The art of acting ... Gianni Motti's Yogic Policeman at Frieze Art Fair. Photograph: Linda Nylind
I've never come closer to the thrill of being at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 or at a Sex Pistols gig in 1977 - never come closer to the pure spirit of dada - than I did one night at the Edinburgh festival in the late 1980s. We'd gone to an all-night event at the Gilded Balloon. It was about 3am. An act came on we'd never heard of and never seen before: a stand-up comic and magician called Jerry Sadowitz.
Seeing Sadowitz at the absolute peak of his power to shock that night was one of the most extraordinary cultural experiences of my life. Funny? I suppose he was funny. But what I remember is the total abolition of all constraints on what he allowed himself to say - offending every group in the audience, one by one, not even sparing himself.
Is stand-up comedy performance art? If it's good, it is. Sadowitz at his best was comparable to Andy Kaufmann, the American comic and inventor of inter-gender wrestling, or Lenny Bruce, the original practitioner of the fine art of offence.
At the Frankfurter Kunstverein cardboard theatre in the Frieze Art Fair (Stand H12), a series of experimental events explore the idea of stand-up comedy as art, in disconcerting ways. Entitled "A Delicious Feeling of Confidence", the project proposes in a deadpan way to "bring stand-up comedy to the art fair." I chanced on an actor reading, in a realistic American accent but without any engagement with the audience, from The Essential Lenny Bruce. The actor showed no emotion and no tension as he read a passage about "hookers", Jews and blow jobs.
When I arrived, a small audience had collected. Every time he read out an obscene word, someone left. After a few minutes I was the only person left. The actor just went on reading from Lenny Bruce. It was, I think, the Frieze moment I will remember.
