Performance Arts: Zhang Huan vs Blue Man Group
Zhang Huan’s exhibit came as something of a shock to me. I was not sure what to expect as Asian-American art, but I had not even begun to imagine Zhang Huan’s exhibit. I’m still not sure whether or not I enjoyed it, or whether or not I really consider it art. There are some pieces of work that I liked more than others. I think that my favorite may be the series of pictures in which he has people write on his face and head in kanji and Chinese characters. The final picture seems very deep, where he has so much written on him that he “fades into blackness.” I also found it wonderful how in his woodcarving piece, he used old doors rather than just plain panes of wood. He has a theme of reusing old, useless objects to create new and meaningful ones, much like the idea of reincarnation/rebirth. Another example would be the pieces that he built out of ash, such as the huge Buddha head and the Chinese and American flags. Not only did he use just ash, but he used materials that had meaning in them, such as photographs and other small objects.
The performance artist that I chose to research was the group now named Blue Man Group. Never before have I seen Blue Man Group on Broadway, but I have heard a lot about it. Many responses on this blog speak about how performance art is often not that great of an art, and that it is often more bizarre than it is creative, but Blue Man Group is an example of how it can be both entertaining and an art. In bald caps and covered in blue grease paint, these “blue men” always appear in a group of three, and according to Wikipedia, “this is because not only are Blue Men viewed as outsiders to the rest of the world, but three is the smallest group possible where one member could be viewed as an outsider by the other two. Many of the Blue Man skits involve one of the three Blue Men performing in a manner inconsistent with the other two.” I find Blue Man Group to be a very intriguing type of performance art, in that it is a comedy, and does seem to find necessity to take the shock value to extremes to entertain their audience. An example of their type of work can be seen here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8453442377878175440
What’s interesting is that Zhang Huan’s performance pieces seem to do more to shock than to have meaning. Is this what the role of an artist is today? Is their main goal to shock and create interest above all else? I did not particularly enjoy any of his performance pieces, but I could respect them, as a few of them do seem to have a deeper meaning. As was said, he has a theme of “testing himself” in his performance pieces. However, I feel as if in many of his performance pieces, he uses nudity to shock his audience, rather than to portray a theme or send a message. His piece entitled “My America” was not much more than a bunch of naked Caucasians running around with him in the midst of them. What’s interesting about this, however, is that they focused more on the imperfections of the average American’s body, rather than the model bodies that we are used to seeing in the media.
Overall, the appeal of performance art depends on the artist, and the artist’s ideas. Some do no more than portray bodily functions on stage, while others, like Blue Man Group, entertain while getting points across. In my opinion, Zhang Huan’s performance art was somewhere in the middle. I enjoyed his other arts more than his performance arts, even though he is known most as a performance artist. What I’ve learned from this experience is that paint and canvas is not necessary to create art: sometimes, all one needs is their own body.