ABOUT FRANK MOORE

Frank Moore was an American performance artist, shaman, teacher, poet, essayist, painter, musician, and internet/television personality who experimented in art, performance, ritual, and shamanistic teaching from the late 1960s until his death in 2013 in Berkeley, California.

Moore is well known as one of the NEA-funded artists targeted by Jesse Helms in the early ’90s for doing art that was labeled “obscene”.  He is also well known for long (5–48 hours) ritualistic performances with audience participation, nudity, and eroticism.

Moore coined the word, “eroplay” to describe physical play between adults released from the linear goals of sex and orgasm. He explored this, and similar concepts in performance and ritual as a way for people to break through isolation, and connect on a deep human level beyond the social and cultural expectations and limitations.

Moore was born with cerebral palsy, could not walk or talk, and wrote books, directed plays, made award-winning films, gave poetry readings, played piano, sang in music jams, lead rock bands, and hosted a live variety show on his radical webstation, which he ran for 14 years.  Frank's original oil and digital paintings have been shown across the United States and in Canada. Moore communicated using a laser-pointer and a board of letters, numbers, and commonly used words.

From 1991 to 1999 Frank Moore published and edited the acclaimed underground zine, The Cherotic (r)Evolutionary.  In addition to his books, Cherotic Magic, Art of a Shaman, Chapped Lap, Skin Passion and numerous other self-published pieces, Moore was widely published in magazines and books.

In the 1970s, Frank Moore created the popular cabaret show, the Outrageous Beauty Revue. In the 1980s he became one of the United States’ foremost performance artists. In 1992 he was voted Best Performance Artist by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In 2001 he began producing shows for Berkeley’s public access channel, and these shows continue today.  In 2006, Moore became a write-in candidate for President of the United States in the 2008 election, qualifying in 25 states and receiving votes across the country.  Since 2011, he has become internationally known for his performance/video archive on Vimeo.com which has been viewed by over 10 million people worldwide.

Frank Moore performed regularly in the San Francisco Bay Area up until his death.

His students and the people influenced by his life/work continue his vision.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In this, the first collection of prose by “one of the U.S.'s most controversial performance artists” (P-Form Magazine), Frank Moore explores his deep and uncompromising vision of human liberation and art as a “battle against fragmentation”.

In the essays, writings and rants of Frankly Speaking, roughly covering the period from the late 1970s until his death in 2013, Moore reveals his plan for the complete political and social transformation of American society (see Platform for Frank’s Presidential Candidacy 2008), stirs up the “art world”, urging fellow artists to truly live their calling and not accept censorship (see Art is Not Toothpaste or The Combine Plot), pulls the reader deeply into the heart of magic, responsibility, shamanism, play, and expanded sexuality (see Dance of No Dancers and States of Tanpan), and much much more.

Frank Moore's essays have been praised by political activists, authors, artists and cultural icons like Bill Mandel, John Sinclair, Penny Arcade, Annie Sprinkle and many others for their comprehensive and revolutionary world-view.  The reader gets to join Frank's joyful and fearless digging into the core issues of human experience to get to something deeper: intimacy, tribal community, freedom.   Frankly Speaking also gives us a peek into the history of these pieces, which have been widely published all over the world, from the smallest of underground zines to the most established mainstream art journals.  But Frank always focused on the small, personal, intimate level, and always fought to stay “underground”.  As he writes in Mainstream Avant-Garde?: “The underground is where the real freedom and the real ability to change society are to be found.”