"In the early 1970s, the artist Chris Burden pioneered a kind of sculpture that explored boundaries few people would care even to approach." The artist has had himself (in two of many examples...) nearly electrocuted and shot; some of his later and lighter work includes building complex model bridges and reconstructing a "Speed of Light Machine". He created a ghost ship, uninhabited and self navigated, and continues to surprise with his latest work....
posted on Jun 8, 2008 - View this thread

About twenty years ago, HBO aired The Mondo Beyondo Show, a sort-of send-up of avant-garde performance shows like Alive From Off Center and Night Flight. Hosted by Bette Midler (as the character Mondo Beyondo), it showcased artists that covered the broad spectrum between performance art, dance, and absurdist comedy. Strap on your Eighties Goggles; here's the meat of the show: Bill Irwin | La La La Human Steps | The Kipper Kids | Yes/No People | Paul Zaloom | David Cale | and the Divine Miss M as Eudora P. Quickly
posted on May 29, 2008 - View this thread

Are lice art? "Seven young artists from Berlin are trying to stretch the boundaries of art by living in an Israeli museum for three weeks with lice in their hair." Video.
posted on May 2, 2008 - View this thread

Amber Hawk Swanson was lonely. So, like lonely singles everywhere, she contracted RealDoll.com, "Home of the World's Finest Love Doll," to provide her with some companionship. But she had one special request - that the doll be made to look exactly like her. Nine months later, Amber Doll was born, and the two were married the next day in a Las Vegas ceremony. Amber documents the wedding, and explores the relationship between fantasy and reality, in her film To Have, To Hold, and To Violate, Amber and Doll (5-minute compilation.). (most links nsfw)
posted on Apr 30, 2008 - View this thread

A site for artist Bas Jan Ader (wikipedia) who was last seen in 1975 when he took off in what would have been the smallest sailboat ever to cross the Atlantic. Site includes his most famous piece, I'm Too Sad to Tell You.
posted on Dec 23, 2007 - View this thread

The man got lit up early. Culprit out on bail. LOLCATS on the case.
posted on Aug 29, 2007 - View this thread

NoSo [embedded audio] is the next stop on the self-referential satire train of Web 2.0.* Going beyond Useless Account, inspired (kinda) by Flash Mobs, Fight Club ("the first rule..."), and MeFi Meetups, it allows anonymous users the opportunity to organize "NOevents" where members can congregate in selected physical locations without using their technological connectivity devices and NOT engage in communication with each other. That's right, no talking allowed at a NOevent. Reading books is OK. You may go home and blog about it, but NO live blogging. Organized by a San Franciso art group that may just be using it to get people to show up at their installations (aha!), and who violate the Fight Club rule in an interview with R.U. Sirius.(viablame TechCrunch) *Plagiarized with attribution from bhouston.
posted on Aug 27, 2007 - View this thread

Andy Kaufman { Mighty Mouse, Elvis impersonator, Bachelor #3, Latka Gravas/Vic Ferrari, the host of his own TV special, trouble-maker [?], Dostoevsky's Idiot, "born again" Christian, percussionist, inter-gender wrestling/bitch-slap champion, lounge singer Tony Clifton [?], bit player, Elayne Boosler's ex-boyfriend, and the Man On the Moon } RIP [YA RLY]
posted on Aug 20, 2007 - View this thread

Art Crimes is a fascinating site about the history of vandalism in the fine arts, recently revived by a Frenchwoman who left a lipstick imprint on a 2 million dollar painting by Cy Twombly. Other examples include a British suffragist attacking a Velazquez with a knife, an installation vandalized by the Israeli ambassador to Sweden, two Chinese performance artists who urinated into Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, and a Canadian art student who vomited blue gelatin on a Mondrian. Oddly enough, the artwork that has weathered the most attacks is Rembrandt's The Night Watch, which has survived two knife attacks (one by an unemployed teacher with a butter knife) and an attack by a mental patient who had a compulsion to fling sulfuric acid at fine artworks. Other art vandalism methods, including glass cutters, hammers, scissors, guns, and ink, are discussed here.
posted on Jul 26, 2007 - View this thread

"He spent three days in a room with a coyote. After flying into New York, he was swathed in felt and loaded into an ambulance, then driven to the gallery where the Action took place, without having once touched American soil. As [he] later explained: ‘I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote.’" ( documentary yt clip)
posted on Jul 3, 2007 - View this thread

The Knitting Machine is a performance art piece/sculpture by Providence artist Dave Cole. Cole's other works include a Memorial Flag made out of toy soldiers and a size 8 dress made entirely out of money.
posted on Mar 5, 2007 - View this thread

The Black Light Theatre of Prague ("Černé Divadlo" or simply Black Theatre) is a Czech performance style characterised by the use of black box theatre augmented by black light trickery. Although this performance style can be found in many places around the world, nowhere is it more prolific or specialized than in Prague. Some sample images: 1 2 3 4. YouTube: 1 2 3.
posted on Feb 8, 2007 - View this thread

Beijing artist Li Wei switched from oil painting to performance art in 1999; in 2000 he used mirrors to create a ... detached collection. Then he began falling into things.
posted on Jan 29, 2007 - View this thread

"To play this motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Erik Satie's Vexations (previously) was more-or-less disregarded as an unperformable thought experiment, until John Cage staged an eighteen-hour performance in 1963. The event cemented Satie's importance in avant-garde music and his influence on a generation of artists. In 2006, several musicians and artists performed their own renditions.
posted on Dec 30, 2006 - View this thread

Topor et moi. Roland Topor was the graphic artist behind the beautiful Planète Sauvage (Cf. a few posts below) but his body of work also included founding the Panic Movement with fellow oddballs Jodorowsky and Arrabal, writing plays and novels (The Tenant, turned into a movie by another Paris-born celebrity of Polish extraction and amateur of bizarre, Roman Polanski), and making strange and popular TV shows for children (YouTube clips from the 80s). Except for the kids shows, most of the links are quite NSFW with abundant sex and/or violence, though in a cartoonish, disturbing, surreal, or even political way: Topor once said (YouTube documentary in French starting with his Phallunculi series) that to renounce sex was to banish oneself from mankind. Topor himself was also a familiar figure of the French cultural landscape, instantly recognisable thanks to his manic cackle (heard at the beginning of this video where he explains how to make art from random pornographic images), that he (over)used to play the madman Renfield in Herzog's Nosferatu.
posted on Dec 11, 2006 - View this thread

We need more artists in politics! In 1969, Canadian performance artist Vincent Trasov constructed a human-sized peanut costume and took on the familiar identity of Planters mascot Mr. Peanut. Five years later, Trasov took his performance art persona to the next level as he entered Mr. Peanut into the 1974 Vancouver mayoral election, running on a platform of "Performance, Elegance, Art, Nonsense, Uniqueness, and Talent." Trasov posed a "visual question" to his opponents at the debates via tap dance, received at least one celebrity endorsement during his campaign, and in the end, garnered 3.4% of the vote. Recently, Trasov (and fellow artist Michael Morris) launched the Morris/Trasov Archive, where you can find a nice collection of photos from the campaign trail online (Performance -> My Five Years in a Nutshell).

Mr. Peanut remains a central part of Trasov's art; his "Histories" place Mr. Peanut in the Bamyian Valley of Afghanistan, the Marx-Engels monument at Berlin, and at the entrance to Thebes, playing the role of Oedipus opposite the Sphinx.
posted on Dec 10, 2006 - View this thread

Imagine a massively multiplayer music studio, connected worldwide over the Internet. Log in, and everyone sees a set of synths, effects, sequencers, or other custom patches. Everyone’s looking at essentially the same screen, and can add beats, trip out effects, slide the bpm up and down, and reprogram synths — all at once. That’s the basic idea of netpd.
posted on Oct 25, 2006 - View this thread

James Patten creates interactive works in diverse media with themes including performance and social commentary. Projects include Tactile Photography and, most impressive to me, The Audio Pad.
posted on Aug 1, 2006 - View this thread

GX Jupitter-Larsen - noise maker, video artist [some NSFW] and inventor of the TNU.
posted on Aug 1, 2006 - View this thread

kama3d ~ Made by an anonymous French artist, this series of sculptures of kama sutra positions was supposedly exhibited at the Chambéry Modern Art Museum (Musée d'Art et d'Histoire) recently. Now you can virtually walk around them. Reminscent of that sculpture of Britney giving birth on a bearskin. But are they real? *NSFW* (Note: FLASH)
posted on Jul 13, 2006 - View this thread

"Sloppiness is my palette." Neal Medlyn is the self-proclaimed "Paris Hilton of Performance Art" who looked for "bits and pieces of coolness in normal things or in anything" when he was growing up in small-town Texas. Now performing regularly in New York City, Medlyn played a nude Dubya shacking up with Karen Finley's nude Martha Stewart in George and Martha (here's a review and another review; photos NSFW). According to the 2000 Austin Chronicle profile (written by his future wife) Medlyn came off as a lunatic in his early performances, many of which were sparsely attended, and involved "music, little routines, and group activities, like having everyone sit in the dark and listen very closely to a song he likes." Medlyn has performed, with Kenny Mellmann, a show of R. Kelly songs (watch him performing one; Google Video); he loves (NSFW) Lionel Richie (whose songs he finds strange and beautiful; watch mpg here); and he wrote a book inspired by his own buttocks (NSFW). Medlyn is currently doing, with Carmine Covelli, a somewhat Peewee Herman-ish video series for Nerve called Neal Medlyn's Land of Make-Believe (NSFW; videos depict group sex, performed by various animal puppets). Here is a 2004 interview with Medlyn. And Medlyn has a Myspace profile.
posted on Jun 17, 2006 - View this thread

When Anarchist Performance Art takes the guise of a humble Ice Cream Truck, I can't help but think that money spent funding the arts is money well spent.
posted on Apr 19, 2006 - View this thread

The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984 features, among many compelling pieces, works by Tehching Hsieh. Hsieh may be best known for his 1983-84 collaborative piece with Linda Montano, in which the two artists were tethered together at the waist with an eight foot rope -- for an entire year. [Previously mentioned here.]
posted on Feb 13, 2006 - View this thread

The Six String Sonics are about reinventing the guitar. The conventional guitar has many limitations. For example, it binds the player to chords that one can hold with one hand, or melodies that can easily be reached with one hand. As a result, guitar compositions have come to sound very similar to each other. We created Six String Sonics to rid the guitar of these limitations, and make room for more possibilities in composition. A video of their debut perfomance. [embedded MOV file]
posted on Feb 3, 2006 - View this thread

Whether Man. Every morning (since November 22, at least), an NYU student (and video artist) has stepped out onto his Queens rooftop, clad only in his underwear and a necktie. Why? To provide you with "up to the 6 o'clock weather information," of course.
posted on Dec 9, 2005 - View this thread

On Friday, September 2nd, artist Mary Coble will subject herself to a marathon tattoo session that could make a career Marine wince. Beginning at 6 p.m. and likely continuing until dawn the next day, a tattoo artist will etch 400 names of victims of the nation's gay, bisexual and transgender hate crimes into the artist's back, legs and arms. And we're all invited to watch. More (WashPo [reg.rqd])
posted on Sep 1, 2005 - View this thread

The inventor of mail art and master of performance events he liked to call "nothings", "the most famous unknown artist in the world" has caught my fancy. He called his enigmatic collages "moticos" and stored them in cardboard boxes to be shown in Grand Central Station or on the street. He playfully hinted numerous times about his mortality; even his closest friends and associates agree that his carefully planned death was his last “nothing". I can't wait to see How To Draw A Bunny. Here's an open letter to him.
posted on Jul 5, 2005 - View this thread

My Million-Dollar Year. "One million dollars. 365 days. Yes, she's serious." Performance art goes commercial.
posted on Apr 4, 2005 - View this thread

After Walker Evans Alternatively, After Sherrie Levine. In 1936, Walker Evans famously photographed a family of sharecroppers. In 1979, Sherrie Levine rephotographed Evans' work. Performance artist Michael Mandiberg has reproduced Levine's work online, made them available for printing, and assembled texts and wrote plays to give the site's conceptual art concept - and Levine's work - meaning, and a punchline.
posted on Mar 20, 2005 - View this thread

Chris Barr is available on Thursday for the next two months. So what you ask? You can schedule things for Chris to do and view things he's done in the past. I especially enjoyed the "ask strange women to hold a sign saying I Like Spike" and "ask a bunch of random folks what is on their iPod." Can wait to see what he has to do next.
posted on Mar 11, 2005 - View this thread

The Center for Tactical Magic: a fusion force summoned from the ways of the artist, the magician, the ninja, and the private investigator.
posted on Feb 3, 2005 - View this thread

"The MP3 Experiment is the world’s first live theatrical performance that audiences will experience exclusively through headphones. There are no actors. There is no host. Audience members will download an mp3 track from the show’s website in advance, load it onto their portable players, and bring it with them to the show. The lights go down, a video projection cues the audience to press play on their mp3 players simultaneously, and the show begins. The mp3 track is an intricate mix of music and instructions from an unknown voice." Produced by Improv Everywhere, also mentioned here.
posted on Nov 30, 2004 - View this thread

So, why don't you like doing interviews? Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock takes the piss. [wmv]
posted on May 16, 2004 - View this thread

Courtesan Tales are thirteen intimate tales of the senses, designed for a blindfolded audience of one, as told by Nicole Blackman (of golden palominos, scanner, recoil and KMFDM). The tales have returned to New York for May.
posted on May 15, 2004 - View this thread

9 beet stretch is the act of using digital tools to slow down Beethoven's 9th symphony to the point where the piece takes 24 hours to complete. Next week, a 9 beet stretch will be taking place in San Francisco, at 964 Natoma, from Friday April 23rd to Saturday April 24. Sleepover!
posted on Apr 15, 2004 - View this thread

Bill and Liz sit down on a sidewalk in New York City, and put up a sign that asks people to talk to them. No catch, no trick, just conversation. They do this full time, up to 14 hours a day, every day.
posted on Aug 4, 2003 - View this thread

Oh my. Is this performance art? A political statement? An in your face variation on cosplay? Meet the very not-safe-for-work Rati. Is this a contemporary nod to tradition? Does it rise to the same level as another popular theme in art? Weigh in on Rati!
posted on Jun 11, 2003 - View this thread

Democratic Torture - "By touching a hotspot on their screens the Global audience can shock my exhausted face...". Yesterday his face "was sewn into a bind" today in around 3 hours time viewers may "contribute an electric shock direct to Mike Parr by interacting directly with the webcast"
A SMH article and an Artist's Biography provide some context.
posted on May 2, 2003 - View this thread

Scotty the Blue Bunny - add some color to your next party or family get together with Scotty. "There's something to be said about a seven foot pastel rabbit hurling insults at a party-worn Sunday evening crowd..." via Presurfer
posted on Feb 18, 2003 - View this thread

I've never had a cup of coffee in my life. Can't stand the smell. However, if I were able to watch Reverend Billy's Starbucks Spat Theatre I'd be living there 24/7. Has anyone witnessed one of these performances? [via an email i got from bud]
posted on Nov 17, 2002 - View this thread

Coyle and Sharpe were two geniuses of street improv. Their man on the street interviews and bizarre senses of humour were unique and daring. Check out these great mp3s. (Great to see MeFi back!)
posted on Jul 15, 2002 - View this thread

Million Clown March attended by 80 clowns, who chant "No more chanting!"
posted on Mar 18, 2002 - View this thread

"Each vagina is different, each is like a snowflake, unique in its own way." More about explicit "edu-tainer" and "sexpert" Maria Falzone's "Sex Rules!" performance at Dartmouth College. Includes excerpts from performances there and elsewhere (including the above) and the College's official reponse.

Only touched upon in the article is the huge response to the event from Dartmouth's alumni, including a heated discussion at a College-sponsored alumni event yesterday in LA.

The original article and MeFi thread.
posted on Nov 8, 2001 - View this thread

Online Art - strange delights.
posted on Mar 16, 2001 - View this thread

Shop Mandiberg!! eCommerce or performance art?
posted on Jan 26, 2001 - View this thread

David Blaine is at it again (requires flash). If you are in New York, you can also see him frozen live at Times Square from now through the 29th.
posted on Nov 27, 2000 - View this thread

Is nudity art? Or is this USF student just a flake?
posted on May 25, 2000 - View this thread