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As more and more gay couples are doing these days, Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing will don tuxes on Saturday and walk down a wedding aisle to say their vows. But what will distinguish their marriage from ones happening in Iowa and most New England states isn’t just the fact that it will have no legal standing in Texas, which confers none of the rights and responsibilities of marriage to same-sex couples, even if they’ve been together as long as Galbreth and Massing, who celebrated their 25th anniversary last year. Or the likelihood that their wives will attend the ceremony...

Convicted killer Michael Stone stormed the Irish Parliament with enough homemade bombs to kill dozens in a rain of fire and nails. But it was all in the name of art, he says. The lifelong terrorist, now awaiting judgment in Ireland for his November 2006 raid on the Stormont Parliamentary Building in Belfast, is trying a novel defense against the attempted murder charges he's facing: His bombs were part of an innocent performance art installation and nothing more. The 53-year-old Stone was caught red-handed with a hoard of 18 deadly weapons he says were props in his one-man show. The...

HAMBURG, Iowa, August 7, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Nude dancing in strip clubs is "artistic" even when performed by an under age girl, according to an Iowa judge in a ruling issued late last month. Fremont County Judge Timothy O'Grady called the strip club a "theatre" and agreed with the club owner who argued that the state's indecency law does not apply to "theater, concert hall, art center, museum, or similar establishments." Hamburg, Iowa, a town of 1,200 just across the Missouri River from Nebraska, has one strip club. After the 17-year-old niece of the local Sherriff, Steven MacDonald, did a...

Costa Rican artiste Guillermo Habacuc Vargas is making headlines for tying a dog from the street in an art gallery as part of an exhibit to starve it to death. The title of his exhibit "Eres Lo Que Lee" was written across the gallery in dry dog food. The food and a bowl of water were both out of the dog's reach. Eventually the animal died of starvation. The artist claimed the dog was sick and would have died anyways. Now Vargas has been selected to represent Costa Rica in Visual Arts Biennel of Central Americas 2008. The organizers have...

Four years at Yale costs $180,000. Here is how senior Aliza Shvarts planned to conclude hers: The art major would repeatedly artificially inseminate herself, then induce miscarriages, which she would record on video. She would build a four-foot-wide plastic cube and wrap it in layers of plastic. Between the layers would be Vaseline mixed with blood from the miscarriages. She would hang the cube at an exhibition and project video of the miscarriages onto four of its sides. "This piece," Shvarts wrote in the Yale Daily News, "is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as...

"Horrified" is how Choose Life at Yale's Margaret Blume describes the general reaction of her peers towards Aliza Shvarts' senior art project, one in which the art major supposedly impregnated and induced abortions on herself over the past year. "Almost every student whom I encountered yesterday was horrified at the thought that Aliza Shvarts had repeatedly impregnated herself, only to induce miscarriages, and glory in her 'freedom' to do so. It was deeply reassuring to me that most of my friends and fellow classmates, regardless of their political views on abortion, shared my outrage for such an awful and unnatural...

Beginning next Tuesday, Yale senior Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself ?as often as possible? while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages

NEW YORK, July 26, 2007 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Charles Merrill, the artist who recently edited the Holy Bible with a black marker and pair of scissors, has lately burned a rare Islamic Holy Book, The Koran, valued at $60,000.00, in an undisclosed Chicago location. "The purpose of editing and burning Abrahamic Holy Books is to eliminate homophobic hate," Merrill stated. "Both ancient books are terrorist manuals."..."Airplanes are flown into buildings because of words, and hate crimes against gays," Merrill said.

A Pacifica woman was arrested Sunday on suspicion of a hate crime for allegedly throwing fruit and vegetables at a gay couple while riding in a van, police said Monday. Tiffany Adler, 20, who works at a grocery store, was a passenger in a van in Pacifica on Sunday when she spotted a gay couple who frequent the store, according to police. As the van drove by around 7:50 p.m. on the 500 block of Esplanade Drive, she allegedly rolled down the window and threw apples and vegetables at them, police said. Later, the van turned around and approached the...

Barbra Streisand's politics didn't find a wholly agreeable crowd during her Monday concert at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise. As Babs traded political barbs with a George W. Bush imitator, a fan of the songstress who apparently disagreed with her politics pelted her with a beverage. And as her anti-GOP riff ended, another man in the crowd found himself being escorted out of the center as he shouted at Streisand. Streisand shrugged both incidents off, saying some people would do better to buy her records than come to her shows.

A naked performance artist who says she experienced fantasies of "interspecies metamorphoses" while working with dead pigs has angered British animal rights activists. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals criticized an exhibition where artist Kira O'Reilly sits naked for hours with a dead pig, planned for Friday evening at the Newlyn Art Gallery in Penzance, southwest England.

3 Gitmo Detainees Reportedly Hang Selves (AP) WASHINGTON Three Guantanamo Bay detainees hanged themselves with nooses made of sheets and clothes, the commander of the detention center said Saturday. They were the first reported deaths among the hundreds of men held at the base in Cuba — some of them for up to 4 1/2 years and without charge. Two men from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen were found "unresponsive and not breathing in their cells" early Saturday, according to a statement from the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, which has jurisdiction over the prison. Attempts were made to revive...

University of Oregon president Dave Frohnmayer has run afoul of evangelical Christians over his failure to take disciplinary action against a school newspaper for running sketches that depicted Jesus Christ in homosexual acts. Perhaps he is taking a cue from his brother’s controversial tenure as head of the National Endowment for the Arts. John Frohnmayer, who served the first President Bush as head of the NEA from 1989 to 1992, now teaches at Oregon State University. The brothers are a rarity in academia; they are Republicans. But if they typify the respondents in national polls, then Democrats dominate the Grand...

LONDON: A “performance artist” sparked a major security alert in London on Wednesday when she left five packages, one with nails sticking out of it, across a busy area of the city during the morning rush-hour, police said. The woman, who has not been named, told officers she had strategically planted the “devices” around the Shepherds Bush and Hammersmith Grove areas of west London, a major traffic and transport hub crammed with commuters on their way to work. Police, fearing a possible repeat of last July’s suicide bomb attacks that killed 52 people on the capital’s transport system, rushed bomb...

SARATOGA SPRINGS -- A 37-year-old Saratoga Springs man is accused of putting a roasted chicken in his pants as a means to steal it on Tuesday evening at the Price Chopper on Railroad Place in the city.

MILWAUKEE, WI (AP) - The Milwaukee Gay Arts Center has filed a claim against the city, contending it committed a civil rights violation by shutting down performances of a touring musical revue. An ordinance requiring a city theater license was selectively enforced against the center last week for a presentation of "Naked Boys Singing" because it is a gay organization, according to the claim filed Tuesday by attorney Richard Hart on behalf of the group. The claim said such a permit was never required for other productions in the past and that numerous other venues typically present theater performances without...

Syrian born artist, Hala Faisal, protests the war in Iraq and the occupation of Palestine by appearing in the nude with anti-war slogans written in both English and Arabic, in Washington Square Park Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2005, in New York City. Faisal was arrested by New York City police. (AP Photo/Ramin Talaie)

CHICAGO -- Performance artist Kerry Skarbakka, wearing a business suit and safety harnesses, jumped repeatedly from a museum roof to create photographs that recall scenes from the World Trade Center attack, drawing scorn from some onlookers and victims' relatives. Mr. Skarbakka, 34, fell more than 30 times from the five-story Museum of Contemporary Art on Tuesday. He said he started thinking about falling after watching on television as people jumped to their deaths from the Twin Towers on September 11. "What kind of a sick individual is he? Tell him to go jump off the Empire State Building and see...

Artist Stages 9/11 'Falls' From Museum Roof Thu Jun 16, 1:05 PM ET A performance artist wearing a business suit and safety harnesses jumped repeatedly from a museum roof to create photographs that recall scenes from the World Trade Center attack, but his spectacle was scorned by some onlookers and victims' relatives. Collaborating photographers snapped away as Kerry Skarbakka fell more than 30 times from the five-story Museum of Contemporary Art on Tuesday. The photographs will be retouched to erase the pulleys and wires that kept Skarbakka from hitting the pavement. Skarbakka, 34, said he started thinking about falling after...

Millions watched in horror as officer workers leapt from New York's World Trade Center Towers on Sept. 11, 2001. Kerry Skarbakka was horrified, too, by the TV images but -- and he tries to be careful when he explains this -- he was also inspired. The scene sparked a fascination with falling -- the fear, the freedom, the fate. "I was so distraught, I needed some way to find an artistic response,'' he said. On Tuesday, the 34-year-old "performance photographer'' demonstrated his art by repeatedly plunging four stories from the roof of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, his arms and...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Two gay Israeli men have installed a huge double bed in a New York art gallery and are inviting Arab men to become their "lover" as part of an exhibition called "Sleeping with the Enemy." But the artists who like to be known simply as Gil and Moti talk about the project in romantic terms, saying it's about "falling in love" rather than sex. Gil said visitors should not come to the show expecting to see pornography. "The bed is there for us to live in. Artistically there are three pillows to symbolize unity of three...

A woman has given birth as part of an exhibition in a German art gallery in front of dozens of spectators. Ramune Gele, 27, gave birth to her first child, a healthy baby girl named Audra, in the DNA art gallery in the capital Berlin. The father, 29-year-old musician Winfried Witt, who said before the birth "it's a gift to humanity, a once in a lifetime thing", called the experience "an existential work of art". Johann Novak, manager of the gallery, said the couple wanted to challenge conventional norms. "It's a bit of test to see if society can cope,"...

Bolshoi's 'porn opera' upsets the Russians By Nick Allen in Moscow (Filed: 24/03/2005) The Bolshoi Theatre was surrounded by protesters and paramilitary police last night as it raised the curtain on a production that some Russians have branded a "porno-opera". Placard-waving activists called for a ban on Rosenthal's Children, a contemporary look at Moscow's underworld of prostitution, alcoholism and violence. The work is the first new opera to be commissioned by the state-funded theatre in 30 years. It tells a curious tale of Soviet-made clones of classical composers including Tchaikovsky and Verdi, turned out on the city's streets in 1991...

Protesting as Performance Art. By Bernard Chapin Here in Chicago there are few better opportunities to meet your neighbors than during the yearly protest march which takes place on the anniversary of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Actually, one’s neighbors are rarely seen but Jessie Jackson, trustafarians, communists, anarchists, and depressives of all varieties are plentifully on hand. This is the third time that I have personally attended the rally, and I have to say that the mood of the demonstrators was more hostile on this occasion than in the past. Previously, amid the threats and overemotional lamentations, there was...

AN ATTEMPT to cook a human blood pudding as an act of outrageous art has been abandoned after health inspectors were alerted. Scottish artists John Beagles and Graham Ramsay were planning to slice and fry black pudding made from their own blood in a show of "live art" this afternoon. But they were forced to abandon the project after Edinburgh City Council dispatched its environmental health officers to the Royal Scottish Academy building on the Mound, the show’s organisers said. The National Galleries of Scotland, which runs the building, also read the riot act against any such creative cookery. John...

In 1962, the painter and film critic Manny Farber coined the phrase "termite art" to describe small-scale work with an obsessive bent. This month, the Chelsea gallery LMAKprojects is offering a strangely literal twist on this idea: for the inaugural exhibition of its satellite location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the artist Emily Katrencik is eating the wall that separates the gallery's exhibition space from the bedroom of its director, Louky Keijsers. Five days a week, Ms. Katrencik consumes a section of wall 1.956 inches square and three sheets of drywall thick, for a total of about 8.5 cubic inches of drywall;...

2 UCLA professors quit after gun allegedly used in performance Associated Press LOS ANGELES - Two tenured art professors have resigned from the University of California, Los Angeles, after the university refused to suspend a graduate student who may have used a gun during a classroom performance art piece. The resignations came after a brief performance on Nov. 29 in which a student simulated Russian roulette by appearing to point a loaded handgun at his head and pull the trigger, a student and law enforcement officials told the Los Angeles Times. The weapon didn't fire, but the student then left...

Two tenured art professors have resigned from the University of California, Los Angeles, because the school refused to suspend a graduate student who may have used a gun during a classroom performance art piece. Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins, internationally known artists who taught at UCLA for more than two decades, filed their retirement papers Dec. 20. "They feel this was sort of domestic terrorism. There should have been more outrage and a firmer response," said Sarah Watson, a director at a Beverly Hills gallery that represents the couple. In the brief performance on Nov. 29, the student appeared to...

Second of two parts. What is the artist's role in society? Artists have been debating the question throughout history. The former U.S. poet laureate said he thought about the election results all day -- "when I could think." "The question of how the rest of us should behave seems pressing," he said. "Erosion of civil liberties? The courts? Further and deeper predations on the environment? It's hard to see how the Endangered Species Act will survive, except perhaps in name. An interesting indicator of the intentions of that Bush clique will be to see whether they punish Republican dissenters like...

Puppetry of the Penis has survived yet another complaint, with police in the US city of Chicago ignoring pressure to ban performances by the controversial Australian act. Featuring two naked puppeteers who twist their penises into different shapes, the show has attracted much attention since being created by Simon Morley in 1996. The latest complaint came from a concerned Chicago community advocate during the group's current US tour. Chicago Citizens for Community group spokeswoman Arlene Sawicki cited the Chicago Municipal Code in saying that the play was illegal and subject to law enforcement. Ms Sawicki has urged people to register...

Confirmed to date: Vanessa Carlton, Toni Childs, Rosario Dawson, Eve Ensler, Jane Fonda, Rha Goddess & WE GOT ISSUES, Jehmu Greene, Isabella Rossellini, Susan Sarandon (pending availability), Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Gloria Steinem, Julia Stiles, Marie Wilson, and many more. WE GOT ISSUES has been commissioned by V-Day for the event and will feature young women speaking out through a performance-based dialogue on feminine power, politics, and civic transformation. The Executive Producers are V-Day Founder/Playwright Eve Ensler and V-Counsel Member/Actor Jane Fonda. Two Centerpiece Events Announced: "Vaginas Vote, Chicks Rock" September 13 at NYC's Apollo Theater and "Women And Power III:...

Has anyone heard or seen "Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping" and can gives some details on what they have seen? The 'reverend' is a "Performance Artist" who is very Liberal, somewhat activist working in NYC. I know with the convention coming up some of these folks may be truying to get National exposure. I know about this group because I know one of the 'members' from college days. Was wanting to hear more about them first hand. His site is: http://revbilly.com/index.php

When we lodged a complaint that Columbia University had allowed Comedy Central to film a movie entitled "Porn and Chicken" at Columbia in 2002, we thought that we had reached the dregs of a cultural wasteland. We were wrong. According to an article in the June 13th edition of the New York Times Magazine, Andrea Fraser is selling her body to a collector for sex on a video. What the entertainment column failed to mention was that Ms. Fraser is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Columbia University School for the Arts. Even if the "art" was not performed at...

Ambassador Mazel’s "Performance Art" 17:26 Jan 18, '04 / 24 Tevet 5764 Israeli Ambassador to Sweden Tzvi Mazel caused an international diplomatic incident Friday with his act of protest against an installation art piece equating an Islamist suicide bomber with her Israeli victims. Israeli Ambassador to Sweden Tzvi Mazel caused an international diplomatic incident Friday with his act of protest against an installation art piece equating an Islamist suicide bomber with her Israeli victims. The Ambassador literally pulled the plug on the exhibit, on display at Stockholm’s Museum of National Antiquities. The piece, entitled "Snow White and the Madness...

'Performance art' hits Wal-Mart Store staff forces crowd to leave The Oconee County Wal-Mart was under siege Friday night by a guerrilla performance art project staged by University students for their Studio Art 2810 final. The students, who call their group "Private Agenda," held a rave in the family bathroom and a fashion show in the electronics department before being asked to leave by Wal-Mart staff, who warned participants over the store's public announcement system that they could be arrested. "Wal-Mart is the New America ... united we stand, 24 hours a day, consume, consume, consume," said James Kubie, a...

An artist who rolled a monkey nut seven miles with his nose has announced his latest stunt.Mark McGowan says he intends to sit for 12 days in a bath filled full of baked beans, with two chips up his nose and sausages wrapped around his head.It is due to take place in the shop window of a gallery near his home in Camberwell, south London, next month.Mr McGowan, 37, claims the serious issue behind the stunt is to defend criticism of the full English breakfast.The graduate in fine art attracted media attention when, on hands and knees, he rolled a...

That's how Nao kicked off her infamous 1992 work "Indigurrito" in which she strapped-on a burrito to her loins and called for white men to come up on stage, take a bite out of the burrito and absolve themselves of 500 years of the white man's guilt. There was no shortage of enobled participants, who knelt in front of the protuding offering, some taking delicate bites, others deep-throated chunks.

"That's how Nao kicked off her infamous 1992 work "Indigurrito" in which she strapped-on a burrito to her loins and called for white men to come up on stage, take a bite out of the burrito and absolve themselves of 500 years of the white man's guilt..."

Sean Lennon cuts away with scissors a piece of his artist mother Yoko Ono's dress as she repeats her 1960s performance 'Cut Piece', in Paris Monday Sept.15, 2003. The appearance repeats Ono's famous performance in Japan, which captivated the media and art critics at the time for its boldness. Sean Lennon is the son of the late Beatle John Lennon and Yoko Ono. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

PARIS (Reuters) - John Lennon (news)'s widow Yoko Ono (news) could end up stark naked on a Paris stage Monday as she performs her one-woman art show "Cut Piece," in which members of the audience are to cut off pieces of her clothing. Ono, 70, who accompanied her Beatle husband in numerous controversial anti-war campaigns including the "Bed-In for Peace" against the Vietnam War, first performed her "Cut Piece" show in 1964 in Japan as a protest for peace. At the end of the show, she stood naked before her audience. "Come and cut a piece of my clothing wherever...

A performance artist trying to wipe out his student debt by using his nose to roll a monkey nut across London has arrived at Downing Street. Crawling on his hands and knees, Mark McGowan nudged the nut over a kerb and up the steps to the famous black door of Number 10. He began his journey on 1 September at Goldsmiths College in New Cross, south-east London. Each day he covered about three-quarters of a mile in about eight hours. During his journey, the 37-year-old from Peckham, south-east London, has encountered abusive people, curious children, wide cracks in the pavement...

Yoko to recreate naked art show Yoko Ono is to re-stage her conceptual art project which saw her invite people to cut off her clothes until she was left naked. It was 40 years ago that Ono, widow of John Lennon, took to the stage in Japan for Cut Piece. Now Ono, 70, will recreate Cut Piece in Paris on 15 September in an effort to promote world peace. During the original stunt she wore a white gown and gave audience members scissors to cut away the fabric. She remained motionless until she was left completely naked. Now she...

<p>A grateful mayor is delighted that the Republican Party picked New York as the site of the 2004 presidential convention next September, and no wonder. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg expects the event to draw 50,000 visitors and generate $150 million for the city.</p>

Billing itself as "ultimate minimalism," a play at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is charging theatre-goers to stare at an empty and silent stage for an hour. With no cast, no plot, no props and no script, the play has attracted wide media coverage in Britain but, alas, completes its emptiness by also attracting next to no audience. Appropriately called Sweet FA, the play's opening night attracted six journalists to the early morning performance at the 142-seat theatre inside Edinburgh's Crowne Plaza Hotel. On the second night, one journalist turned up but fell asleep in the lobby before the show began....

I was appalled when I picked up my July 21 edition of The Journal. The front-page story, ``Saucy Aussies," I feel did not belong in a family newspaper, let alone on the front page next to a story about a camp addressing special needs children. This article is what one would expect to see in the Washington Blade, not The Journal. For those who might not recall, the story describes a so-called performing arts presentation at the Rosslyn Spectrum Theater. In their performance, male performers publicly manipulate their genitalia for the audience. This is supposed to be art? I have...

County Board members said Saturday they have neither the power nor the intention to stop a troupe called Puppetry of the Penis from performing at the county-operated Rosslyn Spectrum Theatre, despite complaints that the show’s content makes it inappropriate for a municipal venue. Practicing what troupe members call the “ancient art of genital origami,” Puppetry of the Penis is slated to perform at the Spectrum from July 22 to Aug. 17. Performers manipulate their private parts into everything from a hamburger to their signature effort, the Eiffel Tower. A few Arlingtonians are not amused. “We should not be pandering to...

Plans by a British conceptual artist to kick an empty take-out curry tray down the street have been scrapped after several days of vilification by opponents of conceptualism, reports The Independent newspaper. Andre Stitt, 44, a former bricklayer, had planned to stride down Bedford High Street in silver platform boots, kicking the carton in a performance intended to tackle the issue of "personal-societal dysfunction" of drunken youths on a Saturday night out. However, Bedford Creative Arts, which had earmarked £12,000 ($30,000) for the event, cancelled it, citing crowd-safety fears. "We were not anticipating the huge interest by the media ....

A Korean artist staged a one-man drama in front of Kyobo Building at the Kwang-Hwa-Moon station. He wore the uniform of Chinese police and an armband marked with the word "China" both in Korean and English. He was dragging around a dummy which is supposed to symbolize a N. Korean escapee. He was highlighting cruel treatments of N. Korean escapees by Chinese authorites. Irate Chinese tourists are shown here on the left side of the photo, protesting to him.

<p>OUTRAGED Catholics wanted comic-magicians Penn & Teller removed from ABC’s Super Bowl special over an act they performed featuring Jesus, a midget angel and a sex act. The duo - who are scheduled to perform on ABC’s pre- and post-game show from Times Square - acted out the controversial bit at the World Magic Seminar in Rio last week. When the Catholic League’s William A. Donohue got wind of it, he fired a letter to ABC saying that such "an incredibly anti-Christian statement" should not be "rewarded." A network rep told the Las Vegas Review Journal that Penn & Teller are still in the show.</p>

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. Las Vegans Al and Rita Cummins are not turning the other cheek to that risque crucifixion skit by local magicians Penn & Teller. "What they did is blaspheme the Lord," Al Cummins said. "I know there a lot of scenes in the casinos that we would not approve of. That's their business, but it became our business when they criticized our Lord." The Summerlin couple learned of the Jan. 13 routine at a magicians' convention after reading items in Norm Clarke's Review-Journal column. Penn & Teller have been publicly quiet about...