Film Overview

Billy X Curmano is an award-winning artist that exposes the rough edges of "life as art". Amused journalists have dubbed him, "The Court Jester of Southeastern Minnesota" with comparisons to P.T. Barnum, Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp.
A camera follows him through three life altering performance works in search of that indefinable quality that separates the masterpiece from everyday art.
During the "Performance for the Dead", the artist spent the last 3 days of a 7-day fast buried alive in absolute darkness seeking visions and hints of the other side. What was performed for the dead is left to the imagination, but elaborate trappings for the live audience included a New Orleans style Jazz Funeral.
He followed up with a 2,367.4-mile Mississippi River swim from its source at Lake Itasca, Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, a distance of about 30% of the earth's equatorial diameter. The Swim was never intended to be an athletic event, but rather - an intermix of art and life expressing an ecological imperative. It teetered between the Zen of stroke after tedious stroke and near death emergencies to the humor and absurdity of performance sculpture like the "X3C Polluted Water Wear" making a serious statement about water quality. The documentation was awarded the Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Film & Digital Media.
Still searching, Billy X. abandoned the traditional storyboard and limited recording to just a singular moment from each 24 hours of a 40-day desert fast in the extremes of Death Valley. The 40 some minutes in 40 days premiered in Los Angeles without the benefit of editing. A fasting body and brain, the environment, creatures, visitors - the forces of the valley... and of the spirit - directed the taping to create the third leg of this fine art trilogy.