Latest submission to the Fluxus registry... >From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 08:51:16 EST >Subject: register me >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >X-Mailer: AOL 6.0 for Windows UK sub 10510 >X-Loop-Detect: 1 > >Hi, >my name is Fabrice Joseph Arfi. I am a servile creep as well as a derivative >artist who would do anything to get noticed. Richard Demarco said that I was >Fluxus so, I decided to join up your group in order to invite lots of people >to my private view at the City Gallery, Leicester, UK, on March 22nd 2002 at >6.00 PM. >You can reach me on [EMAIL PROTECTED] >PS: I'm sending a few attachment as I feel that they give a few clues about >my work. >Cheers,
Attachments: --------------------------------------------------- Fabrice Joseph Arfi Artist�s Statement My work stands at a crossroad between performance, installation and painting. Its goal is to challenge the traditional role of the artist in the west as a maker of objects rather than images and situations. I came from a double background, both culturally and artistically and I tried to take different traditions into account and to break boundaries between purported art genres and cultures. This piece originally started as a humorous and poetic photography exhibition where the public was confronted with images of graffiti and other landscape abnormalities and then encouraged to produce their own graffiti. This time, the artist acts as an officiant and guide, a performer of cathartic ritual who operates as a catalyst of forces between the public and the work, responding to the public�s intervention by modifying the space and covering the walls with paint. This show is dedicated to the memory of Professor Nicholas Zurbrugg. Contact: Fabrice Joseph Arfi tel: 0116 2545221 9, Saxon Street mob: 07810781825 Leicester e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] LE3 0BL ---------------------------------------- I Want a Life�III Mapping the Mind The I Want a Life� project has been running since last February and normally operates in two parts; half photography and half performance/installation. The two parts do not need to work together and so the photographic part finally took a life of its own and has already been exhibited in Leicester and at Canas de Senhorim, in Portugal. The performance part was successfully crash-tested at the Ales Wagon, in Leicester at the end of 2001 and was, effectively, the second avatar of the show. The version I am currently planning for the City Gallery will be its third. The piece is more a reaction to the world as a social and philosophical entity rather than influenced by any artist, piece or genre as such, though it bears connotations if not direct references to other artists and movements, such as fluxus or beuys, Jimmy Durham or even Bobby Baker. It is fair to say that this piece of work was born out of frustration and lack of means to produce art at a time when I badly needed a life, IE: a way to produce art, though I was at a financial dead end. Maybe lack of means and material allows a concentration process which can be very productive. Anyhow, no matter how little you have left, you still have yourself, your own body, your mind and the input of others, which is already a lot as well as a highly versatile, enjoyable and direct way to make art. I feel that far too few people think about it but, as an artist, you are, as an entity, the first and most obvious medium as well as, for many in my case, also the best and most expressive. It is made to propose a different and more poetic approach to urban environment and to encourage the public to interact with it and with each other at the same time. The project is time/process based and deals with organising and building and environment for a performance as it is actually taking place. In other words the performance deals precisely with building the space for the performance; you interact with the world as you actually act the world; you create it, as you are precisely what it is made of. (Danton: �We didn�t make the revolution, the revolution made us.��Or is it vice-versa? - Bhchner, Danton�s Death, II;1) It is set in a square brightly lit white room. As the public pears through the only opening, the floor has already been covered with tabloid newspaper as if the room has been prepared to be painted. Here, the artist acts as an officiant and operates as a catalyst of forces between the public and the work and responds to the public�s intervention by modifying the space and covering the wall with paint in three different colours. Indeed, only three colours are needed to colour a map, though it is, in this case, the map of the mind of the people present at that point in time, which will be fixed on the walls with paint. The surrealists likened the role of the artist to that of a medium; here, the artist is the medium in every sense of the term. In other words, the artist doesn�t only stand in between what Plato would call the sensitive and the sensible world but also in between the public and the piece as the brush does in between the painter and the canvas. The artist, then, becomes effectively the medium of the performance/installation in the way that he or she becomes at the same time tool and material, indispensable to the creation of the piece.
