Second Life: The Artist Actualization Services, 2011
18th Street Art Center
A research-based residency/exhibition, exploring the fabricated history of a fictional performance art group known as the Artist Actualization Services (1979 -1980), and the true history of the seminal Los Angeles performance art magazine HIGH PERFORMANCE. These performance artists conceived of identity theft as a form of conceptual art, purportedly stealing the identities of important artist contemporaries like Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, and Chris Burden, “posing” as their doppelgangers and creating counterfeit reports of their performances in the pages of HIGH PERFORMANCE.
The exhibition presented selections from the Artist Actualization Services archives, and included the publication of a limited edition "Corrections Issue" of HIGH PERFORMANCE, calling into question the role of authorship, memory and documentation in the field of performance art.
