Eve Hennessa Performance Art
I'm going to explain my performance art to the best of my ability. I think that intellectualizing things can really ruin them, especially art. Words will never do it justice and you are free to see into this whatever you like. I usually have only a vague idea what I'm doing I can only analyze it later. I will give you an idea of things I was thinking about, experiencing or feeling.
mid 2020 right in the heaar of covid. performance art piece by me. Epic Photo by Tom Wolff
This piece was about a lot of things how everything was falling apart but also about disintegration is natural in nature, how death and disintegration are inevitable. And ,of course, I was seeing in the future, the damage that would be done socially with increasing racial rhetoric and fabricated division. Write-up below by Eve Hennessa feat: Viky Davis & Basher Bassene.
Alchemical Vessel
Bad Breakup 2014
https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/407346/vessel-mania-125-plain-white-bowls-get-a-makeover/
he article is from the Washington City Paper: “Vessel Mania: 125 Plain White Bowls Get a Makeover”
by Christina Cauterucci
Published April 24, 2014
https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/407346/vessel-mania-125-plain-white-bowls-get-a-makeover/
It covers the 2014 Alchemical Vessels exhibition at the Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery (U Street NW), in which 125 local artists transformed plain white ceramic bowls. The show ran through May 16, 2014, with a benefit/auction on May 2 supporting Smith Center for Healing and the Arts programs.Your section (quoted directly):
Eve Hennessa
Hennessa buried her bowl in Rock Creek Park for two weeks and burned it in a campfire for a “Bad Break-Up Ceremony.” “Fire, I give to you my pain, I give to you my sorrow…Destroy if you must—I really don’t give a shit about this stupid auction,” she says in a video of the ritual.
The weathered, cracked, scorched bowl in the photo you shared matches this description exactly.
Disintegration performance art piece during Covid lockdown
In February 2020 I was groomed and permanently injured by a 300-pound MMA fighter at my martial arts academy. Besides a bad spine injury, I had a terrible brain injury. I couldn’t read right, remember passwords, or do anything that took more than two steps to complete.
I really couldn’t even schedule a doctor appointment and then go to it. It was just too complicated.
I was home alone. I was recovering from a horrible relationship where somebody was using me and I was still too naïve to understand.
So that was February when Mike Nasser permanently injured me.
Then the world was in lockdown. Nobody went out. We were worried about dying. The stock market crashed. The crypto market crashed.
It was an amazing time. I already was a person who spent a lot of time in the forest, and in my injured time all I could really do was go, build a campfire, and hang out by the campfire or watch the fire. It was all I could do to haul enough branches and put them in the fire pit.
I remember—I think it was from the lack of any kind of air pollution—the tree bark, the leaves, the nature, and the sky seemed like super-realism. Everything was magnified. It was really beautiful in a way. I would go cook some food on the campfire.
I had already spent many years hanging out in the forests of Washington, DC, but now other people were going there too. It was really a great refuge.
I was a nature mystic back in those days.
Dancing is what really kept me feeling good. I had a dancer friend, Basher Bassene from Senegal. He was the most incredible dancer. And in the park during lockdown I met this girl from Italy, Viky Davis. Although she has zero Italian accent. She was probably a spy, like so many people in DC. I know she had grown up on an army base—some kind of special operations something, whatever. Anyway, she was a fantastic dancer.
To create a performance art piece in the forest with some dance and nature—and this was the only place you could hang out too—I invited others, but my brain was so injured I really don’t remember. Did we have a rehearsal or did we just swing it? I think we were sometimes going to Basher’s house and we would do these improvisational dances and come up with ideas.
So when I was in the forest, just the word “disintegration” came to my mind because you know everything was breaking down, and even in the forest everything is disintegrating. I spent a lot of time at the same place where I had built my medicine wheel, so I was in touch with how quickly the forest changed. I buried some jewelry there and I could never find it because the trees would fall over, new trees would come up, the root system in the ground would make it impenetrable. The force of nature is powerful when you’re observing it like that.
So maybe my favorite log that I used to sit on was now completely disintegrated.
And Black Lives Matter—you know I had already started to lose friends who thought I was too white. I had to see on my Facebook every day some kind of villain that had blonde hair. All of these things I could never talk about, and you still can’t to this day. But as an artist, we’re just expressing. We talk about the able things. A picture is worth a thousand words; it will literally take a thousand words just to explain that.
I had always been a fully international person, and so these were my friends who were suddenly rejecting me. Not to mention that everything was boarded up all the way up to Meridian Hill Park, where I lived, and people were looting and breaking windows and breaking into businesses. Businesses were closing. I mean it was full disintegration.
So I think I named it that afterwards because that’s how I roll. I don’t really think in words, so I’m just expressing and feeling and putting these ideas together which are visual. But it was disintegration, and I put that on there. And of course some of my friends are like, “You know what that means, right?” Of course I knew what it meant. I was a very small child when we had integration of schools in South Carolina. That was a very defining moment in history, and now this is a defining moment.
So it was a very cool dance. These two dancers were amazing and I could hold my own even though my spine was so injured. I couldn’t have great moves, but I know I was not the star dancer. We just sort of wore whatever. I’ve always in my art been a person like: just do what you feel and we’ll see what happens.
So Viky wore this amazing shirt with the stars and the moon on it—like she got inspired for her outfit—and if you see the pictures, it really is fantastic.
I have a sable that was my grandmother’s and my silver pants, which is a thread through all of my aluminum foil and alien works.
I really love this piece. You know, we’re just connecting with nature. There’s this great kind of nature song that goes with it and we just were all like right there in the zone. It was a piece that floated. It was in the zone. It was really fantastic.
I did two of these performances. I think one was in the fall, the other one was in summer, and I cannot remember the difference. All I can remember is that all my friends got mad at me.
That’s a lot to do with the disintegration—the disintegration of relationships. I’ve been observing the disintegration of relationships for years and it’s still getting worse and worse. My own family will not allow me in the family. For some reason. I’m not sure why; they won’t tell me. Somehow they think I’m trying to get all of their money… but really it’s them getting my money, but whatever.
People are not thinking things through.
Yes, since it was two women and one man, there was a little bit of that dynamic—jealousy dynamic. I was a little jealous because even though I introduced them to each other (because they’re both fantastic dancers), of course they got together and danced. I mean they were great. You know I’m not a great dancer.
And she was very young and I do believe she was a self-professed psychopath. She was into this Roman religion, paganism—the old Roman paganism—which was very interesting. She told me that like certain times you had to do horrible things and other times you had to do good things. Curiosity has always gotten the best of me, yet I’m entertaining these ideas. Somehow they all hated me and got all of my friends to hate me.
This photographer, Lloyd Wolf, was so amazing. He’s famous and his work is in Architectural Digest, and if it wasn’t for him this piece would have disintegrated because his photos are what really kept it alive. These are his photos. The piece that we did was amazing and of course I think they’re his best photos he ever did. Later he went on to do photos with Viky and maybe even Viky and Basher, but they did not have the same aura.
He told me that I always bring the aura, and that’s true. Even though they were better looking and better dancers and way more beautiful, physically fit bodies, they didn’t have the aura because they were like too much ego. I guess I don’t know, but it didn’t have the aura… which made me feel a little consoled. LOL. We are all human.
(Lloyd Wolf: [lloydwolf.com](https://lloydwolf.com/))
Somehow Salisbury University offered me an exhibit and we did a live broadcast of the next performance piece. It was really wonderful even though it was horrible. I still love this piece. I think it’s by far the best piece of the lockdown.
(Event page: [suartgalleries.org/events/ceremonial-landscapes](https://www.suartgalleries.org/events/ceremonial-landscapes)
Video: [youtube.com/watch?v=rBrxmUmsz8c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBrxmUmsz8c))
DC artists were just busy doing dingy, politically correct art.
So as an artist, I’m just feeling things and expressing. That’s just how I’ve always been. I think I’m highly sensitive in the right-brain area and I’m noticing a lot of things. I’m putting a lot of things together, but it doesn’t ever really come with words until much later. This is six years later that I fully understand my piece.
I knew it was good. I knew I was hitting something. That’s why that word came to me—disintegration—and that is what it is and that’s what we were going through, and it’s a disintegration of so many things.
### What is performance art?
So I’ve called myself a performance artist since the first time I dressed in tinfoil. You know I have a master’s degree in art so I had to study all of these things—Marina Abramović—and I would go to performance art things, and the most famous performance art people don’t even make sense. They’re just… it is very irritating to me and it’s like the king’s invisible clothes, or I guess the prince. But I do love performance art and even if I don’t understand it, I really enjoy it because it’s so visual. It’s so physical. It’s so present. It’s so amazing. Like you don’t want to watch a whole play of my disintegration piece—that would be so boring—but in eight minutes it’s pretty mesmerizing and amazing. It’s not a dance. It’s using the forest, using the costumes, and using the music. It’s creating a moment in time.
I used to feel like I was cheating calling my work performance art. But I didn’t care, and I realize you know performance art is whatever I say it is, and that’s actually true. So me dressing up in tinfoil—does it even make sense? It’s kind of funny and playful. It’s talking about aliens, talking about genders… like there’s just a lot of stuff involved. Art pictures are worth a thousand words.
And it’s not just the moment of the art but the photos. I have a photo from Lloyd Wolf which is me eating a banana, which is just what I was doing on my way to the performance, and he took the picture. And my piece was called “Alien Eve Eats Adam’s Apple”—so my name is Eve and Adam’s apple is referring to the gender subject that started to become very important. That was like 2018. So I’m eating a banana and I name that photo, which I also call a piece—I mean in a way it’s performance art, in a way photo—but the title is integral to the art piece and I call it “Origin of the Species.” That’s a famous book by Darwin which completely shapes our society today. But it was about monkeys and evolution. And so Eve is the first woman and then there’s the monkeys. It was so deep nobody ever commented on my photo, but I think it’s because people are free to just say things. I don’t know. You know I realize that art is supposed to be intimidating that way so you can charge tens of thousands of dollars because like “I’m so much more, you know, I know these great secrets,” and it’s so deep—but really it is not so deep. It’s deep but not that deep. You know it’s not like for judgment of levels of intelligence. That’s just stupid. And I went to grad school in Mexico City and we learned communism, and thank God I learned that because they talk a lot about why they make art snobby and it’s because they can charge tons of money for it. Back when they built the Maya temples, nobody signed their name. It was a different financial structure.
I’m not a communist because I had gone to Cuba at one point and realized it was the most unjust thing I ever saw.
I’m hoping in the future people would just be free to be like “Oh that’s funny” or “Oh what the hell are you talking about?” You know, start a discussion. I’ve never talked about all this until this year. I realize I better talk now because I could die at any moment and all the work I’ve done will just disappear into obscurity and nobody will know what the hell I was doing. Because nobody has seen it all in one place like here on this website. No one. And I’m going to explain all of my work. I’m very excited about it.
The wonderful stage in life where you really don’t care anymore. You’ve lost everything you could imagine losing and there is a level of freedom in that. I’m not trying to get you to like me anymore.
So I just want to talk about performance art. It really could be anything. It’s a fantastic art. It’s just very hard to make money at it, so you know things cost money—production—and one of the reasons why I fell out with certain people is because I didn’t have enough money and couldn’t pay people. So performance art is not cost-effective unless you’re super famous or you’re good at writing grants.
This is the photo for the piece. by Tom Wolf
---
I will create performance art for you or your institution, but it’s gonna cost you. ehennessa@gmail.com
