Skip Arnold: Truffle Hunt
Truffle Hunt (1998) illustrates some of the more distinctive, recurring themes of longtime Los Angeles-based artist Skip Arnold’s pioneering performance practice—the desire “to explore the relationships between self, place, and particular time.” Originally conceived for the late Jason Rhoades’s International Museum Project About Leaving and Arriving (I.M.P.A.L.A.), the work follows Arnold, Rhoades, and Hans Weigand’s journey to Italy via Switzerland in search of truffles, and includes maps of their journey to different locations in the countryside, Polaroids, video clips, and related ephemera, as well as one of the truffles smuggled back to Los Angeles by the artists.
Skip Arnold (b. 1957) lives and works in Marseille, France. He received his MFA from the University of Los Angeles, California and his BFA from the State University College, Buffalo, New York. He has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; the University of Houston; the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach; and Exit Art, New York, among others. He has participated in group exhibitions at venues including the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Louisiana Museum of Art, Humblebæk, Denmark; and Secession, Vienna. He has received awards and grants from such prestigious organizations as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Art Matters, Inc., among others.
Skip Arnold and guest curator Robert Greene discuss how space and the artist’s body factor into Arnold’s video and performance.
