Marcella Vanzo : Performat
JUNE 12 - JULY 12 2008
Lucie Fontaine is proud to present Performat a project by Italian artist Marcella Vanzo.
This event embodies a new challenge for the artist. After showing videos like Lovesong, during “Exit” (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Turin), Limbo (Studio Guenzani Milan) and Summertime (Galleria Continua, San Gimignano) Marcella Vanzo experiments for the first time with the medium of performance.
During one of her trips to New York, the artist saw “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” curated by Cornelia Butler and hosted at the MoMA | PS1. Marcella Vanzo was inspired by Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Manifesto for Maintenance Art (1969) by Mierle Laderman Ukeles and La Roquette, Prison des Femmes (1974), by Nil Yalter, Judy Blum and Nicole Croiset.
These pieces became the starting point for Performat, conceived by the artist as a way to transmit and reenact historical pieces, this time with a “21st century female sense of humor.”
The result is an attempt to reweave the fragmented documentation of a group of historical works that served as a platform for an entire generation of women artists into the present, expanding it and rendering the foundation for new work. Rosler, Laderman and La Roquette are in fact the inspirational material for the artist.
Marcella Vanzo engages with the issue of documentation and its relation to performance. Seminal works of performance art from the 70s exist only as documentation of the event and yet the document is treated as the original artwork. The artist, in collaboration with Lucie Fontaine’s art employees, will create an alternative way to document Performat.
The day after the performance Marcella Vanzo exhibited a series of cutouts. The artist appropriated images of celebrities invited to an exclusive party in Rome by fashion designer Valentino. Oddly enough, the photos stand somewhere between a fashion shoot and a paparazzi frenzy, a paradoxical mix of documentation and the algid style of the fashion system’s modus operandi.
The shooting was published in Vogue, a magazine that Marcella Vanzo often manipulates, as testified by the hidden project made in the issue seemingly forgotten next to Lucie Fontaine’s sofa among other selected magazines and catalogues.
Suggested reading: Vogue Italia (any issue); Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, Harper Collins, 1991; Gabriella Parca, Le italiane si confessano, Parenti, 1963.
For more information : www.marcellavanzo.com