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Performance Series Art Miami 2007 January 4 - 8 Tursday Jan 4th:
Thursday Jan 4th: click here to read .doc file about this performance Our performance piece (by Performance Engine, homo sapiens-the new name of our performance entity) will include Adora and Teddy Behr as two TV Evangelistsd proslytising the word of God according to the scriptures and handing out pamphlets on redemption and giving yourself to Jesus. They will also be accepting contributions to the their missions in LAtin America, Africa and Asia, and their Miami based Church of Eternal Damnation and Despair. If the response permits it and the Lord Jesus Christ is present it is very likely that a healing or two will take place right there, on the convention floor amidst all the highly spiritual art. Friday Jan 5th: Crane/Crane is a multimedia installation by Michael Sheriff; a New York based performance artist who was raised on Miami Beach. The overwhelming number of cranes, that are highly visible along the Miami skyline, inspired this performance project. Through the use of split screen video, this installation juxtaposes cranes (as in birds) and the cranes that are building the buildings in downtown Miami. It also focuses on the traffic in Miami, a by-product of construction, through a personal video account of a man on his way home from work. This man, played by Michael Sheriff, is a corporate employee who hates his job. In the video the audience sees a man who behaves candidly in reaction to the stress of his job and the traffic, in an effort to make himself feel better. Yet, ultimately, the construction alienates him from the natural world, which is represented by the (bird) crane. The video component of this project is re-shot for every performance in order to capture the state of the construction in Miami at that specific time. Michael rides around the city in his car taking hours of footage as “The Man Who Hates His Job”, and then edits the piece together into a ten-minute film. The structure of the film always remains the same, it employs a split screen to draw out parallels between The Man and The Birds as creatures from the natural world, and parallels between The Traffic and The Construction Cranes as by-products of the modern world, then these two worlds are juxtaposed. In the first performance of Crane/Crane Michael created a car type structure that he was inside of to highlight the caged feeling of “The Man”. In the second incarnation of Crane/Crane Michael will be in a cage in front of the screen using an erector set to build a city, this performance installation will do more to highlight the caged feeling of “The Man” as well as imply that he plays a role in the construction and traffic by working a corporate job that only produces what he hates. Meaning, that he is stuck in a position where he is alienating himself by doing what he does. Michael Sheriff has an obsession with men who work jobs that they hate. He has produced a public performance piece in NYC based on the character “The Man Who Hates His Job” it is called American Bob. Get inside American Bob’s head by going to http://americanbob.blogspot.com
Saturday Jan 6th: Already presented by Benjamin Sabatier in the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, March 2002, entitled 35 hours of labour. For this occasion, it consisted in sharpening pencils 7 hours a day, 5 days along. For Art Miami 2007 the performer will be Xavier Brossard and will last only one day, Saturday January 6th 2007. A chair is placed in a pre-determined area so that the spectators are able to walk around, as in a sculpture. The performer is sitting in this chair and sharpens pencils repeatedly and completely one after another. The performer wears a T shirt on which is printed: "Business Day and the date of the performance on back." At the end of the performance, he leaves the T shirt on the chair and puts the pencil sharpener next to the pencil shavings pile and leaves. This performance takes the general essence of the main pupose of it exhibitor... business of an Art Fair. By its title, content and its action it talks about the merchant exchange and condition of the artist (through repetitive work, production of a plastic form, loss creation recovered by the market, object destruction consumer and consumption in direct relation to the merchandise). The relation and core of this performance is universal and leads into a direct open discussion...
Sunday Jan 7th: The Human Pixel Project is an art project, open to anyone, made up of thousands of 2x2 inch works in all media donated by artists from around the world. Over 1500 artists and over 15000 pixels so far. These thousands of pixels will be continuously used and re-used as elements in larger, aggregate works. The work of thousands of individuals become the underlying palette and media for future work, each pixel engaged in a continual process of formation and reformation as a component of a larger whole, existing as both an expression of an individual vision and as an element in larger, themselves temporary and contingent, works of art. This process of assembling new works from the pixels is a fundamental element of the project and extends its core idea, namely that of a democracy of artistic creation defined by a broadly shared willingness to participate in an effort that transcends the individual and to discover through that process new modes of expression and new understandings about what it means to be a creator, viewer, and 'consumer' of art. |