Performance art gets extreme.
Anything can happen at a performance-art festival like Experimental Action. For instance, you might stumble upon someone allowing slowly thawing frozen breast milk to gently rain down on her as an artistic exploration of how being unable to provide enough food for your young child makes you feel.
That’s Sarah Sudhoff who has done that, one of the many artists who will be part of the three-day convergence of performers.
This time around, her work will be less … liquid. Instead, she’ll be drawing upon her work on human sexuality with the Kinsey Institute, aided by researcher Nicole Prause. Tentatively titled “Wired 2.0,” Sudhoff will be hooked up to a variety of scientific instruments, including a galvanic skin response sensor, a thermographic camera and a vaginal photo plet hysmogram.
These devices will display Sudhoff’s sexual response to what the audience in front of her does in real time. Though not allowed to touch her, they will be encouraged to read poetry, display pornography, make out with their partners and more. Sudhoff is famous for tackling taboo subjects — just like her hero Marina Abramovic — and hopes that Experimental Action will be a venue allowing her to artistically and scientifically explore the boundaries of sex.
“I am putting myself out there, making myself vulnerable to strangers and see what turns me on, and how we can together create something we can use for research,” says Sudhoff.
Yes, he ate his eyebrows
Another dynamic artist who will be on hand is Miao Jiaxin. He has garnered quite a reputation from taking performance art to strange places. He’s perhaps most famous for a piece he staged in New York where he turned a studio apartment into a jail cell. Participants paid $1 per night and had to stay within the barred space at night with no entertainment or even sleep allowed. He also once ate a sandwich containing his own eyebrows.
In many ways, Jiaxin is exactly what the popular image of a performance artist is.
“I can’t exactly describe my work or visualizing the work might mislead,” says Jiaxin. “I started as a photographer and visual artist but later tend to be more conceptual in making art. …
“My performance works always try to escape narratives or any autobiographical description, but are still largely inspired by life experiences… The experiences mainly come from the anxiety of living in the urban environment, dealing with modern life style and participating in everyday identity politics.”
Growing the Houston scene
For all that the festival sounds like a wild time, it also seeks to elevate performance art beyond the conception of it as shock and awe. One of the women who helped found the event in 2016, out of the ashes of Lone Star Explosion, is Evan McCarley. This will be her first time as a performer at the event, but she is also directing and curating Merge, a subgroup of Experimental Action that is specifically designed to encourage local and regional performance artists into a more intersectional scene.
A group of them will all be performing in one space, allowing a shifting audience to gain them a platform.
“I feel when people hear about performance art they think foreign or alienated or just naked people, but so much of what is happening in Houston is so smart, and I want to foster that in our community. I want to normalize performance art to the level of sculpture or painting.
I think that’s incredibly relevant in an era where people are using TikTok,” says McCarley, referring to the mobile app for short videos.
Those views are shared by visiting artist Marcella Torres, who will be presenting her piece “Angelic Mode.” She is set to explore the psychological changes people go through in times of war, using poverty and friction between socio-economic groups in the United States as her theme. Her performance will involve a series of martial-arts monologues accompanied by sound loops controlled by pedals and specialty punching bags that have been augmented into musical instruments. It’s an inventive idea that approaches performance art from a more subtle, deeper place.
“I’m all for the shocking if it’s within reason,” says Torres. “I have a lot of rules about, say, nudity or bloodletting. If they aren’t used well, then it’s shocking with no content. I believe the person has to be a skilled storyteller and use their body as a technical tool. I love the shocking things when they’re impactful and the person has thought about, but I also like the nuanced pieces that make every hair on my body raise up.”