For anyone with an abiding interest in American cultural politics, the name of writer and performance artist Tim Miller will forever be synonymous with the bitter battles over what kind of material could be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 1990, the Los Angeles-based Miller was granted an NEA solo performance fellowship to help develop a body of work focused overtly on issues of gay sexuality. When the controversial grant was rescinded under political pressure from the White House, the outspoken Miller joined with Holly Hughes, Karen Finlay and John Fleck and became one of the notorious “NEA Four” to sue the federal government. The maverick artists won a settlement, but the NEA subsequently added the “decency clause” to govern its future grants.
That was enough to make Miller something of a hero among the radical left and, to this day, his work remains a staple of some college courses on gender issues. Students tend to pack his shows, and Miller often does college residencies. (This week, he’s at Roosevelt University.)
But Miller’s newest show, “Body Blows,” which was performed for the first time last weekend at the Bailiwick Arts Center, feels like a generation away from those aging culture wars that once raged with such force. Miller is in his mid-40s now. And on Sunday night, one couldn’t help but ponder how much his shows have mellowed over the years.
Certainly, Miller is still a sexual-political activist (much of his current agitation involves his inability to sponsor a green card for his foreign-born life partner). And part of the way through “Body Blows,” he flashes his genitals for no apparent reason beyond the act’s role as one of his signatures. It’s just the stuff that once drove the NEA batty.
But “Body Blows,” a surprisingly moving 70-minute monologue themed around assaults to the body–both pleasurable and painful–has an unmistakably elegiac tone.
In typically personal fashion, it begins with Miller’s warm memory of a movie date with his first high school boyfriend and meanders genially through his formative experiences in New York, where he ponders the pre-AIDS world with nostalgia.
As is typical with longtime performance artists of the higher caliber, Miller’s writing has deepened and become less reductive with the years. The fights seem different now and there’s an emotionally resonant sense of time slipping by him.
Even his current fight for gay immigration rights is as much personal as political. One senses Miller has come to crave personal peace as much as social change–although it’s doubtful he would ever know how to separate the two.
