S4 Ep6: Johanna Went: the cult performance art-punk on feminism, fake blood, embracing ageing and inspiring Lady Gaga

The Last Bohemians

Speak to anyone from the 1980s punk scene in Los Angeles and they’ll tell you: Johanna Went is an underground legend. While the bands like Black Flag, Fear and X were thrashing out their three chords and the truth, Went would take to the stage at clubs like The Masque, Club Lingerie and Hong Kong Cafe and perform between the live shows. The crowd hadn’t seen anything like it before.
She wasn’t a punk musician per se but the “hyena of performance art”, whose transgressive spectacles of New Wave theatre, experimental noise, elaborate and crude costumes, chaotic rituals, and gory props like pig heads and fake blood – lots of blood – built a cult following and predated Lady Gaga’s meat dress and Peaches' raucous stage antics and costumes by decades.
Johanna’s shows were wild, depraved and often grotesque, boldly taking on themes like female pleasure and menstruation. Take her 1988 performance Passion Container, in which she pulled giant bloodied tampons out of a silk vagina and chucked them into the crowd – this was pre-riot grrrl and before L7’s legendary tampon-flinging performance at Reading Festival in 1992.
Many aren’t sure where Johanna Went went but The Last Bohemians: LA, supported by Audio-Technica, found her living a quieter life, in the beach town of Ventura, California. Across her garden table, she looks back at her transgressive work and talks about the magic of the 1980s punk scene, growing up an outsider, the beauty of performance art and why embracing ageing is the punkest move of all.
CREDITS
Presenter and Exec-Producer: Kate Hutchinson
Editor: Georgie Rogers
Additional production: Holly Fisher
Mixing and mastering: Mariana Sousa Aguiar
Photography: Kate Hutchinson
With thanks to Sarah Cooper at the Getty, Alice Bag, Mara Carlyle and all at Erased Tapes.
MUSIC
Theme music: Pete Cunningham, Ned Pegler and Caradog Jones
Piano Scapes 3
Written and performed by Qasim Naqvi
Courtesy of Erased Tapes
Angelus Novus
Written by Saki Sugimoto
Performed by Hatis Noit
Courtesy of Erased Tapes
Away With These Self-Loving Lads (Instrumental) - Mara Carlyle
Pearl (Instrumental) - Mara Carlyle
Bowlface en Provence (Instrumental) - Mara Carlyle
Bonding (Instrumental) - Mara Carlyle
Nerveskade - Sickhead
Apache Tomcat - Alright Rock N Roll
FURTHER READING/LISTENING
X-Trax
Hyperallergic
ArtForum
Bandcamp
ABOUT AUDIO-TECHNICA
In 1962, with a vision of producing high-quality audio for everyone, Audio-Technica’s founder Hideo Matsushita created the first truly affordable phono cartridge, the AT-1 in Shinjuku, Japan. Since then, Audio-Technica has grown into a world-renowned company devoted to Audio Excellence at every level, expanding the product range to include headphones, microphones and turntables. Audio-Technica’s commitment to the user experience and their devotion to high quality design, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution has placed them at the forefront of the industry for the last 60 years.
ABOUT THE LAST BOHEMIANS
Journalist and broadcaster Kate Hutchinson launched The Last Bohemians in 2019, pairing the audio with stunning portraits by photographer Laura Kelly. It featured 86-year-old Molly Parkin’s stories of self-pleasuring, LSD countess Amanda Feilding’s trepanning tales and Pamela Des Barres’ reflections on supergroupiedom. The series won silver for Best New Podcast at the 2020 British Podcast Awards and was a finalist at the 2021 Audio Production Awards.
Season two featured folk legend Judy Collins; British fashion icon Zandra Rhodes, dealing with the aftermath of losing her lover while celebrating 50 years in fashion; anarcho-punk innovator and illustrator Gee Vaucher; and the controversial witch at the heart of the 1970s occult boom, Maxine Sanders. In 2021, The Last Bohemians launched a lockdown special with performance artist Marina Abramović; it returned in 2022 with the UK’s greatest living painter, Maggi Hambling, as well as Bowie’s former best friend Dana Gillespie and theatre actor Cleo Sylvestre, and launched an LA series, supported by Audio-Technica, in summer.
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