Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/749295
culturedmag.com 219 Ambassadors series. She also spent several years teaching art at the maximum security Sing Sing Correctional Facility (where she was brought to tears by an inmate re-enacting a painting from her mentor at UCLA, John Baldessari); recorded more than a dozen albums (including Das Ram, which just dropped in November); assisted her idol Joan Jonas (who fired her after being floored by one of Mason's performances); and accidentally discovered the tale of the cannibal and child killer Hamilton Howard "Albert" Fish while working on a performance in 2007. Mason had begun researching people who had been executed at the prison and learned that Fish was one of the oldest inmates ever electrocuted at Sing Sing in 1936 at the age of 65. "I looked up the date Fish was killed because that's fun to do. Who knew that would lead to this 10-year odyssey?" says Mason, referring to the rabbit hole she dove into after seeing a newspaper clipping featuring obituaries for the convict Hamilton Fish and former New York State Speaker Hamilton Fish II on the same page. Over the next five years, she wrote a sprawling rock opera, The Lives of Hamilton Fish, and ultimately filmed a hypnotic feature-length film from it featuring Bill Weeden and Theodore Bouloukos. Mason shot all over New York, including at Aaron Burr's upstate mansion and in the halls of Sing Sing. "They were holding back inmates and there's a real prison guard in that shot," she says of the lusciously staged drama, in which she plays a Ziggy Stardust sendup of the editor of the Evening Star News, a local nightly paper Mason discovered in Peekskill, New York. "I wanted to give voice to this very unlikely behind-the- scenes character who embodies what many of us have now become: editors of stories. No one is ever aware of this huge amount of thought that goes on in the back end of presenting the stories that we read. I would never have made this film had not an editor of some tiny paper thought to put those two stories nearly side by side." As for Mason's performance in the film, it was intentionally "very frontal" because performing into the camera was a wink to the conceit of her voice coming out of everyone's mouth (a fortuitous cost-cutting method). "I wanted the story to feel first- person driven with this contemporary twist through the minds of these historical people," she explains. After live performances alongside screenings of the film at LACMA and Night Gallery to raves, Mason is now embarking on an interstellar trip. Through December 22, the artist will give a handful of performances based on her new rock opera about the lives of stars at the Hammer Museum as part of its In Real Life: Studio series. She's also working up a dervish of a performance for Miami where she'll be participating in The Artist as Composer panel, reflecting on music as a medium, at Art Basel. Hammer curator Ali Subotnick thinks Mason is unparalleled in her approach. "She's not your typical performance artist, she's pulling from the history of theater and musicals but the visual art is really present," says Subotnick. "A lot of performance art is redundant and rehashes the same concepts, but she has this voice that's really quite disarming and she has such an interesting view on culture and politics and then bridges it with her own autobiography." In other words, she's redefining what it means to be Masonic.