|
Written by Perpetual Art Machine
|
|
Friday, 24 March 2006 |
If you are in NYC please check out fellow PAM artist, Liuba, in her solo video installation.
LIUBA Chelsea sabotage curated by Irina Zucca Alessandrelli
March 9, 2006 – April 8, 2006
WEISSPOLLACK Galleries is pleased to present the first solo show by performance and video artist Liuba in New York.
Liuba is a young Italian artist who slips into the art world mechanisms to tease it and its protagonists through ironic performances. In this solo show she presents videos of the actions she did during the Venice Biennial (2003), the Italian Bologna Art Fair (2004) and the SOFA Fair in New York (2005). In the series called Virus, the artist is a sort of living sculpture. Dressed in a black outfit with red dots, the notorious sold stickers, the artist went to art fairs and placed them under several works under the noses of upset gallerists and stunned visitors. The sold dot is a universal sign that makes the difference. You judge a work in another way if it has been sold. Red dots mean money, power, and often fame. The same performance in Bologna (Italy) and in New York had extremely different results. Liuba's main interest in doing this provocative performance is the social aspect of the reactions, a sort of anthropological point of view. The audience's reaction, in fact, provides a direct and immediate take on a country, a people, and its issues. At the SOFA, Liuba generated such an angry reaction that she was forced by the Show Management to leave the fair. The ironic aspect of this strong reaction is that security guards spent at least 20 minutes explaining to her what the red dots mean in the U.S. before they pushed her out, confiscating her cameraman's ID and passport "because people pay for having a booth and people pay for visiting the fair," as they kept repeating in the video.They could not even imagine that she was sticking red dots on purpose – to the security staff she was a silly woman acting pointlessly. In Italy the gallerists at the fair were really annoyed by her, but it was clear to everybody that she was playing with the art system and this provided a degree of entertainment at the same time. Liuba's works are based on the direct comparison between the artist and the audience, the live performance and the recorded video, the rules and the illegal. (Irina Zucca Alessandrelli)
|
|
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 26 April 2006 )
|