection, for the power of the Other, for the total dissolution of ego structures, I load my brush with fluid from the Universe of Supreme Love.
KF: This then again brings to front the exigency in our current sexual structure. Does the libido warrant such excitement that a woman is able to have more than one partner?

PL: Monogamy is hypocrisy, an outmoded creed, a total fiction propped up by an exhausted system of laws and values. But hey, don’t think that I’m a swinger! It’s all happening in my imagination. I am very shy.

KF: (Laughter)

PL: Don’t laugh! All my art is a sublimation of instincts so passionate that they would tear me apart! For people who have trouble comprehending that my art is a multivalent sign, may I remind you that among the Navaho, there are special medicine men who do the elaborate sand paintings that cure illnesses. These medicine painters are always called Singers….The Sand Paintings of the Navaho only exist from Sunrise to Sunset. The gallery system can do violence to the creativity of the artists. Art works become trapped in the viscous, fluorescent netherworld of the Institution.

Art needs air. This is why I became so deeply involved in Live Art Performance. Art should be like a meal prepared by your mother. You eat it, you love her, it disappears, on to the next meal. That’s healthy art, can’t we get beyond commodification? It’s 2008 already. In the Navaho world you sit on the sand painting and you are cured of your illness. I’d love to sit on Les Desmoiselles D’Avignon. I would feel so much better. Picasso worked on that painting for months.

It is about Sacred Prostitutes. Picasso really knew the score: Abstraction is figuration. Painting is always about the body. Go back to Balzac’s story Le Chef D’Oeuvre Inconnu. The centerpiece of that story is St. Mary of Egypt. Check it out. She is the root of Cezanne and Picasso’s abstraction. You can get it at Project Gutenberg. It’s better in French.

KF: I have to say the delight of Phoebe Legere is more than just the looks. We’ve come far from Betty Page. You are actually a very serious artist.

PL: In my art I seek to restore myself to wholeness, and to integrate myself with the totality of Space, and Time. Much of my recent work is based on Science. I have been writing and painting about the parallels between Darwinian Creation Myths and the Creation stories of the Penobscot/Abenaki people of Maine. There are stunning similarities.
KF: Your drawings and paintings have gorgeous swirls and vortices, eddies and currents…the fluid line of your brush is like the energy trail of a cascading river.
PL: It’s true, I love curves. But sometimes I am seduced by squares and rectangles... I love beautiful houses, I love beautiful cities, I love speculative modern furniture. I had a show last year at the Patterson Art Museum called, Homage to Barney Newman—lots of squares and rectangles, and I did a video for the S.V.A. Digital Salon called Chromatic Wave Cantata that used colored squares and rectangles as vessels for “Chromatic sensations.”

Ultimately what woman in her right mind prefers a square to a circle? For decades the Modern Artist has been forced into the role of geometer, installation conceptualist, or arbiter elegantiarum. Artists must break away from enforced Puritanism. I abhor the desiccated, circuit -driven visual tricks taking up space in so many galleries and museums.

My whole life has been an attempt to visualize and invoke images that point to a higher reality. I can achieve higher cognitive levels through painting, drumming, singing, writing poetry and dance…

On stage I am in a trance. When I perform people think they are hearing me. But it’s not me. I come from an ecstatic tradition of shamanic performance. Art is medicine. Art is better than Ayuhuasca.

In my Celebrity Blow Job series, and Phallocrata Symphonium series, I have reclaimed the phallus as a personal signifier. For many years I have used my own body as a brush, as an instrument, as a poem. Now I am a female penis, thrusting myself into total art synthesis.

KF: More can be said about society’s feminine sphere having undergone something similar as in the labia becoming penial. You’re on to something. (Sigh) Can you please explain the origin of Phoebe Legere. What set of circumstances created this living, breathing example of Brigitte Bardot in the film… And God Created Woman? Or even the Marilyn Monroe reference. Is that where it all started?

PL: Marilyn and the young Brigitte were Magic Blond Women; beautifully lit, impeccably coiffed and flawlessly styled. Marilyn died before I was born, but I saw Some Like It Hot on TV. I was overwhelmed. I fell asleep, and I had a dream in which Marilyn cradled me in her arms and sang my song Marilyn Monroe. I woke up and wrote it down.

The lyrics unfolded with a kind of dream logic. I believe Marilyn composed it in another dimension and bequeathed it to me. Marilyn was an avatar of art and love. (Sigh) At the time I was signed to Epic/Sony Records. I submitted the song to the label. They said, “First we find out you are an American Indian, then we find out you play the accordion, and now this…you are a lesbian!” (The song is about making love to Marilyn Monroe.)They dropped me from the label.

Thank you very much. I knew my life was over, so I just laughed it off and booked Carnegie Hall for my debut as a composer…It worked. Once I was off the label, and out from under the corporate thumb, I immediately began to get famous. And it wasn’t a hype driven artificial fame, it was the real, old-fashioned kind of Flame—I mean fame (Laughter)—I kept singing my song, Marilyn Monroe. 

The Marilyn song seemed to have a strange demon attached to it. When you pierce the membrane and stick your hand into a parallel universe you have to be careful, there are billions of demons in billions of worlds. They are all begging for our attention. Hobgoblins are by nature greedy and narcissistic. They want to be famous just like you do. They cling. Songs are built from mathematical codes.  Long complex DNA codes create complex living creatures, but short strips of code create viruses that are half dead and half alive, some songs are like that, they are short strips of numerical code that have a kind of prong that enters the brain. They’re “special.” They don’t die. My song Marilyn was like a virus and I knew it. (Sigh). 

Anyway, after Epic booted me out for being a gay Indian, I spent all my money on a recording and video of that song. Yeah, yeah I should have bought a building on the Bowery, but a seductive little voice kept whispering, “Phoebe, record my song.” And in those days, 1988–9 recording costs were astronomical. I spent $20,000 recording four songs, 24 track. Nobody under 30 remembers this era because now it costs 3 cents to record a song.

Sigh).Within two weeks Marilyn Monroe was immediately picked up by Island Records for the soundtrack of the film Mondo New York. It became a huge hit on college radio—with no promotion! And me with no manager, no agent, and now, no record company! (Sigh) You don’t want to hear what I know about the music industry: The drugs, the lies, the corruption, the sexual harassment. That’s where I spent my teenage years; in a putrid snake pit.

Complete on: http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/2008-interview-with-phoebe-legere/1435