The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
It is a very intimate experience, to hold the body of a stranger, lift their form and feel the weight of their limbs reliant upon your support. With a team of others the task becomes one of momentary community, of mutual and unspoken co-operation. Co-opted to help carry the body of Alicia Frankovich through and around the galleries of Artspace during the opening of her recent Auckland exhibition, A Plane for Behavers, I was one of many visitors who unexpectedly found themselves as participants in the work, literally props to the artist. With the arrival of the artist, carried into the gallery by friends and assistants, the regular, busy opening became a procession, a celebration of the performing body, and a test of endurance for both artist and bearers. Somewhere between the formal homage of Francis Alÿs’s The Modern Procession (2002) and the celebratory spontaneity of parading a triumphant sporting hero, the event ruptured the conventional distance usually maintained between audience and work, and between bodies.1
The work of Alicia Frankovich has evolved through a practice of installation toward this recent focus on her own body as performative subject and sculptural object. Reference to the performing body, however, has been consistent in her work in the construction and styling of earlier installations such as Condition Me/Trampoline (messed with)/KAUSTBY Chair (2004) or WE ARE HOUSED (in and around all of this stuff) (2005). The wide reach of Constructivism’s idealist project to turn art into social action is evoked in structures echoing gymnastic apparatuses, banners bearing the names of Eastern European gymnasts and references to Ikea furniture—historical echoes of Constructivism’s ambitions to reform the social body through work, celebration and... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline