rePerformance: "VELVET WATER" - Don Simmons

- Contemporary art performance
- Performance on Dec 4, 2001, in the Boardroom at NSCAD, Halifax.
- Modeled after Chris Burden's Velvet Water, my performance is an experiment in understanding the experience of extreme body performances that were more frequent in the 70's. The audience reactions were much more extreme than I foresaw. Some upset individuals were mad at me, while some were mad at themselves and others cried.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• contemporary
• art
• Don
• Simmons
• performance
• chris
• burden
• reperformance
• history
• television
• jack-ass
• drowning
• suffocate
• air

[popejoanrose]

Don- You need to read "Contract With the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970's" by Kathy O'Dell if you have not already!!

[methaddict99]

i don't get it! lol!

[FraterO]

That was just a really silly thing to do ;)

[pishdad]

The problem with this work is that you never breathed the water eventhough you believed it to be a thicker, richer carrier of oxygen. Fact is that you cannot breathe water and that is the achilles heal in this work. All the water was spit out each time the performer took his head out and spat out the water. QED. Works of art must be, forgive the pun, more water-tight! Ha, ha, ha!

[userjoshc]

i saw thes recreater breathing a bunch of air in between water breathes

[romney27]

near death

[romney27]

surrealism

[lbdsm7]

You might as well get a paint-by-numbers Monet kit.

[ttttkr]

Chris Burden did it better.

Regurgitated masochism is a waste of your time and health. You might just as well cultivate his mustache.

[clckwrkpnk]

How did that go? Where did the audience member place the pins?