kip’s a scrapper, & never more so than in his onestar press book, “Cleaning in China.” He is nude in the photo on the book’s cover in a pose reminiscent of Jack Pierson’s “Youth”, as he often is in his performance pieces. Skip takes himself literally as an artist. First degree is his M.O. From the time he started fi lming himself jumping off garage roofs in California to his recent skinny dip in an industrially polluted lake in China and by way of the Bermuda triangle, Skip has remained true to his fi rst love, the elegant proposition that art is anything an artist does. Skip became an artist in the era of late 80s/early 90s California conceptual art; he’s not the only one still ready to crucify himself for the cause, and he’s getting the word out in his own determined fashion. Hence his well-known & brief manifesto, which concludes: “What is common to all my work is Skip. Skip is the artwork. The act of doing, my actions, my choices.” Talk about living sculpture. The images from “Cleaning in China” are all from Skip’s recent trip there, which is now fi rmly part of the Arnold mythology. Many of these images were shown in other formats at the galerie frédéric giroux in Paris: scenes along the road, many ends of meals, the famous bathing scene, shots of Skip. There’s a lot of chewy work for critics here, and maybe Skip isn’t quite as literal-minded as I make him out to be. He’s like your weird younger brother who ends up as a famous scientist. Or artist. It’s good to know Skip’s got his tent set up wherever he is, and that he’s busy making art, living his life with a purpose.
Richard Dailey.

Skip Arnold
China
Published October 2004

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