No parents want their children to be performance artists. Because performance art as a genre wants to be a disgusting, bloody and vom-filled political celebration of capital “U” urges. This is the genre where everything reeks and people really smell it, and where people slather things all over themselves instead of just touching things in a “using” way to get things done. Or at least that’s what I thought when I was younger and flipping through fat books in the art school library.

ICKKFAXX 2010 is a short video about one woman’s physical relationship with a fax machine. It is a cinematic take on how people often subconsciously perceive “performance art” as an especially gross or uncomfortable thing, even though daily life is full of gross and uncomfortable moments that become banal in their repetition. Bodies are full of fluids, they teem with bacteria and intermingle with environments and other bodies. Yet somehow on a great many days we leave our beds and lovers and put on clothing and pretend that it is okay to do business.

It is loosely based on something I read about Istvan Kantor before I’d ever seen his work, and how I was at a loss when I finally did see some because I’d expected to be a shaking, sweaty palmed mess. Like I’d just been pumelled in the mosh pit at the futuristic, cutting edge art version of a GWAR concert. Istvan taught my friend Keith how to freeze bags of urine and deposit the contents into the mail slots of unwitting jerks during a workshop at the Banff Centre once. The VERY LEAST he was capable of in my mind was engaging with office equipment until it ejaculated. I impulsively made ICKKFAXX some years later, so that I could put some of these ideas to rest.