It's dirty work, but somebody's got to do it.

Performance Art Watchdog is back on the case. From the Ohio University Post::

Two girls washing each other's hair, and a man dressed in a skirt with his face painted white are not the types of things most people would imagine in an art exhibit. However, these are just some...elements in the genre of performance art.

Photographer and performance artist Jeffery Byrd said he defines performance art as "symbolic actions."...Byrd, a professor of photography at the University of Northern Iowa, visited Ohio University for the opening of the exhibit "Smoke and Mirrors: Photography and Performance" at Seigfred Hall Tuesday.

Byrd gave a lecture about the transformation in his work from photography to performance art. Growing up in blue-collar Alabama, he said he never saw a true painting until college at the University of Florida....He said he believes the body is a big mechanism, which is present in both his photography and performance art. It is all about the body and its specifics, and everyone can relate to it because everyone has a body, he said.

....During a live performance at the "Smoke and Mirrors: Photography and Performance" exhibit, Anni Holm and Nyok Mei Wong, performance artists from Chicago, washed each other's hair. Polaroid pictures were taken of the performance and hung on a wall with the watering cans and ponchos used in the piece as the exhibit. Holm and Wong, originally from Denmark and Malaysia, respectively, collaborate on many performance art pieces. The two were chosen for Byrd's piece after submitting samples of their work, including a piece about washing someone else's hair, Wong said.

Wong, a "devoted" performance artist, said performance art can't really be described because it has to be put into art history context and be recognized as something that won't last forever. "It is like executing a task," she said. However, Wong and Holm both value the audience interaction of performance art as a sort of "thrill," Wong said.

I must say that I too would be thrilled if a bunch of people would interact with me as I washed someone else's hair in an art gallery.

Imagine the level to which such interactions might rise were I doing something truly salient.

Like ol' Jeff Byrd here.

Twirling around under dim lights like a miked ballerina to demonstrate "the metaphorical potential of the human body."

This is from another performance art piece (not part of the current OU show).

It's called "Melanoma Aria." And damn straight: that performance is metaphorical, Jeff.

Gotta be hard to be a performance artist from the University of Northern Iowa, if you ask me. How to establish a reputation? Guess you just gotta try ever so much harder.

Maybe do a video sculpture for the good people of Buffalo, about nipple-hair plucking, or something.

TECHNORATI TAGS: PERFORMANCE ART, HAIR WASHING, OHIO UNIVERSITY, JEFFERY BYRD, UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN IOWA

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at January 12, 2006 10:41 PM