It's Performance Art: Challenging Human Nature

when it's hot and uh. And I'm always saying, just kind of crazy stuff happening on the train, and occasionally it'll be crazy enough that there was a moment where I have to question, and it's what I'm seeing legitimate human activity. Is this Is this somebody that is adduled, that is in danger, that is unhinged, or is this performance art This is somebody trying to make a state it about human nature right here on the train. Because that is the thing about performance artists, right like, they

completely disenter you. They make you stop and say, is this person truly um sort of out of their wits or do they have something to say? And that is the goal of the performance artists. Right, and as as we'll discussed in this episode two, at times it may seem that there is a gray line between madness and

performance art. So absolutely with some definitely some of the people were going to cover, like to what extent are they going to explore these ideas of our own humanness, our frailties are power by doing these these acts that sometimes they actually um will do to their bodies. We'll talk about that. They are arguably no same person would do no, no, But they are interrogating what it is to be human, how we feel, how we think, how we act, what is morality? This is, you know, a

question that we're always grappling with as humans. UM. And I really think the artists are are these nice um, these nice additions to the scientific mind, to scientific researchers out there, because I think that they're doing the same thing that scientists arts to some extent they are. They're going through the process of UM, Okay, here's this, here's the situation, and how can I examine it, and how can I peel away the layers to come to some

sort of truth? What works and what doesn't? Um, you know, into what extent do we even have free will? This is a question that comes up a life with neuroscientists. And I think this is something that performance artists do really well, is exploring this topic. Like you said, they drop truth bombs. They do to quote Tracy Jordan's there what strikes me about the performance artists. With a traditional artist, the the art they create is kind of like kind

of serves as a proxy by which they deliver truth. Two. Like, there's truth in the art the artist creates, and that is the means by which he or she gets the truth into your brain. Um. But the performance artist, there's no proxy like they they are they are becoming a vessel for that idea. They are becoming an idea, and they're forcing you to confront this idea in the flesh.

Um Often, I mean, there are a lot of new performance artists out there, and nudity is often plays into I mean, because that is uh, I mean, that's the thing itself. There's a line in Shakespeare's King lear Um where lear is um. You know, it's a one of these seats out in the in the middle of the storm. Lear is is mad. There's a there's a fool that's pretending to be mad. Uh. And and lear says, is man no more than this? Consider him well, thou owest, the worm no silk, the beasts no hide, the sheep

no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha, here's three uns are sophisticated, thou art the thing itself accommodated. Man is no more but such a poor bear forked animal as thou art. Okay, that's that's really interesting because it's about stripping away right that the thing. And that's what I think is interesting about performance art is it does peel away our particular constructs of realities, some of them built on how we as a society work right, all these

sort of rules that are either spoken or unspoken. UM. And I wanted to talk about how performance art is actually an offshoot of data is M and even UM and futurists um. And it has a pretty good Uh, it has a pretty good run here UM, particularly from the seventies on. Lori Anderson is someone who is associated with performance art. And I just wanted to mention this because this is a good example of the type of

performance art that began to be performed. She did duets on ice, which she conducted in New York and other cities around the World, and it involved her playing the violin along with recording while wearing ice skates with blades frozen and to a block of ice. Now Lorie Anderson, her husband, Uh yes, um yes, because Anderson was also NASA's Artist in Residence for a short period of time.

She is an amazing artist, um and she has I believe that she's even if I've got this read, I believe she's even invented a couple of instruments as well. She's an amazing finger. And so that's what I think is really interesting about performance artists is that they're bringing all those critical thinking skills to the table and like scientists, trying to figure out, like, you know, these causal relationships and what happens when you, you know, push the needle

here and there. Her performance, you know, they're no newdating, nothing too crazy, nothing blowing up. But her performance ended when the ice had melted away. Another artist that people might be familiar with this Karen Finley. And I actually saw her in American Chestnut here in Atlanta, and that was very interesting. That was this interrogation of the missticity

and a woman's role. And this was after she had a child and she was actually using breast milk quite a bit too, um express herself, I guess you could say. But one of the things that hallmarks of performance art to me at least is this lack of documentation. Um. This this symbol of the ephemeral nature of life, that everything is fleeting. And uh, I wanted to bring this little quote out from a book called The Family Fang, and this was one of yours in your summer reading

when my summer picks. It's really good. It's there. In some ways it's it didn't quite live up to what I what I thought it might be, but other ways it really surprised me. Is about a family of performance artists, the parents in particular, and um, here's a quote from the father talking to child. Be I believe that's his son, um, he says, And I'm gonna have to believe this out a little bit. Art happens when things effing move around, he told them, not when you freeze them in a

gall durn block of ice. He would then take whatever item was closest to him, a glass or a tape recorder, and smash it against the wall. That was art, he said, And then he would pick up the pieces of the shattered object and hold them out for his children to inspect. This, he said, offering the remains of the broken thing is not so Again, it's this moment that's eliciting these certain

emotions that I think are most central to performance art. Yeah, and you know, another thing that comes to mind is if we were researching this and as we're discussing now, um, there's there's also this line between performance art and just someone being a provocateur, you know, or you know that someone that's just doing something shocking for the sake of shocking and shocking you. Um. And certainly there are some individuals out there who just do that and call it

performance art. But but but when when you're dealing with real performance are like performance art of a high caliber, um that there's there's that nugget of message in there somewhere, well, something that resonates a long time afterwards, Like for instance, you could see was it the naked cowboy in New York who plays on the side of the street with the guitar? Oh yeah, yeah, And I wouldn't call it

performance art. But I'm just I'm kind of picking on him a little bit because I don't think he builds himself as a performance artist. But some people might go by and say, oh, that's so crazy. There's a you know, six ft five dude, he's pretty much naked and the cowboy hat. Yeah, various individuals in Atlanta that have become famous for like baton Man, the baton guy that would march around with the baton. Oh yeah, like like that was I mean, he wasn't pretending to be a performance artist.

He was just doing it because it made him happy. But I've seen him in a long time. Yeah, I haven't seen him recently either, I have uh you know, maybe he uh, maybe he's good now, he didn't need it. Yeah, maybe got that baton thing out, um, that baton demon that we all have. Um. And then there's the flatuless that you you hit me to the other day. Oh yeah yeah, um, which I didn't even know it was a real thing. I was. I was reading a book

Mary Anne is Sleeping. I believe it's the name of it. Um. It was look for a big book prize about a decade back, and there was a fart farting artist in the book. But the whole book is like cloaked in dreams and dreams within dreams so I just assumed it was made up, but we discovered yesterday that it is not there. There this is a there's a grand tradition of individuals using their their their their musical their Actually

there's Mr. Mythlen Is the name of one of the Flatuless. Yeah, that was on like what Britain's got talent the proud moment for the Empire. But but that so that is another example something that is not quite performance art. Um. But but let's get into start getting into some of the examples that we're gonna cover in this this episod because we want to we want to hit some high points or performance art well. And in some cases you could call them it's in the eye of the beholder.

Some of these may be considered low points that performance art, depending on where you're coming from. But but the idea is that the message is received, there's a there's something worth talking about with all of the pieces we're going to discuss today. So one of these gold standard UH performance artists is Maria Abramovich and she has been doing performance up for forties something years. Um. One of her most provocative pieces that was called rhythm Oh and UH,

I just want to mention too. She's a New York based Serbian performance artists and she had a very interesting upbringing to and believe her parents were in the army, both of them very rigid. Um. There's a documentary out about her. Yeah, it's gotten a lot of media attention playing on HBO. I believe yes it is, and we'll talk about that in a moment too. Um. That is

called the Artist is Present. But Rhythmo was performed in nineteen four in studio Amora and Naples and Maria Ramovich adopted a really passive role with audience as an active taking on an active role, and she put seventy two objects around her on a table, anywhere from flowers and perfume to nails, a knife, a hammer, and a loaded gun, and she just she just laid down, was very docile. She was naked, and then the members of the audience were allowed to use any of those objects on her

in any way that they wished. And what she saw over this six hour period is that people at first were pretty modest um, you know, they might pick up some perfume and put her on it. By the end they were actually attacking her with some of these objects like that didn't like one individual point of the guy that her head, yes, and another individual took it away. So what you're seeing here is the the audience became the show essentially, and she, like the artist, as the

piece becomes this, this mirror in which we perceive ourselves. Yeah, she said, what I learned was that if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you. I felt really violated. They cut up my clothes, stuck Rose Thorne's in my stomach. One person aimed the gun at my head, as you say, and another it took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly six hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone

ran away to escape an actual confrontation. So it was interesting because she had said, here are the rules. I'm gonna sit here. But after six hours I get up. Um, So it's interesting that people ran away, uh, sort of knowing that whatever this, this false contract was now broken. And it made me think about objectification, which is something we do on a daily basis, whether or not we know it all the time, right for for a variety

of reasons, into a variety of things and people. And this is from the Atlantic that there's a study that came out said study proof that we sexually objectify women,

and the question of the study everything around. It's interesting and it definitely relates back to I think what Abrabam which was doing, because there's this idea that especially if the artist tells you, well, she didn't you know, explicitly tell them, hey, I'm in an object but she did set the scene for that to happen to a certain extent, to test the limits um of what human behavior was

like in that instance. But anyway, there is this idea of like, straight up, um objectification, can we quantify it? And um, do we really look at women differently than

we do them when it comes to this. So what they said is is they okay, They said, We're going to give everybody men and women um in our study images of average, fully clothed individuals, So no supermodels in bikinis, men or women, and these are going to quickly flash before the eyes of the participants and then they'll be shown two side by side images that zoomed in on one what they call sexual aspect. This could be like

the mid drift of a man or a woman. And they asked them to identify the version that hadn't been modified, and then experience was also reversed so that participants participants first looked at a specific part and then had to

identify the context of the entire body. So the test was actually designed to clue researchers in whether or not participants were using what they call global or local cognitive processing while leaking at the images, In other words, whether or not they perceived individuals as a whole or in parts,

which is fascinating to me. So the results, regardless of gender, participants consistently recognized women's sexual body parts more easily when presented in isolation, and men's sexual body parts, on the other hand, were more memorable is part of their entire bodies. So what they're saying is that the cognitive process behind our perception of objects is the same that we have

been looking at women and both genders. Both genders here are sualty of taking in the parts instead of the whole, but when we look at men we globally process them more fully as people. This is really interesting that we're talking about this during the Olympics, because, um, the summer Olympics startup and you inevitably start seeing all these pictures from women's beach volleyball. Um, and there's there's a great little piece. I think it was a blog post that

was um it was a great idea. I didn't think that the execution was was perfect, but um, it brought up the idea, what if all sports were photographed the way women's beach volleyball is photographed, Because we've all seen these like it's the only Olympic sport where it's okay for the photo spread of it to be women's hinders and uh in mid drifts, you know, without seeing their faces or or or necessarily even any sports action like you don't see you don't see people shooting Greco Roman

wrestling like that or or you know, or or various Winter Olympic sports. It's uh, it's like sexual objectification theater. Well, and this has been talked about a lot um, you know, over the years, particularly in terms of um and if they never even go swimminghy are they wearing swimsuits? Right? I know, I know particularly in gender theory though, because that that's what they call the male gaze, right, Like

this idea that you know, these body parts are being isolated. Um. And I was thinking about it in terms of like, well, this type, these different medias in which women have been represented have been in existence for thousands of years, right, but more recently in the ways that we know them,

um through television or through our computer screens. And I thought, well, if if we know, if we have evidence that a search engine like Google can change the way in which our memory works, then is it possible that the way that women are portrayed in these different types of media could change the way that we think about men and women um as they say, like the cognitive processing of

what a woman is or what a man this. And so that's why I think it's interesting when you look at Maria Abramovich's work that that she is considering, or it seems to me and some of the work that she's doing, she's considering this idea of objectifying herself or

being objectified UM. And I think that in her her most recent work, which is a retrospective of all of her work called The Artist Is Present, she really kind of comes full circle with this idea of well, let's let's do let's focus more on um acceptance rather than in this this holistic putting together of the human form as opposed to the objectification. And if you look at this documentary called The Artist is Present, you'll see that she takes this retrospect of her work, which is fascinating.

Forty years worth. People go through the exhibit and I believe this was at moment right um, And this was earlier in this year between March. It for for three months with retrospective rand. So you go through this when you were in Yeah it was unfortunately, uh, but you go through and at the very end, the artist herself, as she says, is present. She is sitting at first at a table for a couple of months, and you, as a participant, are allowed to come and sit across

from her. And I don't know for how long, um you can, but that's really a very simple idea, right for the Artist is Present, I'm gonna go and sit in front of her. But what we're talking about here and this is that when we say people are dedicated to their arts, um or to performance art and to really seeing this through this concept, we're talking about a three month period in which every single day she sat at that table and did not get up, and did

not eat and was absolutely silent. All told, seven hundred and thirty six hour and thirty minutes static silent piece that is part of her performance. Art is just sitting there in and of itself, like the the endurance involved there, Like it's not just somebody getting up and on a on a stage and being like, oh oh I'm naked. It's art now. This is somebody that's sitting there at a table for a grueling amount of time. I mean, I can't say it's still for fifteen minutes at a stretch.

Most days, I can't can't even imagine that seven hours, seven hours and individuals coming and sitting in front of you. Um. People were waiting for hours every day, by the way, just to do this. The reason is is because she would For every single person, she would um but like before they sat down, she would look at her lap and then look up at them, and she said she wanted to give them the recognition they deserved as humans, as a whole human sitting in front of her, and

she would say nothing and just stare in her eyes. Okay, have you ever stared into someone's eyes for for fifteen minutes straight before? UM, Well, my wife, I guess, I mean not saying anything, not saying anything, mm hmm. Fifteen minutes, no no break in eye contact, no breaking eye contact. And it's also a stranger, right, mm hmm, yeah, I don't know. That's I may not have, you know, because I mean generally, if if it's somebody I really know,

there's gonna be some discussion. And uh, I generally can't. I have trouble maintaining eye contact with most people who are not my wife. So well, it's such a simple idea, but when she did this in front of people, everybody, and now I have to look away from your eyes just because it's just the way like mine, because they're piercing ye with their grace. Still, I started, like, I look into someone's eyes and it's like and then I

start uncomfortuences to look around. But yeah, I mean, so we're not really used to doing that, right, We use our eyes to connect with other people, but certainly not for fifteen minutes with a stranger. The that the sort of reactions were so incredible and powerful. People started crying. And the reason is because they're projecting all of their

feelings onto her. She allowed herself to be a blink slate and so a lot of people felt absolutely like that they fell in love with her some people were angry with her or like they just they're there, they're imagining the way that Yeah and um, and then this documentary is fascinating to watch this happen. And people were they just went nuts. And that's why she had people waiting for hours. Sometimes they would get there in the wee hours of the morning before the museum opened to

stand in line to do this. Um. There was a website called Maria Abravich made me cry. Uh that popped up. There are people who just started doing really disruptive things in the museum to get her attention. There were there was one woman who sent in front of her and took her top off because she wanted to try to

be as raw and as vulnerable as Maria was. So again, it's such a simple concept, but here's this woman who was really forty years done these incredible things, not with her own not just with her body, but really with interacting with people. And to me, this really was a culmination of ultimate connection with someone I want to like.

The people who did disruptive things, I mean, I wonder if they, I mean, were they familiar with their work enough to to realize this is a lady who once uh, you know, set there and had a loaded gun next to her and allowed members of the audience to to point it at her. I'm not going to really disrupt her by taking my top off. I think it was the way allowed noise is probably not going to cut it.

I think someone had I can't remember what they wrote on the papers, but they took a stack of like five papers and threw them from the top of the of moment. Do you know, they have an open atrium, so all these um papers flee down and there was sort of a negative sentiment on that. I can't remember off the top of my head what it was, but to me, it was someone trying to take a bit

of that power that she had. Yeah. Yeah, it's like when when I mean, just like when somebody messes with with like someone who's on guard duty or something, you know, I mean, you're just trying to I mean, it comes down to the whole whole. Like even things like graffiti, and I don't mean street art, but just straight up like tagging something. I mean, it's about proving that you have control over something else and it's petty. Well and at this point too in the exhibit, there was like

this mania epting over her. So it was just it was Christian doing. Yeah, but the nunetiness. But again, here's that's a powerful work, right, that is eliciting these feelings and people and connecting with them on on such an incredible level. Um, you probably take a break and then we get back. We're going to talk about the crazy dude. Well, yes, yes, we're gonna talk a little bit brilliant about the crazy and the brilliant steel Ar. Yes, the man with the

ear on his arm. Alright, we're back. So yeah, let's talk a little bit about Steeler. This guy is this guy is pretty incredible. Um. He's probably most well known for the ear on the arm deal, which, um, you know, unless you actually this is one of those things that, like a lot of things, that gets picked up in

the media and and gets carried out. I think a lot of people just have surface level information about it, Like their basic level of the story is, oh, there's some crazy artist dude and he had an ear so zoning on to his arm, which isn't really the case at all, um, But but what he did is really fascinating.

And then it, uh, it ties in with with some of the things we've discussed in the past about about growing organs and UH and you know where we're going as far as body modification, cybernetic enhancement, UM, growing human tissue, over scaffolding. I mean, all of these things are involved, particularly in this piece, but but also in a lot of his work, and we've talked about it more in the context of survival, either in space or just in trying to UM to help with disease or you know,

even like organ replacement. Yeah. So yeah, along comes this guy and he starts to get his thinking even more about this topic. Yeah. Now, but before we got to this is two thousand six, when he had the year done. Before that, he did a lot, like a lot of what he was doing was like he would do with body suspensions, where he has UH hooks and his skin and he's hanging um everyone a little like Jim rose Fercus. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,

he's and a lot of what he does UM. I think I read a piece that William Gibson UH wrote. It was actually the introduction to UH Steel Arc the monograph, which is a collection of his of his work UM where he talked about it invoked his work is invoking like the side show geek um, you know road show kind of vibe and also but but also all these other disciplines to make some commentary about you know, where we are the people and how we interact with with

technology and uh and ultimately where we're going. Um. But so yeah, he did a lot of that. He did. He did a piece where he um swallowed a sculpture, a sculpture that kind of opens up in his stomach and there was apparently a tricky moment where he wasn't sure he's gonna be able to remove it without surgery from it. Yeah. Um. He did a piece called Ping Body, in which he wired himself to the Internet, um by attaching electrodes to various muscles which could then be activated

by remote users. And uh, I mean and this was all about uh, sensory experience and the idea that increasingly today and certainly in the future, but our sensory experience isn't bound to a particular location or bound by the body itself. You know. He's forcing you to to think about our modern sense experience as being this uh, this international thing you know. I mean it comes back to like doing Google image searches of things, and how does

that change our perception of the world. Um. But then the the ear idea came to him, and the ear of the idea apparently he had it, you know, back in the mid nineties and spent ten years tracking down people who had actually performed surgery. I read somewhere he said, if the technology would have been present, then I would have gone ahead and pursued it, but I had to wait until we could actually do this. Yeah, And I

mean that's something to to say. Surgical technology hasn't really caught up with my art yet, you know that is that's generally considered the statement of of someone who is deeply disturbed, of someone who's is uh, deeply creative and uh and yeah. So two thousand six, the day finally arrives. Um, a biocombatible scaffold is surgically inserted into his left forearm, and it creates the shape of an ear. So it's not yet, it's not an ear per se, right, it's

you know, we mentioned scaffoldings. We can grow tissue, we can use stem selves to grow tissues. We can grow heart tissue, but we need the shape of a heart around which to grow it. Um, And this is a scaffolding of an ear. It was just surgically implant under the skin. And uh, and it's actually took successive surgeries in a in a six about with with with infection.

He had to take all these antibiotics, So it wasn't just a simple procedure of flying it in Like this dude suffered for his art um and now has an ear shape in his arm and that that that's just sort of stage one, right, six years later, he's still adding to it, right, like with his own adults, some cells, because he wants to give it a lobe. It doesn't really have a proper lobe because that's not really part

of the scaffolding. Uh, the fleshy lobe is fleshy, yeah, right, and so and and he's got an idea about that too, because eventually he wants to insert a small microphone that connects to a wireless transmitter. And he says that in any WiFi spot in the world, he'd be able to have that ear become Internet enabled. So he says, if you're in San Francisco and I'm in London, you'll be able to listen in to what my ear is hearing

wherever you are and wherever I am. And again, here's this idea of it's not just this person doing this solo act, and he's really trying to connect with humanity in this other way. Yeah, so we can reach a point where you can go to a website and you can listen through Steve Lark's arm ear, and uh, that's that's pretty amazing. Um. He apparently gets kind of touchy about how it's described as was. There's a Wired magazine interview with him in two thousand twelve, and this is

how he describes the ear. He says, uh quote partially surgically constructed, partially cell grown, and this year it's been confirmed now we'll be doing the augmentation of the helical part of the ear to make it more prominent and will also grow a softier load of using my extracted adult stem cells. So um, it's uh yeah, it's it's it's pretty mind boggling. And that and this is not the end. This is not his final piece by any

stretch of the imagination. He has other plans for the future. So, and I know it sounds ridiculous, probably tell the listeners like, ah, this guy, you know, sculpting and ear so that it can then be why but you know, we talked about, you know, in a contact lenses of the gods. We talked about augmenting our own reality and teasing contact lenses that essentially hooked up to the Internet, UM that can project to certain images. So when you start to look at it in that way, it's not too far along.

Of course, not all of us are going to graft tissue onto ourselves and why are it um? But he is exploring this idea of different ways of communicating and perceiving the world. Yeah. And and once you get like if you it's performance artists to a certain extent, like a like all artists kind of like a door to a room. Uh. And if you if you just look

at the door, you don't walk through that door. If you just if you just judge it at the face dog and be like, oh, I'm crazy to do do you put an ear on his arm or somebody painted a bunch of colors on a canvas, You're not gonna get anywhere.

You're not gonna engage with the piece. But once you get past that that level, you know, that kind of shock level, you think about what you're perceiving and what this guy is doing and why he's doing it, Um, I mean that's where the performance are really forces you to think about the be at times part or or fascinating truth regarding human nature or technology in this case. Um.

He actually said, I really like this quote. He said, artists can be early award warning systems, generators of contestable futures, possibilities that can be examined, evaluated, perhaps appropriated, often discarded without That's a good way to look at it. Because we have all these technologies coming online, and we often talk about that, how does it How is that going to affect us fifty years out? So I want to set forth and here's this person who's extrapolated a lot

of these ideas onto his own being, William Gibson. In his forward to h the Steve like the monograph, he talked about meeting him for the first time, and this is this great little bit I wanted to read from that Gibson. Gibson, of course, is the author of Neuromancer and UH more recently books such as A Pattern Recognition, which you know, all of these books deal with technology and and how humans are changed, how we interfere involved

ourselves with technology. Gibson says, I imagine now that I was watching Steve Lark in performance with his robotic third arm, But what I recall experiencing was a vision of some absolute chimera at the heart of a labyrinth of breathtaking complexity. I sense that the important thing wasn't the entities stee Lark evoked, but the labyrinth that the creatures manifestation suggested, which I thought was a nice way of summing it up.

It's not so much look at this freak with a third arm, or look at this frequent an ear on his on his arm. Now this is like to think of the world that sort of flows out from this piece in the same way that um uh, you know a lot of the performance artists about forcing the viewer to think about themselves. He forces the viewer to think

about the world that we've created for ourselves. Yeah, and it appears that he doesn't have an opinion one way or the other in terms of this sort of technological augmenting of his body, and you know, making a statement about dystopian future versus utopian future, right, um and he doesn't think of himself in and and Gibson was rather dismissive of the He's like, I don't think he's talking

about the future at all. No, No, he says, and in fact, and he says on the point, Um, he says, I don't think that machines will take over at some imagine point in time a singularity. I think it will be much more complex. There will be multiple and alternate possibilities that will be constantly generated. It's another perspective on that. As for the future, Steel has a couple of products planned.

Just going to mention him quick here. Um. First, he wants to engineer a quote insect like microbot that will climb into his mouth unquote. Uh. And it's a in this level webcam and led light. It reminds one of the like The Mermaid, the endoscopic cameras that we've talked about in previous episodes. Well, he wants to he's taking the artistic approach with this technology, which is fascinating. And then he also wants to grow a microbial second skin.

And this would involve covering his body with a layer of agar, which is that that clear stuff you see in peachfea dishes. It's the medium that helps grow the culture. Yeah, we had some of this when we did the video series we did. Yeah, if I known, we should have ordered more of it, and I could have slathered myself with it and grown more skin. But now he would be growing a skin of microbes. And uh, then he has he has some fantastic ideas about what that would

mean and all. And so we'll just see how that Isn't he going to encase himself for like three days in it or something, and then he's going to discard it but allow it to continue to grow grow matter on it. Yes, microbial matter. Um, I want one of those, although I think that if I didn't, if I wore microbial second skin all the time, I wouldn't get the benefit, of course, of my own uh good microbes hanging out. Well,

it comes back to Marta. I feel like I have encountered individuals on the train who have grown a microbial second skin, but they were not performance artists. Alright, let's shift over. Now that we have this kind of foundation with a couple of artists who have I really think set the bar here in terms of dedication and big themes,

let's take off a couple of others. There's Guillamo Guillenomo Vargas, yes, Costa Rican and this guy is rather controversial and this is the guy was definitely thinking of when we were talking about the highs, but also poticially the loads of performance. Art Um tell us about his piece with the Dog. Okay, this was in Nicaragua and two thousand and seven at

a gall which neighbors UM and Uh. It was at a gallery there, and it featured UM a dog tied to a wall with a short length of rope and the words eros look Lise, you are what you read were written on the wall with dog food. Um. So okay, set dog that is not being fed and yet there's dog food around it. So it caused a ton of controversy um and especially when it was reported that the

dog actually died of starvation. Yeah. So let's like I said earlier, art as is this doorway into this room of truth and thought and in contemplation and confrontation at the door level to this piece. It's it's pretty horrendous, right, Like this dude brought in a dog, tied it up, intentionally, didn't feed it, and it died. But the audience is also part of this. Yeah, the audience is present the and did the audience feed the dog? No? According to

the gallery director, he said that during the exhibition. Uh, that he didn't have any visitor that tried to free the dog, feed it or call the police. Yeah. And and the other part of the statement here too is everyone gets super up in arms. Oh my god, a dog starved to death and this guy just let it happen. But as a dog, he got off the street where they are all these other dogs starving on a daily basis, where there humans starving. And uh, and that is not

the point of outrage. The outrage is that it took place there as performance art, right, right. But I mean you could take his stance and say that what what the art piece was really about was a diffusion of responsibility.

We've talked about this in the bystander effect before, and there have been a ton of studies carried out to say that when people get together and they see, you know, atrocities, or they see something that seems wrong headed, we don't always fly to the best natures of our beings, right, Um, that we sometimes shirk responsibility and social psychologist John Darley Ambibilitane concluded that the larger number of people who witness something that's seen an emergency or crime, for instance, the

lower probability than an individual will act. So we've seen this in a couple of different ways, or something called pluralistic ignorance. And this is a collective in action by a group because you kind of look to the other person for a queue and if the other person seems like, well, no, it's not that serious, then nobody else thinks it's that serious.

Comedian Louis c k has some great bits about this, uh in a stand up but also on the show Louis that involved like walking past people on the streets of New York who are in really bad shape and having to and then being there with somebody who's either an outsider uh that's visiting New York or somebody who's just in a maybe he has a different state of mind. This says, does he you know, let's help this guy? Does he need help? And Louis like, yeah, he needs

your help more than anything, but we just don't do that. Yeah. I think it was an example was like a I want to say, like a teenager or something. Yeah, it had never been to the city before and was trying to help a homeless person. He was like, oh, honey, we don't do that. Yeah, And to your point, like, yeah, that person does need all the help in the world, but we just don't do that. Um. And that's this

idea to the diffusion of responsibility. Somebody else is in charge or somebody else, um may be better a deal able to better deal with us than you are I. So that is why that peace is interesting. It's it's awful. Yeah, like we are not forgiving that. You know. It was hard for me to research it, to be quite honest, called exposition number one in case anybody wants to look into it further. But um, it's definitely a commentary on society. Yeah.

And uh, like when when I was in Coasta, Rica, I visited the art museum um there and there was there were I don't I do not remember there being a dog tied up, so but there was a lot of fine modern art there. So because it bit it by that time, yeah yeah, yeah, but let it let it be known that Coast Costa Ricue has a lot of very talented artists who don't have don't harm dogs.

And this was in Nicaragua anyway, so yeah, where it's also pointed out that there were no laws in Nicaragua against what he did, so he wasn't actually breaking the law, right, right, I'm not sure that something you could do in the United States, right, Yeah, definitely not all right. So Damien

Hurst is another person we'd like to talk about. A lot of people are familiar with him, um, particularly with some of the formalde hyde preserved carcasses or animals that he's actually done in the past, like the Big Shark, thee the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living, which is like this big formalde hyde tank sort of three divisions, what's not really three divisions, but it has like they're looking at it, it it looks like

there are three sections to it, and there's sins a giant shark in there, and like it was an actual shark that he commissioned somebody to catch. That was his his only um mandate on it was it needs to be big enough to eat somebody, because that's sort of the that's the idea of the shark is a manifestation of human mortality. Here is something in the food chain, something out there in the world, big enough to eat and perfectly capable of carrying it out. And here it

is a completely vulnerable rendered in front of you. Right, He's it's sort of obsessed with death. And uh and uh, I guess you know, putrification preservation. Um. What I've seen before is mother and child divided. I saw the Tate Gallery, and that is a calf and it's mother that are bisected, and so they're in four different formaldehyde cubes and you can walk through them and you can actually see the bisection inside of of their guts and so on. Yeah, and sort of that's kind of a play to mother

and calf divided. Of course, not everything he does involves dead animals. Um. There he has some wonderful sculpture. There's, in fact, one of my favorite sculpture pieces, which I've never actually seen in person, but I've seen pretty great photographs of it, his two thousand and five piece Virgin Mother. UM. If I can find I'll either include a link or embedded picture of this. Let me do the blog post

that goes with this episode, because it's just beautiful. It's painted bronze, and it's a it's uh, it's like it's there's kind of like a half half of it is like an anatomical dissection of of of a pregnant woman, and in the other half, um, it's fleshed and it's it's just just a beautiful piece of art. Yeah, I mean he's got his rendering is no doubt there. There's a lot to celebrate in terms of that sculpture. Yeah,

he's he has the skill. It's not like he's one of these guys that's just like here's a Dutch shark and his art look at it, you know, I mean, you know, there's a lot more going on here. But I do want to point out that he submitted plans for his ninety seven thousand foot When he calls art plant, okay, it's square foot, Okay, it's nine seven thousand square feet of plant. In rendering these animals, he actually has a formaldehyde studio built into this plant and like hooks where

all the carcasses hang. So, I mean he's still obviously interested in this um, but this is actually animal carcasses sixty seven foot sculptures. There's another one called the Angel of the West that he's trying to get done. Right now, Um, this is actually not what we're talking about. We want

to talk about this skull that is bedazzled beyond bedazzlement. Yeah, it's in diamonds, yes, and it's a plastum cast of a real human skull with real teeth encrusted with eight thousand, six hundred and one diamonds, and that totals something like at the time fourteen million pounds, right, And uh, it is rumored that he sold the piece to conglomerate Um and that it's I think he's still look for like fifty million pounds, but I mean it's we don't even

know if it will be exhibited again. This is such an incredible piece and and so very expensive. If you look at it, Uh you, I mean you will be dazzled by You can't not be dazzled by it. And Hurst himself that he was really surprised by how it came out because he really wanted to interrogate death and look at it um in a different light, and he said that he thinks that there's more of a positive spin to the school, that there's it's like the glory of death as opposed to like death as we always

think of as the grim reaper. Yeah, like a fabulous death. Yes, it is a fabulous It looks as though it's awesome when you look at that. Oh death, that's great. Get bedazzled. And he's certainly more of a multimedia artist like there's performance aspects to his work, but then against some of it is more traditional sculpture UM as well. Yeah, and there were people who said, like, you know, there's a comment on this too because of blood diamonds um in

the mining practices. Um. There's another aspect that you can take away from it. To me, I think, is this like the ultimate totem of denial of like our our own mortality that you dress up death. But in any case, you guys should definitely go and google it. It's worth a look. Yeah, and again I'll try and include an embedded image or at least a link to it. So, like a lot of the pieces we're discussing here, so you can be able to handle, uh seek them out

when you listen to this podcast. Okay, we have one more artists that we want to discuss here, and that is Michael Landy. Yes not Michael Landon performances were they were. I will never forget paw Um Alright, So in two thousand and one, this installation artists spent two weeks destroying

all of his worldly possessions. We're talking about seven thousand or more can with some thousand and change objects including like cooking utensils, but also original works by Damien Hurst, like things that beyond just nearly stuff, but like things that this is the only one that exists. Yeah, yeah, like oh that's twenty dollars, I'll burn it. Um and uh what else? Family photos, his sob, his car and this I think from what if I've read this right from an article was an idea he had after one

of his art installations in was thrown away. Do you know if us Oh this is the one yes, where the art installation itself resembled garbage. Yes, And I've not enough. Like I told you about when I went to London and I was on the ferry and we the ferry tour guide was this cottony gentleman. He was talking about

the Museum of Modern Art there in London. He was like pointed, it's like it's like, oh, you can go over there, but they it's just a bunch of roby shell went in there and I saw a piece and I was, I can throw a pizza cotton in the garbage. I'll just make some mot you know. And he's like

just really ragging on it. But that's exactly exactly exh was garbage as art, but then was interpreted by a janitor as garbage and thrown right, And so I think that this is what spurred him on to say, Huh, what if you know, I just lost this installation of garbage? What what if I turned this to my own life? What would happen to me? Um? If all my worldly possessions were just smashed to smithereens? It's like it reminds one of the sort of Vincent van Gogh having to

burn his paintings for warmth on the balcony. Um. I mean, there's just something I mean, and it also brings to mind I think like Tibetan monks creating these mendala's out of sand and then and then destroying them. There's there's something about I mean, it's creation and destruction that the

two primal forces in life, uh displayed there. I mean, there's that's the core of of art right there, right within every man sleeps the great destroyer, right and he he took that, I mean and literally destroyed everything, and not everybody could say they could do that, right Um. And then this idea of of personhood that we talked about, like your identity being bound up with things and the sort of liberation from that from stuff from stuff man. So all right, that's a that's a little uh poopoo

platter of artists in this field. Cool well, speaking of two quick notes, um, speaking of Tookick Ladder, I just want to mention real quick, if you downloaded an early version of our Fecal Fossil episode, there's a little bit where I was talking about owl pellets and uh, I got caught up in the moment and talked about them coming out of an owl's rear instead of an owl's face.

Pellets are, of course, vomit. We subsequently edited that part out because it's just like a quick um, you know, a couple of minutes deal where I started rambling about it unplanned and uh, obviously pellets come out of an house mouth is vomit. But I don't think you know very well since you have pets more and I did a blog post on so I don't know why I got a wires cross in my head or something on that one. But if you download the current version of it,

that air is absent um. And let's see if we have a quick listener mail call over the robot real quick, al right, our listener Murphy from Hawaii right soon, and says, hey, Robert and Julie, just listen to your podcast. I'm screaming. I recently graduated from high school, and um, I gotta love it being out. I mean, the last few years of my high school caused me to become very stressed, and I would occasionally have screaming fits. I would get all wound up over a day or so, start babbling,

and then it would finally scream. I belt out around four seven good screens, rest, and I would feel better afterwards. While screaming could be a good release every once in a while, I've learned to avoid such traumatic incidences by reacting to things that bothered me when they bothered me. This is becoming ramble asque. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye aloha Murphy of a way, so all right, yeah, well you know

that was we were hearing from the heart there on Murphy. Um. I found it interesting to use the goodbyes, but then the aloha, which means goodbye antelope, right, I know. And I was just trying to make a joke like about Mahi mahi in my head but didn't quite come together. Yeah. Well, there you got someone who's using really some scream therapy of their own to deal with their issues, well, especially in high school, right that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, who of us?

If you're not screaming in high schools, then you're probably a jerk. I don't know. I mean it's like if you're if you're not suffering, you're probably causing on the people to Suffer's kind of my take. Unless you go to a grade high school anyway, Uh, do you go to a great high school? Do you have thoughts on screaming? But more to the point, you have some thoughts on performance are if you've ever if you've seen some great

performance art out there in person? Um, if you're familiar a big fan of a performance artist that we didn't mention on the podcast, but you're thinking, you know, you'd really like to get their story out on the podcast. Let us know. Are you a performance artist that would be great as well. We'd love to hear from you.

If you can find us on Facebook where we are stuff to blow your Mind, and on Twitter you'll find us under the handle blow the Mind and you can also drop us a line at blow the Mind at Discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is It how stuff works dot com,