Francis Alys: Bringing Cultures Together

Francis Alys is a Belgian artist who is currently living in Mexico City. He was formally trained in architecture, but has a passion for using performance art as a means bringing people together either for a project or while viewing his work. He travels internationally to film his work, most of it holding similar themes of politics, culture, and location as things that are in the way of community. One of his most famous works is a performance piece called 'When Faith Moves Mountains,' that took place in Lima, Peru in 2002. Alys recruited around 500 volunteers to help with the project, with their end goal to move a sand dune a couple of inches. Though this project seems not only impossible but also a bit of a waste of time, the participants were excited to be a part of it, and once it was over, they were excited to share the story. Another piece he did is called 'The Green Line,' in which he performed a walk through the streets of Jerusalem with a leaking can of green paint beside him, leaving his trail. Spectators thought the performance as a poetic expression. Alys's other works consist of him traveling to different third world countries and filming children playing games together, some of which are the same game in different countries.
Alys also did a performance called Painting/Retoque in Panama in which he repaints a single median strip on a road where the US base used to be.

When Faith Moves Mountains
Lima, Peru
2002

The Green Line
Jerusalem, Israel
2004

Here is the video of Painting/Retoque, Paraiso, Panama, 2008

damali ayo - rent a negro

quoted from the artist's website on the art work:

 

Dear Friends,

Thank you for seeking out rent-a-negro.com. You may be disappointed to find it missing, but I am still happy you came looking. I am its creator and this letter is to tell you why I have chosen to take it down.

rent-a-negro.com was a web-art-performance that culled my experiences as a person of color in a culture that still does not know how to relate to difference. I found myself feeling like “professional black person” and so in 2003 I created a site based on this. I took all the things that white people had asked me over the years: to touch my hair, teach them how to dance, talk to their racist grandmother, vouch for the fact that they were not racist, compare my brown skin to their vacation tans, etc. and put a price on each item. I created a rental form where people could request these services from me on an al-la-carte basis or put me on a year-long retainer. Yep, it was funny and painful all at the same time, as good satire should be.

Rental requests and emails began to pour in from all around the world. I received a lot of responses from people who were thankful that rent-a-negro.com portrayed their experiences of being objectified as a person of color in our culture. I was truly touched when I heard from deaf people, people in wheelchairs, and people of other races that the site mirrored their own experiences and that I had given voice to something they had found hard to express.

But in addition to this positive response, I received a steady onslaught of hateful and threatening rental requests and emails. Letter after letter said I should be gang raped, lynched, beaten, and defiled in unspeakable ways. I was called n**ger, a traitor, a sell-out, and a slave. Some of these came in the form of rental requests from the city where I was living. These came every day for a while, but in time, the flow of hate slowed to a trickle, which although I found discomforting, was bearable. I know this comes with the territory.

However, as the 2012 election approached, these types of emails began to come to my inbox once again. I decided that I did not have the strength or desire to face that kind of attack all over again. I decided to take the site down.

Besides that, in many ways, creating satire about race relations is only one minor aspect of what I have to offer the world.

Vanessa Beecroft - When Art is Disturbing

Beecroft most often uses female models -- thin, tall women usually dressed alike or with similar hair color -- then posed in the art gallery with just red stockings or with black tee shirts but no skirt or pants.  The viewer is surprised...becomes a voyeur -- and the artist questions the interpretations we place on the female body and the very notion of looking.

The Darfur piece exposes similar discomfort with looking. Black women's bodies lie face down in pools of blood, a reference to the mass killings at Darfur in the Sudan. Perhaps we as modern voyeurs become too accustomed to seeing atrocities in the media -- we make only superficial

 

connections to the shocking events of our world; there is something about confronting live nude bodes in an art gallery setting that truly jars us provoking a more profound sense of the horrors on war.

Wafaa Bilal - Clean and Messy Killing

 "Domestic Tension," an unsettling interactive performance piece: for one month, Bilal lived alone in a prison cell-sized room in the line of fire of a remote-controlled paintball gun and a camera that connected him to internet viewers around the world. Visitors to the gallery and a virtual audience that grew by the thousands could shoot at him 24 hours a day. The project received overwhelming worldwide attention, garnering the praise of the Chicago Tribune, which called it "one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time," and Newsweek's assessment "breathtaking." It spawned provocative online debates and ultimately, Bilal was awarded the Chicago Tribune's Artist of the Year Award. quoted from: http://wafaabilal.com/html/shootAnIraqi.html 

Industry of the Ordinary - Performing Conceptual art

(IOTO) is a two-person conceptual art collaborative, the brain trust of Chicago-based artists and educators Adam Brooks and Mathew Wilson. They create all kinds of works

-- sometimes performance based...usually involving audience participation. Guns and Butter is a recent performance.  A  gun is set on a table and covered in 100 lbs of butter. Two heaters beneath the table slowly melt the butter, revealing the gun.

 

Natasha Tsakos - Performance Art meets New Technologies

 

 

Natasha Tsakos is originally from Switzerland, but now hails from Florida.  Performance art in the 21st century takes on many different forms.  Tsakos' creates "technoformances," where she might  combines virtual technology, electronic music, and movement studies with a actor on stage. The works are quick passed, quirky fun, yet thought provoking. Quarry is represented with  a still image above. Below are excerpts form is titled OMEN and as stated in the The Miami Herald, it is a "3D mapping technology in which projected animation transforms flat surfaces into fantastical yet realistic looking images". She calls her works "data-tainment." 

Performance Sara A. Trembaly 7 juillet 2012 - An Artist's Process

 

Rich velvety charcoal zig-zag markings on a large white paper that stretches across the floor and onto the wall -- the female artist dressed in a short sleeveless black dress crouches to make her marks then scoots up the drawings until her knees, arms and hands are as fully covered in charcoal as the paper.  The artist denies all the pristine traditions of charcoal drawing -- keep it neat and clean, no fingermarks -- and fully engages with her work of art.