La Liaison Érotique: Performance Artists

September 14, 2009

Performance Artist Zang Huan at the Opera

Zhang Huan is one of those individuals I find completely moving and inspiring even apart from his work; drawing inspiration from his day to day endeavors, seeing the Earth through the eyes of not only an Artist, but also as an Activist.

Though he first made a name as a performance artist from inside a bathroom in Shanghai's Art district, (By coating his naked body in honey for swarms of flies to feast upon him), it is in Tar magazine that I finally happened upon his work. In conversation with Chuck Close, he spoke of his recent works; building paintings with ash from temples in Shanghai:

"We don't say that we 'bought' or 'collected' the ashes, because this is not a commodity or something that you can actually buy or collect. This is something that you have to pray for. We pray for ash, and the ash itself embodies all the dreams and wishes of all the people when they are offering their spirits." (Huan in Tar Magazine, Issue Two, Spring 2009, USA)

This meticulous man has now moved to the Theatre Royale de La Monnaie, in Brussels, Belgium. It is here where Zhang Huan will make his directoral and scenographic debut with Semele, a Baroque Opera adapted from Ovid's Metamorphosis, under the stage direction of Huan's contemporaty genuis; A first ever in Opera History.

As La Monnaie's "Artist of the Season 2009-10," Zhang Huan is assuredly one of the worlds most pre-eminent artists, and I only wish I could be in attendance for this definite transcendental masterpiece.

Ash Head Series 2007 Ash, Steel, Wood

       100 Sages in a Bamboo Forest   2008
   Live Monkeys, Bamboo, Structure of Ming Dynasty House, Steel Tube and Wire

Hero No.1 2009, Cowskin, Steel, Wood and Polystyrene Foam

Pilgrimage--Wind and Water in New York 1998, Performance, P.S.1, USA
"The year he arrived in New York, Zhang performed the remarkable feat of lying on a block of ice for almost 10 minutes in P.S.1, New York. "

Genesis P-Orridge Cut Up

     P-Orridge (right) and his late wife Jaquline Breyer, 2007 Photo: Laurie Leber

On display at Invisible Exports in the L.E.S this month is "30 Years of Being Cut Up;" Over 80 pieces of mixed medium work from controversial & avant-garde anti-hero, Genesis P-Orridge. (Pronounced pee-orridge)
In addition to this recollective collection spanning three decades of collage work, photomontage, and Expanded Polaroids, P-Orridge has fashioned himself into becoming his late wife Jaquline Breyer through a long term transformation entitled "Pandrogeny," emploring Lady Jaye's strategy of "cutting-up" to use "plastic surgery, hormone therapy, cross-dressing and altered behavior, into a single, 'pandrogynous' character, 'BREYER P- ORRIDGE;'" a focus on the fiction of self.

“We fell in love the minute we saw each other, and as we became more and more obsessively in love, we had that whole feeling of ‘I wish I could eat you up. I wish I could just take you, and I become you and you become me,’ ” he says of Lady Jaye.

Frustrated by the limitations of language in expressing true love, both received matching sets of breast implants, continuing on with over $200,000 worth of facial reconstruction and hormone therapy from 2003 - 2007. For them, 'Pandrogeny' meant absolute resemblance and complete immersion of identity, mirroring each other in every aspect, from mannerism to hairstyle to everyday dress.  "The work was an exercise in elective, creative identity, and a test of how fully two people could integrate their own lives, bodies, and consciousness; a symbolic gesture towards evolution and true union."

Tragically in 2007, Breyer died of stomach cancer, and the project of a lifetime had become an impossible completion. In the words of friend, Katy Paycheck "To me, preformance art is the same as a painting. There's no difference at all. So you're in the middle of a painting that you'll never finish...and it's just this twilight for the rest of your life."
It is undeniable that Lady Jaye and P-Orridge finally found a form of devotion to express their unique 'Language of Love," which in the end could be the most important accomplishment of all.