Michael Alan’s Living Installation Art Happenings

Hanzle and Gretle, The Living Installation; photo by George Marengo

“It ultimately begins with a drawing. My studio work and drawing process bring about the ideas that develop the movement, installation and world for each performance. These ideas turn into costumes and sets, but further more, the drawing is brought to life as a living ‘human sculpture.’” –Michael Alan

Five years ago, Michael Alan began putting together his first living art performances. They were born of a frustration with the lack of creative force in the New York art scene. Alan aimed to reinvent, to borrow from the distinguishing features of several different art practices and thread them together to create a new form of art creation. “In New York City, there are tons of galleries, tons of museums, parks, restaurants, parties, theaters, drawing venues….but where are all the artists getting together to make art, to talk, to meet? I wanted to create a new platform, something beyond typical art school and theater and traditional ideas,” says Alan. These Draw-a-thon theaters, which have now evolved into The Living Installation, have roots that are easily traced (Happenings, interpretive dance, figure study, Dada, and even Neo-Expressionism) but when they are put together into one act, once performance, the lines of each of these influences are less clear only because what Alan has manifest feels like a new whole.

On a recent weekend night I ventured out to Bushwick’s Cosmic Cavern, the studio space of Kenny Scharf, the boundary pushing, pop-culture influenced artist, to see Michael Alan’s Living Installation performed for the first time. Scharf and Alan have struck up a friendship in which Scharf allows Alan to host his events in Scharf’s blacklight dominated, neon, acid-flashback inducing basement. The partnership is an example of how The Living Installation has gained momentum over the past five years. “It went from an idea, to a D-I-Y show, to underground famous, to a now new word-of-mouth performance art/human installation, the piece is a performance where human beings are turned into unique, living art objects that perform beautiful and treacherous acts for an audience of artists and viewers. We have crossed the trench, and we have artists and viewers interacting peacefully,” says Alan.

The Living Installation at Kenny Scharf's art space; photo by Garry Boake

The scene at The Living Installation on a warm June night was different than one might expect. Those who came to draw, to sketch, to interpret the performance that played out before them, were mostly older, somewhat conservatively dressed and serious artists plying their skills. In the minority were the few younger artists in the audience, and then there were a few people who just came to watch, taking in the proceedings as if a play or any other avant-garde performance. The models who perform in the show move of their own volition–the movement, Alan says, is part of the art and encourages the artists there to draw to incorporate vitality in their work. On the night I attended the models consisted of four women, each of whom, pleasingly, had very different body forms. As the night progresses, the women are strewn with paint. In the case of Scharf’s space, the paint is blacklight sensitive shades of neon pink and yellow and blue. Objects are added to the equation. “The objects are a mixture of handmade and found. They are made from paper mâché, wire, cast, masks, rope, paint, etc. The found objects are turned into pieces during the show. I search for these pieces all over the city and think how they can work with the body for each show,” says Alan. Given this attraction to found objects and the manner in which these objects are hung ceremoniously from the models’ bodies during the show, it is not difficult to think of the late, great Robert Rauschenberg and his Combines. The balanced use of objects and paint makes this connection brazenly clear.

Throughout the night–most performances last anywhere from four to five hours–the models shift positions across their allotted working space and Alan moves them too. Alan himself is an active participant. Beyond painting the models and placing objects and masks on them, he jumps into the fray, striking poses, covering himself in props and entangling his body with the models’. All the while, on the night I was there, the soundtrack ranged from purely atmospheric violin pieces, to helter skelter metal, to sweetly-voiced female vocalists meandering over banjo plucking. The mix seemed designed to change the mood of the room and the direction of the artists at a moment’s notice.

"Prostitutionnnnnnn," 2010 by Michael Alan; image by Carry Whittier

The Living Installation is not Alan’s primary art form, however. It is an extension of his drawings, paintings, and sculptures, an experiment that grew out of those more standard art practices. Alan’s drawings and paintings are equally erratic and frenzied as The Living Installation and engender comparisons to artists like Egon Scheile and Ralph Steadman. But unlike his drawings and paintings, The Living Installation is a method by which Alan can involve others in his work as it is being created. In the mind of Alan, The Living Installation is his drawings brought to life and it could not exist if the drawings did not exist first. “We meet and go over movement and how my drawings would like to move” says Alan. “The performers bring my art to life, they animate the work. My drawings, paintings, and performances embrace inner change and cultural extremes. All of my work is about change and how I can use my technique to express this state, from working on paper and using multiple techniques to create a state of change, to building installations on people that physically change every other minute.”

Michael Alan’s next show, “Harmonious Opposites,” will be at the Chelsea gallery Gasser & Grunert from July 8 to 29. The exhibition will feature around 30 of Alan’s drawing and paintings and a video installation. On the closing night of the show, Alan and his troupe will perform a Living Installation called “Cleaning the Clouds.”

via Michael Alan.

via The Living Installation Michael Alan.