‘Halfway through a video of Johanna Went’s 1988 performance Passion Container, a masked, horned, enrobed figure holds up a red container that resembles an oversized organ. Blood pours from it, reddening the figure, now dancing to a No Wave beat. As the dance escalates into an ecstatic bounce, blood drenches the robe.
‘The trancelike dance and allusions to sacrifice recall the quasi-ritualistic performances that characterized Viennese Actionism in the 1960s, but the overall aesthetic is comically macabre. Still, Went’s over-the-top scene is riveting. Few artists would combine the symbols of ritual with noise- and dance music, fake blood, and homemade costumes, and perhaps only Johanna Went would animate it all with humor.
‘Passion Container is one of around 200 shows Went performed from 1977 through the ’80s in Los Angeles. Performances at venues such as Franklin Furnace (1987) and the Lincoln Center (1991) in New York and Track 16 Gallery (2007) in LA show Went’s more formal side, but it’s the club shows — in which she quick-changes costumes, gyrates, grunts and howls, and smears and swallows viscous ooze — that established her as a cult figure in the annals of LA art and punk, and gave her the nickname “hyena of performance art.”
‘Went began performing in 1975 with improvisational theater troupes Para-Troupe and the World’s Greatest Theater Company. Following a move to Los Angeles in 1977, she started performing solo, adding live music after meeting sound artist and percussionist Z’EV and composer Mark Wheaton, who would become her collaborator for the next four decades.
‘It’s no surprise that Went’s boundary-pushing performances drew eyes from the experimental LA club scene. Consider another moment in Passion Container, in which she wears a bulbous mask with an anus-like mouth, and a nun character shovels gruel into a larger anus-mouth. Signifiers are shifting — mouth, anus, eye, sun. Later, her face emerges from the massive vagina of a larger-than-life puppet as two sewage-green demons fling a huge, pillowy three-eyed head into the audience. The show associates the feminine and maternal with the earth, both threatened by monstrous masculinity (reified in a giant phallus). But Went’s frenzied performance is too fast and chaotic to be contemplated; it’s experienced.
‘In an article on Went for 4Columns, author Geeta Dayal writes: “When Lady Gaga debuted her meat dress in 2010, I had a flashback: it sounded like something Went would have done in 1982. In a just world, Johanna Went would be as much of a household name as Lady Gaga.”
‘Went continued to perform into the 1990s and, less frequently, the 2000s. (She stopped performing after Ablutions Of A Nefarious Nature at Track 16 in 2007 due to an ankle injury and arthritis.) She has received some of her due in 2020, with a limited-edition reissue of her 1982 debut record Hyena (on red vinyl) and recent retrospective, Passion Container, at the Box in Los Angeles. The exhibition (which closed March 28), displayed photos, ephemera, art, and costumes drawn from Went’s personal archive, alongside screenings of her performances (available to view online).
‘The costumes, which Went constructed mostly from discards found on streets and in dumpsters, combine craft with invention. Symbols of traditional women’s roles — baby dolls, high-heeled shoes, a nun’s habit — are integrated into colorful agglomerations of unruly femininity. In one eye-catching example, figures and symbols are painted on a metallic pink robe with a grotesque pink mask. Jarring juxtapositions of stuffed animals and dolls, skulls, and dildos exaggerate the creepy side of the visual extravaganza. Along with demented Muppet-like soft sculptures (including the aforementioned three-eyed head and a giant vagina spewing red fabric), they underscore Went’s ingenuity as a maker as well as a performer.
‘More recently, Went (who still lives in Los Angeles) has been working on drawings for new costumes and writing and performing spoken word pieces, while organizing, editing, and preserving her audio, video, and photographic archives with Wheaton.
‘Her exhibition at the Box has made her “seriously consider the possibility of working with younger able bodied dancers and performers,” she said by email. “Those options have occurred to me before, but the public’s response to the Box exhibit was far greater than I had expected and reacquainted me with my audience.”
‘While Went’s transgression of categories is part of her work’s fascination, it has presented challenges to audiences. For instance, an Artforum reviewer in 1983 criticized her work as a “parody of transgression.” Implicit in this criticism, and its implication that parody and transgression are mutually exclusive, is the discomfort that unclassifiable things cause us as a culture. Went transgressed not only genre but also bodily and symbolic boundaries. Her performances have addressed feminine tropes, such as the mother and virgin, and faux-sacrificial blood is conflated with menstrual blood; in Passion Container and other performances she volleyed giant, soiled tampons back and forth with the crowd. These gestures recall Julia Kristeva’s designation, in Powers of Horror, of polluting objects as either excremental or menstrual, the former threatening the ego from without, the latter from within, both ultimately endangering what anthropologist Mary Douglas calls our “cherished classifications.”
‘Went’s outré spectacles — intermingling horror and hilarity — incorporated both. Messy, anarchic, sexualized, they engaged fluidity and flux, refusing to be reduced to a single thing.’ — Natalie Haddad
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Stills
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Further
Johanna Went, the “Hyena of Performance Art”
Johanna Went @ Bandcamp
Johanna Went @ Discogs
Catherine Taft on Johanna Went @ Artforum
Johanna Went @ Forced Exposure
Johanna Went @ The Box
Johanna Went: Where to go after perfection?
Bloody pig heads, jagged music
Johanna Went: Passion Container
JOHANNA WENT: NO WAVE PERFORMANCE ARTIST
Johanna Went @ Ubuweb
Johanna Went: Slave to the Grave
Johanna Went @ LARB
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Audio Recordings
Hyena 1982 EP
Slave Beyond the Grave
Live On Broadway 8/21/82 – cassette
Benny’s Nightmare
Saint Joan Not Alone
Bad End
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Interview: Women in Punk: Alice Bag and Johanna Went
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Visuals
‘The radical performance artist Johanna Went is one of the true legends of the California underground, and one who deserves much wider renown. I first came across her name about two decades ago, while interviewing some punk and post-punk bands from the 1980s. Musicians would talk in awed tones about Went’s infamous shows at venues like San Francisco’s now-defunct Mabuhay Gardens and the late Hong Kong Café in Los Angeles. She was known for transfixing and sometimes gory performances, featuring fantastical costumes made of materials filched from dumpsters and strange, ritualistic improvised music. But detailed information about her work was disappointingly hard to find. When Lady Gaga debuted her meat dress in 2010, I had a flashback: it sounded like something Went would have done in 1982. In a just world, Johanna Went would be as much of a household name as Lady Gaga.
‘One of the best sources of information on Went is RE/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook, a 1983 bible for the industrial music landscape edited by V. Vale and Andrea Juno. The book includes interviews with well-known bands like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, but also with key figures in the subculture who formed the vital connective tissue of entire scenes. These were people like Mark Pauline, the wily founder of robot wrecking crew Survival Research Laboratories, and musician and provocateur Monte Cazazza, who originally coined the term “industrial music.”
‘The Los Angeles gallery the Box has mounted a necessary and wide-ranging retrospective of Went’s work from the 1970s to the 2000s titled Passion Container, its name derived from a 1988 performance. Numerous soft sculptures and costumes fill the space—colorful, hilarious, and often grotesque characters, arranged dynamically as if they were attending a particularly demented party. As you look at them leering and posing, they seem almost alive. Many of these outfits were originally worn by Went in her early stage performances.
‘Passion Container is a crucial step in reviving Went’s riveting body of work. Further exhibitions globally would help to reassert her legacy as one of the most distinctive performance artists of our time—not just on the West Coast, but the world at large. But there should be more—perhaps a book, a tour, a major documentary. And this work shouldn’t just live in the visual-art world; it should be part of the history of music. The stories of punk, post-punk, and industrial music would not have been the same without her searing and original presence.’ — Geeta Dayal, 4columns
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Gig
Bloodletting (Overview/showreel, 1988)
Compilation edit: Mark Wheaton
Johns Place (1977)
Hollywood Central Theater (1979)
Duration: 15 minutes, 13 seconds
Music: Paul M. Young (Serge Modular), Z’EV (percussion)
The Worm (Cue: 15:27 – 18:22, 1980)
8mm silent film by Bill Derby
Duration: 2 minutes, 55 seconds
Featuring Johanna Went with score by Mark Wheaton
New Wave Theater (1980)
Duration: 6 minutes, 7 seconds
Featuring Johanna Went with Brock Wheaton (drums) and Mark Wheaton (Steiner Parker synthesizer)
UCLA Live (1982)
Video directed by Shirley Clarke
Duration: 9 minutes, 12 seconds
Performers: Johanna Went with music by Mark Wheaton (Steiner Parker synthesizer)
and Brock Wheaton (drums)
Camera: Bruce McCrimmon, Martin Kersels, Kevin Barrett
Assistants: Peggy Frarrar DiCaprio and George DiCaprio
On Klub (1982)
The Box (1983)
Video directed by Shirley Clarke
Duration: 4 minutes, 5 seconds
Performers: Johanna Went with music by Mark Wheaton and Joe Berardi
Percussion: Joe Berardi, cello: Jonathan Gold, bass: Hans Christian, clarinet: Greg Burk,
Mattel toy feedback guitar: Mark Wheaton
Engineered by Mark Wheaton and Andre Champagne
Knifeboxing (1984)
Club Lingerie, Los Angeles, CA
Duration: 23 minutes, 38 seconds
Music: Mark Wheaton (Tape loops, Sound Mix), Greg Burk (saxophone), Robin Ryan (percussion)
Primate Prisoners (1987)
Abstraction Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Duration: 19 minutes, 12 seconds
Camera: Stuart Cornfeld and Hugh Brown.
Performers: Johanna Went, Annie Iobst, Lucy Sexton. Music: Mark Wheaton (tapes, synth),
Greg Burk (saxophone), Danielle Elliot (drums)
Passion Container (1988)
Duration: 35 minutes
Performers: Johanna Went, Peggy Farrar, Stephen Holman.
Music: Greg Burk (saxophone), Robin Ryan (drums), Mark Wheaton (tapes and synth).
Hopes and Dreams of the Damned (Cue: 1:20:03 – 1:55:26, 1992)
Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACE)
Duration: 35 minutes, 25 seconds
Performers: Johanna Went, Peggy Farrar, Maureen Jennings, Tom Murrin
Music: Mark Wheaton
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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I honestly just have no interest in Jordan Peterson, and happily I live in France where he is nonexistent. ** Dominik, Hi!!! My pleasure. Yeah, we’ve had, I don’t know, eight baby pigeons birthed near our windows now, and you (or I, at least) do get sort of attached to them, or at least invested in caring that their parents show up to feed them and hang out with them so they’re not lonely and coax them into trying to fly when the time comes, and their parents are pretty good at fulfilling those duties, and of course you cant help but wonder if their loyalties and impulses spring from the same place human parents’ do given how tiny and focused and differently configured they brains are relative to ours, etc. So, yeah, basically, ha ha. Paris Disneyland was lots of fun. The new Marvel Campus is solid, not amazing, and the two new rides there are good, not mindboggling. And we rode everything we wanted, and … it killed a day very entertainingly. You should be its director, clearly. Love putting you in a time machine — my love seems to have a big thing for time machines for some reason — so you could go back and see a Johanna Went performance live in her heyday because they were very weird and great, G. ** Bill, Good, good, my goal was met. Yay me. Oh, wow, thank you a lot for that link. I knew nothing about that for some strange reason. Wow, crazy and awesome. I’ll go find every minuscule thing I can about that. I’ve heard of ‘Resurrection’. Okay, I’m on it somehow. (Don’t think it’s been in France, yet anyway). ** Sypha, Much loftier (and better). Snuggly is squeamish about sex scenes? Granted, I’m not that familiar with Snuggly, but I’d vibed that they were adventurous, so wtf! Maybe Paul Curran can send some of his Yakuza friends over to Mr. Isis’s door. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yes, indeed! I wish I had an ‘in’ in that industry for all kinds of reasons. ** Steve Erickson, Try playing Merzbouw full blast? Everyone, Steve Erickson has interviewed Roger Shepherd, head of the great and legendary record label Flying Nun, and that should be very interesting, so read it post-haste, I suggest. Thanks for the fill-in on the novel. That sounds potentially intriguing enough that even the very tired (to me) zombie thing might not be a problem. Thanks! ** Billy, Hi, Billy. Oh, that’s interesting: I’d never heard that term before. Huh. That Kara Walker piece definitely qualifies. I only didn’t include it because I think it was in the first Edible post a couple of years ago unless I’m mistaken. I’m good. Paris seems un-assaulted other than by slightly too high temperatures. Are you doing A-okay too? And, if so, how so, or, if not, why not? ** Right. Unless you resided in the California region back in the 80s and/or 90s, you might not be familiar with the crazed, brilliant, mind-blowing performances of the great Johanna Went. You might know her recordings, as they were known in the general alt-music scene and still are to some degree. Happily, the LA gallery The Box has uploaded video documents of most of Went’s performances recently, which makes a post intro’ing her work possible. And I’m obviously hoping that you’ll read and poke around and discover her stuff because it’s sadly under-known. So that’s your optional blog assignment for today. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
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Jordan Peterson is pretty much the bottom ofthe fascist barrel. save for Lauren Boebert whose hysteria over what she calls “Lesbian Dnce Theory” was clearlyinspired by THIS
From the perspective of having a background in philosophy and working in mental health, I couldn’t agree more with David Ehrenstein. Jordan Peterson is a douche of the lowest degree. Johanna Went. Made me think how I missed out on so much great stuff in the 80’s because I spent that decade recovering from the 70’s and getting myself on track. Dennis, thanks for your reply from a few blogs ago. I saw “How to Draw a Bunny” a while back. I’m a big fan of Dada and flux. His work is amazing. Shows up at auctions occasionally. I’d like to add one to my collection at some point. You asked what I am working on. Part of my practice is writing letters of support/referral for my transgender clients who need to access medical treatment. Half are under 18, half are adults of varying ages. Right now I have a backlog on which to catch up. I realized a while ago that I began this specialty in 2008, which means I have 14 years of letters on file. I’m slowly organizing them by date, to see if my writing has gotten better. The letters are case narratives – my goal is that, after reading it, the doctor will see more of the person and less of the patient. Once assembled and redacted, I plan to contact journals in the fields of bioethics and medical humanities. Maybe they can get published. The challenge is finding free time. Most of my work week involves face-to-face sessions with people.
Dennis, funny you mention Paul Curran, as Justin has actually wanted to meet with him, and I’ve told Paul that as well… but it’s just never happened for whatever reason.
The story behind Justin and mine collaboration is pretty amusing, though. When I told Justin I was working on PLEASANT TALES III (he himself wrote PLEASANT TALES II, which Snuggly published) he suggested I do a story called “Gay Homosexuality” and that we should co-write it. I was very dubious, partly because I’m a control freak who doesn’t work well with others, and partly because I knew that his pace of writing is much different than mine (by different I mean slower), but I figured maybe having his name attached to the book in some small capacity might make it easier to get published, and I also thought, “Well, who knows, maybe it’ll be interesting.” I started work on it in April of 2020. My proposition to Justin was that I would write a 5 page opening scene and a 5 page concluding scene, and he would do 2-3 scenes in the middle, for a 20 or so page story, and we would then edit each others contribution, to which he agreed. I wrote the opening scene very quickly and sent it off to him, but by June, when he still hadn’t finished his sections, I decided to write the closing section myself, making a guess as to what would happen in his parts (and figuring I could always readjust things as needed later anyway). He told me it would be done by August 2020. By September it still wasn’t done (mainly because at that point Justin was finishing up editing the Neo-Decadent Manifestos book), but by October he said he planned to finish it in a week. Jump to February 2021 and it still wasn’t done, though by March Justin said he planned to finish it that month. When that didn’t happen I decided to put my foot down and give him a firm deadline (August 2021), which he said would be no problem. July 31st he messaged me to tell me that “Gay Homosexuality” would be done “soon.” Over a year later (and 2 and a half years after I started the story) and still nothing ha ha. Granted he’s had some good excuses: the aforementioned “Neo-Decadent Manifestos” book, then both last year and this year he was working on a new anthology of Neo-Decadent short stories (which will be published later this year: funnily enough I wrote THREE whole stories for that one before finally managing one that was acceptable), along with the usual excuses: work, magic, drugs, orgies. Meanwhile I like to joke with him that at this rate the next GAME OF THRONES book will be published by the time this damn story is done. Long story short, I think this will be both my first and last collaboration ever! It made me realize I’m a lone wolf who likes working at my own pace.
In other news, I know there are some gamers on here, so I figured I’d give a shout-out to this Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/meredith-gran/perfect-tides-station-to-station?fbclid=IwAR0BHks_tF5rJz5QkPeiita0QUF-vZJqZhnDeFmF3IMKwvpgm5Tg9-1apKs
It’s a sequel to the 90’s inspired point and click computer game PERFECT TIDES which came out earlier this year. I played the original game a few months ago and loved it so much I now rank it among my Top Ten favorite games ever! It was created by a woman named Meredith Gran, who previously was best known for her decade-long web comic OCTOPUS PIE (which I’ve recently begun reading). A very talented writer, artist, and now, game designer. Anyway it’s got a week to go and they’ve almost hit the 75% mark of their funding, so I really hope they make their goal as I want to see this game come to life!
Johanna Went is a new name to me and I like her work a lot. Happy that The Box documented her doings so thoroughly lest it gets lost to history.
Wow, Johanna Went! Haven’t heard her name in years. I only know her from articles and odd snippets, but never saw her live in those pre-internet years. Don’t think she was performing during my occasional LA trips. Look forward to combing through the videos here.
Bill
Hey Dennis,
I did not know about Johanna Went before right now, shamefully. But I shall rectify that today, thanks to you.
I sent you some fashion photos on your WhatsApp. Did you get them? Is WhatsApp even a thing anymore?
It’s hot af in LA. I’m tired of it.
B
Hi!!
Okay, yes, it’s pretty reassuring that I’m not the only one animals lead down these philosophical paths, haha. Seriously, though, I’d give so, so much to hear their thoughts sometimes.
So, basically, the new attractions are worth a try but probably won’t make your top-three list? Still, I’m glad you had fun!
I’m absolutely down for love’s time machine ideas, so don’t stop bringing them! In fact, I’d be thrilled to see Johanna Went live. I’ve never heard about her before, and this post is just mind-blowing. So thank you! Love making sure that every public soap dispenser in the world is filled with actual soap instead of foam, Od.
Hi Dennis!
I’ve been slow to get back from the film fest but it was a lot of fun. Recommendation wise, there was a few good things. I really liked this Columbian film called “La Jauría” about these teenage prisoners who have to clean a bougie estate. Also saw Lucile Hadzhalilovic’s new film “Earwig” which I thought was really interesting, super dreamy, but also definitely I would say the MOST gloomy-atmospheric-exercise of hers so I can imagine you maybe not loving it. A cyberpunk movie by Saul Williams with his partner called “Neptune Frost” that I thought was really fun. I also saw retrospective screenings of “Spirit of the Beehive” and “Vive L’Amour” which was somewhat embarrassing that I hadn’t seen either, but loved both, especially “Vive” since I’m a bigggg Tsai Ming-liang fan. I also saw the Francois Ozon gender-swapped remake of “Petra Von Kant” which I thought was AWFUL, definitely not a recommendation from me
While I was in Melbourne I also found a copy of Josiah Morgan’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” which I’d really wanted to read on your recommendation. I really blazed through it and really fell into its constantly changing tone. Really engaging stuff!
How have you been! What’s going on in your world?
Sending my best,
Gus