April, 2005

The first thing you have to know about Bushwick Farms is that it is not theatre, even though it involves a variety show. It is also not performance, even though there are characters embodied by this husband-and-wife artist team who perform such carnival staples as aerial acts. It's not installation art, though guests can enter their traveling van and see slide shows that chronicle Bushwick Farms's performances. Finally, it's not even completely accurate to describe it as an imagined narrative about a Vermont family - in spite of the fact that Tara Cuthbert, a native Australian, and Stuart Solzberg, a former Long Islander, have fully developed a faux genealogy that springs into real time as they crisscross the country as the Bushwick family. If this all sounds paradoxical - and somewhat blurry - that's the point, and you've stumbled on the first truth about Bushwick Farms: Whatever's imagined becomes real and whatever's real exudes the dreamlike qualities of imagination.

“It's a modern-day mythological story,” says Solzberg with a glint in his eye, not unlike the one expressed by his main persona, Joe Rotto, scion of the original Bushwick Farms founder and current manager of its sponsored variety show. “We, Stuart and Tara, are the photographers of the variety show, and that's how we developed a friendship with Joe and Violet Gray.” Violet Gray - a name perhaps meant to evoke that crepuscular light that can blur the real and surreal - is Joe's wife. She is manifested by Stuart's wife, Tara.

“All the characters are components of ourselves,” Solzberg goes on to explain. At last count, there were 50 characters. They are not all generated by the couple, by the way; some are the result of strangers feeling connected to the Bushwick Farms narrative and “writing themselves in.”

“But they're hyper-exaggerated,” says Solzberg. “It's kind of like when you drive a car, and someone cuts you off, and you get furious. You don't recognize that as yourself, but it's an aspect. But what if you gave that aspect a name, a mode of dress, certain tastes in music…”

Which is exactly what Stuart and Tara have done. “We met in 1998 as students at Pratt,” says Cuthbert. “Stuart did painting and performance, and I did ceramics. We moved into a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Bushwick, and as we made pumpkin butter for friends, we created a label for the product and named it Bushwick Farms. We had always been intrigued by old photographs, and around this time we began sticking our heads on pictures of people from history. And then we began to think about this idea of Bushwick Farms and the people who ran it, and then their family. And we became obsessed.”

The couple left New York as a way to devote time to the project, and in their travels to Colorado and then Las Vegas, created the personas that would come to be linked genealogically. “We had always loved to go to cafes and look at strangers,” Cuthbert says. “We'd imagine what they kept hidden from their partners, so it was natural to turn it on ourselves.”

“In life, we're all essentially performing,” adds Solzberg. “But we've become so used to it, that we forget we are. The reason it's dismissive to call [our project] theatre is because there's too much of it in real time now. The truck we travel in is real, the trailer is real, the journey we've made across the country is real, the pumpkin butter's real,” he laughs. “When we first put 'Bushwick Farms' on our truck, it was like we were performing. But now, it's very much a part of our lives, who we are.”

For their audiences, too. Bill Hoover, someone who came to see a Bushwick Farms event in Omaha, Nebraska, was compelled by one of Cuthbert's personas, Star Mama. He approached the couple and described the significance he felt in meeting Star, then began to outline a persona he felt was innate to him. That person became Billy Chaplin (a name Hoover always wanted to have), a man, it turned out, who is now rumored to be the illegitimate child of Star Mama. And who is now a part of the Bushwick Farms extended family and mythology.

“Usually we approach people who we think have something,” Cuthbert says, “but there are times when we'll get approached.”

The couple, who are affecting in the sincerity and humor with which they discuss their project - at one point even asking this interviewer if one of his questions was meant to determine their sanity (it wasn't) - are flirting with lines of identity and self-invention that may be particularly American, but also are quite contemporary.

“We're all so overloaded by images, information,” observes Solzberg. “It's opening us up. Take reality TV or the Internet - you can explore things you would never have been able to do in history.” Or become things you would never have been able to be?

But it's also arguable that such redoubtable means of communication have posed a dilemma between fact and fiction. If anyone can be anything, where does the truth reside? In a society that can come across as obsessed with how it comes across - and controlling it by plastic surgery or staying on political message - the pursuit of the truth finds an even greater urgency. After all, the question must always be: Whom do you believe?

Both Cuthbert and Solzberg feel that going inward and inhabiting as many aspects of themselves as they can may afford them unique access to the truth. A truth based on no agendas, no script, no externals at all. At one point, Cuthbert says off-guardedly and almost meditatively, “The more components we discover, the blanker our selves become.”

“Who knows,” Solzberg says, “we might get to the end of this process and realize that identity is a circle, that who you are is really who you are.” Is there an end to Bushwick Farms? Theoretically, it could go on forever, with random people espousing its mythology and manifesting characters. But if the terrain of the internal is more infinite than even the Internet, space, or time - as this technological age seems unable to debunk and Bushwick Farms seems to prove - then the solace of the internal is how its ephemeral permanency eludes influence, identifiers, taste, or any of the determining forces of culture. It's no surprise that Cuthbert and Solzberg often enlist dream analogies and their archetypal traits to describe the project.

“Bushwick Farms,” says Solzberg, “represents a belief in some kind of dream. Your perception of what kind of dream that is and whether it exists in reality is yours to determine.”

For April's MacDowell Downtown, the staff of Bushwick Farms will present a slide-show about their project and take questions. This installment of MacDowell Downtown will be held at Sharon Arts in Peterborough, beginning at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, April 1st. As always, MacDowell Downtown is free and open to the public; refreshments are provided. For more information, sign up for our e-News!