Made in Heaven is a new performance and visual art piece by and video. Inspired by the Jeff Koons/Cicciolina art disaster, and following large scale works by Medlyn on themes of death and God, Made in Heaven is about sex and the doomed and comic creation of something alluring, menacing, and holy.
Having appeared in many of New York’s bars, nightclubs and alternative performance venues since the early 2000s, Medlyn’s longstanding performance art practice – in close collaboration with Andersson’s practice as a painter – closely and cannily mirrors that of Cicciolina and Koons, whose notorious personal and professional collaboration, also titled Made In Heaven, premiered in 1989 and was disastrously received.
Medlyn and Andersson are drawn to artistic disasters: their own, those of others, famous ones. Placing Medlyn’s past as a go-go boy in the East Village in the early 2000s, when he first moved to New York – and his early, sexualized performance works, with titles like Neal Medlyn, the Paris Hilton of Performance Art (2003), Manfinger (2004), Neal Medlyn is Highly Sexualized and in Danger (2005), and I Shock People by Showing Them My Breasts (2005) – into conversation with Andersson’s current visual art practice with sex workers, Made In Heaven becomes a surprising and interdisciplinary container for their shared interest in the overlaps between the visual art world, the performance world, the service industry, and the sex work industry: all exist in these precarious, ephemeral spaces, all create more or less fleeting ecstasies, all are somewhat harrowing and also manage to be somehow beautiful.
Made In Heaven strives not to be a show about sex, but rather a show that feels like sex – seeking the “vague alarm” with which art critic Peter Schjeldahl described his response to the Koons / Cicciolina project.
In Medlyn’s words: “I’ve seen far too many bad art shows and bad performances “about” sex and so we are trying to make a show that’s like sex, the often sudden, sometimes subtle shifts from the outer to the inner world. What we see, how we touch, what is a good time, what is beyond what we can imagine, what is awkward, what reminds you of the edge of your body and what takes away all words, what makes you laugh, what can flatten you.”
Drummer Willie Jones III and His Quartet