Experiments in art : digital : life

There are so many reasons. Here is one, quoted from the blog Metro Times:

“Fluxus artists were irresistible art flirts and menaces. They refused tickets to snobs, patronized critics and dared the public to find a point to art. They pushed the boundaries of what is considered art and, as Fluxus artist Nam June Paik wrote, turned you and me into the same clowns as Goethe and Beethoven. In short — they leveled the playing field.”

Marlene Dumas famously wrote,
“lf a Prostitute is a person /
who makes it a profession/
to gratify the lust of various persons /
for economical reasons or gain, /
where emotional involvement may /
or may not be present— /
Then it seems not so far removed /
from my definition of an artist.”

“31. If an artist uses the same form in a group of works, and changes the material, one would assume the artist’s concept involved the material.”

What does it mean to re-perform a drawing? Even if the original drawing was life-sized? How does involving the body – as a viewer, as opposed to a producer – change the experience with the artwork as object?

There is a sort of object-producer dichotomy in the drawing that is absent when we perform the action. Our bodies are object. Object twice-removed…When we do reperformances, we don’t claim authorship at all. We break free from the notion of authorship, so in a very real sense, Longo is still the author; we’re just allowing him to use our material, to use us as material.

Why Longo?

We were looking for: A portrait. A couple. An object that captured the idea of identity wrapped up in the exterior. Something to model Cash & Ruby on. Something that was already present in – already visually present in the art world – while at the same time, related to our cultural consciousness. Our awareness of ourselves during the 1980s in America. A man and a woman wearing business suits. Money. The notion of surface. Radical surface. A young Caucasian man and woman, well-dressed, attractive.

Transporting ourselves from the analog to the digital. Flattening everything. Giving it all the same value. That’s what happens with the composite. We don’t put ourselves into any sort of scene: it’s a completely clean, neutral space, a non-space, digital space. The original piece of work has all sorts of potential. Our reperformance is just one type of actualization that is available for Robert Longo’s original drawing.

This video by Circlesquare takes it to the next level.