Two Crucifixions


First I went to Skin Fruit at the New Museum, where I saw Pawel Althamer’s ‘Schedule of the Crucifix‘ of 2005 enacted, not by the man above but by another artist who ascended his position a little later than his 3 pm schedule and seemed intent on hanging from the leather straps for a good while. In addition to the leather straps, he sits on a bicycle seat–making the position demanding but not insupportable.

Then I went to see The Artist is Present at MoMA, where I saw a re-enactment of Marina Abramovic’s Luminosity of 1997 where a naked women appears high on a wall, sitting on a bicycle seat with her heels resting on metal supports. Her arms spread wide away from her, whether holding onto the metal straps or high above her head. She maintains this position in a brightly lit square of light. While not distinctly a crucifixion, the position is similar and is places the performer on a wall as does Schedule of the Crucifixion.

Is there a connection between the two visually similar and striking pieces of performance art? The former seemed theatrical in comparison to the starkness of the latter performance. I felt like I was watching a living statue or a painting come to life. I couldn’t watch either for a long time and thankfully was distracted from the performance by a train of thought about bicycle seats. Second train of thought: performance artists are made of different stuff than I. Very, very different stuff.

Naked And Nude


Artists, listen up. Don’t change your art–just show a little skin. The nude has a long history in art as being provocative, symbolic, realistic, and many other things. Go one better, and use naked people not as some prettified, distant nude in a painting, but as naked people. Articles are still pouring out about Abromovic and MoMA, but now they are mostly about the use of two naked models in a doorway- a genre begun by Jerry Saltz, picked up by the NY Times, and now hawked by any widely-read publication for a general audience.

Abramovic herself is all but forgotten sitting there in her chair below. Don’t worry though, this could work if you aren’t (yet) an internationally known artist with a decades long career. Case in point: work by Brian Reed at Chair and the Maiden Gallery in February. The show got plenty of street attention, and even made the NY Times when a model in the window, wearing only something between a mobile and a spiderweb on her head, was asked by police to step down.

In terms of attention-getting, naked is the way to go. It is an amazingly effective and simple technique to get more people, some who don’t even like art, to look at your work. Or is it nude? Whatever it is, it can still raise people’s, ahem, hackles.