James Franco: 'General Hospital' Role is "Performance Art"

In an op-ed he wrote for the Wall Street Journal last week, actor James Franco explains why his current gig on the daytime soap opera General Hospital should be considered performance art.

From "A Star, a Soap and the Meaning of Art":

I have been obsessed with performance art for over a decade—ever since the Mexican performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña came to visit my class at Cal Arts summer school. I finally took the plunge and experimented with the form myself when I signed on to appear on 20 episodes of "General Hospital" as the bad-boy artist "Franco, just Franco." I disrupted the audience's suspension of disbelief, because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn't belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world. In performance art, the outcome is uncertain—and this was no exception. My hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate. Whether they did was out of my hands.

As [Marina Abramović, the "grandmother of performance art,"] told me... performance art is all about context. "If you bake some bread in a museum space it becomes art, but if you do it at home you're a baker." Likewise, when I wear green makeup and fly across a rooftop in "Spider-Man 3," I'm working as an actor, but were I to do the same thing on the subway platform, a host of possibilities would open up. Playing the Green Goblin in the subway would no longer be about creating the illusion that I am flying. It would be about inserting myself in a familiar space in such a way that it becomes stranger than fiction, along the lines of what I'm doing on "General Hospital"...

"Performance art can seem pretentious, but it can also be quite mischievous and playful."

But does a soap opera role count as "performance art" just because it's unexpected from Franco, an actor whose successful TV and film career includes the beloved Freaks and Geeks and the blockbuster Spider-Man franchise? Read the full story online at WSJ.com for Franco's thoughts about the history and significance of performance art, and how it relates to his work as an actor.

-- Daniel Lehman