Skip will be orchestrating/performing the tradition that is most commonly the throwing of rice as the newly married couple leave the ceremony to get in their vehicle.
Untitled ("Punch") : 1984, 15sec color sound. Made to be aired as a commercial advertisement on TV.
Challenging the voyeuristic relationship between art object and viewer, Arnold uses his own body to create startling performance situations that often demand complicity from the audience in the artist's discomfort and risk. "What is common to all my work, Arnold states, is 'Skip' - Skip is the art work; the act of doing, my actions, my choices."
Among Arnold's many performance and film works, actions have included navigating the Bermuda Triangle in an experimental boat (he lived to tell the tale); installing himself beneath a plate glass sheet at the entrance to the Basel art Fair (so that visitors had to literally walk over him to enter the building); laying embalmed in bandages in the center of a public square in Slovakia, and taking eight hour showers daily as part of the Gramercy International Art Fair.
His work has been widely exhibited in America and abroad and has been reviewed widely. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship along with National Endowment for the Arts grants along with many others.
Skip Arnold is a performance artist living and working in both Los Angeles and France.