April 26, 1976. San Francisco. Doug Hall and Jody Procter of T.R. Uthco, a San Francisco art/performance group, sat 60 feet above the pavement in chairs bolted to the masonry wall outside the east windows of the third floor of La Mamelle Gallery on 12th Street. They sat from 9:00 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon, and during this time They talked continuously. The two performers were clearly visible to spectators on the street below. The sounds of their amplified voices and video images from two nearby cameras were fed into the gallery space. Their monologues, performed previously, but never for longer than two hours, were restricted in only one way – both presented a narrative description in the third person, male gender, past tense. They conceived of their voices as verbal muzak and maintained a constant babble, an endless stream of consciousness. Sitting so high above the ground, occupied with this ceaseless talk, the performers, who are both afraid of heights, created a psychic climate in which they believed they were going crazy.
Performance documentation by William Farley