Carey Young’s Body Techniques series is an artist’s photographic attempt to celebrate former artists’ work. We watch pictures of restagings of previous pieces of performance art – including works by Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, Valie Export and Dennis Oppenheim. These pictures maintain a distance from the original artwork and are flawed by as many corruptions as the number of passages interposed between them and the final pictures taken by Carey Young. On one hand, this reminds us of the alterations in colour, contrast, brightness and so on which the subject of a photograph (every photograph) is subjected to from the beginning to the end of the photographic process. But on the other hand, it makes us think of one of the major differences between contemporary art and the most popular forms of art like cinema, literature or music. In Western society, people have always tried to live like the characters in the movies or the great rock idols. Some others have felt a deep connection with the characters of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. James Dean, Jim Morrison, Henry Chinaski, Lou Reed, the Big Lebowski, Bettie Page, Tony Montana, Jack Kerouac, Holden Caulfield, and many others have inspired the lives, the looks, the ways of talking, the expectations, the attitudes and the behaviours of many of us. But very few of us, probably none of the people we know, have taken as a source of inspiration the lives of the great modern and contemporary artists or the subjects of their works.

Carey Young shows us that if this happened there would be people blocking city traffic or performing strange actions in public. One may say that this is already happening, especially in the big metropolises where alienation is widespread. But has anybody ever done that with the purpose of imitating a piece of art? Most likely the answer is no. Nor does the English – American photographer want to live every single day as a different artist. Her plays (for, in a sort of way, she stages the comedies written and performed by others) last as long as she needs in order to document them with her camera. Every gesture that is not recorded is superfluous. After all, art is produced to be experienced through our five senses. Whether for one person only or for the masses, art is never conceived to be stored away from human beings. It has always had, and will always have, a receiver.

This is the main difference between Carey Young’s Body Techniques project and a life totally devoted to the embodiment of an artwork: the former is a further piece of art and is such only if it is proved by documents (the photographs) and experienced by the public; the latter is self-sufficient and does not need to be legitimated by anybody. But this means also that something which is not recorded, acknowledged and given its proper caption is neither noticed as the emulation of an artwork, so poor is the mass knowledge of contemporary art (especially its branches, which are unlikely to fit onto a gallery’s wall). This is exactly the idea that we get when looking at Carey Young’s works: even though people may adopt lifestyles based on stereotypes in cinema or music, should someone emulate an artwork outside of a context explaining his action, he would certainly be labelled as mad. Contemporary art is popular as long as it stays inside museums because they guarantee that what we are watching is art. But when it comes out onto the street, out of its institutional context, it is an unidentifiable, deviant form of expression.