Ann Coulter as Performance Art

In On Edge, C Carr’s collection of essays and reviews of performance art, she describes a 1988 piece by Joe Coleman. It was one of several acts during a performance evening at the Hotel Amazon (a former New York City Public School). By the time Coleman made his appearance on stage, a woman’s crotch had, predictably enough, already been pelted with paint-filled eggs and a man named Victor Poison-Tete had managed to accidentally tear down a set of Christmas lights.

Then came Coleman:

"It was around 1.A.M. when Coleman appeared with animal entrails draped over his suit, pig hooves tied to his arms, a white furpiece snaking down his back…I caught some line about ‘cosmic retribution,’ and then a flash of fireworks rocketed into the audience across the aisle. Coleman lit another match to the load of firecrackers strapped to his chest, filling the room with cacophony and smoke and the odor of gunpowder. He picked up a pitcher of what looked like blood and gulped it as his wife, Nancy, entered in a white dress and fake pregnant belly. He spit blood on her. Then he opened a little Chinese takeout container and began to scream, 'It's my father!!!' as he pulled out white mice. One crawled over his chest and he picked it up, screaming. He snapped off its head, flinging the carcass out into the crowd."

Seem familiar? This week, Ann Coulter appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual convention for "conservative activists," dressed, as if in 1988, in a grey vest and black shirt, dark roots showing. Her face was, as always, blessed with its hard sharp features, starved into a parody of uber-bitch physiology. She ended a speech about democratic presidential candidates as follows:

"I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I--so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards."

Ann Coulter's act is a truly amazing bit of performance art. Her calculated queen-bitch persona (or "thundercunt" as one youtube commenter calls her) is pure calculated nastiness. She is simultaneously oversexed and completely sexless, a horror-villain caricature: the Repressed returning from a botched Sears make-over. Every month, she manages to say something so inflammatory that it sets it motion a media shitstorm, in which everybody is made to rationally discount her position--an impossible task, since she is performer, not an academic. Her act betrays the sneering xenophobia that underlies conservative American culture: mouse-beheading tailored to the world of disposable 24/7 news and hyper-Warholian celebrity culture.

Also, she like gay stuff:

-Bill Clinton "shows[s] some level of latent homosexuality."
-"Al Gore--total fag."
-What would she would do if her child came out as gay: "I'd say, 'Did I ever tell you you're adopted."
-"I think there are some people in this audience who meant to be at the sexual reorientation class down the hall."

C. Carr wrote of Coleman: "Performers in this tradition appeal to a language in the subconscious which may never have words. At Coleman's spectacle of rage, I only know I felt the pity and the terror of tragedy."

This is our new language, and here is our modern tragedy.