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

Research Fellow Timothy E. Bradley's essay explores the work of Frank Green (1957–2013), a performance and installation artist who worked in New York and Ohio, and its lack of representation in the art historical and AIDS art canon. Bradley focuses on The Scarlet Letters, a performance that incorporates many of Green's ideas about art, society, and HIV that set him apart from other artists of the time.

In the Q & A following his 1991 performance at the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, Frank Green was asked if his decision to place a live rabbit and a dead rabbit together on stage made the AIDS epidemic out to be “more terrible and distressing than it actually is.”¹

The audience had just seen “Just Say Yes to Bugs,” a forty-minute multimedia frenzy in which Green roams the stage conducting lab experiments with glass beakers, insects, a charcoal grill, a bed frame rigged into a restraining device, and more. The performance begins with the artist wrapped in bandages, injecting himself with needles and swallowing pills while crying out, “One more time!” He then transforms into a menacing health official in a hazmat suit and gas mask, handing out vials of strange concoctions to the audience. Finally, he strips down to a jockstrap, revealing his near-naked body painted into segments, as if primed for an operation. Throughout, a television placed high above the action shows scenes of biological warfare, lab technicians, and sexual acts, all set to an ominous soundtrack of phrases like “disease centers control, control centers disease” and “ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” The piece ends with Green locking himself in a cage, much like the live caged bunny twitching its nose on stage near a dangling, dripping rabbit carcass.²

To the audience’s question, Green responded: “I don’t see how it could be more terrible and distressing. I think the AIDS epidemic is one of the most terrifying things happening on the planet now, and I think that’s why this piece had to be so terrifying.” He added, “A lot of times, when I’m trying to show something . . . the best way to do it is to show it.” By then, he had been living with HIV for two years.³

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. 

Early in my research, I discovered that Green published a powerful essay in 1998 that addressed a controversial feature of his practice: he was an HIV-positive artist who questioned the link between HIV and AIDS. This outlook impacted his critical reception. He writes:

Marginalizing me as an artist who fails to accept that HIV causes AIDS, critics ignore the most interesting aspects of my work. They don’t talk about its liberating belief in the possibility of survival. They don’t talk about its exploration of the psychological mechanisms of concealment and isolation. They don’t talk about the appropriation of medical imagery I employ to turn my diagnosis into a position of strength. They don’t talk about multimedia strategies or my performance’s relation to a body work tradition. They don’t talk about its ritual structure or the postmodern strategies applied to Hawthorne’s novel or the way autobiographical discourse expands out from a classic text. But then, critics don’t talk about my work at all. Though I’ve performed The Scarlet Letters in a dozen North American cities, it hasn’t been discussed in a single book or critical article, and has never been reviewed.⁶

These devastating words left me wanting not only to give “The Scarlet Letters” the appraisal Green felt it deserved, but also to learn what preceded and followed this particular work. Who was Frank Green, and what might his practice reveal to us today? 

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.⁹

His 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

Perhaps the most illustrious artifact from Green’s early career is “A-RAIN-MENT,” a sound/text performance for two voices that he presented as early as 1985. The script was published in the performance art journal The Act and an undated, partial video remains of Green presenting it, accompanied by his own recorded voice.¹² On the page, “A-RAIN-MENT” has the aimless, recursive look of a Gertrude Stein text, but in performance the intended effect becomes clear. The piece begins with an imposing droning sound from which Green’s speech emerges (an opening motif that reappears in “The Scarlet Letters” and elsewhere). Through accumulating fragments, a loose narrative forms: after forty days, Noah and his Ark fly over the sea, aided by birds and buffaloes and Noah’s embrace of an adventuresome refrain that “you can Marco Polo too.” Noah eventually lands in the plains of “Oklo / homo,” where he becomes Geronimo, “a scientist of the highest order” who “spent many years searching for a vaccine to combat the white plague.” Geronimo describes seeing “buffalo jumping through a hoop over the flames”—a transformative hoop appears in “The Scarlet Letters,” too—and this vision enables him to summon rain and extinguish fire. In the video, Green prefaces the performance by telling the audience: “I need to do this piece every once in a while, it’s kind of a cathartic piece to me.” Dressed in black with an elaborate mullet, his delivery is pure punk as he yells out the names of animals and ship parts and sways to the rhythm of his recorded voice. This early work exemplifies Green’s unconstrained imagination, his attraction to reinvention, and his belief in art as a healing force, all of which would continue to define his oeuvre.

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

By the time Green premiered “The Scarlet Letters” at the Cleveland Public Theater in 1993, his self-determined approach to living with HIV had crystallized. He wrote of how his diagnosis initially left him feeling “pretty damn depressed,” convinced he would die young.²⁴ When his T cell count dropped but then bounced back, he attributed the rebound to his positive attitude and to taking cues from how his body felt: healthy. Having lost friends who had taken AZT, he rejected doctors’ prescriptions and instead amassed a catalogue of research that seemed to poke holes in mainstream theories about AIDS causation. If testing positive indicated the presence of antibodies, for instance, didn’t that imply resistance to progression? How to explain all the HIV-positive Americans who hadn’t gotten AIDS? Didn’t the CDC’s evolving definition of AIDS seem rather arbitrary? Drawing on the work of a handful of doubting researchers, Green often also expressed skepticism about pharmaceutical companies’ profit motives. Finally, in his notes for “The Scarlet Letters,” he tracked dozens of cases in which those living with HIV had been stigmatized and punished.²⁵ “The more I read,” Green wrote, “the more convinced I became that the HIV paradigm is a sham. This knowledge gave me strength.” With this spirit of defiance and determination, he took to the stage in 1993 in “The Scarlet Letters” and declared: “I am HIV positive. And I say, so fucking what?”

In the face of a damning society, Green challenged the sentence imposed on him. The Hawthorne novel, in his hands, readily lent itself to mapping out the villains of the AIDS epidemic. The deceitful priest Arthur Dimmesdale evoked, in Green’s work, America’s culture of concealment and shame; Roger Chillingsworth conveyed the doomsday prophecies and self-interest of doctors. In Hester Prynne, Green found a kindred “‘high-risk’ sinner who transcends her stigmatization by embracing it,” while her daughter Pearl’s refusal to be pinned down by moral codes made her a “pagan anarchist wild child” and helped Green reclaim his autonomy.²⁶ The anthology Sharing the Delirium posits that by the early nineties, a new wave of performers moved beyond mournful, elegiac accounts of the epidemic to instead “defiantly postulate an alternative discourse which opposes hierarchical structures, asserts subjectivity, and challenges cultural suppression of sexuality.”²⁷ Green’s new work reflected these “second generation” trends emerging in AIDS-related performances around this time.

“The Scarlet Letters” begins with Green, bandaged in white, pacing across a white circular tarp. He extracts letters from the tarp—a metaphor for his body, the script notes indicate—that are written to him by Hawthorne’s characters. As he reads the messages, Green paints the floor red with his footprints to spell out the letters HIV. With his body now dramatized as a source of information, he becomes gradually able to “see the virus” with each new letter. The messages trace his journey from being “just another American boy” to becoming a bisexual junkie, and then a dissenter against HIV’s forces of concealment, deceit, and victimization—until ultimately, he becomes a self-healer. In the final act, once he takes Hester’s advice to “use your artwork as a needle,” a ritual unfolds. To whispered incantations of “trust your body, love your body,” Green slathers his skin in red paint and then slips, slides, spins, and glides across the floor. A caduceus descends from the ceiling, from which he unsheathes a sword. He carves out a hula hoop from the tarp. Jumping through it, Green delivers a mantra:

I heal myself of concealment and shame.
I heal myself of isolation and guilt.
I heal myself of helplessness and medical dependency.
I heal myself of frustration and anger. 
And I declare myself cured.

By the end of the ritual, the audience has witnessed Green’s brave and vulnerable path to healing. A new softness emerges in his closing appeal to his mother, when he says: “You know, the ironic thing, in all this clamoring for life, mom, is that death does not seem to me to be such a bad thing. In the end, all I really want is to go back inside you. All my love, Frankie.” The lights go down on his anointed body, and we feel indeed that a cure has been attained.

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.