Puke performance artist Millie Brown just returned from the South by Southwest Festival where she “performed” with Lady Gaga. The UK artist has recently relocated to Los Angeles and painted her colored vomit canvas to a very small crowd in a rare performance at club Mmhmmm at The Standard, Hollywood, Saturday night. There were a little over 20 audience members, half of them photographers; the other half working their iPhone video cameras.

Brown entered a makeshift stage a little before 8pm with a single spotlight on her. She was dressed in an exquisite sequenced sheer floor-length dress revealing her slender figure (near anorexic?) and chunky black wedge heels with her flowing waist-length sandy-colored mane. She sat on a chair with four tall glasses of chalky-colored milk on the floor beside her with a blank white gessoed-canvas lying flat in front of her. She quietly sat down in a chair and sipped her first glass of green milk from a straw (maybe a third of its contents), very prim and proper, not an ounce of spillage on her lap. She put the glass down and contemplated the empty canvas before her. She then proceeded to get up and walk toward the right of the canvas, sweeping her dangling golden locks away from her face as she bent over the canvas. She spread her fingers of her right hand and daintily poked her forefinger and middle finger all the way into her mouth. She began to retch a little, but nothing was coming out. She did it again, her body trembling a bit. There—she finally got a little of the green liquid to come up and spill onto the canvas. Not wholly impressive for a vomit artist, but there were three more glasses (and colors) to go.

Brown drinks from her first glass of green liquid

Brown contemplates the empty canvas

Brown purging her first round of “paint”

Accompanying the performance was a looped operatic soundtrack of a diva singing “meow, meow, meow” stretching out each vowel, then an actual recording of a cat’s meow…with a laughing audience (laugh track?) every time the cat’s meow came on. That lent a bit of humor to the performance, but then it’s hard to laugh while watching someone throwing up in front of you. Personally, I have a weak stomach for this kind of stuff, and found myself gagging several times. Often I had to look away for fear of making her painting a collaboration.

Her second glass was an aqua tint. She now had a blue mustache and drank slowly and deliberately from the glass, sans the straw. At this time we were all rooting for her to get a good ralph on, for the sake of the painting. There were a few splatters, but more bile than color.

Brown’s second glass of aqua-colored milk

Brown’s third glass of magenta-colored milk

Brown “painting”

Her third glass of liquid was a magenta color and she still seemed to be having difficulty regurgitating. It was disturbing as it seemed she might be in pain. Without deconstructing this performance, many issues start to arise. Is this about eating disorders and purging—these are seemingly obvious references. With the repeating bizarre soundtrack, and Brown now starting to look disheveled with streaks of bile and colored liquid running down her face, one was just hoping for her to hurry up and get through this. She has yet to get a good projectile vomit going, and that’s now what the crowd was there for. Finally, on her third and fourth glasses, the liquid started spewing out and the painting was starting to “fill” up. The audience’s concern for the painting was palpable and the barf was starting to resemble a painter’s medium.

Aside from the spectacle value of this performance, it was very emotional. The British artist tidied up before coming out after her performance and made herself available to the small crowd of people that remained. I approached her and my first question was, “Are you okay?” She responded yes and didn’t seem bothered by my inquiry. She looked like a beautiful delicate flower, but her constitution cannot deny her strength. Brown told me her art is about using her body and she’s been doing this for 10 years now. Her paintings are for sale and I’m not entirely sure of the archival quality of vomit, but her aim is true.

Brown’s finished canvas

Millie Brown after her performance

Photography by Lynda Burdick