Stories of John
First Contact
I met John Liebrand in Chicago in the late 80’s. I had heard about his performance work and everyone was saying I should see it. “He’s ripping you off” was the call I heard. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago people were telling him he should see my work. John was attending the school to get his Masters degree. At the end of his first semester he called me and asked if I would stand in for him at his review. I had never met him or seen him perform at this point and he thought it would be amusing for me to present his work to the staff at the Art Institute. I had attended S.A.I.C. several years prior and was familiar with the Staff. The premise was that John had been hit in the mouth with a baseball and his mouth was wired shut and he was heavily medicated. He brought over his notebooks and I made myself familiar with his work for the semester. On the morning of the review we met and went over a bit of Johns theatrics. He would require me at one point to smash up some aspirin and help him drink it down. He would also write down responses and I would read them to the review panel. All in all it was a very amazing experience and I realized immediately that John was creating very interesting work. His work was very real and certainly no rip-off of what I was doing.
Brendan deVallance_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Here is one sent in by Robert Daulton:
My Dear Brendan,
John appeared in and around the performance venues in Chicago about 1988. I saw him several times at the Art Institute and at various performances in the capacity of an audience member before I ever saw his work. You introduced him to me in your selfless role of vanguard enabler, but he was so internalized and my persona was so vain and megalomaniacal that our connection was weak and noisy with the background static of my own dissipation and ego. At that time, I perceived even someone as self-effacing as John as a threat to what I pathetically thought was my "status" within the community of live artists. I grudgingly witnessed one or two brief works by him in some "variety show" gigs that were so endemic at that time, but I viewed him as just another autistic retard performer, the style of which I believed you were supreme. He seemed to idolize you and it appeared that he found it difficult to speak at all without an interpreter.
On a cold, cold winter evening around that time, late '88 or 89, I was one of several performers at a Lower Links show, perhaps one of the shows you curated with such tenacity, sincerity and aplomb as part of your neverending battle to create a "scene" out of a molehill. You were self-assuredly confident that somehow you could make Ronald Reagan's Chicago of 1987 into Zurich of 1914, or Paris of 1924 or at least Homburg of 1959, and I was swept into your one man zeitgeist that night.
Drunken and obnoxious, I delivered my cliched self-aggrandisement as usual to the apathetic crowd of maybe nine persons at the club. I don't really recall if John came on before or after I did, but I was determined to experience his acrimony and pain and react to him in a confrontational manner to see what he was made of - to see if there was a chink in his armor - to take him at his word, since he seemed to be crying out for someone to care, to respond, to join in, to actually be there in synch with his call to the crowd, which was, really, a call to join him and take up arms and a call to a violent revolutionary overthrow of the phoniness of performance, of interpersonal relations, of living in such a stupid "Wall Street" (starring Michael Douglas) milieu as a less than human bunch of poseurs, against the pennilessness and pointlessness and the isolation.
As soon as he began reading I pointed a lazerbeam, which I had stolen from the holography department of SAIC, directly at his coke-bottle-bottom glasses. The beam refracted into blinding star-points of intense incarnidine, just the effect I was looking for, but it clearly made John nervous. Lazers weren't very common in public then (you had to actually plug this one into the wall) and he came from the stage down to where I was sitting to ask me to please stop, and ask if it would damage his eyes. I basically laughed in his face, feigning incomprehension, so he re ascended the stage and continued. I watched smugly, shouting occassional reactive snide asides at him. I could tell it was bugging him. He would glance at me nervously. I wanted to fuck his show up, to out retard the retard, to one up his ass.
At some point he had brought an axe or a sledge up and was daring the crowd to smash his head in with it, so i JUMPED UP THERE TO DO JUST THAT AND AT THAT POINT JOHN STOOD UP TO ME AND CALLED ME ON MY SHITTINESS!! He said, sotto voce, that he would have prefered not to die that evening, but if I had the balls, I should take my best shot. Enraged, beaten and frustrated again, I walked offstage, got my lazer and left the club, climbing those dark stairs into the cold, cold, winter coldness at two a.m., headed somewhere to try and fuck some girl I'd never met, and would never meet again.
I never really got to say thanks, John.
Thanks.
r________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Got any stories about John that you’d like to share? Send them in and I’ll post them here.
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