Performance and sculpture formed a peculiar alliance in the 60s that generated a legacy that goes from Chris Burden to Vito Acconci, among others. The family resemblance between the two media now seems almost natural, and has a certain economy about it: the fleshy vulnerability of the body performs actions a sculpture cannot; sculpture assumes scales or postrures too painful or humiliating for the human body to sustain. Bristol-based artists John Wood and Paul Harrison are part of this genealogy; with their work, the economy in the performance/sculpture equation is so extreme as to verge on the scientific. They call their sculptural video performances 'devices', suggesting a kind of machine-like utility that is close in character to three-dimensional models for some physics theory. The sculpture Wood & Harrison build to enact their bodily 'experiments' -- contraptions for headstands, for flying, raising one's arm, climbing a ramp -- are like the hokey constructions of old-fashioned science, before chaos theory and virtual anything, when it was all nuts and bolts, levers and chalkboards. The site of Wood & Harrison's weird science, however, their laboratory so to speak, is the video monitor.
