Frederick Blassie

Richard Fliehr
xxxIntro
xxxThe Caribbean
xxxNorth Korea

Randall Poffo & Aurelian Smith Jr.

Fliehr in The Caribbean

In the late 1970s and early 1980s the Caribbean was a hotbed for political performance art. Most of the major performance events included collaborative performances where a local artist would act out the sociopolitical frustrations against an established American performance artist. This was the case during Fliehr's first trip to the nation in 1982.

"The first time I traveled there, I didn't realize that I needed a passport. Since I didn't have one with me, people had to get paid off to get me into the country. I check into the Sheraton Hotel in Santo Domingo feeling a little disoriented because nobody spoke English, I was just settling into my room when George Napolitano, the art magazine photographer, called. 'Hey, Richard,' he said in his Brooklyn accent, 'look out the window!'"

- Richard Fliehr

Fliehr did as he was told to see thirty thousand people going wild in the street. Off in the distance he could see a little speck running across a bridge with thousands of people running behind him. "Who is that?" Fliehr inquired. "That's the guy you're performing with tonight," was the response.

When he arrived at the venue, he noticed street vendors selling rocks and rotten fruit to the scores of onlookers outside. The people promoting the event had oversold it, probably two or three times the capacity of the venue. The people who had bought tickets that weren't being allowed in had started a near riot and were fighting with the police.

Jack Veneno, his collaborator told him that the crowd was too riled up for them to safely perform, but Fliehr insisted they get was they paid for. After nearly sixty minutes of very physical performance, the crowd snapped. They started to throw their chairs, at the military police who were know flooding the building. Three of the Republic's most highly trained military officers rushed the stage and grabbed Fliehr and fended off hundreds of violent attackers, tossed him in the back of an armored car, and drove him straight to the airport where there was a private plane waiting for him. When he arrived in America he was met by his agent who told him Veneno wanted him back as soon as possible. He assured him that next time he would be accompanied by armed body guards 24 hours a day. Fliehr agreed, only if close friend and occasional collaborator Roderick Toombs could come too.

"Fliehr and Toombs created hell everywhere. If they were together, you were going to have combustion, whether it was in South Carolina or Santo Domingo. And these general who ran the country, they thought the performance was real. They were at the arena and didn't want to see anything that would hurt their national pride. It was a very delicate situation."

- Hugo Savinovich

Two months later, Fliehr was back in the Dominican Republic. When they entered the venue, Roderick Toombs pulled out an American flag from his pants and started to wave it while singing "God Bless America" in a high pitched voice. The crowd was even more violent than before, screaming and cursing Fliehr and the United States while they cautiously walked toward the stage.

Everything played out pretty much the same way as before, except this time Toombs was having a great time riling up the crowd even more. At one point several dozen of the military police present to secure the event raised their rifles and pointed them at him as a warning not to let things go too far. Toombs got the hint. As the performance reached the sixty minute mark, again, the ten thousand member crowd had had enough and rioted, and again they were taken straight to the airport in an armored car.

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