Skip will be orchestrating/performing the tradition that is most commonly the throwing of rice as the newly married couple leave the ceremony to get in their vehicle.
Untitled ("Punch") : 1984, 15sec color sound. Made to be aired as a commercial advertisement on TV.
Progress as of July, 2011 (combined with Olivia's studio visit, since they live together):
Bec, Ruben, Tif and I had the pleasure of visiting Skip Arnold and Olivia Prime (a married couple as it so happens) in their studio recently to check in on the progress of their pieces. Skip will make a work based on the tradition of throwing rice as the couple leave the ceremony. Olivia will be making the program. We're not going to spoil any surprises here, but we will confess our excitement for the ideas they've been brewing. I will however tell you that Skip had originally proposed a very romantic, somewhat uncharacteristic piece wherein the bride and groom leaving the ceremony would break through a thin sheet of water barracading the exit. Their exit would be filmed and the slow motion moment of breakage would be the piece. I loved it...fairly shivered with delight, but after talking it through with Bec and Ruben after he'd proposed an alternate idea, we decided to go with the latter, since it is more Skip-like, and I want the works to reflect their makers. Olivia will be making an interactive program - one in which each program will be like a single cell in a beehive, and as guests arrive and take their own proam, the structure will change, shrink and disassemble. It's brilliant. Thanks Skip and Olivia for the invitation to a lively cocktail hour in your studio.
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.
His work has been widely exhibited in America and abroad and has been reviewed widely. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship along with National Endowment for the Arts grants along with many others.
Skip Arnold is a performance artist living and working in both Los Angeles and France.