While some performance artists deny television’s influence and others use video uncritically, the Loofah Method–a three-person multimedia performance troupe based in Bucktown–embraces TV, using the medium to critique the medium. “We all grew up with this TV blasting at us,” explains video artist and Loofah member Kurt Heintz, “and we don’t want that anymore.”
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In a piece the group did before the election, “I Dream of George,” Salach played Dorothy while a gigantic, digitally manipulated video image of the president’s head played the Wizard of Oz, revealing the humbug behind the great and powerful Bush. Likewise in “Vogue With the War Dead” Salach sings a parody of a vacuous Madonna song as the jumping-off point for, as Heintz puts it, “fucking the media.” In the piece, which manipulates video footage of the Iran-contra hearings, Salach, Messing, and Heintz make barbed comments about American militarism in general and the Iran-contra affair in particular. “We get to fuck Oliver North back for the bullshit he’s perpetrated,” says Heintz.
The Loofah Method was founded one evening in 1987, when Salach and Messing ended a date–“Our first,” Salach admits–by recording some of her poems at his loft. At the time Salach, a free-lance advertising copywriter for Spiegel, was already making a name for herself at Marc Smith’s weekly poetry slams at the Green Mill.
Heintz joined the Loofah Method in 1990. A hacker since high school, he eventually moved into video and computer graphics because he couldn’t stand the idea of doing “other people’s accounts receivable” for the rest of his life.
Using computer and video equipment he’d acquired over the years–“My dining room is decorated in middle WGN period”–Heintz manipulated Salach and Messing’s images to create a short animated sequence starring them, which he replayed on Salach’s computer. “I said, ‘OK, Cindy, watch.’ There she is talking on the screen, and Mark is doing this wiggly dance behind her–and her eyes lit up.” Heintz was immediately invited to join the Loofah Method.
