In the book, "The Dirty Rotten Depriving Ray" the antagonist, the Chief of MOM-ZA, Alexander Graham Wang, has created a radiation-emitting ray on a certain frequency that turns people off and prevents them from procreating. His base is somewhere in the mountains of Siglutfjordur.
Inspired by Eurospy films, Austin Powers, "In Like Flint" and "Our Man Flint", James Bond films, 60's spy culture, 60's erotic spy books like "The Man from T.O.M.C.A.T" and "The Coxeman" and "The Man from O.R.G.Y." and "The Man from S.T.U.D." and "The Baroness" and "Valentine Flynn Series" and "The Lady from Lust" and "Cherry Delight" and Operation Hang Ten" and "Operator" and "Christopher Cool- Teen Agent" and "The Man from M.O.D." and "Agent of T.E.R.R.A." and "The Miss from S.I.S." and "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." and "The Mod Squad" and "The Avengers" and "The Cat" and "I, Spy" and "Get Smart" and the 60s counter-culture spy fiction written on hash by Adam Diment such as "The Dolly Dolly Birds" and "The Great Spy Race", "The Girl Called Fathom", "Modesty Blaise", "Terror of Intent" by Anthony Burgess, "Yolandi", "Captain Kennedy", "Agent X", "Agent 0008", "The Man from Planet X", "Agent 13" and all the fun, various espionage books, films, tv shows, the fun and thrill of it all. What does it mean? Is it purely entertainment? Is James Bond just a film and real-life espionage a dreary job that lacks the romance and thrill of the films? Yes and No to all questions and answers. Performance Art, in it's role of using the artist's body in works of art, the body itself, it's actions, all into a medium of expressions to give underlying meanings to existential angst. The role of the Superspy, a hero, a commando, a ninja, someone who kicks butt, in the game of espionage that makes up an intricate web of intrigue, a game of strange rules and rules broken, the structure of which spy films undergo a montage of missions, the problem, the troublemakers, the dossiers of them introduced to the audience, the problem-solver, which is the Agent who kicks ass, and then the adversaries and orgasmic climaxes in the end, with a charming nightclub scene and sexy scenes spiced in. The Sixties Eurospy film genre wasn't just a fad or entertainment, it was a celebration. Just as Jim Morrison wrote "Celebration of the Lizard King" the Eurospy film scene had their "Celebration of the Superspy". They were celebrating being human, in the shadow of death, but have no fear, for they are stronger, they have the Ubermensch within, to win over death, to overcome the struggles that plague humankind.
'No other medium has so forecfully resisted and denounced categorisation'- Simon Herbert "Bread and Circuses".
Thus, in going beyond the boundaries of childhood/adult fantasy of James Bond roleplay, I utilize performance art as a medium to express myself in ways that I want to, rather than resisting myself and "not being myself' by 'selling out' to 'art-conformism'. In a Critical Thinking Intellectual Autonomous analysis of passion, desire, inspiration, muse as an artist, I decided that by trying to engage in espionage missions as a superspy, was a way to fullfill my fantasies and to bring out my medium of expression. Since the Eurospy film and James Bond has fullfilled a role in art in bringing espionage and art to the cinema and mediums, it was wiggled it's way into art, into my lap, of which I fancied that being James Bond or Austin Powers or Derek Flint as a performance artist was an adventure, an extreme-extreme sport unlike no other. Since I am a martial artist, I can express myself as an artist by using my fighting skills in my performance art, such as fighting Dr. Evil's henchmen or Blofield's henchmen. So, where was I to gather my intel? At my whimsy, as luck would have it, I found a book, "The Dirty Rotten Depriving Ray" by Mallory T. Knight, a Man From T.O.M.C.A.T. adventure.
Tim O'Shane is an agent for T.O.M.C.A.T. He had been a Captain in the Marine Corps on special assignment to the Embassy in Paris in the fall of 1961 when an assignation with the beautiful wife of a French nobleman unearthed the theft of top secret NATO information. As a strange reward for his diligence, O'Shane was whisked away to an undisclosed location where he was told he had been commandeered to be an agent. Tactical Operations Master Counterintelligence Assault Team - a multinational espionage and counterespionage organization, T.O.M.C.A.T is comprised of agents from most of the Western nations, all under the control of Colonel MacSwiver, an eighty-one year old Scottish rake and lecher who was also one of Britain's greatest living spies. As an agent, O'Shane had training in numerous languages, all reasonable fighting methods, and every other type of spycraft the organization could think of. Within a year, O'Shane was as ready as anyone could be to enter the shadowing world of cloak and daggers.
While reviews for this book may be lacking on the interwebs, even on specialist rare cult adventure book blogs, I can provide such essentials. Tim O'Shane, the superspy for T.O.M.C.A.T: Tactical Operations Master Counterintelligence Assault Team. The back of the book thus reads: What do they do on a rainy night in Reykjavik? Where the nights are six months long... and the sinister Alexander Graham Wang (kinda like a Dr. No version of Fu Manchu) is testing MOM-ZA's most hideous, most demoralizing, most dastardly weapon yet- THE DIRTY, ROTTEN, DEPRIVING RAY that exhausts the potential (but not the desire) for sexual fulfillment. And if the fiendish Wang could lay every able-bodied man and woman in Reykjavik to waste, what would prevent him from picking up his tools, and his transmitters and focusing frustration upon nerve centers all over the Western Hemisphere? Never had the villainous MOM-ZA developed a more diabolical plan. Never had he hit upon a more perfect lure. And who would know that watching television would wreck his sex life! Somebody had to stop Wang before it was too late, and so T.O.M.C.A.T.'s Tim O'Shane leaped into the thick of things; for if every a secret agent was ready to give his al in the cause of sex, that agent was THE MAN FROM T.O.M.C.A.T. But the road to Reykjavik was rocky and fraught with detours to out-of-the-way places like Tokyo and Chicago and garnished with such agreeable distractions as bugged belly dancers, psychic prostitutes, and a bevy of nubile nymphettes from Nanking... AND WHEN HE FINALLY MADE IT TO THE MOUNTAIN FORTRESS OF OF THE MOM-ZA CHIEF, TIM FOUND HIMSELF THE HELPLESS, HAPLESS VICTIM OF THE DREAD FORCE HE HAD TRAVELED THE GLOBE TO DESTROY...
THE DIRTY ROTTEN DEPRIVING RAY!
As an artist, I have decided to use this book as Intel, short for Intelligence, for my Performance Art as playing the role of Tim O'Shane and looking for the mountain lair of Alexander Graham Wang, chief of MOM-ZA, in Siglutfjordur, a fishing village in northern Iceland, a hour away from Akuyeyri.
The Dirty Rotten Depriving Ray emits a special kind of radiation that prevents people from having sex, thus the human race dies out, and thats when MOM-ZA can create the Super Race (Kinda like Moonraker).
Here in this video clip I made I am on a mossy park nested between mountains as a survey the volcanoes and mountains that surround the small herring fishing village of Siglutfjordur. I look for clues, in the village and the mountains. Surely I need more intel, such as red infared light scans from a satellite, which aracheologists use to find places to dig for human remains and artifacts. Since I still consider the case open and not closed, I am not quite done with this "mission". Since the book was written in it's inception in 1967, during the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties and the Spy Craze, the question is, is this good 'intel'? Is there really some sort of a Wang or Dr. Evil lurking in a mountain lair? Such a lair is quite feasible. Miles of tunnel has been dug through these mountains in a few days. However, some mountains take forever to tunnel due to it's dangerous problems. The fact arises that nothing has happened since 1967, to show us that there is an underground lair or "Dirty Rotten Depriving Ray" tells us that this books is pure fantasy and nothing more? Such a question poses arguments for the sublimation of reality and fantasy, fact and fiction, for is art fantasy and fiction, or is art also a medium which can give us factual, empirical science, such as representational figurative paintings, hyper-realism, for in art there is no direction from which one can infer to a given; it is in the viewer and the response that creates a sensation of being in the art, for is there art without the viewer seeing the art? If a tree falls in the woods, can anyone hear it? In such a similar theory, if a work of art creates fictional characters and actions, can anyone in reality experience it as non-fiction? Thus this body of work, "Operation Performance Art: The Dirty Rotten Depriving Ray" is to find those boundaries between the polarities of reality and fantasy, and where they merge, it is at those precise points where they merge, is the Intel, the data from which missions are made.
As you can see, I am well prepared to do any James Bond, Austin Powers, Derek Flint spy mission as performance art. Such notions would be performance art as my body of work.
