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Here at Oregon Arts Watch, we like to think we have a fairly expansive definition of “the arts.” We cover visual art, theater, music, film, dance, and more. But according to Viva Las Vegas, the stage name of Liv Osthus, we’re missing at least one activity from that list: stripping.
Viva is the subject of Thank You for Supporting the Arts, a documentary that relates her fascinating story and her crusade, if that’s not too strong a word, to convince the world that getting naked in front of strangers is an art form, and that she, and strippers everywhere, are artists. It’s having a screening, followed by a Q&A with the star, directors, and producer, on Sunday, Feb. 20, at the Hollywood Theatre.
It’s hard to refute her point. Why, after all, should we treat a dance performance any differently just because the performer removes their clothing over the course of it? Nudity certainly isn’t unusual in practically every other art form – painters, sculptors, choreographers, photographers, and directors of both stage and screen have always sought, and found, beauty in the human form. Ecdysiasts (I just had to get that word in there) from Salome to Blaze Starr have garnered fame not only for their off-stage lives but for their notable acts. Perhaps it’s the intimacy and vulnerability inherent in a stripper’s performance that triggers our puritanical impulses. Maybe it’s just too real.
But for Viva, that authenticity is the point, one she elaborated on in a recent interview. “Most strippers aren’t going to declare that what they’re doing is art, but when I sit in an audience and watch them, I’m having an artistic experience. I’m seeing this body, and I’m seeing this subtext, and I’m far more moved (than) by anything that came out of the art history courses that I took in college.”
That visceral sensation was a wakeup call for Osthus when she first stepped into a strip club during those college days. “The musculature, and the skin, and the fact that there’s an actual human up there. It’s the difference between listening to a song on CD and going to a rock show.”
So is an acknowledgement that “the body itself is gorgeous and artful. You can go to a drawing class and see a nude body or an art museum and see a sculpture, but where else can you actually see that work of creation that is the body, its strength and all the amazing things it can do.” That power is only enhanced, says Viva, by being displayed in “a culture that’s so misogynistic and so body-phobic. That’s real strength.”
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Thank You for Supporting the Arts also serves as a tribute to Mary’s Club, the Portland institution that became the city’s first topless club in 1965 and recently relocated from its original location, and where Viva has danced for years. “It’s a different sort of scene in Portland, and it’s important to show the smaller, mom-and-pop establishments that aren’t so much neon and strobe lights.” Mary’s is a frequent stop for out-of-town guests, including the time Gus Van Sant (another interviewee) brought Sean Penn in one evening. “I gave Gus my favorite shoes, these Lucite heels with little ducks in them, and I gave Sean one of my punk band’s CDs. We ended up talking about Pete O’Neal, this Black Panther who’s exiled in Tanzania and who Sean and I had both studied with. And then somebody bought a table dance for Sean from me, and we talked about Chris Penn, who had just passed away. Sean invited me to a party back at his hotel, which is something I’d never done—go to a party after work. But, I thought, Gus would be there.” He wasn’t. “And that’s about all I’ll say about that.” Gus and Viva became friends after that – he directed her in a short film called First Kiss and took her to the Cannes Film Festival.
It’s clear that the movie’s subject had complete trust in directors Carolann Stoney and W. Alexander Jones, and not just because she bares herself physically. “The stage is a literal safe space; it’s easy to be nude. I was always more vulnerable in my writing.” In the movie, Viva opens up about her origins as the daughter of a small-town Minnesota Lutheran minister (her parents and her brother are interviewed in the film), her bout with breast cancer (her surgeon is interviewed, too), and her personal relationships (an ex-boyfriend provides candid commentary as well).
If there’s an almost inevitable drawback to this Portlandian portrait, it’s that Osthus’ other accomplishments and identities get a bit short-shrifted. She’s an accomplished author, and her musical identities range from the aggressively sexual punk rocker Coco Cobra to the delicate Renaissance-inspired vocal harmonies of the trio Bergerette to inspiring a one-act opera. She even adopted the alter ego of “Lila Hamilton” when she testified before the Portland City Council and had a memorable verbal exchange with Commissioner Jim Francesconi, a scene preserved in the movie. Of these multifarious identities, “Coco is the most fantastic. When I turn into her, I am a different person, and that is a huge relief. It’s like a vacation!”
As a boundary-ignoring artist who has been charting her own path for more than two decades, Viva is a Portland icon and, some might say, an increasingly rare specimen in our decreasingly iconoclastic city. It’s almost suspicious that Thank You for Supporting the Arts doesn’t include any cautionary tales of life in the downtown demimonde. But, despite spending a couple of decades as a sex worker, Viva has rarely encountered what many assume are the unavoidable, unpleasant, even dangerous aspects of that work. “Maybe I’m just a Pollyanna, but I have not seen a lot that’s problematic in my career. There’s been some drug abuse among my co-workers, but if anything the music scene was a lot harder to live in. Strippers take really good care of themselves, and our customers are positively Victorian in their boundaries around us.”
Besides, nine-to-five employment has its drawbacks as well. “I had a woman come in one day and tell me that she had just come from a meeting at work, which was OHSU.” She’d been told, along with other employees, that they were “the face of OHSU” and so they should be careful about where they were seen. The woman, says Viva, “told me she came straight [to Mary’s Club]. She was so offended that they would tell them that. Everyone makes compromises for their jobs.”
So if stripping is an art, why aren’t there stripper critics, in the same way we have music critics, film critics, and art critics? For one, of course, it’s difficult in this society to separate a critique of bodies themselves from the skill and artistry of a performance, even from a mindset where all bodies are seen as equally beautiful and artistic. Another factor is the setting for those performances, which is usually about as far outside the definition of a usual artistic space as one could imagine. But, after talking with Viva, it doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea at all.
Thank You for Supporting the Arts was filmed over the course of several years, and just when it was about to wrap up, Viva learned she was pregnant. The film culminates with the birth of her daughter, who’s now six and will be with her mom at the screening. After playing the festival circuit back in 2018, the movie had been in limbo, but now has a distributor and a DVD and VOD release.
Given that it’s been several years since the final footage in the film was shot, are there any things Viva would respond to differently today? “I really appreciate my candor in the film,” she admits. “Even I’m a little surprised by my vulnerabilities. I’m certainly happier now than I was then; I’ve struggled with depression so much and I’ve finally gotten a handle on that. So it’s nice to have a document that shows I’ve come a long way.”