Art should be in the streets surprising people, not necessarily in galleries or museums. Art should be part of everyone’s daily journey into work. Art should make us laugh and catch people unaware. Art should show us something that we can all understand. Art should make us think effortlessly. Art should question its own what-ness.
The Museum of Modern Art presents Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, the first U.S. large-scale museum retrospective of the artist’s groundbreaking performance work, from March 14 to May 31. Internationally recognized as a pioneer and key figure in performance art, Marina Abramović (Serbian, b. 1946) uses her own body as subject, object, and medium, exploring the physical and mental limits of her being by creating pieces that require her to withstand pain, exhaustion, and discomfort in the quest for artistic, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual transformation.
After I had been engaged in art for ten years in China, I moved from southern China to New York in 2001. I grew up in the Cultural Revolution in the 60s and the 70s, the reforming and opening of the national policy in the 80s, and the commercial economic society in the 90s. My works were profoundly influenced by this kind of social changes, especially by cities that have changed constantly and enormously. It inspired me to create a series of works with installations and performances. In these works, the combination of conception and substance is emphasized, and the body itself turns into a kind of material and visual stimulant. Most of my works happened on the street and unusual space, which echoed the flourishing urban life in contemporary China. Since I immigrated to the United States, I have been undergoing a radical change in my career.
When I began graduate school, I also began working in the sex industry as a way to finance my education without having to work full-time. During the three years of developing my work while under the intensive supervision of the institution, I recognized more and more within myself a conflict raging between my “public body” and my “private body.” I became preoccupied with the definition of prostitution as making public, something that is usually kept private.
I have always traveled extensively and experienced different cultures and social contexts. This has shaped my understanding in the scope between the concerns of individuals in their unique situations and the individual within a broader socio-political condition. In 1984 when I was living, working, and studying in America I was employed as well as a volunteer worker for an organization, which was dealing with the Street Work Program (JASP, JESCA) within ethnic minority communities. My tasks involved individual counseling of young criminal offenders and developing reintegration schedules with social and creative activities. During the participation of several seminars and conferences I received awards by the Mental Health Assoc. of Dade County Inc.
Faced with the question of how to operate as an artist within an exuberant art market Cai Nyahoe plays with the parameters of an instantaneous society in his recent work: Towards a Semi-Autonomous Self-Perpetuating Art (Phone Sex). Shown at Satellite project space in Newcastle upon Tyne as a bare audio installation, the work presents a recorded telephone conversation between the artist and a sex-line worker. This woman who is selected by pressing 1 to talk to the first available girl becomes the facilitator in the process of Nyahoe’s search for validation in his own artistic practice.This notion seeking external approval and confirmation is while at times humorous, not entirely satirical.
I am a performance-based visual artist and writer. My practice scrutinizes the context and reading of the pre-existing image, performance, film, subject, and the nature of the “exhibition” using improvisation, re-enactment, commingled materials, synchronization, research, collage, and forms of ambiguous self-analysis, the self-portrait, and a scrutiny of the “reference.”I operate within a framework led by technology, research, process, and performance (video, sound, Web, blogs, self-publishing, print, film, live art) and a practice that absorbs multiple roles, including writer, producer, curator, performer, researcher, artist, editor, using these tactics to develop processes through which multiple and complex synchronized outcomes can be reached.
The Further the Distance, the Tighter the Knot was a performance installation that used Victorian mourning rituals, old-time American folk songs, and knitting to explore my longing for home as a recent transplant to Australia. Linden is a repurposed Victorian mansion, built in the 1870s as a family home. The piece drew on Linden’s history and architecture to reflect on ideas of home, migration, and memory. I filled the exhibition spaces with hand-knit memento mori, riffing off the domestic crafts Victorian women made to memorialize loved ones (such as jewelry made from human hair) while they were sequestered in their homes during long periods of mourning.
My art practice is invested in creating a free space for contemplation that lends itself to mutual understanding and the promotion of non-violence. My work has taken a variety of forms including performance, installation, photography, film, video, text, sculpture, and sound. For the 13th annual DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival, feel free to join me in Gut #5: Witness Walk, a performance and sculptural installation project. During the festival, I will distribute white chocolate Humvees in a wandering performance. In the spirit of gift exchange, the festivalgoers and I will collectively dissolve these war vehicles by consuming them together.