ATTENTION ALL DREAMERS!

"A new type of performance art that may seem, well, a little odd."

-- CBS News coverage about T. J. Richter's performance art

Interview by Mitch Freund

If you've been involved in the Midwest rave or Milwaukee poetry scene for the past few years, you've probably been witness to a tall, lanky, alien-like humanoid wearing long underwear and dark sunglasses spouting poetry in front of projected cartoons. Other times the humanoid has appeared as a frolicking, hermaphroditic devil-angel. Or Merlin the Tripping Magician. Or you've seen him embody a human bumble bee zooming on Thai Joe's stage, frothing feverishly through verbal mazes. If you haven't witnessed T. J. Richter, Multimedia Performance Artist, then you've missed him performing with the Superstars of Love in St. Louis, rubbing his bulging sex unit on erotic, half-naked women in front of thousands of raving maniacs, And you haven't heard him spouting, "ALL HAIL THE GODS ABOVE, TEAMS OF LESBIAN GENETIC ENGINEERS FROM SAN FRANCISCO!!!" If you have witnessed his onslaught, you probably said to yourself, "Damn, I like this a lot, but what the hell am I looking at?" You have entered the world of T. J. Richter, Human Comic Book, where a vampire of funk, several thousands of years old, moves like a mutant mixture between Felix the Cat, Spiderman, and the Silver Surfer, projecting his psychedelic cartoon apparitions amongst lasers, a bubble lamp, strobe lights, and smoke, layered under his own unique brand of urban poetry.

His world is a world of dreams, a world where you never know if what you are seeing is real, or hallucination. Reality and fantasy easily intertwine like his rotating slide show of homicidal aliens and sex-crazed dolphins. His shaved head is a ball of action, eyes intense and focused, mouth rattling, he wears a beaded bracelet that spells out "Dream." With a twinkle in his eye and a twist of his hand, he said of his art, "I am a human comic book, or rather I present comic book material in a projected form." He dreams up elaborately detailed stories, writes the text, draws and colors the pictures to go with the stories, and projects these stories using a slide projector. Slides of a pierced dolphin having sex with a studded ambiguous Calvin Klein humanoid amongst bursts of fluorescent colors followed by starfish in "aqua-love" are artistically-depicted slipping smoothly one after the other in a postmodern extravaganza. Utilizing DJ mixing equipment and vocal processing units, T. J. Richter acts out the characters on screen, as well as acting in the action himself. By understanding the use of body language in communication, he takes the audience to a world where dreams are reality.

Being born and raised in New York, his accent infects his work with the urgency of the big city. While growing up, underground art surrounded him. He saw the Beastie Boys perform at CBGB's in front of only fifty people as a bunk band. He followed underground hip-hop by Grandmaster Flash, goth by Peter Murphy, and glam rock by David Bowie. But the one moment that changed his life forever was when he saw a 15 second clip from a film titled, "Home of the Brave," by performance artist, Laurie Anderson. His voice sharpens as he recalls this powerful image, "She stands alone, rotating on a stage, arms spread out like a satellite dish receiving information, and behind her a projection of an actual satellite dish rotates, and they're both rotating together, while the music repeats, 'Language, it's a virus! EEE!'" This image burned itself onto his brain. He decided he wanted to be more than just a poet, more than just a visual artist, more than just a DJ, more than just an electrical technician, he wanted to be all these at once; so he rolled them together and became a performance artist.

Dennis Leary's comedic bluntness and Jim Carroll's poetic elegance helped shape his thoughts and actions, giving him an outlet for the poetry bursting inside him. After seeing Alfred Hitchcock's storyboards for South by Southwest, and Bob Dylan flipping through words in a video, a visual window of creativity opened for T. J. Richter. Combining these influences into his own original style, he began entertaining the littered subway stations of New York. He would set up a boom box, flip through storyboards, and rattle off his urban poetry "The train would come by, and people thought it was really weird. I would have these storyboards and Wall Street brokers would look at me saying, 'What the fuck?'" Soon he was performing at New York City's Performance Space 122 and Nuyorican Poet's Cafe.

After receiving a degree in Mechanical Engineering, T. J. Richter left the poetry underground of New York City, and wandered into Milwaukee in 1992 [sic] (1990). His art had evolved into a black and white slide show offset with special lighting effects and samples, and his poetry had begun to spin at a high velocity like an oral whirlwind. You could catch him launching his verbal attacks on stage at the Y-Not II bar, or opening for bands like Wild Kingdom and Citizen King. Soon he was introduced to the underground rave culture, a culture blending the creative use of technology with human's primal urge to dance. After attending his first parties he felt like he fit in. "I related to the energy. Rave parties are, in a way, UNFOCUSED energy. They're a sensory overload," he explained. This "unfocused energy," like Laurie Anderson's satellite dish, changed the direction of his life and art.

He soon became a regular for the Midwest's premier rave promoters; Drop Bass Network of Milwaukee, and Superstars of Love in St. Louis. When asked why a performance artist at raves, Kurt Eckes (aka Jethrox) of Drop Bass Network explained, "It goes back to my days going to Medusa's in Chicago. They had performance artists running around and in glass cages. You never knew what to expect -- if it was real or the drugs." This confusion between reality and hallucination coincides with T. J. Richter, an artist constantly mixing dream and reality. "Actually, he is in human form," Kurt further explains, "the essence of what our events are -- chaos, sensory overload, sound, light, visual, the whole nine yards!" Raves' communal energy found the perfect unharnessed focus to cross the fuzzy boundaries of the real and unreal. Like a high priest of psychedelic paganism, T. J. Richter helps heighten, and loosen, the floodgates of reality.

His chaotic dreaming has had him performing at parties in St. Louis thrown by the infamous Superstars of Love. According to Dr. Lovestar (or Davidian) of SoL, "He's like mind candy to give all the kids who like candy in Candyland. He adds a personal touch to he environment. He is the tour guide for those who are dimensionally enhanced in the pants." By pushing the senses and language beyond normal limits, T. J. Richter helps elevate a rave or poetry reading to levels unexplored. This keeps his act contemporary and fresh, miles beyond the normal poet standing behind a microphone. It's not just a reading or a recital, it's a sensory experience.

When asked what the future holds for audiences at both raves and other performances, he excitedly stated, "I want to use language, all languages, because we are all multilingual using the language of speech -- excitement, tone, pitch; the language of pictures -- line, shape, form, shade, color; the language of motion -- graceful or awkward, bouncy or sluggish; all forms of communication to make my dream, and everyone's dream, a communal dream like a hive of bees moving together." When asked to further explain he continued, "I want people to dream. It's bad enough the average work person is stuck in a concrete room for 40 hours a week so they can afford the basic necessities they need to live, just so the guy on top can live in the lap of luxury. But then, you can't even look out a window and daydream about those luxuries to ease the stress of your workday! They'll say, 'Stop daydeaming, get back to work!!' I believe you should be able to please yourself. You should be able to look out the window for twenty seconds and go... 'What if I was in the Bahamas right now? What if I could breathe underwater? No wait! What if I was in the Bahamas making love to Ashley Judd UNDERWATER, BLOOP, BLOOP!!' I just want to be a St. John the Baptist of the Strange in white long underwear, roaming the cultural wastelands of this country in an Anni DeFranco Astro van, dropping multimedia silicon chips laced with whispering icons that say, 'DREAM!'" And that says it all.

T. J. Richter -- the Human Comic Book, the multimedia performance artist the computer-desktop-projectionist-turntablist, the poet, the Dreamer, the artist -- like all artists, helps to remind us we all live in a land of illusion, a reality based on reflections of sunlight bouncing off matter. Reality is a dream we all cannot wake up from, it's a constant creation of the mind. And in this land of dreams there are those who rearrange, reconfigure and refresh the dreams we all live by. T. J. Richter, through his one-man show, helps remind us that live is but a dream.