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| THE TALE OF THE CONDOR COMMANDOS | |||||||||||||
| The Captain Condor project was reconceived in the mid 80s after I had put performance stuff aside for a few years.� Essentially, I was bored with making money in the stock market and I needed an outlet for my tendency to madness while I was tinkering on and off with psionics and working on my first book on that subject.� By that time I had a considerable helmet collection and it came as a bit of a surprise to my friends that I chose what was my oldest helmet, made back while I was in college.� (I've got older ones now, thanks to e-bay.) | |||||||||||||
| There was a small group of us who hung around at the Theosophical Society and we created a bunch called the Condor Commandos.� We had a poet, an electrical engineer, a budding computer nerd and his wife and various other folks who drifted in and out.� And we all possessed a peculiar sense of humor.� Well, it did not take long to convert a few of them to bdsm and that, combined with our wit and intelligence led to us coming up with some pretty funny little performance actions.� Unfortunately we were having SO much fun we sort of forgot to take pictures and thus except for a few snapshots laying in some old drawers or packed in boxes, there is really not much of a record of that period except in our memories. | |||||||||||||
| But it was fun. | |||||||||||||
| It was during that time that I formulated the idea of art as warfare, as an act of aggression against the culture and the environment.� It was a celebration of nastiness and violence, of shaking people to their core.� We would first find out what would make our targets upset and then deliberately push those buttons, like one Good Friday when a bunch of people got out of church to find the area plastered with signs advertizing the Church of Satan.� We photocopied pictures of women in bondage from porno mags and would leave them laying on train seats, park benches, inside public lockers in train stations or the Art Institute of Chicago. | |||||||||||||
| We would deliberately litter. | |||||||||||||
| But time takes its toll upon everything and the old gang just sort of faded away.� It was time for something different. | |||||||||||||
| it was time for Doctor Mirabilis | |||||||||||||