What new energy can be brought forward from remnants of a past life? ….A life that was vibrant, adventurous, rebellious, and “incandescent” – to use a word writer José Esteban Muñoz uses to describe Fred Herko. Herko was a queer dancer, performer, muse for Andy Warhol, and participant in the performance circles of Judson Church.
The opening question above prompted me to find new materials and means to make a live space to pay homage to the dancer. Herko tragically died at the age of 28 when he leaped naked in the form of a perfect jeté out of a friend’s fifth story apartment window in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1964. A close friend of Herko, Diane DiPrima, talks about her friendship with him in her memoir. When going through his belongings shortly after his death, she wrote, “On the floor in his room there was a book by Mary Renault open at the page where the king leaps into the sea. Where the ritual to renew the world is described. It was the closest we found to a suicide note.”
Movement was a primal element in Herko’s life. When making an artwork to honor him, it felt necessary to respond through movement. I wanted to form an oceanic image that would literally move, so I began to make small, kinetic sculptures to experiment with this idea. The stands of the sculptures became roller skates: a reference to one of Herko’s performances where he danced with one foot on a roller skate, the other one untethered. I then chose key words Muñoz and DiPrima used to describe Herko that captured his energy and personality. All the words together formed a new script. I chose to whisper each word slowly, syllable by syllable – the first syllable spoken on an inhale, the next on an exhale, and followed that alternating pattern for the duration of the piece.
After exploring a range of texts that capture different aspects of Herko’s life, one is confronted, of course, with his death and all the complicated emotions and questions surrounding it. This work was a way to meditate on Herko and what he leaves behind, but also to try to suspend myself in a realm more fantastical, mythical, and beyond the ordinary, like he did.