Film UbuWeb

Skip Arnold (b. 1975) Punch (1992) Skip Arnold's performances belong to that tradition of extreme body-based work that includes Chris Burden, and the late Bob Flanagan. Challenging the voyeuristic relationship between art object and viewer, Arnold uses his own body to create startling performance situations that often demand complicity from the audience in the artist's discomfort and risk. "What is common to all my work, Arnold states, is 'Skip' - Skip is the art work; the act of doing, my actions, my choices." Among Arnold's many performance and film works, actions have included navigating the Bermuda Triangle in an experimental boat (he lived to tell the tale); installing himself beneath a plate glass sheet at the entrance to the Basel art Fair (so that visitors had to literally walk over him to enter the building); laying embalmed in bandages in the center of a public square in Slovakia, and taking eight hour showers daily as part of the Gramercy International Art Fair.