Banana Duct-Taped To Wall

Another trip into the absurd world of modern art.

Recently, a banana duct-taped to a wall sold for $120,000 at some fancy art show called Art Basel Miami. 

The piece, titled Comedian, was created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Cattelan appears to be most famous for making a 18-carat toilet titled "America" (how edgy) which was stolen back in September of this year. 

You might be questioning the longevity of Cattelan's most recent display of brilliance with the knowledge that most bananas rot pretty fast. Well, let me ease your mind because at the low price of $120,000, not only do you get the banana and a strip of duct-tape, additionally you get a certificate of authenticity which allows owners to replace the banana as needed (new banana not included). 

But the story doesn't end there. 

While on display the banana was eaten by New York based performance artist David Datuna.

You might think that a spectator eating a $120,000 banana would cause quite a bit of trouble for the gallery, the purchaser and Datuna. But that's only because you don't get how art works. You see, according to the gallery's director of museum relations Lucien Terras, consuming the banana did not diminish the integrity of the work. “He did not destroy the art work. The banana is the idea,”  And since it's just an idea, the whole situation was easily fixed as the gallery owner simply had another banana taped to the wall.



The Telegraph: Banana duct-taped to a wall sells for $120,000 at Art Basel

Miami Herald: Someone ate the $120,000 banana at Art Basel. Some quick thinking saved the day

Wikipedia: Comedian

Performance Artist Emilia Pennanen

According to her website bio, Emilia Pennanen is a Finnish artist creating performances, videos, photography and sound of feminine bodies.

"My work aims to address the dilemma of the conventional ideals of the feminine body and the rules of a woman’s pleasure by placing the female in control of her body and desire."

Apparently the best way to do this is to cover your body in milk, sugar, red fruit or pigs blood. It's also important to slobber on your self while rubbing it all in.

Sugared
In Sugared, Emilia puts some beet puree in her mouth then dribbles it out onto her body. She then pours sugar on top of her and starts licking it off.

Performance of Sugared at Labbodies on March of 2014.




BloodCube and SpitFace
Collaborative work with Jennifer Wright. One girl rubs what I assume to be frozen pigs blood on herself while the other rubs in her own spit.

Blood Cube
Solo performance of Blood Cube


Blood Cube from E. A. Pennanen on Vimeo.

Spit Face
Solo Performance of Spit Face


Spit Face from E. A. Pennanen on Vimeo.

Find more of Emilia Pennanen on her website

Helping Johnny Remember (Reimagined)

A 1956 PSA reimagined and reanimated by artist Ashleigh Nankivell.

Snuff Puppets: Everybody

Warning: not for sensitive viewers.

Everybody is an interactive installation from the Australian puppet theater company Snuff Puppets. It is the largest human puppet on the planet with detachable and interactive body parts and organs.

According to their website, Snuff Puppets are "always a nuisance – poking fun, rebelling, kicking over the traces, infiltrating the mainstream and wielding its information against it, being irreverent, naughty, a goad; reflecting power/society disrespectfully, being a bull in the china shop on purpose, breaking taboos wherever we shall find them, being rude, vulgar, violent, sexy". I believe this is an accurate description as watching the above video seems to generally illicit a WTF response from viewers. It is certain they do a splendid job of moving the viewer out of the ordinary and into bizarre dream like world. For this I applaud them. But I don't think I'm alone in finding it a bit unsettling to see children at the performance. Call me a prude if you'd like but I don't think I'll be taking my daughter to an art show which includes a giant naked puppet having it's head smashed by a brick, giving birth, having it's breast detach and spray the audience with what is supposed to be milk, having it's vagina detach, morph into a penis and then urinate on the audience. I don't know. Guess I'm weird like that.

Snuff Puppets

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared is a 2011 short film produced by THIS IS IT Collective and directed by Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling. The film is a parody of children's television shows which starts out like the typical kids show but becomes progressively darker. The juxtaposition of innocent looking characters singing a happy sounding tune with the embedded disturbing imagery leaves viewers with a WTF? feeling at the end.



Becky & Joe have released two sequels called Don't Hug Me I'm Scared II which deals with the concept of time and Don't Hug Me I'm Scared III which looks at the concept of Love. Both can be seen on their YouTube page here.

Interior Semiotics: Natacha Stolz

The following performance, titled Interior Semiotics, took place on March 27th, 2010 at an apartment gallery event in West Town, Chicago called FOREVER (21). Artist Natacha Stolz begins by awkwardly struggling to open a can of SpaghettiOs with a manual can opener. Finally succeeding in her task, she proceeds to pour its contents into a pot (which some believe has dirt in it), adds water, then mixes it all together with her hand while reciting some nihilistic poem about everything being shit.

It's at this point things get freaky. Stolz begins to recite the poem backwards in monosyllabic form while rubbing the contents of the pot onto her chest. She then cuts her pants at the crotch, inserts her dirty SpaghettiO covered fingers into her vagina and then either urinates or expels some dark liquid she put inside her before the show, into the empty can below. Stolz ends the performance by taking off her shirt and using it to wipe up the mess.



I'm guessing that every year, somewhere around the country, some art student performs an equally shocking yet ultimately unimportant work as they leave the fold of the alternate universe known as the university. What's different about this one is that a video of the performance was taken and shortly after shared on 4chan. Within 48 hours the video had over 200,000 views. From there it went viral after being picked up by Buzzfeed, Reddit, I am Bored and others.

Though the performance received a great many WTF reactions, many commentators also focused on ridiculing the seemingly pretentious hipster crowd gleefully applauding what they believed to be a respectful bit of performance art. Is the criticism warranted? I'll leave it for you to decide.


Know Your Meme: Interior Semiotics

Performance Artist Kira O'Reilly

After my exposure to the works of Kira O'Reilly, I would say I find her performances to be both varied and consistent. They are varied in the sense that they always incorporate new and interesting ways to make you think, "What the fuck?" but consistent in that they always make think, "What the fuck?"

Let us begin with an early piece named 'Succour' performed back in 2001-2002. O'Reilly sits in a towel covered chair surrounded by white sand. She wraps tape around her body in a grid like pattern from the pits of her arms down to her ankles. Once the grid is completed, O'Reilly picks up a scalpel and starts cutting little diagonal slashes into each taped square. When finished, she removes the tape, puts a little piece of gauze onto each cut, then drops them onto the sand.

In 2006, O'Reilly performed "inthewrongplaceness" at the Newlyn Art Gallery, where she spent four hours naked hugging a dead pig. According to an article from the Daily Mail, she said the performance was an attempt to 'identify' with the pig which she, at various times, cut with a knife.

Animal rights activist were angered by "inthewrongplaceness" so O'Reilly responded with a performance called "Falling Asleep with a Pig" where, for a few days, she lived with a pig named Deliah in a specially constructed sty.

Kira has a number of projects she is currently performing, two of which are "Stair Falling" and "Slick Glittery". "Stair Falling" is exactly what it sounds like, except done in slow motion...and of course, naked.

Here is a video link showing a sample of "Stair Falling


In "Slick Glittery", O'Reilly enters a room with eggs and glitter placed throughout the floor. Then, over the course of the next four hours (and of course without any clothes on) she rolls about the floor, crushing the eggs beneath her body, letting the glitter stick to her skin.

Performance Artist Michal Samama

WARNING: CONTAINS NUDITY

Michal Samama is a performance artist who, according to her bio, creates "body-based art works that incorporate movement, sound, objects, text, installation and site-specific practices....In my works I seek the space where opposites overlap. I explore how weakness, at its most extreme, utter vulnerability, uncovers a peculiar, uncanny power. I do that by creating obstacles for myself, actions to perform on stage of which I could never achieve full mastery, and keep me exposed to the possibility of failure. This structure produces images that are at the same time humorous and disturbing and evoke a sense of insecurity rather than comfort and ease...My aim is to trigger, in my most intimate, private, almost idiosyncratic images, the texture of the scars the collective leaves on the individual body, in my very flesh. It is there at my most intimate that I find the traces of collective memory, the hidden choreography of our life, for which there is no author...Much of my research is devoted to the tension between the ephemeral and the eternal; performance art and visual arts; I test the power but also the risk and uncertainty of live-presence with its ephemeral, passing quality against the static quality and the possibility of perpetuation in the visual arts."

Wow, most of that fancy intellectual talk went over my head but it sounds like her performances must be some really deep, philosophical stuff. Let's take a look.

Michal Samama: The Chicken Memorial

Michal Samama: Block

Tracey Emin's My Bed sold for $4.3 million

So the story goes something like this: Back in 1998, artist Tracey Emin spent four days depressed in bed after being dumped. She went to get a glass of water and on the way back took a look at the bed and decided to make it into art.

Fast forward to July 1st of 2014. The piece is auctioned at Christie's in London and sells for a whopping 2.5 million pounds (4.3 million dollars to us Yankees).

So what do you get for 4.3 million dollars? Well of course you get the bed itself. But in addition you also get some dirty stained sheets, a small blue rug, used condoms, menstrual stained underwear, pregnancy tests, cigarettes, and various other miscellaneous items. What a bargain!

Here Emin talks about the piece and her "installation process"




http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-18/emin-s-messy-bed-shattering-record-shows-female-art-surge.html

http://time.com/2933839/tracey-emin-my-bed-auctioned/

Performance Artist Dana Michel

A little performance art to enjoy before you make the drive home.

Artist Franko B

Franko B "I Miss You"

When it comes to weird stuff, performance art really is the gift that keeps on giving.

Case in point, I recently came across this 2000 piece by artist Franko B titled "I miss you." Here's a quick synopsis of the work. The audience surrounds a long catwalk which is covered in canvas. Franko presents himself naked, painted white with an open catheter inserted in the crook of each arm. As blood pours out of the catheters, dripping onto the floor, he walks up and down the runway while Diamanda Galas's 'My world is empty without you' plays in the background.

Here is a short 2003 version



As to be expected, reactions to the performance run the gamut from "self-harm is not art" to "he's personifying art." But this isn't the first time Franko B has done this sort of thing. In 1996 he performed "I'm not your babe" where he again paints himself white, catheters in arms, bleeding on the floor. He does this for about 10 minutes, then falls to his knees for a couple of minutes, then finally lays on the ground for bit.

Franko B "I'm not your babe"

And then there is his 2001 performance of "Oh Lover Boy" where he paints himself white, inserts catheters into his arms and lays down to bleed all over a canvas covered table.

Franko B "Oh Lover Boy"

Here is a collection of a number of Franko B's performances including the ones above. Fair warning, the video does not allow you to fast forward so to get to the later performances, you would have to be very patient and very interested, neither of which I was.


Franko B performance from Tim Ashton on Vimeo.

Artist ties rooster to penis. Found guilty of exhibitionism

Last September, artist? Steven Cohen went to the Eiffel Tower dressed in a corset, platform shoes, red gloves, g-string, feathered headdress and painted face. He then tied a rooster to his penis and proceeded to dance around until police arrived and dragged him and the rooster away.

Recently, a Paris court found him guilty of sexual exhibitionism but did not impose a penalty. After the verdict, Cohen said "I think the victim is art." I would have to agree with him, though not in regards to the court's decision but to his atrocious performance he tries to pass off as art.

Performance Artist Injects Herself With Horse Blood

For the 2011 Ars Electronica art festival, Marion Lavel-Jeantet performed May the Horse Live in Me, the very weird experiment of injecting herself with horse blood plasma as an exploration of trans-species relationships.

Over the course of several months, she prepared her body to accept the horse blood plasma by receiving injections of different horse immunoglobulins. At the beginning of the performance, she put on specially designed stilts with hooves (I guess to make her feel more horse like) then walked around the room alongside the horse she was to receive the plasma from. She then laid on a bed and received her transfusion. Next, she dawns a lab coat and does some sciencey stuff with what looked to be blood in a petri dish. And that was it.




Personally I found the performance kind of boring. I think it would have been a lot better if at the end she demonstrated her new horse powers by horse kicking an audience member through a wall.

Milo Moire: PlopEgg

Sorry I didn't get this out in time for Easter. German performance artist Milo Moire performs a piece cleverly titled PlopEgg in which she pushes paint filled eggs up her vagina, climbs a ladder, hovers over the canvas, then allows the eggs to fall, break and splatter into what I'm sure is an expensive piece of artwork.



The obvious metaphor of her giving birth to the work is expressed in a long string of pretentious, wordy paragraphs you can find in the YouTube description. Here is a sampling for your enjoyment:
"Milo Moire's performances start with daydreaming, with (every)daily, personal physical experiences which condense by wild associations to an internal whole piece of art about to mature and enter the world. The corporeity becomes the need for her artistic expression to make the happened - also for the spectator - experienceable. Milo Moire describes her art, as an „art led by intuition. To create art, I use THE original source of the femininity -- my vagina".

Dances with Butter

YouTube description: Melati Suryodarmo (b. in 1969 in Surakarta, Indonesia, lives and works in Braunschweig, Germany) performes EXERGIE- Butter dance, an older piece but shown for the first time at Lilith.20 blocks of butter in a square on the black dance carpet. Suryodarmo enters the space, dressed in a black tight dress and red high heels. She steps on the pieces of butter. She starts to dance to the sound of indonesian shamanistic drums. She dances and falls, hitting the floor hard, rising, and continuously being on the verge of standing, slipping and falling in the butter. After twenty minutes Suryodarmo rises one last time, covered in butter, and leaves the space.

And now, without further ado, I present to you EXERGIE!

Marina Abramović: The Onion

Creepy Dancing Animatronic Doll

This creepy dancing animatronic doll is an art installation created by Jordan Wolfson and Spectral Motion currently on display at the David Zwirner Art Gallery in New York City. The robotic sculpture is "a curvaceous, scantily clad woman covered in dirt marks and wearing a witch mask." It moves in a very fluid, human like way has sensors which allow it to follow your gaze with its eyes. Reminds me of old cyberpunk manga like Battle Angel Alita or Ghost in the Shell.

Millie Brown: Vomit Artist

Of course I'm using the word artist in the loosest possible way. In case you haven't heard, self proclaimed vomit artist Millie Brown recently performed her shtick with/on Lady Gaga at the SXSW festival. In case you missed it, I've provided this handy looping GIF so that you can enjoy it over and over again.

This isn't the first time Millie has expressed herself all over Gaga. She also did so back in 2010 in the short concert video dubbed Exorcist Interlude.



So you might be wondering, how does vomit art work? Well, not so surprisingly, there isn't much to it. Basically, Millie doesn't eat for a couple of days to empty out her stomach. Then she goes to some pretentious art gallery, lays down a piece of white canvas screen and sets up her glasses of variously colored soy milk. Next, she drinks one of the glasses, walks over to the screen, sticks her fingers down her throat and vomits the colored milk onto the canvas. She repeats the drinking and the vomiting until she has finished creating her next masterpiece.

It seems all of the exposure she has gotten from puking on Lady Gaga has really paid off. Older articles stated that her work was selling for just over $2,000 a pop. Now it looks like they are going for around $20,000.

People: 'Vomit Artist' Millie Brown Defends Herself After Controversial SXSW Show with Lady Gaga

Daily Mail: 'It's like a cleanse for your body and mind': Vomit Painter artist throws up on canvas to create Jackson Pollock-style splatter paintings that Lady Gaga loves

Flash Back Friday: Poodle Fitness

A little bit of old weird to enjoy.

Vaginal Knitting

You would almost have to be living in a cave to of missed the Australian vaginal knitting artist but in case you did, here it is.


Are you brave enough?