Critical Evaluation

In my work I am questioning the meaning of art, identity and socially acceptable behaviour, approaching the concept from a light dada-influenced perspective, in which anything can be art and it is almost impossible not to make art, as long as it is presented within the right discourse.

With this project, my intention is to guide the viewer into building a collage of myself, maintaining the same deceptive feeling that I have put into my previous projects, which highlight the chance of lying, especially in the context of a portrait and therefore setting the parameters for a conversation to happen between the viewer and the work.

I feel that, like in Gilbert and George’s work “a portrait of the artists as young men (1972)”, this project raises the question of whether the work is a “portrait”, in the sense of a representation of a person that tell the viewer who he or she is and what he or she is like. It is also not clear if this work contains any personal information, or whether it is just a mask that is there to hide nothing.

The choice of the medium used in this project is dictated by the year in which this work is made; 2008, the peak of virtual presence, online communities and web-dating culture, with online simulator for communities like Second Life, gathering millions of new users every week.

Using a webpage and a film played on a TV, my intention is to critically address the television and the internet as mass mediums that feed the audience with selected and polished information. While I am building a portrait of myself through other people’s eyes or through their perception or view of me, I am speculating on the fact that the entire portrait that the viewer is building could be an ambiguous fictional interpretation of the reality. And therefore questioning the possibility of facing the me, as a different, foreigner being, from the one that I know, thus investigating the real existence of my own self as I know it.

The ultra-stylised pose of me in the image on the web page compared with the one in the film of a self-conscious decadence, are there with the presumption to refine the meaning of aesthetics within its context.

The work could be about play-acting, about masquerade and about becoming something other that what we are told we are every day. Without hiding behind masks but declaring that we are the mask or the “sculpture” and we therefore maintain the right t to reinvent ourselves.

Hanna Wilke used herself as a model in her own work, as a deconstruction of cultural trends of feminine vanity and beauty. She also confronted the audience creating an interaction and making it become a fundamental part in some of her pieces. In the same way, I am addressing the importance of an audience’s involvement, not just as a significant aspect of the work, but necessary for it in order to exist, by creating what I see as a poetical conversation between the piece and the audience. Within my work and in this project in particular, I am doing this through investigating the concept of being, the fact of existing on a personal and social level and the way to occupy a specific position in the world.

Filming myself whilst getting drunk is a narcissistically closed structure, dictated by the solid notion of the medium that I have used. Like in street performance it is feeding the psycho-social condition of seeing and being seen in relation to the context of the surrounding reality. This is an integral component of the work and reinforces the argument of a meaning of true identity.

The film has been shot in one long take. The washed out colour, the unclear location and the poor quality of it, gives to the project an uncertain space in time which reinforces the doubtful certainty of truthfulness of the work. They are also used to maintain the non-beautiful aesthetic of the piece and set the parameters in order to create a situation that is more intellectually challenging rather than visually and consequently help to preserve the connection with my previous works.

The film is showed in its entirety 27.05 minutes, in order to exasperate the feeling of a “claustrophobic boredom”; this adds an extra dimension to the interaction between the audience and the piece, which will depend on the way the viewer will receive it.

I feel the film is stimulating an apprehensive expectation in the viewer, by showing myself controlling the time on my watch, checking my mobile phone and looking at the window, as if I am waiting for something to happen or someone to call me or to turn up.

Being silent in front of the camera could be seen as a way to portray a form of ultimate truth, the only possible way to being able not to lie to others or to myself, disclosing of any possible ground of distortion of that “real truth” that is therefore clashing with the information given in the other part of the work, the dating site.

The blow up web page project on the wall, challenges the meaning assigned to an object and like John Baldessari’s “Folding Hat”, it is to be seen as a conceptual exercise that represents an attempt to rescue an object from the meaning assigned to it.

The web page extracted from a dating site, is not a live web page and has no real physical interaction. It is there to occupy the space on the wall in the same way as a traditional painting of a portrait would do. The communication between the viewer and the image on the wall, is more in the form of notion and acknowledgement of the information in it.

By projecting just one page of the dating web site, I am consequently reinforcing the idea of an object beyond its real meaning. The development of an entire web site is therefore irrelevant for this stage of the project, as this would detract the attention of the viewer from the real meaning of the work, which is not based on the practical use of this type of medium, but it is subjected to a personal interpretation of the persona.

My life as pictured in the web page is based upon simple and equal decisions.

In a very cynical way, the style I chose to have “my hair” cut has the same relevance as deciding to “break up a long-term relationship”.This is to analyse and argue the notion of self-promotion within this discourse, and by placing it in a gallery environment, it can be seen as an attack to either the all-inclusive nature of art as well as the opposite, its irrelevance.

The decision to project the site next to the film, is to give a comparative sense of interaction between the two pieces. On one side of the room there is the dating site which by its nature is supposed to promote an embellishment of the person portrayed in it and on the other side of the room the film displaying me, lonely and distressed, there to almost convey the feeling of expectation for something to change the course of my evening or my life.

Solely by watching the end of the film, it becomes clear to the viewer that my expectation has not been fulfilled and my life has not changed in the way that I was hoping.

In conclusion I feel that by making this work I am stimulating the viewer with a series of personal debates, questioning the meaning of the gallery as a structure and therefore the concept of art as a structure. At the same time I have achieved that private challenging and confrontational feeling that I was looking for within my previous work, exposing and researching the idea of intimate vulnerability as an artistic expression, by exploiting the perception of identity within communities, by manipulating virtual examples and by critically approaching mass media references such as the internet and the television and the way they can be deployed in order to portray what it could be a false truth.

I have used my own body to challenge a private frustration and I feel I have fulfilled my intention to research the idea of putting oneself in the middle of controversial or debatable situations, creating a challenging environment for the viewer in order to portray and stimulate a creative conversation.