Hello Everybody!

There is an interesting opening at Central Fine Arts, 70 Greene Street,
Soho/NY, on Thursday, Sept. 11, 18:00 to 20:00.

Nui Bo, known for his Space Atelier Project 1993, which involved using a
zero gravity plane at 20,000-25,000ft to produce art in a weightless
state, exhibits at Central Fine Arts a large scale installation named:
BUDDHA-COITUS. In the Tibetan plateau making love with god is considered
a divine practice. This specific practice is physically done by monks
and nuns in their cells. Instead of feeling sensual pleasure, they
directly attain a lofty realm of unity of Heaven and man.

Niu Bo's environment displays two temple-like tents (one is intact; the
other demolished) connected by a hallway. These tents contain male and
female deities and other ritualistic objects designed by the artist but
executed and produced by Tibetan craftsmen, carvers, who claim to obtain
their craftsmanship through reincarnation. Although very detail
oriented, the deities do not depict or represent a specific god or
Buddha: they basically incorporate a universal concept of a Buddha which
unifies all aspects and types of god in one. The wood used to create
these deities was taken from old and abandoned, sometimes destroyed,
Tibetan temples which is an important aspect because it is believed that
the old wood has absorbed the essence of human meditation, and traces of
contact with the deities through the course of hundreds of years.

In contradiction to these ancient but still practised rituals, Niu Bo
has painted on the outside of the tent modern instructions and tools for
sexual intercourse, derived directly from our realm of mass consumerism.
A statement concerning the fundamental loss of our basic senses and
sensuality, the estrangement of ourselves and our alienation from
nature. As Niu Bo states this loss is an inevitable one caused by the
"process of progress" within the material world: "We have gradually lost
our creative ability to face our world and ourselves. At first we lost
contact, lost the ability to feel and then to respond. Our response is
not a natural one: instead we follow instructions, we are read like
instructions, and we become instructions." At the end of the 20th
century the possibility of cloning human beings themselves without
sexual intercourse is put on the agenda of today.

If this century is characterized by technological accomplishments, it is
also the history of human despair and frustration. Niu Bo's "process of
progress" can also be understood by using Walter Benjamin's metaphor of
the "Angel of History." His "Angel of History" does not dialectically
move forward into the future, but his face is turned toward the past.
Where a chain of events appears to us, he sees one single catastroph
which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his
feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and join together
what has been smashed into pieces. (Which would presumably mean the end
of history.) But a "storm" is blowing from Paradise and irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned while the pile
of ruins before him grows skyward. What we call "progress" is this
"storm."

The second tent embodies this wreckage of our modern times, containing
again several deities, furniture and a video showing the artist, making
his art work in zero-gravity space. Although this scenario is in a state
of distress, there are also undenyable humorous aspects lurking in the
dark. Especially the video working under the conditions of zero-gravity:
"What I felt in zero-gravity space, is in fact a kind of pleasure of
spiritual intercourse. It is fully personal. I