
Nicknamed "the Fluxus cabdriver" by Nam June Paik, Jeffrey Perkins is an artist and filmmaker who has worked in relative obscurity for over four decades, having collaborated in the 1960s with Fluxus artists including George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, and Alison Knowles. Until recently he was best known for his light projection performances and his "Movies for the Blind" (based on sound recordings of interviews with passengers in his cab). He recently completed a documentary, The Painter Sam Francis, an endeavor that was itself 40 years in the making. He continues to do performance art, most recently at X-Initiative and Daniel Reich Gallery in New York, and his artwork was most recently on view at Front Desk Apparatus Space. In Part Two of this two-part interview, Perkins discusses redeeming the catastrophe of his documentary, and getting out of the driver seat his new work. PART I is here.
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Nicknamed "the Fluxus cabdriver" by Nam June Paik, Jeffrey Perkins is an artist and filmmaker who has worked in relative obscurity for over four decades, having collaborated in the 1960s with Fluxus artists including George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, and Alison Knowles. Until recently he was best known for his light projection performances and his "Movies for the Blind" (based on sound recordings of interviews with passengers in his cab). He recently completed a documentary, The Painter Sam Francis, an endeavor that was itself 40 years in the making. He continues to do performance art, most recently at X-Initiative and Daniel Reich Gallery in New York, and his artwork was most recently on view at Front Desk Apparatus Space in New York. In Part One of this two-part interview, Perkins discusses his life and work in the 60s and 70s.
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Ken Okiishi's name has appeared alongside that of Nick Mauss in several collaborative exhibitions, but (Goodbye to) Manhattan is his first showing of solo work in New York. In a long video and an array of presentational supplements, Okiishi puts pressure on what he calls, in his press release, the grandiose analogies underlying New York's art fantasies about Berlin, and vice versa. Acknowledging his position of no distance, complicit in everything he presents, Okiishi uses his friends (artist-boyfriend Mauss, curator Pati Hertling and student-critic Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen) as conduits for these Germano-American misfires. Filmed against a green screen and reciting a garbled script, the actors wander aimlessly in a permanent haze of jetlag. But even as he deflates the art world's perpetual transatlantic quest for "something else" or the "next big thing," Okiishi refrains from a knowing cynicism.
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