That was cool, I guess
I had very mixed feelings towards Zhang Huan and his reputation as an artist. Although I thought that the pieces he created (such as the giant buddha head made from ash and the pieces created out of old farm doors) were very remarkable and required great imagination, I wasn’t so sure about his performance pieces, which is ironic, because he is most notably a performance artist. In China, he strove to add a meter to a mountain and raise the water level in a giant fish pond. Huan’s objectives in those pieces seemed very innocent and serene, whereas his pieces in America seemed very aggressive and challenging, as if he was trying to provoke the American public into some sort of outrage. The general culture in the United States is a conservative one, and at this point in time, nudity seems sort of a cliche way to get reactions from the public. I didn’t really get any sort of message from his performance pieces in America, and I found it ironic that photographs of the performances (such as when Huan was covered in honey and flies, or the photographs of the people in the pond) were more poignant than actual footage of the acts themselves.
I don’t really like performance art. A lot of the time it seems really pointless, an attempt to be outrageous and to get attention. There doesn’t seem to be a ton of talent going on a lot of the time, just tenacity and an inordinate boldness. The performance artist who I decided to research was Nao Bustamante. She is someone who gained notoriety by doing such things in her performances such as tying a plastic bag tightly around her head and filling it with water, only then to tear it off with water bursting everywhere. The piece was called “Sans Gravity” and the purpose of the act was to create “an urgent situation to respond to” and to fill audience members with fear and anxiety over her well-being in the Houdini-esque act. Another far more ridiculous one was called “Indigurrito”, in which Bustamante stood on stage with a burrito strapped to her crotch. She then called down to all the white men in the audience to come up on stage to take a bite from the burrito to absolve themselves from “500 years of white men’s guilt.” According to her website, “there was no shortage of enobled participants, who knelt in front of the protuding offering, some taking delicate bites, others deep-throated chunks.”
This is the reason why I don’t really like performance art. They just seem like stupid stunts to shock people, like the annoying kids in class who call out inappropriate things in front of everybody so that they can get attention and have the teacher yell at them. It is obvious that the men are not absolving themselves from their so-called white guilt. It was just a dumb stunt that belongs on the Playboy channel.