The Artist Is Present
by Anna Merlan
The artist has embarked on a dazzling constellation of experimental works that stretches the boundaries of genre, performance, and commentary.
Prey
The artist endlessly chases a cloth-covered beast through a domestic tableau vivant in a manifestation of the predatory nature of the art world. The quarry is permeated with a rare perfume, a reference to the status, wealth, and influence so often promised by gallerists and collectors. By pursuing, and inhabiting the role of predator, the artist inverts the traditional roles of the artist and collector within the art market.
Untitled Durational Performance
The artist engages in an intimately focused grooming ritual involving his privates in the presence of an audience for 6 to 10 hours. Critics are astonished by the scale, tenacity and daring of the work, but have been heard to disparage its somewhat derivative influences, likening it to 1970s performance pieces from Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The performance, it must be said, is strikingly similar to their 18 hours totally asleep on the rug upstairs series, staged at SF MoMA last year.
Forbidden Realms
In a bold, site-specific piece, the artist, nude, reclines atop a kitchen table, a transgressive act that asks: what are “acceptable” places for us to occupy, really? Who makes, and who enforces, these artificial rules that have come to govern so much of our society? A meditation on, and sly decoding of, social performance and internalized structures of power and ritual.
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