A Product of His Time: The Performance Acts of Chris Bors

MTV spawned an entire generation that is impervious to shock and has an attention span the length of a music video. These children of the 1980s are males who came of age in a transsexual world where the ladies' man was dying, literally, and the evolved man was still a decade unborn. Or they are women who knew nothing of inequality and saw no reason not to be mother, breadwinner, lover, and wife all in one. They were raised on Madonna, Twisted Sister, and Culture Club, and occupied the bulk of their days playing video games and buying Orange Julius drinks at shopping malls. As they grew older, many responded by declaring themselves alternative. Grunge culture and the Seattle sound of Nirvana and Soundgarden seemed like the anthem for Generation X, but this so-called alternative culture was co-opted by the mainstream and became one of the first casualties of a new world where nothing is immune to marketing. Automobile manufacturers and retirement planners wanted to know about this elusive group; a generation of consumers that has spent more time on the couch than in the throes of politics or social revolution, all of their motivation and preoccupation swirling around in a vast eddy of the self. It is this world of in-your-face commercialization and media-saturated culture that that the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, conceptual artist Chris Bors ponders in his work.

As an adolescent, according to the artist, he was nourished on a steady diet of the four food groups: Slayer concerts, The World Wrestling Federation, Warner Brothers cartoons, and Colecovision, spending his early years in Ithaca, New York, developing his future artistic aesthetic by watching four hours of television a day, wrestling, and publishing an underground high school newspaper.The 1980s as a whole didn't leave much for posterity, but the "me decade" bequeathed a legacy of self-reinvention and gave us a Teflon generation blessed or cursed with an exaggerated sense of its own importance. It blurred the line between reality and fantasy to the point of irrelevancy, leaving behind a residue of unprecedented apathy toward—well—everything. For many of those who grew up in the eighties, nothing is permanent, nothing is precious, nothing is absolute. It's all just cross advertising.

Not surprisingly, the art that has emerged from this generation is as polished and concise as a Nike commercial, and takes pride in its entertainment value. Bors and his peers instinctually understand that art need not be austere or uncomfortable to yield impact, and like the work of founding father Mike Kelley, it originates from an autobiographical impulse, but is liberal in its use of fiction. Bors is a painter, sculptor, and photographer, but much of his recent work is performative video, possibly the defining art form of his generation. Performative work is qualified by the presence of a contrived reality, but to some, it is the elixir of self-transformation. In the self-portraits of Nikki S. Lee and David Henry Brown, Jr. [see PAJ 66], metamorphosis is as simple as posing next to a stranger in a scene from a niche outside of their own. Their photos forge a false familiarity and mock our National Enquirer credo of seeing is believing. In the video work of artist Guy Richards Smit, the yearning to leave the confines of one's own emotional prison is even more overt. His alter ego, the typical loser, dreams of attention and acceptance, but beneath his comedic escapades is a cold lonely caste system of social haves and have-nots. The traits that classify all of this work are subtler in Bors's videos. He is both in front of and behind the camera, but there is an invisible, yet almost tangible resistance to this association.

The impetus for his video The Tourist (2002) came shortly after Bors's December...