The Artifact.

The artifact as a subject has been a recent topic in my work. My interest in the artifact initially came from a personal involvement with performance art that started about four years ago. While I was in college there was a general re-visiting of the second wave feminist movement and as a result I was looking at artists who dealt with taboo subjects in the 1960’s and 70’s. I experimented with performance partially to understand how it worked as a political apparatus and also because I wanted to find out which taboo subjects existed in the art world at the time. I arrived at some conclusions, most of which are inconsequential to what I am doing right now but while I was exploring these subjects I momentarily abandoned painting to focus on performance. Eventually, I began to think of such things as Carolee Schneeman’s Internal Scroll and Eve Klein’s Anthropométries, objects that function as recordings of time-based significant actions or performance artifacts.

As I got deeper into performance theory I was inevitably compelled to read about theater history and I learned how Artaud led to Grotowski. The Western idea of theater was gradually stripped down to its elements from the late 30’s to the 60’s, first theoretically with Antonin Artaud who proposed to engulf the audience within the stage, and then in practice with Grotowski. Theater was stripped down of the stage, the script, and of the conventional audience-performer relationships. From this I began to carve out a definition for myself of what the term perfomance really meant now, or what it could mean, and the word became so permissive that I felt I was after an absurd endeavor. For example, I deduced that a performer does not need to be human, it can be an animal or a thing; I deduced that any action may be considered a performance as long as it is acknowledgeable, and I deduced that all verbs exist to describe performances except I was doubtful about ontological verbs to be and to exist because it is unclear to me whether they imply action. This might sound a little far-fetched and irrelevant, but it awakened in me a new way of looking at objects, as recordings of different processes and forces that shaped them into their current state. The same interest in objects that I suppose drives Justin Allen to paint worn out consumer goods. This same interest was the prime motivation for the making of a couple of pieces including the Cigarrete Tapestry, the Automated Biography (image above), and the Library Due Date Installation.

I should mention that the work of Maria Teresa Hincapié also brought my attention back to the object through performance. Her background was in theater and she was extremely influenced by Grotowski but also by Joseph Beuys. She was making performances in which she interacted with her personal belongings inside the gallery space. She was addressing the potential of everyday things to stimulate the body and activate the mind, and ultimately, she implying that the relevance of an object exists in the actions it instigates, and that these actions may or may not be relative to the object’s appearance.

After I acquired a new appreciation for objects and how they came to exist in their current state, I began to look at paintings themselves as performance artifacts. It was then that I realized that paintings are most important when they stand as signifiers of processes that were and that are to be, or in other words, that a fundamental part of a good work of art lies in its capacity to belong to and speak of a certain history. Hence came my interest in the artifact.