Adam Young

Work with Live Art Danmark
2015 Skype Performance for Samtalekøkken, Royal Theatre School, Copenhagen.

Skype Performance
On the sixth of June 2015, Adam Young performed at one of our Samtalekøkken events which was held at the Royal Theater School in Copenhagen. Or actually he didn’t. He performed somewhere near a park in Leeds. His performance was broadcasted live via Skype to our event. During Adam’s performance, the young acting students fell completely silent. Many of them literally sat with open mouths: they had never seen anything like this before! The rest of us just watched a good performance. Adam chewed a whole packet of chewing gum and worked with a big hammer. He had paid 34 pounds for these materials (it was a very nice hammer).

We paid exactly the same amount for his performance on Ebay, where he sold it and we bought it through AUCTION ACHTUNG!, a short lived brokering service for Live Artists to sell their work on an open and global market, accompanied by a live event at the Month of Performance Art MPA-B in Berlin, on 5th May 2014, which Adam co-organised.

During his 34 minute-performance he spat out the chewing gum and hit it with the hammer. Then he rested on a park bench with the hammer taped to his mouth. Watching the performance on Skype possibly made it more intense than it would have been to witness it live. The Skype transmission added several layers. The atmosphere in our room was tense. Were we allowed to watch this performance? Was it performed just for us? Were we being watched? Who was watching us? We said hi to one person, saw another one pass on a bike, some people quickly disappeared. It felt strange to watch. We, the Copenhagen audience, shared the feeling that we where performing for someone unknown. This uncanny situation was in a sharp contrast to Adam Young sitting quietly on a park Bench somewhere near a park in Leeds.

About the Artist
The prolific and proficient performer and organiser, of, among other things, Live Art Bistro in Leeds, Adam Young has apearantly completly cut ties with the performance art world or, at least, social media and the Internet at large. The only faint trace he left online at the time of writing is this Twitter account, dormant since 2016.