| Faced with the question of how to operate as an artist within an exuberant art market Cai Nyahoe plays with the parameters of an instantaneous society in his recent work: Towards a Semi-Autonomous Self-Perpetuating Art (Phone Sex). Shown at Satellite project space in Newcastle upon Tyne as a bare audio installation, the work presents a recorded telephone conversation between the artist and a sex-line worker. This woman who is selected by pressing 1 to talk to the first available girl becomes the facilitator in the process of Nyahoe’s search for validation in his own artistic practice.This notion seeking external approval and confirmation is while at times humorous, not entirely satirical. |  |
Dawn Bothwell
Faced with the question of how to operate as an artist within an exuberant art market Cai Nyahoe plays with the parameters of an instantaneous society in his recent work: Towards a Semi-Autonomous Self-Perpetuating Art (Phone Sex). Shown at Satellite project space in Newcastle upon Tyne as a bare audio installation, the work presents a recorded telephone conversation between the artist and a sex-line worker. This woman who is selected by pressing 1 to talk to the first available girl becomes the facilitator in the process of Nyahoe’s search for validation in his own artistic practice. This notion seeking external approval and confirmation is while at times humorous, not entirely satirical. The work also inevitably leads the listener/viewer to question the nature of coercion and acceptable modes of behavior in marginalized and inherently exploitative industries (in this case, the sex trade). For the duration of the call certain unspoken rules are observed, and a dual narrative is created: that of the artist seeking affirmation and the “client” seeking physical gratification.
In commandeering such a widely used device for immediate sexual gratification, the limitations of capitalism’s existing devices for measuring success or failure are challenged. These limitations are especially recognized throughout the conversation pattern that follows that of a typical phone call of this nature. Once a climatic point is reached, Nyahoe seems overwhelmed with responsive gratitude to the stranger, but these “thank you’s” are imminently empty through their non-specification. While no specific work is discussed, a temporal work is generated through allusions to its dimensions, although these dimensions vary in relation to the “tasks” requested by the artist—a device that simultaneously asserts and surrenders control of the work. Following the “thank you’s” closing the conversation, there is an awkward pause that acts as a post-climactic silence—following the rapid build-up the false pocket of praise and support is popped, the artist’s ego deflated and returned. This pattern in Nyahoe’s work has been paired to Freud’s theory of the Death Drive—in parallel to the emptiness of contemporary Western culture.
In other works Nyahoe deals with similar concepts such as the degradation of culture, and questions the idea of enlightenment and sophistication through ideals created on televised sensational rags-to-riches programs such as Pop Idol. Götterdämmerung (Wagner in the Toilet) exists as video documentation of Nyahoe performing his own interpretation of Wagner’s final Ring Cycle opera, from within a men’s’ toilet cubicle. This derivative performance of the opera, which at the time was intended to embody a pure synthesis of all arts, including visual, as Gesamtkunstwerk (“total artwork”) and to be seen in the dedicated opera house Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The direct nature of this work, Nyahoe playing all parts, using and reusing the same crude props for contrasting purposes—even re-labeling the same mannequin to alternate characters in the play, turns an artwork associated with the elite into karaoke.
