Taste The Rainbow

Our scene is set in Randy Polumbo’s Tunnel of Love installation, a techno-organic, handblown glass, metal, and crystal garden that speaks to people’s libidinal instincts and mass appetite for extrasensory-inducing substances. The artist is interested in alteration and transformation, and his work is recognizable for its heavy use of innuendo and proliferation of reflective, technicolor blossoms.

It’s work that’s made it into New York City’s Museum of Sex and has found an avid fan base at Burning Man, the festival of radical self-expression that draws hordes of creatives out into California’s Black Rock Desert at the end of every August. That such gatherings have become so culturally imperative illustrates our increasing appetite for immediacy, for human contact, for communion with nature and for expression of self. People are looking for out-of-body experiences to guide them toward existential transcendence: from chemically-fueled, video and light-led dance parties to shamanic ayahuasca ceremonies. Not since the sixties has drug culture held such pop relevance. Humankind is searching for something.

All of the performance art I’ve seen in Miami this week has held some sort of metaphorical mirror up to its audience. We are the message. Anti-art is its own practice, and art today is whatever you want it to be. It’s the Internet, it’s YouTube, it is blogging as a public performance piece. We live with art through advertising and pop stars, we live in a time when even fine artists like Cindy Sherman can collaborate with a fashion brand like Louis Vuitton, when Jeff Koons is making work for H M. It’s the realization of all that Andy Warhol predicted, passed down to us by the denizens of the Factory through the hands of the club kids. Taste the rainbow, get your freak on, live with eyes wide open, see, experience, create, repeat.

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