REAL ARTISTS DON’T HAVE TEETH, by DORA GARCÍA
RijksakademieLIVE #1
Monday, 28 February 2011
8 PM
Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten
Sarphatistraat 470
1018 GW Amsterdam
Entrance: free
Limited seating, reservations: info [at] rijksakademie.nl
RijksakademieLIVE will be streamed via the new Rijksakademie website:
www.rijksakademie.nl
Tinted by the artist’s characteristic dark humour, the monologue Real Artists don’t have Teeth examines the complexity in issues related to censorship, the involvement of artists with their audience and the meaning of mainstream and marginality. One male actor addresses these questions to the audience in a conflictual way. The ironical moral of the story seems that the real artist should always remain marginal to be safe from so-called mainstream ‘wolves’. The contradictions of such a position point to the concept of counterculture, defined by psychiatrist and researcher Franco Basaglia as “the culture of the deviant.” So, what then is the contract between the normal and the deviant, and what are the political and cultural implications of this agreement?
A lot of Dora García’s work involves the interplay between the spontaneous and the imposed, between knowledge and ignorance, between awareness and the unconscious, or between theatricality and truth. García uses fiction as a tool to expose reality as multiple and questionable, and to disclose mechanisms involved in perception processes. Lately she has become interested in more “traditional” theatre structures, the dynamics of stand-up comedy, the art of the monologue, humour that is not funny but makes you think; satire, acidity and sarcasm.
Part of the ongoing project Mad Marginal, Real Artists don’t have Teeth is prompted by the artist’s readings of the writings of Basaglia, promoter of a law, allowing Italy to be one of the first countries in the world to abolish mental hospitals and becoming a laboratory of experimentation for the treatments of mental illness. Dealing with the idea of marginality as a political position in art, its contradictions and its beauty, García recognized the similarities between Basaglia’s anti-psychiatry, avant-garde theater makers such as Antonin Artaud, and underground filmmaker Jack Smith. Mad Marginal wants to research a form of artistic practice, using the traditions of anti-psychiatry as a prism to look at certain cases of artists who have consciously chosen to remain outside the mainstream.
Real Artists don’t have Teeth is a performance monologue which premiered March 2010 in Moderna Museet. It had a second incarnation at the Kunsthalle Bern in August 2010.
Dora García (Valladolid, 1965) studied Fine Arts at the Universidad de Salamanca and was resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (1989-1991). Recent projects and exhibitions include Kunsthalle Bern (2010), Index (Stockholm 2010) and Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt, 2009). She participated amongst others at the Lyon Biennial (2009), the Sydney Biennial 2008, and Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2007. She will represent Spain at the upcoming Venice Biennial (2011).
The Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten is an international residency program for emerging, professional artists.
RijksakademieLIVE is a series of public events, curated by Philippe Pirotte, advisor at the Rijksakademie.
