We’re partnering with Portland Institute of Contemporary Art to profile artists in their 2025 TBA festival. First up, Los Angeles-based Asher Hartman, who performed on September 5. Get your tickets to the rest of TBA’s amazing performances here.
Q: How would you describe your relationship to the West Coast?
A: I was born in San Francisco at the end of the 1950s when mass cultural movements born of the Civil Rights Movement affected our daily lives so vividly: the Black Panthers, Gay Liberation, the Women’s Movement, and ACT/Up, which arose in response to the first HIV/AIDS epidemic. I moved to Los Angeles in early adulthood and have spent most of my life in the lively, vast, diverse theater and performance communities and the visual art world, which I love.
Q: Name one thing you’ve read, looked at, watched, or listened to this month that left an impression on you:
A: Hell of a Book and People Like Us by Jason Mott. Obviously, he’s a thrilling author, profoundly inspirational, specifically because of the depth, craft, audacity, humor, and apparent ease of his language. His nuanced, granular understanding of human character, his display of how elusive and mystical, how divided the self can be made through America’s global brand of oppression, its historical and pervasive racism, and adamant denial of its cruelties, is emotionally deep, clear, and resonant. His characters maintain a relation to the divine, particularly in the honesty of self-examination and in the realm of imagination.
Q: When did your artistic journey begin and what was the spark?
A: I was probably born an arrogant artist until life pounded the arrogance away. In kindergarten, where I told everyone I was actually just visiting from San Francisco State University, I sold drawings of eyeballs in the classroom for a quarter. I wrote and directed my first full-length play in the first grade, where I, naturally, being the lead, had to sacrifice myself for the arrival of spring. I forgot to stab myself with my cardboard knife and just sort of fell over and lost my wig in the finale. The spark can be rage, desire, wild infatuation with life, profound embarrassment, feelings of being ignored, sadness.
Q: How has your work changed in the last five years?
A: Five years ago, I wrote and directed a traveling six-part play called The Dope Elf that collided with the pandemic, splintered, and produced a series of other performances and plays that yielded yet more performances and plays. I’ve been able to trust the language of these plays in spoken texts that are meant to reach into the murkier parts of ourselves, parts that can’t really be given language, but instead are ululations, broken consonants, shrugs, suggestions of a self/ves hidden somewhere in the body, the bowels.
Q: If you had to choose a new medium to work with, what would it be?
A: Oh, definitely, energy, what people might call the unseen, the thing we often don’t believe in, that invisible viscous soup that connects us, that conveys and translates thought and feeling between all beings.
Q: Shared workspace or solo studio?
A: Solo! (I work with people so being alone is critical to my thinking and work.)
Q: Five artists, dead or alive, that you’d invite to dinner:
A: Excluding the geniuses I’ve had the good luck to know in this life, I’d say Franz Kafka (a single lemon for him), Missy Elliot, Leonard Frey, Alexis De Veaux, and Diego Velázquez.