The Problem: Provocative Performance Piece Marks the Opening of Unlimited at Art Basel
Launching last night, Mitchell-Innes & Nash announced The Problem, a new performance piece conceived by Pope.L staged as part of the opening of Unlimited, Art Basel’s pioneering exhibition platform curated by Gianni Jetzer. Mitchell-Innes & Nash strive to forge an informed dialogue between emerging and established internationally recognised artists as part of their provocative programme of exhibitions. An idea that is central to The Problem, which opened with a white gorilla emerging from a white stretch limo at the entrance of the fair. Spilling white plantains onto the ground, the gorilla enters Unlimited and wanders through the convention centre, looking for something. It’s mate? It’s cage? It’s formal organisation via an enactment of a ritual? The beast drops me white things as it roams. Eventually, the entity finds what it is looking for, an exhibition space containing a set of paintings called Circa by the critically acclaimed American artist Pope.L. The gorilla ignores the paintings and searches behind them, finally extracting five fat stacks of money. The creature exits, leaving behind a garden gnome painted completely white expect for a black faced nose.
In the performance Pope.L plays with uncertainty, incongruity, humour and sociality. The audience’s identification of the performance’s persona, the creature, is influenced by the structure of our language, specifically our conflicting babble of languages. What is seen is understood similar yet at the same time different ways, the spectator becomes very crucial in the message that is developed, like a photograph slowly coming to life. The problem once inserted remains, what is shared is corrosive and what is understood by all is a divisive elixir between individual interpretations, politics and stupidities.
The reality of a white creature roaming the halls of Art Basel can be seen as a kind of displaced repetition, a repackaging, of what is perhaps the largest, most prestigious spectacle in the art world. The question arises then, whether the nature of performance acts as kind of a break from the spectacle or if it serves to celebrate it. The problem is not the performance out there, in them but rather the performance, in here, in us.
