Curated by Ben Judd
7 December 2007 – 13 January 2008
- ‘Indeed it is precisely by connecting our tales of the real and the unreal, the superficial and the deeply felt, the authentic and the inauthentic, that artists […] lead us to wonder, finally, at the artifice of our own hybrid natures, and from there to question the sense of human life, of all accepted meanings, and all truths deemed to be beyond dispute.’
Ralph Rugoff
Persona Non Grata is a show about artists who use reinvention and the adoption of different personae as a method for producing work that is rich in narrative, whether true or false. The videos and films gathered together from the 1970s to 2007 share in common an approach to assumed identity that might be seen as an attempt to anatomise duality, exorcise a character, or vicariously adopt a set of displaced possibilities.
The relationship between the artist and his or her personae remains in flux by the shifting sands between a real and a fictional world. The appearance of whether the artist is passive or controlling the action is fluid, and to what extent the direction of events illusory. The duplicitous structure of the work invites us to fill in the gaps between what is real and imagined, and it is this process that seems to offer a portal into another world. It is a particular type of invitation to make a leap of faith, and an undertaking on behalf of the viewer, that seems to compel the need to take on this type of approach.
Persona Non Grata presents artists’ film and video that examine these notions using a variety of different guises. From John Smith's 'director of real life' The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) to Paul McCarthy's assimilations of artistic practice, the selection encompasses the past four decades, combining established artists and emerging newcomers.
1 - Alex Bag: Fall ’95 (1995, 57 min)
2 - John Baldessari: I Am Making Art (1971, 18 min 40 sec)
3 - David Blandy: I Am (2003-04, 2 min)
4 - Marcus Coates: Finfolk (2003, 7 min)
5 - Alan Currall: I Know You’re There (1995, 7 min 44 sec), Message To My Best Friend (2000, 4 min 20 sec)
6 - Oriana Fox: All My Life (2007, 20 min), Consciousness, Understanding ‘N’ Trust (2004, 5 min 50 sec) The Embodiment Workout (2005, 6 min 20 sec)
7 - Dryden Goodwin: Reveal (2003, 15 min)
8 - Ben Judd: I Will Heal You (2007, 12 min), I Love (2003, 7 min)
9 - Meiro Koizumi: The Art of Awakening (2005, 9 min)
10 - Paul McCarthy: Family Tyranny, Cultural Soup (1987, 6 min 55 sec)
11 - John Smith: The Girl Chewing Gum (1976, 12 min), Museum Piece (2004, 12 min)
12 - John Spiteri: Petshop Violence (2003, 3 min), Omm (2002, 2 min 30 sec), Can’t Do That (2002, 1 min 30 sec)
13 - Gillian Wearing: Homage to the woman with the bandaged face who I saw yesterday down Walworth Road (1995, 7 min)
14 - William Wegman: selected work 1970-1974
John Baldessari
I Am Making Art 1971, 18 min 40 sec
Oriana Fox
The Embodiment Workout 2005, 6 min 20 sec
Installation view
Installation view
William Wegman
Selected work 1970-1974