The Wall of Vagina by Kembra Pfhaler & Bruce la Bruce

A Extremely Limited ( Edition of 8 ) Artist Book Documenting Kembra Pfhaler's Notorious Performance "The Vagina Wall" photographed by Bruce la bruce with critical text by Michael Vannoy Adams.

"I first saw the pancake stack up of girls in a cheezey magazine I bought at 7/11, while on tour across the U.S. with my band “The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black”. It was a picture that I always remembered. I duplicated it live at the Disinformation Conference in New York in 2002. Samoa filmed us that night with his new camera. He was excited about this new performance too. We were in our traditional band outfits... I gave Alice a turkey baster filled with plain yogurt that she ‘splooged’ onto me as I was on the top.

A couple of years later, at a show in Los Angeles that was organized by Ron Athey and Vaginal Creme Davis... I did the W.O.V. live again and we decided to do a photo shoot in the garden of the hotel we were staying at. The Highland Gardens. These are the photos by Bruce La Bruce, Legendary filmaker....

Bruce La Bruce’s direction was perfect. He made us feel beautiful and important. It was a little precarious because we just sort of free~balled the situation and pretended like everything was normal when we were shooting. He motivated us to focus on our intentions. Bruce is a very important ‘pre~code’ filmaker. Because of him... punk rock boys everywhere blossomed into glamourous porn stars and artists." - Kembra Pfhaler - NYC, 2009

"Kembra Pfahler (Born August 4, 1961) is an American performance artist, rock musician and actress. As a performance artist she has been recognized on every "Top 10 List" published during the past quarter century. Her graphic depictions of the horror, repetition, degradation, and sheer misery of the human condition have been recognized as insightfully accurate in art curricula globally. Her humanistically centered positions on Feminism and  Post Beat Ban The Bomb Politics has moved a generation." - Wikipedia

"LaBruce was born Bryan Bruce in Tiverton, Ontario, and wrote for Cineaction magazine, curated by Robin Wood, his teacher. He first gained public attention with the publication of the queer punk zine J.D.s, which he co-edited with G.B. Jones. He currently writes and photographs for a variety of publications including Vice, Nerve.com and BlackBook magazine, and has made a number of films which merged the artistic techniques of independent film with gay pornography."

Available through Anteism Book Shop

Roman Singer - Seeing in slow motion.

Signer’s works have acquired the label ‘time-sculpture’. They share traditional sculpture’s concern with the crafting of physical materials in three dimensions, but they extend that concern into what may or may not be characterised as the fourth dimension: the dimension of time. Time-sculpture investigates the transformation of materials through time, focusing the viewer’s attention on the experience of the event, the changes wrought, and the forces involved. Variously combining three-dimensional objects, live action, still photography and moving-image documentation, Signer’s time-sculptures frame episodes of the containment and release of energy − always with ingenuity, often with captivating, epigrammatic swiftness and irresistible humour. In Cap with Rocket (Mütze mit Rakete 1983), for example, a length of string connects a firework and a knitted hat that Signer has pulled over his head. The firework is ignited; it shoots into the air and whisks the hat away, revealing the artist’s face. In Stool − Kurhaus Weissbad (Hocker − Kurhaus Weissbad 1992) a small explosion triggers the catapulting of a four-legged stool out of a window; the stool sails through the air and crashes to earth. In Kamor (Kamor 1986) a gunpowder explosion at the summit of a small mountain in the Swiss canton of Appenzell produces a burst of flame and a plume of smoke and momentarily lends the summit the appearance of a live volcano. In Attaché Case (Aktenkoffer 1989/2001) a concrete-filled briefcase is taken on a short ride in a fast machine − a helicopter, to be precise. At a height of about a hundred metres it is dropped. Like a meteorite, it plummets into a grassy field and gouges a deep crater in the turf.

Simple! And in some ways, the step from sculpture to time-sculpture is indeed beautifully simple: elementary, to borrow a word the artist himself has often associated with his work. In the face of the striking immediacy and poetic plasticity of Signer’s pieces, critical commentaries can sometimes seem frankly redundant − like a dull-witted, pedantic glossing of a perfectly-timed, beautifully-judged joke. The critic is dogged by the suspicion that (to co-opt a phrase from Simon Critchley) a time-sculpture ‘explained’ might be a time-sculpture misunderstood. From a seemingly restricted palette of processes and materials, Signer generates a poetics whose tones range from the melancholy to the thrilling, from the charming to the violent, from the grave to the frankly, irresistibly silly, and many points north, south, east and west of these affective co-ordinates.

© Rachel Withers 2007, Excerpt from: Withers, Rachel, 'Collector’s Choice. Roman Signer (engl.). Volume 07', Cologne: Dumont Literatur und Kunst Verlag, 2007

Zhang Huan

Zhang Huan was born in Anyang, Henan, China. He began his work as part of a small artists’ collective known as the "Beijing East Village" located in a rural outpost of the city. The group of friends from art school pioneered this particular brand of performance in China and Zhang was often reprimanded by officials for the perceived inappropriateness of his actions. Zhang’s performances always involve his body in one way or another, usually naked, occasionally involving masochistic actions; he cites the body as a primary method of communication, describing it as the only means by which people experience the world and vice versa. By using quasi-religious ritual, he seeks to discover the point at which the spiritual can manifest via the corporeal. He uses simple repetitive gestures, usually regarded as meaningless work-for-work’s-sake chores. Buddhism, with its temple music, sculptures and philsophy are a prevalent theme in Zhang Huan’s work.

Three years in making, Donkey was completed in 2006 and was the very first mechanical installation Zhang Huan made after he transferred part of his artistic production from New York back to Shanghai. The artist was both overwhelmed and dismayed by the overbearing and standardized presence of high-rises in the city. He challenged the notion of development and questioned the homogeny of urban transformation by staging this absurd and provocative scene, in which a stuffed donkey is fucking a tilted Jin Mao tower, the foremost landmark in Shanghai and currently the tallest building in China. Known for its extra-sized sexual organ in Chinese culture, the donkey entered the toy-like Jin Mao with an enlarged and stretched steel phallus that moves in and out with a shrill jarring sound when the installation is switched on.