I Miss America, Peter Max Lawrence | Gallery Night
Τhe political aspect of aesthetics, an interactive performance installation by Peter Max Lawrence
CHEAPART participates in "Gallery Night 2018" organized by the Hellenic Art Galleries Association (PSAT) and Art-Athina, part of the Athens Culture Network of the City of Athens and Athens 2018 – World Book Capital of City of Athens.
Macklin Kowal, independent curator and Founding Director of Athens's Sub Rosa Space, presents the interactive performance installation "I Miss America" by American artist Peter Max Lawrence. As a part of Peter Max’s work, our momentary transcendence into a superhero can reveal much about the 'epidemic melancholy of our time' as the presence of super saviors expose the political aspect of aesthetics and confront us with our personal ideals.
The work, entitled I Miss America, questions the poetics of identification in contemporary political culture. Addressing hero worship as a political phenomenon, Lawrence’s piece asks how feelings of nostalgia and dispossession conflate to produce a melancholy that is at once endemic to our times and perpetually attendant to the liberal capitalist project of self-determination.
With a green screen installed in the gallery space, Lawrence recruits visitors to participate in their own Wonder Woman transformation. The action references the 1970s American television show Wonder Woman, where actress Linda Carter would spin in a circle and transform into the titular hero of the series. The process is simple: individual audience members stand before the green screen and spin in a circle, arms outstretched; then, they spin once more donning a simple costume that the artist will provide. The process is filmed in the moment, compiling an archive of superhero transformations. The accumulation of these transformations on film constitutes the piece itself; its supporting actions of invitation, explanation, and execution constitute its supplemental flair. An avid showman, Lawrence talks to the audiences through the process while simultaneously explaining the theoretical concerns that underscore the piece: the adoration of idols; the nonhuman as political ideal; nostalgic longing as summoned and shaped by populist politics; the place of femininity within a masculinist political sphere. Charismatic yet ever critical, Lawrence will call his own position, as instigator, into question. That is to say, he spouts an ongoing meta-commentary on the the male artist as a figure of alleged objectivity and dispassionate detachment; this he recounts while he explaining the work’s technical process and theoretical framework.
Multiple actions occur simultaneously: the recruiting of participants; a running tutorial given by the artist, accompanied by layers of reflexive self-criticism; an overall spectacle to be consumed by passersby. Its total effect is for sure a delight to the eyes and ears of audiences.
"I Miss America" extends several of the thematic and methodlogical currents of Lawrence’s work, namely the idea of participation as medium and revelry as aesthetic. In this work, though, Lawrence exposes revelry as mask to the unavowable; in the context of this piece, the unavowable perhaps concerns anguish, isolation, ignorance, self-loathing. By extension, the artist posits a broader idea of aesthetics itself as mask to the unavowable, a fundamental set of concerns that are often taken to have no relationship to the actions that they inevitably compel.
Gallery Night
Friday, October 5th, 20:00 pm.
CHEAPART
25 A.Metaxa str., 10681 Athens
