Skip Arnold and Sigrid Hackenberg at Roger Merians - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, June, 1995 by Calvin Reid

In both exhibitions and videos, Skip Arnold uses his naked body to aggressively marry the act of creating art to the literal act of living. While some of his earlier work has been downright confrontational, this exhibition was almost meditative--an ambiguous pastoral on what is real and, perhaps, what is real art. Each day of the exhibition Arnold stripped, handed his stuff to the gallery assistant and climbed inside a lucite cube. He sat there perfectly naked and on display for several hours, impassive and inexplicable.

Arnold generates a thoroughly cranky physical vulnerability. His blunt attempts to produce an uncommodified expression can be as disarming as they are absurd. In a search for both extravagant effect and open-ended contemplation, he has defined a personalized approach to absurdist endurance and self-exposure.

His past work is varied and not always so benign. In one videotaped performance, he sat naked, like a gargoyle, on a building's ledge in a parody of architectural sculpture. In another video he screams "Girls in bikinis get fucked all day," over and over; he's been strapped to the hood (yes, naked) of an 18-wheel semi driving through California; and he's even had himself punched in performance, quite authentically and apparently quite painfully.

Arnold shared the gailery with Sigrid Hackenberg, who exhibited a slow-motion video projection of herself, also nude, against a blank, garishly lit and starkly shadowed wall. Although her past work is also quite varied, Hackenberg's approach to self-examination seems more concerned with the poetry of existence and its visual manifestation. Her full-figure standing image was projected larger than life, awkwardly but dramatically positioned on the horizontal. And while she denied that the horizontal projection was a mediating device ("it was the only way to get the whole image in," she told me), it nevertheless functioned in that manner. Her naked image, abstracted by its unusual orientation and slow-motion activity, was a kind of moving painting--laced with a quietly reflective subtext on the socialized response to the female body. Her range of movements and the vivid shadow-play that followed produced a work as iconic as it was meditative and sensual.

Hackenberg provided the perfect foil for Arnold's homely, body avant-gardism. Arnold demands that we confront how art and life intertwine and offers crudely imaginative stunts combining primal physicality and personal risk as a kind of lowest common denominator. Hackenberg suggests some of the same concerns about life and art, but her projection conveys her own lyrical subjectivity and an ingenuous sense of her body.