Andy Warhol said that “an artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them.” This conviction is what drives artists to expose themselves, to take risks, to face the possibility of failure and also to accept the eventuality of ridicule.
This idea is made very clear when watching the magnificent video “Untitled (Original orchestrated ersatz light version)” (2011) made by the Portuguese artist João Onofre for the Espai 13 of the Fundació Miró in Barcelona. In it, Onofre gathers a symphony orchestra and dares to take the microphone to sing a song by the popular Portuguese singer Adelaide Ferreira. She does it with more courage than musical qualities until she appears, Ferreira herself, displaying talent and stage presence, while Onofre is silenced and relegated to the background.
Peter Land also filmed himself in obsessively repetitive and doomed processes: dressed as an old-fashioned TV showman who tries in vain to sit on a stool while falling over and over again (“Pink Space,” 1995); trying to paint the ceiling of a room perched on a stepladder, unable to avoid falling over and over again (“Step Ladder Blues,” 1995); rushing down an endless staircase (The Staircase, 1998) or sinking with his boat into a lake (“The Lake,” 1999). As the artist himself once stated: “I suppose in my work, through the recording of acts and their repetition, I try to reflect some of the basic conditions of my own existence and perhaps to confer a kind of apparent meaning on that which is meaningless. (…) Much of my work focuses on disillusionment; the impression that meaning slips away from you when you need it most; When you think you have understood the world as it is and put things in the right perspective, suddenly something happens that ruins that feeling. Your world falls apart and you have to start over.”
In his work “Commission” (2011), the Dutch artist Erik van Lieshout also exposes himself and does not come off too well either. His “exposing himself” translates into carrying out an art project in a rather run-down shopping centre in the south of Rotterdam. The artist immerses himself in the real world and without the protection offered by the art framework he must face curiosity, incomprehension, frustration and ridicule.
The artist exposes himself personally as an object of study, with his body, his self, his fears and his doubts. By placing himself personally in situations that show differences with respect to the norms of society, he revises the perception of himself or the social meaning of his occupation. Bruce Nauman said it a long time ago: “It is said that art is a matter of life and death. It sounds melodramatic, but it is true.”
[Article published in Bonart, 2011]
