All This Clamoring for Life: The Performance Art of Frank Green

Research Fellow Timothy E. Bradley explores the work of Frank Green (1957–2013), a performance and installation artist who worked in New York and Ohio. Bradley focuses on The Scarlet Letters, a searing and iconoclastic performance that questioned medical knowledge about AIDS in the mid-1990s.

Frank Green was a beloved and defining figure of the Cleveland art scene from the late-1980s until he passed away in 2013. He staged maximalist performance art pieces, published extensive art criticism, and was considered a “cultural force” and “mischief-maker” by his friends and collaborators in Tremont, a west side neighborhood whose cheap rents in the 1990s attracted a community of artists and galleries.⁴ Fearless in his approach to showing the gritty sides of life, Green made work that responded to the stigmatization of HIV/AIDS with an iconoclastic stance towards the medical establishment and a fervent insistence on the health and integrity of his own body. In a 1994 press release for “The Scarlet Letters,” a solo piece he wrote and performed, Green stated: “My work differs from much of current cultural work on AIDS in its radical refusal of victim or patient status. Rather than appealing to institutional power for help, I challenge the power of the institutions themselves.”⁵

I was not familiar with Green when I first encountered his name in the Visual AIDS archives, but his biography’s resemblance to my own—a queer writer who came to New York from the middle of America—made me want to know more. I wanted to know how he experienced the city in the ’80s, how he grappled with AIDS, and what shape his performances took, if I could even find them. I wanted to know, in the spirit of José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, how the traces of Green’s life and work live on today. When I discovered that Green is conspicuously absent from critical anthologies documenting the performance art of his time, I grew even more curious. 

By the time he moved from Ohio to New York City in 1980, Green had already begun making the kind of edgy work that would define his practice. As a student at Kent State University (KSU) in the late seventies, he studied with experimental filmmaker Richard Myers and made 16mm and Super 8 films, including The Dark, a dialogue-free portrait of three young women moving through haunting scenes of captivity and escape.⁷ He also began exploring spoken word. Green met his friend Cindy Penter in a modern dance class at KSU in 1975, and she writes that even then he was an impassioned artist, an engaged collaborator, and a person of social conscience.⁸

Documentation of Green’s New York years is limited, but in 1981, at the age of twenty-three, he was living downtown on East Fifth Street between Avenues A and B. Recounting an early visit, his friend Mike DeCapite writes that Green’s apartment was strewn with books and manuscripts and that he a kitten named Billy. Green worked in bookstores, including Gotham Book Mart and Samuel Weiser Bookstore. During this decade he performed what he referred to as “sound/text pieces” at iconic venues like Limbo Lounge, Pyramid Club, 8BC, Neither/Nor, ABC No Rio, and the Nuyorican Café.⁹His published writings from this time offer a view of the artist just setting out, years before HIV would reshape his life. The works focus on provocative, countercultural, and afflicted subjects—interests that would sustain him throughout his career. In their Winter 1981/1982 issue, for example, the downtown arts journal Benzene published “Concussion,” a performance piece for five voices that deployed hazy vignettes and wordplay to evoke a bedridden, convalescing male whose “eyes weren’t on right,” with references to Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.¹⁰

In 1983, Green published a trio of prose pieces titled “Thin Air” that features transitory street characters struggling to get their bearings, including a woman who sits and sleeps on street corners and yells at passersby, “Spell it! Spell it!”¹¹

By the mid-1980s, drug addiction commanded Green’s life in New York—eventually leading to his departure from the city.¹³ In 1987, he was “squatting on 13^th street in a place without a floor,” DeCapite writes. “He slept on a beam . . . His life was mostly about drugs and raw survival.” Green recounted this time in a humorous, digressive text he later wrote called “Shining Moments of a Trashophiliac,” stating that he “did a minimum of four YEARS time on the street”:

I spent most of my days and nights either thinking about cocaine, carrying out elaborate schemes to get the money for it, buying it, shooting it, smoking it, sweating from it, trying to come down off it, or feeling guilty about it . . . Crack had just begun to proliferate and I was alternating between shooting up nickle [sic] bags of street coke and smoking nicks of rock, one or the other every half hour or so. ¹⁴

Green moved back to Cleveland in 1988 and “courageously licked a drug addiction.”¹⁵ Soon after, he learned he was HIV-positive. He also leapt headfirst into new artistic opportunities.

The Cleveland Performance Art Festival (PFA) ran annually from 1988 to 1999 and became the largest festival of its kind in the United States. It presented over one thousand artists from twenty-seven countries, including each of the artists who would become known as the NEA four—Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, and Tim Miller.¹⁶ The festival embraced experimentation: “We’re going to start a few fires and see how hot it gets,” Founding Director Thomas Mulready wrote in the 1990 program, the year Green piled found objects on the stage for “Trashophiliac.”¹⁷ These were also the years when queer solo performance was “booming” in America, as David Román and Holly Hughes observe in the anthology O Solo Homo, reflecting a rise in queer self-representation and the accessibility and inclusivity of performance art.¹⁸

Green was among the first waves of artists to present at the PFA. He appeared in the festival four times, sharing the stage with artists like Hughes and William Pope L.¹⁹ As a Cleveland-based artist, “he certainly had a following,” says James Levine, founder of the Cleveland Public Theater, where the festival was hosted. “There was a Frank Green contingent that would come see whatever he was doing.”²⁰

Green’s PFA performances were transgressive affairs that took viewers to “bizarre, powerful, intriguing, surprising” worlds.²¹ Grounded in autobiography, they nevertheless avoided linearity and realism, instead favoring associative sequences and satire. (Doctors were among his most satirized subjects.) He maintained a focus on maligned and neglected subjects, from trash and bugs to the last pleading letters of an ailing Jane Bowles, but his approach evolved to include video, sculpture, movement, costumes, and props. With these additions, he seemed intent on affecting overstimulation in his performances, as though by inundating audiences and pushing mediums to their excesses, he could force viewers to understand the intensity of his lived experience. By 1991, the dehumanizing stigma of living with HIV became his explicit subject. In his final festival piece, “Adventures in Safe Sex and Advances in Orificial Surgery,” Green challenged what he described as the “sex-negating” aspects of safe sex culture under AIDS by farcically eroticizing the disease itself and proposing a medical procedure that limited sexual compatibility to one other human.²² The work oscillated between sarcastic irreverence and affectionate care. Climaxing with an orgy of physicians—“we all pumped the pus out of each other’s lesions . . . and we shook it up in plastic test tubes until it fizzed”—it closed with Dr. Frank Green tenderly confessing that “I carried everybody, kicking and screaming, to my safety, and I stuck my tongue out at everybody, and I put my arms around everybody.”²³

After Ohio, Green performed “The Scarlet Letters” at Franklin Furnace in New York, as well as in San Francisco, Denver, Saskatoon, Calgary, and Phoenix.²⁸  He also presented the work three nights in a row at a first-of-its-kind conference in 1996 called Performing AIDS, held in Cleveland. The program states: “Frank marshals alternative information to challenge the authority of the medical profession and enacts a shamanistic ritual of self-healing. The result has been described as a graphically stunning multimedia bodywork performance that explodes the current ideology of HIV = AIDS = Death.”²⁹

Green’s practice continued to evolve and mature, with two more major performances rounding out his career. In 1996, he wrote and starred in “Science Gets Serious,” a play about a doctor attempting to photograph his psyche as it looked from the days when he was an addict.³⁰ For this production, Green worked with a director for the first time. The Cleveland Plain Dealer called the result “a tour-de-force multimedia performance.”³¹

In 1997, he produced Anonymous Test Site, a charged interactive performance in which volunteers submitted to clinical examinations of their hands that left them with vague, unsettling diagnoses about the risks of everyday touch.³²

In 1998, a few years before his health turned, Green responded to a question in a public access talk show, filmed at Tremont’s Literary Café, about whether there was a guiding thread in his work.³³ With an easy grin, he said: “All the work that I’ve done has come mostly out of pain, things in my life that I’m trying to understand and work through . . . My work is not known for being happy and pretty, at all.”³⁴  He added that he was no longer interested in performing, that he’d been doing it for twenty years and wanted to write a novel instead. Finding time was difficult—he’d been busy driving a taxi, writing for the Cleveland Free Times, and trying to pay the rent—but he said he had an idea. He remained engaged in the arts community and lived for another fifteen years.

About the author

Timothy E. Bradley is a New York City-based fiction writer, playwright, and educator whose work explores queer aging and memory, the climate crisis, artificial intelligence, and music and visual art. His fiction has appeared in Foglifter Journal and his art writing has been published by Galleria Poggiali. He has received residences and awards from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Good Hart Artist Residency. Timothy is a graduate of Yale and the MFA program at Hunter College, where he was a Hertog Fellow. He teaches writing at Queens College.

Writing from the 2024 Research Fellowship is edited by Sophia Larigakis.