1. Hamster Nest By Dash Snow
Art collector and gallerist Charles Saatchi put the artist Dash Snow up in a posh Piccadilly hotel along with his friend and fellow New Yorker Dan Colen. The pair decided to make a “hamster nest” within their hotel room – shredding 50 phone books, blankets and curtains for “bedding” in which to curl up and take a cocktail of drugs. The experiment ended with them evacuating the hotel room in the middle of the night to escape arrest. The performance piece is typical of the late artist’s infusion of his excess into his art, he then went on to set up the NEST installation with Colen at Deitch Projects in New York, where two thousand phone books were destroyed over five nights.