Doug HallPerformance and Psychogeography

two men painted white wearing white clothing on the medium of a busy street
Doug Hall and Jody Procter of the media art collective T. R. Uthco performing Walking Mission Street (1972) in San Francisco. Photo by Diane Andrews Hall. Courtesy of T. R. Uthco.

T. R. Uthco—the media art and performance collective formed by Doug Hall, his wife Diane Hall, and his college roommate Jody Procter—made work from 1970 to 1978. They used spectacle and theatricality to satirize mass media, working with the idea that the stronger they could make an image, the more it would circulate. In two 1972 performances, Doug Hall and Procter dressed as men, powder white from head to toe, with Diane Hall staging and photographing the events. In the first, 32 Feet Per Second Per Second, they sat for six hours in chairs bolted sixty feet high on the façade of La Mamelle, an art space in downtown San Francisco. In the second, they set out to walk the eight-mile-long urban Mission Street corridor from Daly City to San Francisco’s Embarcadero. Their walking performance, an intervention in the urban geography, was inspired by the Situationists International,1a group of European avant-garde artists and writers who sought to create situations to disrupt everyday capitalist routine, breaking down the barriers between art and life.

  1. Doug Hall, interviewed by Nick Kaye, October 25, 2012, on Site Works: San Francisco Performance 1969–85 project website, University of Exeter, available at siteworks.exeter.ac.uk/interviews/doughall. ↩︎