I went to Sammlung Boros with my best friend on Sunday.  It is a huge bunker that has been turned into a private home which is also an art gallery that houses an immense and impressive private art collection.  

One must reserve a spot on a tour well in advance, which my friend and I did.  The tours are given in either English or German by attractive and intelligent young people who guide you around the massive building, showing you select pieces.  The work there now is curated around Installation & Performance, but the exhibition will change this year to Photography & Painting.  

Oh the wonderful things that money and good taste can buy…

The naked man on the right is Igor Josifov.  He was an artistic resident at The Watermill Center in New York during the same time I was in residency there with Implied Violence.  He is a young performance artist from Macedonia, and at the time, he was collaborating with a young man from California named Michael Ryan Noble on a performance project about copying, reproducing, and being inspired by other performers’ work.  I see by this photo that he is still investigating that theme.  He has a blog where you can see more of his work.

http://igorjosifov.blogspot.com/

mirrorpress:

Marina Abramovic | The Artist is Present

(via performanceartempire)

Video from “A Dolls House” by Vinge/Mueller

Fucked-Up Norwegian duo Vegard Vinge and Ida Mueller have been presenting a series of radical adaptations of Henrik Ibsen plays for a number of years now.  John Gabriel Borkman, the fourth part of their Ibsen saga, is now playing at The Volksbuehne’s Prater Theater here in Berlin.  Mr. Vinge (Director) and Ms. Mueller (scenography and costume) also perform in their pieces.  Mr. Vinge supposedly pisses in his own mouth during John Gabriel Borkman and at some point makes a painting with his shit.  How stifled and Scandinavian of him!  The piece is performed for 12 hours by an ensemble of over 45 actors.  I had the opportunity to observe (I would call it observing rather that “watching” or “seeing”) The Wild Duck by Vinge/Mueller & Co. this summer, which I attended off and on for 12 of its 24 hours.  I left the show drunk, covered in barbeque flavored potato chips, baffled and exhausted.  It gave me faith that performance work can still shock, awe, and mind-fuck an audience into submission.

From John Gabriel Borkman.  Photo by William Minke

Cheers to you, Vegard and Ida.  You had me at “hello”.

These photos were taken at a Clown Show at The Double Header, Seattle’s Oldest and Dirtiest Gay Bar.  Three clowns told the tale of Hurricane Katrina/911 , during which Oprah and Sean Penn inevitably saved the day.  My clown, whose name is Grrretchen, was pied in the face several times, which made her first very angry and then very very sad.  She later fell down and embarrassed herself by mooning the audience.  Grrretchen always wears a too-small children’s size gymnastics leotard, a school-girl plaid skirt, high heeled shoes with tassels on the toes, a lime green mock crocodile belt, Mardi-Gras beads, a gold sequined headband, and a pair of glasses without the lenses.  I played Grrretchen for several years, off and on, during many different clown pieces and performance events.  

Photos @Flickr.com/Espressobuzz 

From artists Diego Agullo and Dmitry Paranyushkin, whose piece “Humping Pact” is a tribute to dysfunctional spaces that still emanate creative potential.  They attempt to build an intimate and personal relationship with space, being loyal to its demands and dedicated within their efforts.  They love the environment.  Literally.  This piece is presented as a six screen video installation, a short film, and as large format photo prints.  

Personally, I think it is spectacular, articulate, and unexpected.  I think that The Zollverein in Essen, Germany, (the location where this was performed and filmed) is a breathtaking and special place.  I’d fuck it if I could, too.  

See the captivating and oddly sexy trailer at www.humpingpact.com 

This is a photo from my new studio, Das Haus Von Anja.  I have been working on my play-for-performance “LEAVING”, which is a III to IV act performance piece about manipulation, desire, sex, and death.  I am happy to announce that Mr. William D. Brattain and Ms. Allie Hankins will be joining me in Berlin to work on this new piece later this year.  

On Thursday, January 12th, I broke up with my OK Boyfriend.  ”Ok Boyfriend”, an installation in my bedroom, was created and installed in November.  After a short and chaotic romance, I decided it would be best for the both of us to break up.  In the long run, the installation was very effective as a psychological/architectural renovation.  Staring at the wall of chaos above my head every night filled me with, at first, feelings of comfort and security.  After a while, the comfort and security turned to annoyance, inconvenience, and suffocation.  Finally, the entire installation became an articulate metaphor for emotional chaos and insecurity.  Perhaps this metaphor always existed, but it took me two months to understand and be effected by it.   

(“OK Boyfriend”: View from above)

In the end, I decided it is better to have “NO Boyfriend” rather than an “OK Boyfriend”.  

“NO Boyfriend”: solo performance & installation, January 12th, 2012.

It’s not me, it’s you.  

Catherine Sullivan is one of my favorite video artists.  Her work combines video and performance.  She brilliantly explores dance, theater, film, and installation.  She collaborates with dancers, composers, performers, and designers to make both live performance and film pieces.  I have only seen one of her pieces at The Henry Art Museum in Seattle — the unsettling and curious “Triangle of Need” shown first in this video.  Following “Triangle of Need” are several segments from five or six different film and live performance pieces by Ms. Sullivan.  I highly recommend you check her out.  I find her work extremely intelligent, disturbing, and challenging.  All good things in my book!  

May The Horse Live in Me

Over the course of several months, the artist prepared her body by allowing to be injected with horse immunoglobulins, the glycoproteins that circulate in the blood serum, and which, for example, can function as antibodies in immune response. The artist called the process “mithridatization”, after Mithridates VI of Pontus who cultivated an immunity to poisons by regularly ingesting sub-lethal doses of the same.

In February 2011, having progressively built up her tolerance to the foreign animal bodies, she was injected with horse blood plasma containing the entire spectrum of foreign immunoglobulins, without falling into anaphylactic shock, an acute multi-system allergic reaction.

Horse immunoglobulins by-passed the defensive mechanisms of her own human immune system, entered her blood stream to bond with the proteins of her own body and, as a result of this synthesis, have an effect on all major body functions, impacting even the nervous system, so that the artist, during and in the weeks after the performance, experienced not only alterations in her physiological rhythm but also of her consciousness. “I had the feeling of being extra-human,” explained the artist. “I was not in my usual body. I was hyper-powerful, hyper-sensitive, hyper-nervous and very diffident. The emotionalism of an herbivore. I could not sleep. I probably felt a bit like a horse.’