Danke! (Thank You!) is a series of photographs that paraphrase well-known images from art history and work their way through idols and anti-idols. Sometimes this is all too serious for me. Art can be fun, too.
For Danke, Valie! (2012), Tina Greisberger puts a leash on Jari Genser, because to enter Brian Jungen’s Dog Run at dOCUMENTA (13), you need a dog. The re-enactment of Valie Export’s and Peter Weibel’s performance Aus der Mappe Hundigkeit is stopped by an attentive attendant.
Photos © Simon Goritschnig
Photos © Jari Genser
Danke, Joseph! could also be called Danke, René! Magrittes painting La trahison des images from 1929 dealt with the simple yet sometimes not so simple notion that an object and the picture of that object are not the same thing. Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs from 1965 does not add anything particularly interesting to that notion, and neither does my referential work from 2015.
I can‘t help it, but I have this feeling I am getting weirder with every stroke of my brush... while my hair is waning and my beard keeps growing I develop this strange love for bag-like garments and cats. Is this normal?
Photos © Kamen Stoyanov (Jari) & Moritz Nähr (Gustav)
Photos © Jari Genser
In 1917, having recently arrived in the United States, Marcel Duchamp took a photo in photo-booth that depicted him simultaneously from five different vantage points with the help of hinged mirrors. These booths mechanically produced photo-postcards, usually in a small edition that could be shared with friends.
Art theorists would probably write something about fractured identity now, but I prefer to write about my own relationship to Duchamp, which is also somehow fractured. Being one of the (the?) most influential artists of the 20th century, I am still unsure if he did art a favour with his infamous pissoir. However, there’s one thing I absolutely admire about him: unless most of his conceptual followers, he had a great sense of humour.
And allegedly, he liked postcards, a passion that I also share! So I guess I can make it public: Merci Marcel!
