The Smithsonian has bought its first piece of performance art. Which means that if you visit the Hirshhorn’s sculpture garden you may find that a young woman will suddenly start singing while following you around.
The performance piece, titled This You, is the creation of Tino Sehgal, though he doesn't perform it. There are four women who do that, in shifts.
Sometimes the performers will abruptly stop singing in order to state the title of the performance piece: “This You, Tino Sehgal, 2006.” And then they'll start singing again.
"Vital Capacity" by performance artist William Lamson, in which he battles black balloons. There's a longer, larger version of the video here (but not embeddable).
For one week in 1992, German artist Christian Jankowski "hunted" his groceries in the supermarket with a bow and arrow. From his website:
Jankowski shot down frozen chickens, butter, toilet paper, and various other "essentials." His game, if edible, was not just dead, it was processed on a mass scale. Thus the reaction of the woman working the checkout counter: she remained wholly unimpressed by the trophies of his "bargain hunt," which she scanned with the arrows still sticking out of them.
Imagine trying to go into a supermarket with a bow and arrow nowadays to hunt your groceries.
In order to confront the stereotype of the "perceived passiveness of Asian people," the artist who calls herself Squished Cockroach painted herself yellow and then wandered through a crowded train while eating rice and stepping on printed articles strewn in her path. The articles referred to "the rise of hate speech against Asians, stereotypes against Asians presented by the media and increased crime rates targeting Asians."
She walked through the train and then was gone, leaving the befuddled commuters to wonder about "the many incidents of racial harassment that do in fact occur on public transport" as well as "the ‘progress’ of humanity."
Performance artist Tim Youd retypes famous novels word for word on old typewriters. The only change he makes is that he leaves out all the spaces between the words, producing page after page of unbroken text. He does this as performance art events at museums, art galleries, coffee shops, etc.
I figured that since typing was his thing, he'd probably be a pretty good typist. But as can be seen in the video, he turns out to be a two-finger, hunt-and-peck typist. Although a relatively fast one.
Breadwoman is a character who wears rags and a loaf of bread on her head while she dances to electronic music. She was created in the mid-1980s by performance artist Anna Homler, apparently having emerged from Homler's "background as an anthropologist and her inexplicable desire to wear bread." Although Breadwoman's mask was originally a hollowed-out loaf of bread, it's now made out of latex.
Back in September 2017, artist Noëmi Lakmaier lay still for nine hours as a team of balloon assistants and a "bondage engineer" attached 20,000 balloons to her immobilised body. Eventually she achieved lift-off, but since she was inside the Sydney Opera House, she didn't float away.
Belgian artist Mikes Poppe recently chained himself to a four-ton block of marble and then attempted to free himself by chiseling away at it. His goal was to demonstrate how the "inescapable burden of history" imprisons artists.
Nineteen days later he gave up and asked to be freed, admitting that he had "underestimated the marble." Despite this, he said, "I don’t see that as a failure... On the contrary. I have been able to communicate with the public. I am now going to read the many comments in the guestbook and take a warm bath.”
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.