When you enter "Frank Yang" into the search bar of YouTube, the site returns amateur videos of hardcore workout sessions. But don't be quick to judge. View more videos posted by YouTube user digitalairair, and you are opened to the expressive, artistic, fucked up world of Frank Yang and his quote-unquote art.
The first Frank Yang video I experienced was a compilation of shots of Yang destroying his room wearing nothing but his mother's tiny underwear. With his brother on the bed screaming "how long is this going to take clean up?!" he tears up his belongings with rage and disgust. These action shots included scene cuts of Yang vomiting, reading out of a dream journal about eating out his mom's pussy, playing the fiddle, and masturbating. The first thing that came to my mind was: What. The. Fuck. It was like watching a car accident; it hurt to watch, but I just couldn't look away. Immersing myself in this video was like watching a psychotic rage party at the local mental hospital. Was this even real?
The video was aptly titled Entropy aka Ultimate Workout. On a sidebar next to the video, an artist statement is given. It explains the origins of the video are that for years he has been fighting entropy by "by meticulously cleaning, maintaining, and organizing fruitless material objects in a habitual manner." In addition to wrestling entropy, he eloquently concludes that we define who we are by the objects we keep, and that his ragefest and video was his way of putting an end to his personal consumerism.
But my question was, was all of this really necessary? Yang concludes "If nothing else, the result of this disturbing anarchic served as a kind of wake-up call, as it raised interesting questions about the nature of my identity and my relationship to the world I made." Whatever makes you feel better, dude. He categorizes his video under comedy. I'm pretty sure that's the only funny thing about it.
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