Performance artist Stelarc profiled in the NYT

The New York Times has published an article about one of my favorite people on the planet, the Australian performance artist Stelarc. His art focuses heavily on futurism and extending the capabilities of the human body, and as such, most of his pieces are centered around his concept that the human body is obsolete. From the article:

The body, however, has its ways of fighting back against the 5-year, or 500-year plans of its owners. Geneticists report that our own genes are still evolving, to what end, no one can guess. No supercomputer can yet predict from simply reading a sequence of A’s, C’s, T’s and G’s that make up a genetic code what creature will emerge.

The progression to postnatural history may be a painful birth if the experience of Stelarc, 62, who splits his time between Brunel University in West London and the University of Western Sydney in Australia, is any example. The body, he says, is obsolete and needs to map its “post-evolutionary strategies.”

To that end, Stelarc has outfitted himself at times with an extra hand (nonsurgically), swallowed a camera that would explore the sculpture of his stomach and hung himself in the air on hooks. For a show called “Fractal Flesh,” he wired half his body, in Luxembourg, up to muscle stimulation equipment that could be controlled by computers in Paris, Helsinki and Amsterdam. The result, he told an interviewer later, “was a split body experience.”

The ear on his arm, he said, is a work in progress that has required a couple of surgeries so far. It took him 12 years to find the doctors and the financing, which was provided by the Discovery Channel as part of a series in experimental surgery, to do the work.

Read the entire NYT article.

As an aside, I had the great pleasure of meeting Stelarc when he keynoted at TransVision 2004. Unlike the anti-social Steve Mann (who also gave a keynote presentation), he stayed and mingled with the conference attendees for the entire weekend -- he's a very warm and approachable guy. He was even in attendance for my talk on working the conscious canvas, which was a great honour (yes, I'm a fanboy).

Stelarc's third ear

Stelarc has been talking about this for years, and now I see that he's actually done it:




Marcelo (aka k0re) writes: "Stelarc [is] going to implant a mic that will connect to a bluetooth transmitter to connect the ear to the internet! and another surgery to give the ear more definition."

Chris Burden's extreme performance art

Chris Burden took performance art to unprecedented extremes during the 1970s. During his performances he would often put himself directly in harm's way; the point of his art, in addition to making political and social statements, was to illicit discomfort in the audience/observers.

His first performance was Five Day Locker Piece (1971). He spent 5 days locked in a two-foot by two-foot locker. Immeidately above Burden was a 5-gallon supply of water, while the locker below him contained an empty 5-gallon jug. He remained crammed in this space for the entire 5 days without food.

His best-known performance, called Shoot, came a year later when he had a friend shoot him with a .22 rifle from a distance of 5 meters. Burden wanted the bullet to graze his bicep, but he flinched when the rifle went off and the bullet went right into his arm. Interpretations of Shoot often relate the piece to the Vietnam war, the political assassinations of the 1960s, and the frightening realization that anyone could be shot at any time -- and most likely by a familiar person.

In 1974 Burden performed Transfixed in which his body was stretched along the roof of a Volkswagen Bug while a friend drove spikes through his hands nailing him to the car. The vehicle was then driven out into the street where it obstructed traffic. Aside from the strange religious connotations of this piece, the point of Transfixed might have been merely to shock and disturb.

But is it art?

In a word, yes. The fact that the artist makes the claim that it is art and that there are observers who experience the performance are criteria enough -- never mind the fact that these pieces evoke extreme reactions in the audience.

Stelarc's talk at Transmediale

Stelarc's recent talk at Transmediale has been covered at We Make Money Not Art.

Stelarc is an Australian performance artist who uses medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, virtual reality systems and the Internet to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body.

As an aside, I had the great pleasure of meeting Stelarc when he keynoted at TransVision 2004. Unlike the anti-social Steve Mann (who also gave a keynote presentation), he stayed and mingled with the conference attendees for the entire weekend -- he's a very warm and approachable guy. He was even in attendance for my talk on working the conscious canvas, which was a great honour.

I suspect that Stelarc go down as one of the greatest visionary artists of our time.