An installation and a site-specific performance
As a part of site-specific performative installation in collaboration with Sebastian Alvarez, Pedra Costa, Yingmei Duan, Alexander Felch, Andrés Knob, Roberta Lima, Evamaria Schaller, Anna Vasof
Production by Wiener Festwochen
Künstlerhaus, Vienna, Austria, May 14-22, 2016
Hours performed: 45
Images by: Ilya Pusenkoff, Renate Mihatsch, Raffaela Bielesch
Video by Ilya Pusenkoff
In 1968, a young Austrian artist, VALIE EXPORT, walked the streets of Vienna with a box strapped to her chest. She invited any passer-by to try her: the only condition was that they look into the artist’s eyes while touching her bare nipples inside the box. TAPP und TASTKINO became a true manifesto of feminist art and opened many doors for future generations.
I tend to explore the distance between the audience and the work of art — which, in the case of performance art, is often the artist’s own body. The complete elimination of this distance is, more often than not, the expected outcome.
There are five erect men standing behind a wall concealed by a dark blue velvet curtain embroidered with golden penises. Cheerful 1970s music plays as the curtain rises. One of the five men is me; the others are hired for the job. Each man’s scrotum, covered in blue jeans, is presented through an individual plywood window, fitted with a button at the bottom.
Visitors are invited to play a game. They have five attempts. They are asked to give whatever is hidden behind the jeans zipper, a strong massage and decide: which one belongs to the artist?
If they fail to guess, all five windows shut automatically and the curtain falls. If they win, another cheerful music plays and they are issued a certificate stating: You have grabbed the artist’s dick — accompanied by a schematic drawing and all the necessary measurements.
What does anonymity bring to the game?
How many people would actually dare to touch if they could see the face of the living person they are meant to be touching?
Why does the absence of personality unlock frivolity and render the spectator’s limits nonexistent?
It is a common misconception that the glory hole phenomenon belongs exclusively to sexual vocabulary. In fact, it also has at least a religious dimension (a Catholic confession conducted through a grilled window), a financial one (the clattering metal drawer that a banking priestess slides across the bulletproof glass, inviting you to deposit your grubby roubles and receive, in return, slightly cleaner dollars in 1990s perestroika Moscow), and even a penitentiary version (a Brazilian prisoner during a family visit, speaking through a small pane in a glass partition).
Framed in a broad musical, emotional and poetic register, the experience becomes different for every visitor. Some may recall long-forgotten sexual memories. Others may think of childhood and the discovery of the body. And there will always be those who reconnect it to theme parks, lotteries, and cunning machines shamelessly extracting money from naïve players.
This game leaves no winners or losers. Art is the sole inevitable victor - though this may only become clear a few decades later.
